"- oh! Sure, I'm a cleric of Shelyn, does She see much attention in the, uh, forest?"

"Some! Nature is full of beauty and - I don't think I actually know anyone who's, like, opposed to beauty on principle. Well, I can think of some people," like those hags probably, "but no-one I personally know. I think Shelyn is - very easy to like, even out of the Good gods, and to worship sometimes even if you don't dedicate your life to Her."

"Does She have many worshippers in Cheliax? I don't - really understand how Cheliax is, or used to be under Asmodeus. I know worshipping Good gods was forbidden, but did people actually - avoid being beautiful or admiring beauty or something?"

"...that's not exactly why I wanted to talk to you so please don't spend a lot of time explaining that to me if you don't want to. What I really want to understand is - out of all the Chelish people I've talked to, noone seems to actually understand Good. I don't mean be Good, I mean just - know what it is. What it's for, what it lets you do that the other alignments don't. Even the cleric of Erastil I spoke to didn't, but he also said he might be Lawful Neutral, so - I guess I just want to understand if anyone here thinks Good means remotely the same thing I was taught it does? Are we even speaking the same language? What is Good, to you?"

"Hmmm. So, I think Good isn't just one thing. Wouldn't that be weird, if it were? It'd be very - samey. Sometimes I get a samey vibe from Sarenrae but not from Shelyn at all, Shelyn wants a thousand colors and a thousand songs and a thousand loves... And I also don't think Good is just three things, either, three planes and three alignments. So you might have been taught a perfectly good Good, and just be discovering how big the possible space of Goodness is!"

"Right, that's true, I meant that - there's a core thing that all the different Good gods and people share, which is why we can call them all Good, why it means something to talk about 'all Good gods' and not about, I dunno, 'all the gods with two alignments'. And Neutral Good has it more - clearly, because you're not distracted by the Law or Chaos. There are still as many different Neutral Goods as there are good people!"

"Just like - there isn't a Most Beautiful Person. To be more beautiful doesn't mean to look more exactly like that one person. Everyone is beautiful in their own way. But that doesn't mean there's no beauty that they share. I think the same way, you can have Shelyn and Sarenrae and other Neutral Good gods, and there's something that they all share, the essence of Good. Something without which I don't think you can be Good. Don't you feel that way?"

"Not necessarily. Like... you could say that there is a thing all, uh... objects, share, that makes them objects instead of... ideas or the wind or something. But that would be a very weird way to talk about objects, when almost always the important thing about an object is going to be more specific than that. I think it might actually make more sense to talk about Evil that way. Evil is hurting people. There are a lot of ways to do it and a lot of reasons to do it but if you're not hurting anybody I don't think you're doing evil. Maybe there are Evil philosophers who think differently, I don't know. Good, though - you could say it's about helping people but that sounds reductive to me. The important thing about an expression of Goodness is almost always going to be more specific than that. You can help people by defending them from their enemies or lifting their spirits or teaching them to reject Evil in their own lives or giving them food or - and if you help an Evil person that could be Good or actively anti-Good depending how you go about it, too."

"That does make sense. Most Evil, some people say all the real Evil, is when someone just wants to hurt others, and the way they choose to hurt them is secondary."

"I don't think it's wrong to say that Good is about helping people, either, it's just - incomplete. You can help some people at the expense of other people, like if you have some food and you give it to your family and not to strangers. If you just - move resources from one person to another, it's not Good, and it's not Evil either, it's just - selfish, and it's normal for everyone to be some amount of selfish. Even if you, say, pay for a friend to be healed, and there's a limited amount of healing spells, someone else would have gotten that spell if it wasn't your friend, so if it's a Good it's a small one."

"I think - I was taught this, and I think it's right - that true Good is about making things better for many people while hurting few or none. Helping people but not at others' expense. Sometimes it's very simple, you can make something beautiful that wasn't there before and some people will enjoy it and probably no-one would ever be hurt by it. And sometimes it's hard, like deciding whether to fight a war which would be very bad if you lose."

"And the thing it lets you do that the other alignments don't is that - if we're both Good, and you tell me 'there's a Good idea we could do', you can expect me to cooperate, because I want Good too. Maybe I won't spend a lot of time helping, but I'll spend at least a little and I wouldn't stop you. We don't need to have a deal about it beforehand like Lawful people, or a common interest like Evil people, because doing Good is a common interest, and it's not about ourselves to begin with."

