And in the circle, there appears... a sleeping human, wrapped in an enormous poofy blanket. Enough of one shoulder is visible to verify that (contrary to the icon) he is wearing a shirt; further information on his state of dress is not available. He looks extremely cozy.

(Looks can be deceiving. His dreaming mind is astonished, off-balance, and a little frightened. The whole shape of the world has changed - no, he's changed worlds. This is a new one. New people, new languages, new prayers. It takes him a moment to orient himself well enough to start listening.)

"Oh, he's asleep," says Korulen. "That's good, he won't be too bothered probably, keep your voice down if you have to talk."

"Okay," whispers Saasnil.

The cozy sleeping human remains both cozy and sleeping.

(He goes for the easiest ones first, because you have to start somewhere and it might as well be somewhere nice. Small children want toys and sweet things; this seems to be a constant even between universes. They're also some of the likeliest people in the world to be pretty vague about who they're praying to, when they're praying at all and not just wishing. And giving it to them is simple enough, on the scale of things he can do: hear the prayer, lock onto it, form an understanding of what the child wants, fill in any details they're missing, make sure the end result isn't going to make them sick or give them any severe allergic reactions or be a major choking hazard or anything, seek reasonable assurance that any nearby authority figures won't freak out about it, grant the prayer and move on.

A few dozen of those later, taking maybe a minute all told, he's starting to get a sense for this world's array of species. Underwater merfolk, furry leonines, itty bitty scaly dragons, elves and dwarves and skyfolk and wolfriders. He starts listening for the harder things - prayers that matter intensely, prayers that hurt.)

The girls wait quietly. Neither of them is praying; he could be quite forgiven for neglecting the room he's actually in.

There's familiar kinds of wants in new shapes: this is not the first time he's seen someone want most of anything to fly, or to stop hurting, or to be something less despised - but it might be the first time he's seen it all wrapped up in one inextricable package and echoed across dozens of children. The clearest undirected attempt at bargaining with a vague force is from a diamond baby peering out of a window, ignoring her caretaker's storytelling, folding and unfolding her wings.

There's completely unprecedented desires, too. This mother is sobbing over her completely unblemished newborn son and the stillborn wolfpup her bondmate has just given birth to. Without the pup there will soon be no rider baby either. She is hoping crazily that someone, near enough to run to at top speed within the next few days, has the opposite problem and they can heal each other.

The room he's actually in is hardly on his radar at all. As this self, he is only sometimes aware that he even has a body, and he usually has better things to do than look for it.

He picks the second prayer because he understands it better, and can probably fix it faster. First he looks for another child matching the understood description - anywhere, not just within a few days' run, he isn't limited by the speed of a running wolf. There isn't one. The prayer hangs there in his awareness, needing a solution.

Well, there's the obvious one. Just how badly off is that stillborn pup? Not, he discovers, all that badly. It's easy enough to just fix the effects of the oxygen deprivation that killed it and get the body to start breathing again. He doesn't even have to pull a true resurrection, bringing someone's brain patterns out of the remembered history of the world; the brain's almost completely intact and only needs a bit of a patch job.

Then he looks for the diamond baby again - dragon? No, shren, apparently. He was fast enough fixing the wolfrider that she's still at the window, still putting out a prayer he can grab. So he does.

Now, what the hell is a shren?

A type of dragon, as far as he can tell. The relevant language really doesn't think so, but he doesn't see a good reason to agree with it. Dragons have magic; shrens have something wrong with theirs. He can see how to pull on it to get it the right size and shape; after another moment's study, he can even see how to do it without killing the shren in the process. He can fix the diamond, no problem.

But he's hardly going to stop there. This is one of those prayers that demands a widespread solution, like Huntington's disease.

He puts together a choice, to give to every shren in the world, of every age, asleep or awake: this is what you are and this is what you could be. Change, or stay?

And into that he ties a few extras. The thing that shrens are is contagious now; it won't be anymore. Just in case anyone doesn't decide to change. That information goes into the choice, too. He looks up how shrens are made; they happen when there isn't quite enough of the magic to go around. Okay then. In future, there will be: when an egg can't get enough on its own, it will make more, instead of developing with what it's got.

