"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."

"Could you make them do so?"

"Make them, what, be actually alive? Sure I could."

"Not necessarily alive, just - growing. We were talking about deifying other people earlier; I'm wondering if you could make independent helpful agents from scratch."

"Hmm. Yeah, I don't see why not. But I don't know how much growing I could make them be..."

"What would be the limiting factor?"

"I've never done something like that before, so I don't know what the limits would be like, I'm just guessing there might be some. Well, for one thing, they might not be able to do things I don't set them up to be able to do, and I might not be able to set them up to do all the things I can do. I'm pretty sure I could make something that could do a lot of stuff, but I don't know about - hearing prayers the way I do, or being able to figure out and mess around with magic I've never seen before. I wouldn't know how to make something that could do those."

"But you could make things that took written suggestions, maybe, or staffed a queue of people with queries, and forwarded up things they couldn't handle to you?"

"I could, I guess. Never thought of it."