"You've just made several claims and I don't agree with all of them but since they weren't written down I'm not sure I'd get them right if I tried to go back over them with you."

"Well, do you think - if something is clearly Good, if it helps people and doesn't harm them, then you support it, even if you don't know any of those people?"

"I just said helping people might be Evil some of the time. If they're Evil, depending how you go about it."

"Yeah, that's a very good point. In theory you'd just say - helping them causes more Evil, so it's not really Good to begin with. Of course you can't always tell. But if you think something helps people and doesn't hurt or cause others to hurt people, then are you in favor of that, and willing to help a little, even though you don't know those people yourself? And even though they probably won't pay it back? That's what I think it means to be Good."

"And - I really really don't want you to think I'm saying you're not really Good, or anything like that. I came here hoping to understand you, and other Chelish people. I'm describing how I think so you can tell me if you think I'm wrong, and what you think Good is about. Because - if it was just a lot of different things for everyone, then we wouldn't care so much that they were all 'Good', right? Delegate Wain made that speech and everyone was very - moved, or something, I'm wrong  sometimes about what emotions Chelish people are feeling, but everyone talked about doing Good and fighting Evil and not just - fighting for Iomedae against Asmodeus, say. I want to understand what they, sorry, you all think that means, and whether it's the same thing I mean."

"If I trusted someone who told me that they were trying to help some people who weren't Evil - or help someone Evil in a way that wouldn't help them do any Evil like, uh, painting their house to look cheerier or teaching them to braid their daughter's hair or something, and I had some help to spare which I might not because everybody's busy sometimes, then I'd help. But I'd have to trust them, that's the big hurdle here, if they were evil or mistaken or just kind of confused I couldn't be sure that it was right to help them without checking and that would take time all by itself. I think part of wanting to all be Good together is to make it quicker and easier to find people you can trust like that."

"That's definitely important! And it's very understandable that you'd only do safe things if you can't trust most people. Even if you agree what Good is about you still need to know who is Good. But you can't even ask who's Good if you don't already know - or agree - on what being Good means or why it's important to you. You can avoid Evil people, but Good is more than just not being Evil. Good is making the world better for other people, beyond what you'd do because you just enjoy doing it or you like those particular people, and without making someone else worse off."

"I'm - not sure if I'm not explaining myself well, or if it's just that I said a lot of things and you agree with some and not with others? I admit I was expecting you to have an idea of what Good means to you and when you said it's just a lot of different things I wasn't sure what to think. If you really think there's nothing important in common to all Good, then why do you care about - promoting all Good churches, that's part of your committee, right? Instead of just making a list of the Good gods you know and saying those are the right ones?"

"You're again saying a lot of things and then skipping right past them pretending I agreed with you! Are you like this all the time? Please don't do that, I know you're probably just from a forest and don't talk to people very often at home but it's really kind of an alarming habit to a regular Chelish person."

Oh no. This is almost certainly Feather's fault, this woman seems nice and if she didn't want to talk to Feather she'd just say so.

"I'm sorry! I really don't mean to - assume you agree with anything I say. I want to understand what you think, not to - convince you of anything. Um. Do you want to respond to any one thing I said? Or should I try to ask a really small question? I'm sorry that I'm bothering you, I'm - honestly not trying to waste your time or anything like that. I just want to understand how a Good priestess sees Good."

"You said I can't ask who's Good if I don't already know what it means or why it's important to me. But I absolutely can! I have to! I started out inventing Shelynism from hostile rumors and a wooden bird prop! That didn't stop me from preparing Detect Good if it'd been useful to me back then. It doesn't stop me from having it now. I prepared it this morning." She uses it to spot people in the audience who would be especially valuable to get to know and selectively call on them when she needs audience participation.

Oh no that sounds terrible. Do these humans... each invent for themselves what Good is?

"So, um, I think understand why you wanted to understand Shelyn or find other Shelynites. But why did you want to ask who was Good - besides Shelynites - if you didn't already have some idea of why it's... good, to be Good, and why you'd want to find other Good people? That sounds like what I'm saying, that there's something common to all Good, that thing you were looking for in others."