Without any examples currently at that stage of gestation, it would take him way too long to figure out exactly when an egg breaks out in stripes, so he can't be sure his fix will catch them all before then; he decides that fixed eggs will develop loopy, flowery swirls, overriding whatever other pattern they might have settled on, because he doesn't want to take the time necessary to verify that un-striped dragon eggs only ever look like so and it's only ever good that they do. Now at least no one will be getting misinformation from a stray set of stripes. And the touch of whimsy doesn't hurt.

In the last instant before he turns the whole thing loose, he looks up all the shren babies in the world and includes a pretty flying toy for each - a Golden Snitch coloured to match their scales, with fixed-egg swirls decorating its little round body, autonomous enough to play tag and obedient enough to come when called. There's a whole collection of them underwater, and the standard-issue Snitch wouldn't handle that well, so he gives all the violet-groups a special version with finlike, reinforced wings that can swim as easily as it flies.

Then he makes it happen. All over the world, every shren gets an informed choice, wrapped in truth to discourage skeptical abstention: stay a noncontagious shren, or become a dragon?

It took a while for all the people with Huntington's to decide, and he's always guessed it was because many of them didn't know they had it in the first place. He guesses now that the shrens are going to jump on it a lot quicker.

The mothers of the babies are startled and relieved when the pup wakes. They assume they must have missed a subtle pulse, shallow breathing, that the little wolf was fine all along.

The shrens are on that choice like white on rice.

It's unanimous.



Meanwhile, a baby dragon that has already hatched, the last alive of his clutch, starts coughing, and his father thinks, not again, no, please...

He's distracted from waiting for the babies to start playing with their Snitches by the prayer. He can always go back and look after he's dealt with...

...man, what is with this species? With the experience of fixing shrens just recently under his belt, he can tell what's wrong immediately - no damn magic in the kid at all. His shren fix will take care of future cases just fine, but in the meantime, he seeks out every tiny dragon with this problem and fixes them all at once. And as a kind of signature, they can get swirl-patterned Snitches too, little puffy cuddly ones with stubby felt wings that can still play tag with all the agility of the sleeker breed. Done.

And now he has one more group of dragons to watch for reactions. Well, he's got the attention to spare, as long as no more intricate magical emergencies come up while he's looking.

The ex-shrens are happy. They are calling it, quite appropriately, a miracle. The parents of the eggs that are newly swirly are confused. The babies love the Snitches and the adults are suspicious of them; someone is trying to wrestle a Snitch away from a fluttering baby to take it to a wizard for inspection. The father whose son was coughing thinks it was just a false alarm and might never learn differently, as far as his child's health is concerned. The weird flying toy, on the other hand, he is quite unable to explain.

This lady flinging herself into a fire hoping to nobody specific that it works, that the mage-potential-tester didn't defraud her, probably isn't a magical emergency.

There's this other mage, though, who tried to jump off a temple and land on her head in a fit of upset, has now changed her mind about wanting to die, and is praying to the gods she's been brought up to worship "or someone kinder" that she'll get away from people currently firing arrows at her. She doesn't have the air under enough control yet to do anything more than fly around by sheer instinct, and not fast, either; if the people of her town have their way she won't get the chance to get accustomed to it.

This world is just full of magic designed by other people. Or maybe magic that wasn't designed at all. He can't imagine a problem to which shrens sound like a good solution.

The air mage's problem, though, is the kind where immediate action would be better than taking the time to design something optimal. He whisks her away on the back of a breeze, swatting away arrows until she's well out of sight of anyone who might try to shoot her, and then lets her find her own balance in the air—and speaks to her, as the last part of his answer.

"I'm someone kinder," he murmurs on the wind, using the same language she was praying in. "I can't be everywhere all the time, but if you pray to me again, and I hear you, I'll answer. Good luck."

"Thank you," she whispers, reclaiming the air around her to steady herself. "Thank you, thank you -"

Meanwhile, in the city of Peiza, an eleven-year-old boy has given up on Sennah personally returning his kitten and is instead asking 'any watchful spirits who can hear me from here' to intercede on his behalf about the animal.

