"Like... I figure out what I'm going to do, and I get it all worked out in detail, but I don't do any of it until the last second and then it all goes at once."

"...Is your memory perfect?"

"Not in the long term. But for things like that, when I'm right in the middle of something, it is."

"At what point do you start forgetting things?"

"As soon as I move on from something complicated like that, the details stop being so fresh, but I can still get them back. I used to lose things while I was out, when my body woke up, but obviously that's not happening anymore. And when one body dies, I lose almost everything on the way to the next one. I only know there's been me for as long as there's been people because I looked, and because things I learned how to do when I had a different incarnation come back really fast, in a way things I'm doing for the first first time don't."

"When you get a new body is it already an adult or close to it or do you get born in fresh ones or what?"

"I get born in fresh ones, or at least I did this time. This one wasn't born yet when I got attached, so there were about six months when I was 'on' all the time before he was born and started being awake sometimes; I don't know how usual that is, I never looked hard enough to find out."

"Do the - characteristics of the body have anything to do with what you get up to while you're on?"

"Huh?"

"I don't have anything specific in mind. You don't share memories; do you share anything else with whatever body you're attached to?"

"...Personality, I'm pretty sure. I mean, can't see much about previous ones from here, but I know previous gods were me in all the ways I can tell that count, and from what little I've seen of this body he seemed like that too."

"So you're kind of - overwriting various fetuses. Oookay."

"Apparently!"

Kaylo double checks his scry and attempts to look in on the fountain.

"The path changes all by itself without you looking in on it and redesigning?"

"Yep!"

"How?"

"I made it so it'd redesign itself once a week. Always picks some path from edge to middle that as long as you're on it, the water won't hit you, and sometimes it makes fake ones that get partway there and then dead-end. And then the water goes everywhere else, mostly randomly."

"So there's an algorithm built into the magic that can do independent decisionmaking of that kind."

"You could put it that way. I don't know if 'algorithm' is the right word. I think it might imply I specified more things than I did."

"...What word would you use?"

"It's more like a semi-autonomous entity with a few basic guidelines than like a spell or program with an algorithm. It's a little bit alive, I guess. Like library creatures."

"Those don't ever grow beyond what you set them up to do, do they?"

"Not that I've seen."