Escher and Raef don't respond, both looking a little distant.

"They escaped it," Trap explains quietly. "From what I've been able to tell it was a complete mess."

He shakes his head. "Sounds like a hard job. Hope you got good people helping you." He pauses, goes back over what she just said. "...are gods seriously a threat to you?"

"... That's good," Lilaina says of the escape. "I'm glad there were survivors. Because yes, gods are a threat in my world. They're--" She thinks about how to phrase it. "Scarily powerful people who ascended from being mortal via the use of extremely magical artifacts, almost all of them, and usually they ascend by killing a previous god with an artifact and the dead god's power flows into them.

"They've destroyed and scarred worlds by fighting over artifacts, or just because they were angry or bored or people weren't sufficiently worshipful. They've left scars on my home world, from a war a long time ago and again more recently." She sighs and shakes her head. "Gods aren't like that on your world?"

"...I'm not entirely sure we even have gods," Trap admits. "But yours sound terrifying..."

"If we have gods they don't have minds as we know them," Esch adds, still somewhat subdued.

"A few of them are decent people," Lilaina says to Trap, "but terrifying isn't a bad description."

And to Esch, "How far away can you sense people? --Do you only sense people?"

"We've never really tested it," Esch says with a shrug. "Pretty far. Can definitely do off-planet, normally we're pretty focused on not hearing every living mind in close proximity. And believe me, for a world with psychics that is terrifyingly hard."

"You had a hard time shielding before you went to Toal," Trap points out. "And you came from a Clan with a high proportion of psychics."

"Who never really bothered to teach me how to do that," Esch retorts. "As for animals...they don't really register, apart from a few minor species. They're more like baselines than the Clans."