He can have it if he wants to stay late!

Today, yeah. Hopefully his blog won't explode in his absence - he does check it when he gets back to the hotel.

Dogwood has been hard at work. People do want to know when he'll post next and what he has to say about a press release from the GCP.

Well, he'll have to read the press release, then.

It says that it's possible that alien "gods" from Raafi's world are, they have been warned, likely to attempt to impose their values on this world. Raafi told a GCP staffer that this was unlikely to extend to letting demons literally destroy the world, but it may compromise the delivery of satisfactory justice, at least to daeva who have no practical right to suicide. Raafi abandoned the conversation before complete details were obtained but the GCP's subscribers have been told what they know. In addition to the threat of a Ganymede jailbreak other known risks include nonconsensual abduction into afterlives, including a (mythology-style) "Hell", the release into the mortal realm of nonsummoned daeva with an unknown range of their powers except that it's probably short of destroying a whole planet, and divine intervention in any other thing that any of the numerous "gods" may feel strongly about. Raafi is quoted as saying "gods aren't the sort of being you can fight". There are two million comments and counting.

-of all the lawful evil bullshit-

Okay.

Blog post.

First off: The GCP staffer in question is apparently the sort of person who sees no problem in taking statements entirely out of context to the point of being half-true at most, so take that into account.

Specific points: Gods are not the kind of being you can physically fight. Neither are, say, faeries. This came up only when the staffer brought up the idea of attempting to physically fight them instead of talking with them, which does work; it's part of what clerics are for. That's why he was having the conversation in the first place, to prepare for talking to Fharlanghn about what policies the GCP could take that he'd find acceptable. He's still confident that he can come up with something Fharlanghn will approve of that will keep the people of this world safe from rogue daeva, though of course that's going to be more complicated if the GCP won't work with them on it.

He knows less about the god of the dead and her feelings on his world's afterlife system in particular, but it is widely held to be better than ceasing to exist - yes, even hell. If someone wants to cease to exist anyway that can probably be arranged - such a spell may already exist, others that affect what happens to souls when they die do, but if it does there's not enough call for it that it's common. He'll prioritize finding out about it when he gets access to his world again. He expects that once there are more clerics in the world it will be possible for anyone who wants something like that to find someone to cast it for free; Pelor's clerics in particular regularly do charity like that. It's also possible to learn ahead of time which afterlife someone will go to, and in some cases to positively affect it. (He adds those spells to his list; the detection spell is in almost the cheapest tier of spell he has, and can take quite a large batch of people in each casting; Atonement is upper-mid and is only available to people expecting to die soon, for whom it's an emergency spell.)

He does expect that daeva will be able to become spellcasters, and, yes, experienced spellcasters can cross between planes, in his world. This takes several years to learn to do, under fairly ideal conditions. He only just today became aware of the existential risk that this poses, but existential risks tend to get the gods' attention very quickly; he's confident that they will have it taken care of before it becomes an actual issue. He will post to the blog as he knows more, which probably won't be until Fharlanghn has arranged for transportation between the worlds.

Dogwood gets a chunk of hazard pay - relatively modest, but with a note that there will be more once Raafi is sure this won't affect his income too much - and the blog post to look over before it's posted, in case there's anything there that's a bad idea in light of all the comments he hasn't read.

Can you be more specific about what kinds of bad idea you mean?

Yeah, he'll hire a second person until this dies down. Is there a way he can authorize Dogwood to do that on their own in the future?

You'd know better than I would what's likely to make your job more difficult. That, and things that people are already panicking about that I might want to address differently or in more detail, and anything that just obviously seems like a bad idea - I'm trying to assure people that things aren't going to fall apart for them.

I'm not sure how reassuring you can be if these are the facts on the ground. You successfully come off as friendly, in my opinion.

All right. Thank you.

He posts it, and tries to get some sleep. He manages a couple hours, and checks the blog when it's clear he's not getting any more.

He has 801,240 comments.

Yeah, he's not going to do that to himself. He looks up a nice tourist spot somewhere warm and daytime and goes for a fly, instead.

Nobody flies up to bother him above the breakers of St. Augustine Beach.

He burns through the rest of his spells, flying, leaving just the one he needs to get back to the hotel. It helps.

He checks his email.

Dogwood apologizes but one of their hires has quit suddenly for personal reasons; they're doing their best to keep up.

He has emails from churches, civil rights organizations, animal rights organizations, daeva rights organizations, media organizations, and several hundred private individuals. His [deprioritized by Dogwood] folder has hundreds more.

It's all right, just do the best you can.

Lets start with the media. The places he has plans with, if they're trying to get in touch with him, and then the rest.

They want to make the interviews a bit longer and adjust some of the questions. A couple would like to have him on panels so that his perspective can join others on "the coming changes".

That's reasonable, yeah. He wants to know who else will be on the panels before he agrees to that, though.

This one has lined up the president of this church and a lama of that one and an atheist philosopher and an imam. These other guys have the President of Mars and some other politicians.

He's really not familiar with the local religions but as long as that one is a few days out he should be able to read up in time. The politicians are fine.

What do the civil rights organizations want?

One is asking about the right to suicide and its interaction with the existence of an afterlife; one is asking about how he thinks the gods of his world might interact with the right to the free practice of religion; one is asking about how they should expect to be able to protect people's rights in general against gods; one wants to know if his world has invented the concept in general and what rights it enshrines in law or affirms by consensus.

In his world right to suicide is thought of as right to progress to one's afterlife; he's never heard of someone wanting to cease to exist and doesn't know what any of the gods might think of that; at a guess he doesn't think that Fharlanghn will care. He doesn't expect the gods to object to the practice of local religions as long as that doesn't involve doing anything they normally object to, which he doesn't think is likely but he doesn't know anything about local religions yet. It's unusual for non-evil gods to wind up in direct conflict with peoples' rights, but if they do, discussing the situation with a cleric of the god in question is generally the best approach; evil gods are rarer and weaker and in situations involving them or a neutral god with an irreconcilable issue with something, appealing to a good god with an interest in the topic also works fairly often - Pelor will often step in if no other good god has a better claim to handling the issue. His world has something like the concept of rights; nations in his world are fairly small and there's not much that he can say that will be true of all of them but there's pretty broad consensus about the rights that the major gods consider important - right to access to healing, right to access to clerical advice, right to live in the manner of one's species (in most cases), right to freedom of travel (including right to freedom from slavery, right to suicide, and right to make personal decisions disapproved of by one's community of origin), right to self-defense and defense of others, right to safe disposition of one's remains, and right to reproduce. There are also rights that are commonly accepted but not specifically championed by any particular god, like the right to choose one's profession, but those are harder to come up with a list of.

The religion one thinks it would probably behoove him to read up on religion and sends him some suggested articles.

He'll hopefully have time for that in the next few days; he appreciates them, though.

Any emails from today's clients, before he continues?

Will he still make his appointments in light of everything going on or does he need to reschedule? Please wear no scents in the facility this patient lives in. This patient will probably be asleep when he arrives but has signed a consent form and he should go ahead without waking her. This patient has Secret Service security and he'll need to identify himself to them.