"-lor Pelor Pelor if this doesn't work either I'm -"

"- hello, you brought a friend."

"Yes, Fharlanghn's cleric, we've been traveling together today. Can I help you?"

"You need a cultural consultant. Yesterday. Last week actually. It doesn't have to be me, I'm sure there are many competent people, but if no one else has volunteered yet then I'm not sure anyone else has noticed the gap is 'cultural consultant'."

"We do," he nods. "Are you interested in becoming a cleric?"

"Uh, I wouldn't turn down extra magic powers but the rest of it sounds not so much my speed, but it's possible I will reevaluate this opinion when you have had a chance to revise your messaging with nonzero cultural competence. Are you taking all your cues from blog commenters and media people and one in-over-their-head GCP functionary?"

"Close enough."

"...don't do that."

"I think Raafi did well in the situation he found himself in, but yes. What should we be doing?"

"Backing up a bit - I'm not sure any of you have processed the implications of this being a godless universe. Some people believe in gods! But since there's absolutely no evidence for this the more functional believers don't treat that as an input into most of their decisions, especially anything that would take their lifestyle out of the consensus normal range. You are a new different thing and you're accustomed to fitting in in a certain way and this world does not have a gap there for you."

"It's worse than that, actually, the god that most of them believe in is evil masquerading as good, they don't have a concept of an actually good god."

    "Well. It seems to me that the thing to do about that is to give them a chance to get to know us."

"...okay, definitely don't say that on international television. You will offend everyone with a pulse. There's - okay, we have no gods, we have never had any gods, we have been getting along with no real gods forever, and have developed a lot of social technology to deal with that. Ripping it all out - evincing the desire to rip it all out - will do more harm than good. You don't understand what you're looking at. Does the main character of the Bible commit a concerning amount of genocide, yes, is that actually much of what your run of the mill mainline Protestant is getting out of it, no, absolutely not."

"All right. I don't want to leave this world without our healing magic, and I'd usually do that by establishing churches, but I can be flexible. What would you suggest instead?"

"Fharlanghn did an absolutely catastrophic amount of damage with his little stunt. I think you can walk it back - about gods as a class if not him personally - if you're really careful. But this means interfacing legibly with all that social technology I mentioned! It means giving people more than ten minutes and allowing them to process reactions you aren't expecting when you want them to remake their projects to suit you. It may mean asking nicely and taking no for an answer and if you are not psychologically architected to ever do those things it at least means framing that as your problem."

"Are you referring to something in particular?"

"The impression the media seems to have gotten was that Raafi here went to the GCP and approximately said - obviously this is going to be a mischaracterization on some level because it's been through a few garbly rephrases but - 'my god is going to let loose all the most infamous dangerous superpowered criminals because he feels real strongly about freedom of movement, he can't be reasoned with, you are totally powerless to protect anyone from those criminals or the god himself, the best you can do at keeping them contained would be to turn them over to an institution you heard about yesterday and have zero, maybe less than zero, reason to trust as competent or value-aligned'.

"It would be sort of like, uh, imagine daeva turned out to be able to nope gods instead of the other way around so this seemed actually threatening, and... you get a visit from that fairy animal rights organization, whose co-chair has now been released from Ganymede, and they announce that you can't have pigs anymore, or any chicken breed that lays more than one egg per week, or beef cows, and you're on thin ice if you want milkers or wool sheep, and you get the impression that these people don't need to eat, they think eating is recreational, they don't really care if your people go hungry because they're used to that being no big deal, they make soothing noises about coconut milk and peanuts, they suggest that later on you can have vat meat if somebody wants to volunteer to wire your cities and install vats but they don't seem to actually have that set up yet and they're taking the pigs now."

    "Mm. What actually happened, Raafi?"

"I told them that that was going to happen if we didn't have a plan in place at all, and that it didn't have to be a firm plan or something that would definitely lead to something Fharlanghn would find acceptable, just, anything. You know what it takes to get him to wait, that's what I told them. And they accused me of scaring people into suicide - while I thought they didn't have afterlives here - by telling them even what I had, and then the next thing I knew they'd given a release with everything I'd been holding back. That's - that's my fault, it hadn't occurred to me that they wouldn't have a way to screen evil people out of positions like that. I'm not sure what I could have done but probably something."

Pelor gives Raafi a reassuring pat on the back. "I'm not sure I could expect a randomly selected one of my own clerics to do better than that, under those conditions. -you do know that he was brought here entirely at random, right? Fharlanghn didn't send him."

"I didn't have a belief on the subject. I think you should probably stop calling people evil, that's a pretty loaded word."

"It's a technical term where we're from, and there's noone here who shouldn't hear it."

"It may be a technical term but it's translating as a non-technical term. I don't know how much your translation magic makes you aware of connotations."

"I haven't been applying it to people in public and I'm not going to start."

"What, technically, does 'evil' mean to you?"

"Having a moral outlook that considers harm valuable or generally deserved."

"Did you check if this person is technically evil in some magical way?"

"It didn't occur to me at the time."

    "That does seem to have been an evil act, regardless of their alignment."