"So - I think this would be harder if I weren't a cleric, being a cleric makes it very straightforward. For me, Shelyn made the first move, kind of - like I was already praying before but Shelyn's the one who said, you, I want you on my team, you're one of my people and everyone can know it now. So I already know that whatever I was doing then, She liked the look of it! And I can guess that if She's doing something I haven't learned about yet I'll probably like the look of that. But it's not like She's constantly bickering with all the other Good gods, now, is it? They say she's the best of friends with everybody in the Upper Planes. So I can guess that if I knew all about all her friends I'd like them too and I'd like their people too. And it's not like everyone would make a good cleric. Somebody could be a brilliant wizard or an ordinary farmer and just not be suited for the profession. But if they're Good, I still know they're on our team, or they're trying to be, or they've gotten dragged kicking and screaming the whole way maybe but they're here.

"I detect good sometimes to know who's the most valuable new friend in a crowd, because they won't detect at all if they're not pulling hard on the course of the future."

"I think it's true that all Good people can and should be friends!" Finally, finally, someone here gets it. "And I think that's part of what Good means, or maybe even all of it."

"I - don't want to say too much all at once again. Just, that the other three alignments aren't like that. Evil people are selfish. Lawful people can be allies but they can also have different conflicting laws. Chaotic people just - each do what they like, you have to consider them individually."

"Good people are the ones who are friends, or at least allies, with all of each other. And because being Good means helping others, it doesn't exclude anyone, unlike saying you're friends with all of your race or your village or your country. Does that sound right to you?"

"I'm a little worried you're going to try to tell me that since I want to be on team Good I have to support your convention agenda, but I know perfectly well that I do not have to do that, because I don't support your agenda and Shelyn still likes me. But even if you meant something more standard than that, I'm not sure I agree. Erastilians, say. They're Good but they're not very cosmopolitan at all! I'll be happy to go onstage for tourists from anywhere in the world but an Erastilian focuses on their own family and village and farm and I think that's fine for them even if they wind up suspicious of strangers and never go traveling to see who needs help somewhere else."

"I don't mean - well, I do think you ought to support my agenda, but I don't think you're not Good if you don't. I think both of us don't understand Good perfectly well, or each other, or all the relevant facts." Like that animals hurt when you hurt them and so you shouldn't that. "I probably don't really understand the Erastilians either."

"But - you don't have to do what I said, to pursue Good for literally everyone, in order to be Good. No-one does that, or at least no-one mortal. I'm focused on my forest, an Erastilian is focused on their village, you're maybe focused on - the people who come see you, uh, do beautiful things," Feather isn't sure what exactly it is that Laia does 'on stage', "and not those who stay home or live in other cities." 

"But we all still want everyone to have nice things, even all the people we don't know and aren't focusing on. Unless it promotes Evil, like you said. We don't want bad things to happen, even to strangers, unless they prevent Evil. And when we meet another Good person we know we can be allies and maybe friends, because we have that in common."

"That sounds right so far."

"Oh. That's great! I mean, I'm happy that we agree about it. Do you think this is something Chelish people often don't understand about Good, if they're not Good themselves?"

"It might be a Shelyn specialty a little bit, because She's also a goddess of redemption, and of - loving your brother forever even if he has made just the worst choices and always hoping he'll come back. I think Chelish people who are trying to be Iomedaean and not very good at it might especially have this problem."

"I think that's very important. It's easy to work with other Good people, if you both trust each other to be very Good. Most people aren't like that. But like Delegate Wain - or I guess I should call her Select Wain - said earlier, most people have some Good inside them. I have to keep hoping people will act Good who didn't before, because someone explains something to them, or - for any reason - if I had no hope for that, I think I wouldn't know how to live. And - I'm happy other Good people think that too."

Feather smiles happily at Laia. At least some people here know what Good is, even if she had to talk to a cleric of a properly Good Goddess to find one, and even if Laia is afraid to trust her neighbors to be Good as well. At least they don't think Good is some alien thing completely unlike what Feather was taught. Soler didn't understand her but he said himself he might be Lawful and not Good after all.

Now she just needs to explain to them that animals are just as deserving of Good, and just as in need of it, as humanoids. And to make all the other Chelish people Good too. 

But at least it's not worse than she thought, before she came to this city.

