"I don't think anybody's ever tried, but it wouldn't make sense for it to work. Same reason as the other thing - I can only do stuff that's relevant to the prayer I'm holding onto, but holding onto a prayer doesn't change how good I am at what it's asking for. You can give it a shot if you want, just to see."

"Maybe. So in general people can't pray for you to be able to alter your own abilities, your status as a prayer-granter doesn't recurse?"

"Yeah. I have stuff I can do, and what prayer I'm holding onto changes which of the stuff I can do right then, but not what stuff. If I can alter my own abilities, it's something I'll have to figure out how to do; just having somebody ask for it won't help with that."

"Can people pray on each others' behalves? Wanting so-and-so to get whatever they want without being specific in the prayer about what that is?"

"Yeah, I guess. I'd just have to figure out what so-and-so wanted, because if they weren't the one praying I wouldn't be 'hearing' it directly."

"But the contents of what they want would fall under the scope of the relevance of the prayer."

"Yeah. And so would, say, asking them what it was."

"The detail work that gives you trouble - like brain stuff - you still can do, but have to do it stepwise. Does altering your own parameters seem like that, where given enough prayers directed at it you could figure out what to tweak to make it come together, or like something else?"

"If you can get Keo something to grab onto she's - good at brain stuff," says Kaylo. "Well, mind stuff, technically. But I'm not sure how she'd interact with you because you're weird. Probably similarly risky to try sending your body back, even if we made plans to resummon you."

"It seems like I came here with no problem, but maybe the mystery coma messed something up, who knows."

"Yeah. There are potions and spells that can wake people, up, too, but likewise, maybe not safe to try."

"Any bright ideas about how to figure out what is safe to try?"

"...I usually avoid them like the plague because they're buggy, but there exist spells to tell the future, and this is actually the kind of thing that they're good at, specific planned action that might do one of two broad classes of things probably based on stable factors as opposed to small perturbations."

"Spells to tell the future, huh? How's that work? What kind of buggy are they?"

"They're kind of terrible in practice most of the time. The ones that work by anything other than random chance are extrapolatory, not prognosticatory. They don't look at the future, they look at - moving parts in the present. Basically what I'd do would be I'd look up one of these spells, and then tell somebody who'd do it on my say-so to go give you a potion at a certain time, and then cast the spell to see what happens at that time, and then if I got a clean result it'd tell me whether to stop them or not. It'd work best if you agreed in advance to do something specific and informative in response to whatever happened. I could give the person with the potion a list of questions to ask your body-self in case he still doesn't remember being you on waking, if that's how it shakes out."

"Like if we agree in advance that unwhat the hell?"

"Huh?"

"You did a thing. I wasn't praying for it, where did the thing come from? ...Also how long does it sit here if I don't juke one way or the other?"

"Sits there as long as you haven't picked something. I'm talking to you, I told you about choices in the list but I didn't go into detail and I figured you might want to know what they're like and that might be something you'd want, so it came under 'talking to you'."

"If I pick 'no' can you re-try or does it stop being relevant then or what? I do not plan to pick no, I'm just - examining it while it's still here."

"Now that we're talking about it I bet I could keep offering it to you all day if for some reason you felt like doing that. Might be a little less relevant to spring it on you out of nowhere again."

"There's degrees of relevance? How does that factor in?"

"There's degrees of relevance, and things are either relevant enough or they aren't, but if they're on the edge sometimes that goes back and forth a little."