They'd like to meet in person with Pelor and whoever is likely to represent him in public communiques.

Decisions about who will be representing him are being made right now; that's something he could use advice on. He can meet with them immediately, or in an hour if they'd like him to bring some potential representatives.

In an hour is good! They're based in Virginia.

Raafi looks up a picture of the place, and they show up in an hour. Pelor brings a human man and woman and a half-elf woman in blue clerics' robes, a halfling man in blue-dyed leather armor; he introduces them and explains that most of his churches are still polling their members but these four are likely to be involved here in some capacity or other, and that he also has a gold dragon cleric who's also a possible representative but has been asked to wait until they know more about how this world will react to him to come.

They meet with a roomful of PR experts. They have a slideshow to structure the meeting. The first slide says "FACTS, AUDIENCE, GOALS". The guy who's presenting introduces himself as Skip Shumaker and asks if they have anything they want to mention or any questions they want to ask before he starts explaining how you do PR.

The halfling wants to know how much "gnome stuff" this is going to involve; Raafi clarifies that he means technology.

"...we use technology every day for virtually everything. Uh, apart from speaking into microphones and looking at cameras, a PR job is unlikely to involve much of it directly -"

"Emails, Skip."

"Okay, yes, you'd also need to be able to receive email or have an assistant to... read them to you? If you didn't want to have a phone or computer," says Skip.

Another person says, "Is this something we should expect to work around?"

"You might need to. I'm sure the younger clerics and such will pick it up but the more experienced of us are usually too busy to pick up whole new skills from scratch. If having an assistant is good enough we'll manage but people tend to overestimate how well that works, in my experience."

"They do! It'd still be better than an actual inability to receive email, some people are pretty good at managing another person's inbox that way. How do you usually communicate over distances?"

    "Couriers, or Sending if it's something urgent enough. Or dedicated magic items, in some cases."

"We do much less of that than you do in general."

"Managing a good PR response involves keeping a finger on the pulse of pancelestial opinion in as close to real time as you can, and having good timing in issuing a response, or if possible getting out in front. We can assign you people to do a lot of that, but the public can often detect when the people they're hearing from aren't the people they want to hear account for themselves. Uh, Raafi, you had a blog, was that very difficult for you learning-curve-wise -"

"I did have some help with it but the parts that I needed to do myself weren't hard to learn, if you can dictate a letter without annoying your scribe too much you can probably do it. I'm not sure how much better it would have been if I'd been able to handle the comments myself, though, I stopped trying after the first day or so."

"Oh, no, definitely don't plan to manage your own comments, comments sections are a mess." Nods all around.

"All right. You may want to hire the person I had doing that, they seemed to do a very good job of it."

"We can keep that in mind. Anything else?"

"How are people going to react to dragons, do you think?" asks the half-elf.

"That really depends on how you manage your general image! I think you can nail a solid 'that is the most incredibly cool thing ever' if there aren't any distractions."

She grins. "Good."

That seems to be all.

Skip starts the presentation. "Our approach relies on these three factors: what is the ground truth about you, your people, your actions and plans - facts. Who are you filtering that information for - audience. And why are you doing it - goals. In this case your audience is presumably the entire human population of this world. You'll tell us the facts, and we'll figure out achievable goals. Then," he advances the slide; it says MESSAGE. "We create a suitably articulate message that hits the right emotional and factual notes, without what we call distractions - sounding offensive in some way, dwelling on facts you want to downplay, winding up associated with events or people who don't stay on-message."

Nods all around.

Slide. It's a still of the Ganymede security fairy giving an interview. "We're assuming some of the facts you want to manage are about the events of Ganymede. But it's a good idea to have more than one thing you want to address in mind as background so you don't contradict yourself later."

"That's the most urgent, yes," says one of the humans.

"But we do want to end up in a good position for everything else later," adds the halfling. "We don't know what everything else is though, yet, it sounds like that's going to complicate things a bit."

"Yep. This is going to be ferociously complicated. And you'll want to work fast; the partial news is leaving folks scared and confused and the longer that lasts the less receptive they'll be." Slide. ONE YEAR OUT. "This might be counterintuitive but I think if you try describing what a good result for you a year from now would look like we'll have a better more bird's-eye view of where we'd naively get tripped up."

"A year isn't very long," says the half-elf.

    "Well, it's longer for humans," one of them says.

        "We want healers here. We might not be ready for a full church presence but I'd want to see us on track for it, by then," says the other.

            "And an idea of what dangers we pose to each other and plans in progress to handle that."

    "And what we can do for each other. Not just our church, all the good gods."

        "It wouldn't be bad to have the neutral ones around. We'll want to be more careful with that going forward but they are important for some things."

"I'd want to see more species of people here but that's definitely going to take more than a year."

            "Well, elves, sure. They could have gnomes and halflings tomorrow if they wanted 'em."

"That's true."

"I'd like to see free transit between our worlds, and maybe not free transit but something in that vein between your plane and your afterlives. They're kicking me out of the continent I've been staying on, I think unless I can get one of our nations to count me as a citizen and have a treaty with them about it."