"I think people are working on it. And some of them only have little inklings of the littlest things and are only concentrating on those things instead of something else because they're worried about Hell, and - it would be better if they didn't have to be, if the only thing that happened after death when people were awful and vicious to each other in life was that they'd feel embarrassed after they grew up a bit more - but it's what it is and it's got people trying, through the fear."

"Does that... work? What I was taught is that, if you're only helping others because you selfishly want to escape Hell - not that I'm saying that's a bad motivation! But if you're not helping others because you actually care about them, then it's not really Good? I'm not sure what Pharasma thinks, this is more - I was taught a guide to being Good, not a guide to escaping Hell if you're already Evil and Lawful."

(Feather's teachers' guide to being Evil said, as far as she remembers, 'to be Evil is to be selfish, so consider if you selfishly want to end up in an Evil afterlife instead of staying Neutral'. There are as many Evil druids as Good ones though, and they're probably just as Wise, so Feather assumes they must have some solution that she never bothered studying because she chose Good very early on.)

"So - I'm still new at this, I've been learning from the foreign Shelynites who've come in to help establish a church here but we haven't covered everything and honestly spend a lot of time talking about music - but one metaphor I overheard someone using was, imagine your soul's a cup of water and you're painting a picture and every now and then you clean off your brush in the cup of water. It'll turn the first color you use very fast, because water doesn't have its own color, so say you're painting in yellow, your soul will look very yellow. If you want your soul to be not yellow any more, say you'd rather have it be green, the fastest and best way to do that is with blue. It's a very normal thing to do, if you've got evil stuck in your soul, to want to drown it out with good, even if all things considered you're more of a neutral sort. It'll work fine, if you're not too old, and if you are too old maybe you save up to have Archmage Naima reincarnate you so you have more time. And then if you dump out your paint water at the end of your life on something white so the Judge can have a look at it, it'll look green. It doesn't matter exactly how much you meant all the evil you did first or all the good you did after. It got on the canvas, and it got there on your paintbrush, and it's there in your soul. Maybe it'll be bluer than it is green, even, if you tried very hard at being good and were just getting by with the evil.

"But also? Any time you want, you can dump out your whole cup, if you really mean it. You can chuck it all in the sea and say, that's not me, that's not what I was ever meant for, I am deciding right now to quit all of that forever and getting a refill, I'm going blue blue blue blue. And that works, too, and even Pharasma knows it - if you really mean it. There's a spell for that, too, called Atonement, which is so expensive and people only ever buy it if they need their alignment for their magic to work and have to have it all finessed right that very day. But it works without the spell, too, just - lagging a little bit while you reassure yourself that you really really meant it."

"I know about that spell! Druids have it too. And everything else you say makes sense. I'm just not sure if it counts as Good, if you're helping others just to escape Hell and you don't actually care about them. It's like - if you're very rich and you give all your stuff to poor people, does that count as Good because you're helping them, or is it neutral because you're selfishly buying something you want more than you want the stuff you gave away?"

"This isn't really important to me personally, it's just interesting. I'm Good already and I like it that way. I think I learned what I wanted from you but if you want to keep talking for a bit I'd enjoy that! Do you want to ask me anything?"

"I'm not sure what you mean by 'counts', if you don't mean 'counts' for Pharasma. It can still really help the people you help no matter how you feel about it. - How'd you become a druid?"

"Counts for Pharasma, yes. Although it's better for the rest of us too, if people really want to be Good and won't just stop doing Good things once they're no longer Evil."

Feather is happy to tell the story of how she became a druid! She may require some prompting for clarifications from Laia, since (as Feather is painfully aware) it can be very hard to explain a foreign way of life.

Looking back at it, her life was very - focused. Always on the same trajectory, even before she knew what it was aiming at, and before anyone could know if she would make it. Great Hoot the giant owl was the first to recognize her potential, perhaps, but it was only that - potential.

She studied with the other young kids, the things that everyone wants their children to know - woodscraft, survival skills, social skills, the war for the forest's survival that will touch all their lives when they are older. She studied the things she wanted, beyond that, found teachers who liked her and who considered her worth their time, until she was recommended for advanced classes. There she learned more, about everything in the forest and about the world outside it, about things that would not touch their lives unless they went out to seek them. She learned about all the different kinds of people in the forest - not to understand them fully, which is a much more advanced skill, but how they live, what they want and fear and like, to communicate without words when she does not share a language. To make friends.

