"Most of the ideas we came up with we tried. A lot of them turned out badly."

"What did you try?"

"So the thing is that human and near-human attention increases recharge rate, which is why religion is a thing. There were--things implemented to try to garner more attention. Some of them were, uh, unethical in retrospect."

"...I can see that. I think my gods work similarly in that respect, worship makes them stronger... Did it work, at least?"

"Mostly!"

"We have no sufficiently benevolent gods, so that's not on the table even if it could be done more ethically." Yet, she doesn't say. "Anything else?"

"Well, the previous Christ also issued a set of moral teachings intended to get people to behave better towards each other, but that...didn't stick as well as we hoped."

Didn't stick, really. This is her surprised face.

"We were expecting it to be less than universally followed! We were less expecting the holy wars!"

...and this is her actually surprised face. "You get holy wars by accident? As far as I know we only get holy wars when gods actually, you know, want them."

"We get people who want wars for other reasons using religion as an excuse."

"...You and your God must be much more constrained in your ability to communicate than my gods."

"Mhm."

"And yet here you are, talking to me. Has your communication ability improved or am I just that important?"

"Angels don't typically come to Earth because the transit is--risky. For reasons I forbear to mention because obviously the risk of a thing happening goes up when more people know it's possible. I don't have any particular reason to mistrust you, this is just a general policy. We're here on Earth now because of the new Christ."

"Risk only obviously increases if it's a thing people do, and wouldn't normally do by accident. If I were to speculate, I'd guess that angel parts - blood, feathers, hair, eyes - are magically useful or something. I am probably not going to cut you up for parts."

"I also can't think of anything productive you could do with the information. If I were to tell you, I would want past-scrying wards at least as good as Kanimir's and without the exception for him doing the past-scrying, which would be very difficult to attain."

"I am not expecting you to tell me but I may keep trying to find out because of who I am as a person. How does past-scrying work?"

"Depends on the spell you use for it, I'm given to understand."

"Does it require the caster to be in the place to be scried? If not, does it work across planes?"

"As far as I'm aware neither hard limit applies to the system but no one has figured out how to do cross-plane scrying."

"Well, until someone figures that out I am pretty sure I have access to a past-scrying-proof area, in case there are other conversations you want to have in private. Though I suppose I haven't confirmed that I can access it from here."

"And something that's past-scrying proof by virtue of no one figuring out how to scry there stops being past-scrying proof when they figure it out."

"The space in question seems to also cease to exist after use, if that effects things. I will also work on anti-scrying, that will probably be useful to have anyways."

"It does?"