The boy is floored. But pleased!

(Meanwhile, in Paraasilan, a human girl goes to get her leonine classmate to show him the contents of the summoning circle.)

Meanwhile in Erubia, a small Orthodox Salvationist girl prays to "the saviors" without being specific about which figure she means to address. The specifics of the prayer involve wanting her parents to take her to Egeria or Petar just long enough to meet a wizard so she can ask the wizard to make her look like a girl, and then she wants the saviors to prevent demons from using this dependence on "unnatural magic" to attack her. The obvious solution is a little more straightforward.

She is now sort of concerned that her family will decide that she's possessed and attempt to have her exorcised.

If it has to be natural magic - then let it be natural magic. He wraps it up and gives it to her, and everyone else - a latent ability to alter one's shape in gendered ways, if and when a person is drawn to that notion. And to change it back, as many times as they want, in case there are times like with this girl when it might be easier that way.

He builds it right into the universe, but makes the magic attach to individual people as they're born (or hatched), in case they travel to other universes like he has somehow done. And he decides that next time he gets a prayer like this back home, he's doing something similar. If he's ever back home again.

Whether this will become common knowledge fast enough to save the little girl a trip to the exorcist is an open question, but she is still on the whole pleased with the result.

Here's another prayer from Ryganaav. A girl has her little sorcerous sister in her arms and is lost in the desert and wants help from 'whoever listens to the damned'.

Oh. Great.

No good solutions to the country as a whole are coming to him, and he's reluctant to try a bad one, however tempting it might be to meddle on the grand scale. He finds the nearest neighbouring country that will accept refugees - isn't surprised to see that they have whole institutional buildings where they do just that kind of thing, specializing in refugees at the border with Nastyland - is pleased to note that they speak a mutually intelligible dialect - and moves the lost sisters to just inside the door of the closest one, in a swirl of windblown sand that provides visual cover for the teleportation while politely keeping out of their faces.

"I listen to anyone," he says in the big sister's ear as the sand falls to the floor in a loose circle around them. "And to me there are no damned. You can call me Kindness. I can't be everywhere at once, but if you pray to me and I hear you, I'll answer."

(Kindness. Ansaamin. Not bad, for a name. He doesn't like to use them, but - sometimes it's a help.)

The elder sister falls to her knees and starts weeping with incoherent gratitude while the person manning the desk at the institution rushes forward with cups of water.

Here in Ryganaav is exactly the kind of person who perpetuates all the nastiness. He has gotten a little incoherent in his prayers for deliverance from the pursuing lion-devils, who are laughing to each other about how he'll taste. "Gods - gods - help, anyone, someone -"

A whirl of sand circles each raiding leonine in rapid succession and deposits them back at their camp; kidnapped humans too far from the village, he returns to the priest's vicinity likewise.

As an afterthought while he's still holding the prayer - because after all the leonines were planning to eat the guy, and they may as well not have to go hungry - he looks up what sort of non-thinking creatures they might find especially tasty and conjures up a pile of fresh ones in the middle of the camp with one final dramatic sand-swirl.

"Kindness," he whispers to the priest. He may not like to use names, but he knows how.

The priest, predictably enough, doesn't take this as a name but as a communique from the gods he was originally addressing.

The leonines are alarmed but not too alarmed to eat the antelopes.



Meanwhile in Paraasilan, a much more civilized leonine peers at the contents of the summoning circle. "He's asleep."

"So?" asks Saasnil.

"So nothing, I guess. So you can do old spells."

"Well, good. I guess we send him back now -"

"What do you mean, 'we'?" asks the leonine.

"Oh no," says Korulen.

This priest, right now, doesn't have to take it as a name. Maybe he never will, if Kindness disappears from this world as mysteriously as he came to it. But if he leaves the word behind at enough scenes like these ones, it'll get around.

Now: How are the Snitches doing? Have all the underwater babies been out to fly? Are there any more prayers of immediate importance to attend to, and if not, are there any fun or interesting ones?



The boy in the circle stirs in his sleep, pressing his face cozily into a fold of his puffy blanket, and mumbles something that might be 'ansaamin'. But probably isn't, because why would he speak Leraal?