The outsiders call people with those kinds of skills rangers. It's not inaccurate, but Feather thinks the term is too broad. Most of a ranger's skills - tracking, hunting, fighting, stealth, moving quickly, knowing the terrain and what you should eat and what is deadly - are ordinary life skills in the forest. Everyone in her extended family is a ranger, the way outsiders use the word, even if they can't cast any spells. Feather and her friends were taught meditation, ethics, working together with people of different races and alignments, world history, fighting with staves, predicting the weather. All valuable life skills, that also just happened to be the ones most useful to those of them who were approved to join the final set of classes.

By the time Feather was told what she must do to be initiated as druid, the only new information was in the remaining steps, not the destination. She worked and studied long and hard for those remaining steps, but she already felt that she could only be a druid - or a failed one.

Feather thinks a druid is the best thing to be - at least for someone like her. One reason for this is that if there's anything better to be then a druid can learn to become that other thing, even if it's something she couldn't become any other way like 'a dragon'. But another reason is that - druids are charged with keeping and improving the world, for everyone in it.

Feather really, really wants to improve the world.

"I... don't think you can learn to become any other thing you want by being a druid about it. Maybe you can learn to turn into any shape, but you're meeting kinds of people here who are, like, clerics and wizards and nobles and things like that, I don't think changing shape would make you one of those."

"It's true, a druid can't turn into a cleric or anoble," Feather agrees. "A cleric isn't really something you are, it's something a god makes you be, and they could decide to stop and you'd still be you. A noble is something a Queen makes you be."

"I don't know if a druid can become a wizard. Some people think that wizards, or at least archwizards, are different kinds of people, and maybe being a druid would help with it if it required a - very different mindset. A druid might be - good at changing the way they think to better understand and fit a god, maybe? But that's not what I meant."

"A very wise druid can learn to become an elf, or a dwarf, or an owl - the kind of owl who's as smart as a human - or a dragon, or even an elemental. These are all very different kinds of people. They're not just body shapes. An elf isn't exactly like a human except with different looking eyes and ears, although an elf's mind might be more like a human than an owl. Different people - races, or creatures - are different in mind, as much as in body, and you need - that is, we druids need - to learn all about them and really understand them, in order to become a person like they are. If you know an elf - or a treant, or a dragon, or a giant owl - and you talk to them a lot and get to know them well, you can tell they're different from humans, even if you don't have any druid training."

"I know there are wizard spells that just change your body shape for a little while but leave your mind the same, maybe that's the confusion here. It's not how druids do it. When I become an owl I'm not - an owl-shaped human, I'm a smart owl who's also me, as a person, with my memories and personality and thoughts. But still an owl and not a human. It's - hard to explain in words, that's part of why it takes druids many years to learn how to do it."

"That sounds so unpleasant, actually? I know in Nirvana they say everyone becomes a new shape but I think they still think like themselves."

"Well you certainly don't have to do it if it's unpleasant! And - it would in fact be unpleasant if you didn't learn to properly be that kind of creature before you did it, or if after you learned you decided you wouldn't enjoy being it. I love being an owl, I chose it as my favourite shape, that doesn't mean all druids like being owls."

"I don't know what Nirvana does exactly but presumably it doesn't make anyone uncomfortable, that wouldn't be Good at all. Maybe it helps people learn about being new kinds of people. I think that understanding different kinds of people, the way you understand other humans, probably helps with being Good, because it helps you see everyone as people and not care about their race. Some humans are Good but only really care about other humans, and if they care about elves or halflings it's because they superficially look like humans, and when everyone is a different creature regardless of what they were born as, it helps you care equally about everyone. But I don't think Nirvana would do that by making someone be a person they didn't enjoy being."

"What about when Archmage Naima reincarnates people and they wind up turned into something new, like that lady in the pamphlet who was turned into a kobold?"

"When she - what? I haven't heard about that." She hadn't heard the word before, but her new magical layer of understanding Chelish informs her it means... Dying and being reborn in a new body? "Why... did she turn someone into a kobold? That sounds - cruel, if the woman didn't want to be a kobold and didn't know how." On top of apparently being a newborn kobold, or maybe an egg.

