"The latter. I have goals but there are lots of ways I could go about them and I need to know what I have before I start picking paths there. Are there any things you can do I might not be able to guess?"

"I don't know what you are and aren't liable to guess."

"The only things I know magic can't reasonably do are the things you thought would make good proof of my divinity. If there are other limits, or other things that might seem hard but are actually doable, I need to know them. If you also know anything about why most people don't know magic is real, that would help."

"In my experience, most things that are magic or otherwise beyond the bounds of the common understanding of the world prefer to maintain that fact in relation to themselves in order to avoid unwanted attention. How it started I do not know. In my experience, the limits of magic are what you can figure out how to do, rather than any hard limits on the system."

"That's promising. The main limit on miracles is that most people can't do them even if they decided to try. Did you read my book? It goes public on basically everything. It's not very widely read so far. I think it's about time everyone knew about all of it, but if there are reasons for caution I would like them."

"You are likely to start Holy Wars."

"This does worry me. But the conservative option leaves me with fewer resources and the status quo isn't sufficient. Do you have any advice on reducing the risk?"

"Start relatively small. Build up a solid base of believers who won't do anything regrettable before confronting those who will."

"I've been considering going to the local pastor anyway."

"If you announce yourself at the next such gathering as the one at which we met, I suspect the running around like headless chickens our peers would do would break the monotony some. If I back you up, I suspect they'll even ultimately believe you."

"You don't think they'd start holy wars?"

"Holy wars happen when large populations or groups with reasons to hate each other already get their hands on information like that. There aren't enough magicians with enough of the right kind of religiousness or social fracture points for a holy war."

"Maybe I will, then."

"I have no particular advice to offer on your church since I know none of the people involved but a single church is probably not large enough in scale for the worst-case scenario to be particularly catastrophic."

"It'll be good practice," Mehitabel writes. "One thing I have considered doing is summoning all of the demons out of Hell. I have been warned that it is impossible to contain a Duke, but I doubt demons are capable of space travel unassisted and I was advised that by someone who at the time did not know that I was Christ. Can I get your expert opinion?"

"There are enough demons in Hell that I don't expect that to necessarily be an efficient use of your time, and I strongly recommend putting them on farther apart rather than closer together heavenly bodies, but if you can summon a Duke of Hell on a Jovian moon and then immediately teleport away I wouldn't naively expect that to fail. Practicing teleportation reaction time seems to be something of a prerequisite, though."

"Of course. The smaller ones can probably be safely contained without having to use an entire Jovian moon to do it, no?"

"Yes, but I would regardless be careful about leaving too many with theoretical access to each other. Pain demons in significant quantities plot."

"Yes. But shouting distance isn't that far on a planetary scale."

"If they are in fact securely bound and sufficiently likely to stay that way then 'beyond shouting distance' should reliably suffice, although do note that demons may have a longer shouting distance than humans."

"Noted."

The next email he sends her is a blank with an attachment that turns out to be profiles of various acquaintances of his detailing their skills, magical traits, relevant personality details, and other potentially useful tidbits.

"Thanks so much, this is a good reference to have!"

"There's some extremely salient information omitted for privacy reasons, I should warn you, but all in the category of 'things they can do,' not emotional landmines or similar that I expect you to trigger as a result of not having the information."

"I understand. Can you give me an example of something like that which you might have redacted if it were real? If there's not that many things it could be you could flip a coin to decide whether to use a real or fake example."