"Oh, she would've paid for it! - not specifically to be a kobold, I assume everybody hopes they'll be a human again or maybe some especially nice nonhuman species like an elf or something, but the spell the Archmage uses doesn't let you pick, the important thing is that whatever it turns you into, you'll be young and healthy again, and have longer to go blue. I mean Good."

"Huh. That's - interesting? I guess if you're Evil and really want to be Good and are too old to change, then it's worth it. I hope there's a way for the humans who end up as kobolds to learn how to be kobolds, though. Or at least to be comfortable."

"I haven't met any yet. I did meet one who looks Garundi now, it was sort of funny with the posh accent, but luckily she was still human. Or he was, I'm not sure how to - it can sometimes make a man into a woman or the other way around."

"I guess now every time I meet someone I'll need to keep in mind the possibility they're actually a human mind in body they're not used to? And are probably Evil. Um." Feather can see her goal of learning to understand Chelish humans recede before her eyes. "I - guess that's why they say archmages can do very strange and novel things no-one else can."

"I don't think it's very fair to look at somebody who got turned into a kobold or a dwarf or something and say, oh, that means they're probably Evil! It means they want to work on being Good and they think it will be hard so they want to work hard. They didn't just give up."

"You're right! Thanks." Feather smiles. "I'll keep that in mind. Do you know how widespread this is?" Maybe if the archmage turns all the Evil humans into kobolds and random other races it will help them learn that different races are equally people. Feather isn't sure if 'build Nirvana on Golarion' is possible but she'd be very happy to learn someone's trying.

"It costs about a hundred dollars? And there are all kinds of warnings posted about how a lot of people really hate even more than you'd expect being in a new body. So - it's expensive, but less expensive than a slave or a city house, and not everyone who'd maybe benefit will decide it's for them. But there are a few just in the convention, I think mostly nobles, and more scattered around."

"I don't - really know how many people can afford that much," Feather confesses. "Even if it's all their life savings that they're spending on having another chance to make Good. I'm just wondering if it means a few years from now you'll end up with one human in ten thousand going for it, or one in ten."

"Either way, it's a very Good thing, giving everyone a second chance, it's - the essence of redemption, right? I'm really glad to hear the archmage is doing it. Hopefully with more time people can learn how to be comfortable and enjoy their new lives." Feather can't exactly offer to teach druidic meditation to a tenth of the humans in Cheliax and she isn't sure what else would work, for someone already stuck in an unfamiliar body.

"Yeah, I hope they can all get used to whatever they wind up with or at least afford another try if their first is awful. I heard she turned somebody into a flail snail, I don't even know what that is!"

"Wow. Can she end up with, like, any kind of creature? I've never seen a flail snail either but I've at least heard of them. They live underground and have their own language and their own magic. They're not very cunning but they're very wise. And they're, well, snails, really big ones with beautiful coloured shells, and every snail has a different pattern." Half the reason Feather remembers this is that her mother told her made-up tales of pretty flail snails going on adventures when she little. 

"I think she wouldn't turn anybody into an owl or anything like that, just various kinds of person - no idea if she could get a dragon or not out of this spell. I guess if someone had to be a snail at least it's a pretty kind of snail with magic."

An owl is a person. Laia is the nicest human Feather has met in this city and may be the most likely to believe her about it, but she is also the person Feather least wants to offend or drive away by explaining what Good really requires.

"If you have to be someone you don't like or aren't prepared for, it's best to at least be someone pretty," she agrees instead. "I hope being beautiful helps that person learn to like their new body, and others to like them too."

"I hope so too. ...is flying as fun as it looks?"

"YES! It's incredible. You get to go everywhere and see so much of everything, and there are so many things that look really different from above. You see - whole new kinds of beauty, of the ways some things are arranged, the way they work. You can see really big things, like whole rivers and woods, all at once and appreciate them for what they are. And you can swoop and dive and you can float almost in one place, and you can dance and sing in the sky where everyone can see and hear you if you want, or you can fly stealthily at night as an owl and just enjoy looking at the world."

"And - this is one reason why a bird isn't just a human with a flight spell. Humans can barely climb trees, humans think the world is flat, when I'm human I know there's miles and miles of air above us but I can't really feel it, the way if you were deaf you'd still know sound exists but that's not the same experience as hearing. As a bird you understand that height really exists for the first time in your life. You can live in the sky and fly close to the sun and - it's like the whole world has become so much bigger, and so much more wonderful."

"But if I had a magic item that let me fly or turn into a bird I'd be able to see all those things too..."

"You could at least see them, yes! If you can't turn into a real bird it's still very much worth going flying if you have a way. Or maybe if you can get up a really tall mountain, you can see very far away and a lot at once. When I look at the world from far above it looks so beautiful, it - makes it easy to remember that it's really really good that it's there, even with all the Evil and suffering in it."

Nod nod nod.

"One day I'll learn to be a giant owl and then I could give you a ride so you could see for yourself, but I'm not nearly there yet," Feather says wistfully.

"Whoa. I won't hold you to that, I assume by then you'll have lots going on that doesn't make space for dropping by Ostenso to catch a play and give me an owl ride, but it's fun to imagine. ... Hey what would be good for more people to know about druids? I've started to dabble in writing plays as well as performing them and have their use as a way to inform on my mind."

Feather doesn't even know where Ostenso is! It's a bit sad to think that anyone nice she meets here, like Laia, she will probably never see again.

"You know, a week ago, I could have told you all about what makes druids different from other people and what's interesting and useful for everyone else to know them," she says reflectively. "But now I think that in some ways the differences between druids and the other people in Ravounel Forest are less than the differences between all of us and the people outside the forests. So maybe when you think about druids, the things that stand out to you the most are just things about - people from the Forest. And if that's true... maybe it's more important for you to know about all of us, and not druids in particular?"

"Of course I will tell you about druids if you want, it's important and also - one thing about druids, is that we think it's very important to understand other people. Not just observe and predict them, not just treat someone as an ally or an enemy or an obstacle, but to really understand them. So I'm glad you want to know! And that you think your audience will want to know."

"The important thing that we in the forest all think - believe, know - is that most living things are people. What does that mean, to call them people? It means they can be happy or sad, they can be hurt or helped. It means that if it's Evil to torture anyone who can feel pain, whether they're a human or a bird or a dryad or a mouse. It's Good to help others and that means everyone, and it's most Good if you're not helping them at someone else's expense."

"Druids care about all living things. We try to make the world better for everyone in it. Not just the Good druids, all of us, it's what being a druid is for. And it's different from the way Good wants everyone to prosper. In a perfect world, like in Nirvana, maybe they're the same thing. But all mortals live at the expense of someone else. We can't just say - no-one can eat anyone else, better starve to death. No-one can cut down trees to build houses or burn them for firewood, better freeze to death. That's impossible, the world doesn't work that way. Even in an empty world with nothing but plants in it, they will compete for sunlight and strangle each other if they can."

"All we can do, even the Good among us, is - not kill for fun if you're not going to eat them or use the wood. Not hurt unnecessarily when you kill them. Not kill so much that the prey population can't recover and there's not enough food for anyone next year or next generation. It's fine and normal to be selfish, to want to live and live well even if it's unavoidably at the expense of someone else."

"Now, as a druid, I want many people of all kinds to flourish. Forests - ones managed by druids - are like that. There are very many people of all different kinds, living in a very complicated balance, at least ideally. And when something disturbs that balance, we try to restore it. If, say, there's a new kind of squirrel, and it's really really good at finding all the acorns and remembering where it put them, we might end up with no new oaks, and that would be bad. So we'd stop there being too many of those squirrels, or if they recently came from outside we might try to kill them all off. Because if the oaks die, then the squirrels die for lack of acorns, and so do the many other kinds of creatures who depend on there being oaks and live in and on and around them."

"Some Chelish people think the druids hate them and want everything to be forest and not human farms. That's not true." Well, some druids definitely want that, but not all of them and it's not the message she wants to convey. "We don't want humans to cut down more and more forest, because that means killing everyone who lives there now. And there are more, and more kinds, of people who live in a bit of forest than on a human farm of the same size. But even if there weren't, they're living in the forest now, and we don't want them to be killed and their world destroyed so that different kinds of creatures can live on that land instead. They're - beautiful, and precious, and we don't want them to disappear just so humans can live there instead. Because humans are also beautiful and precious, but they're not more so than everyone else."

"That's so interesting, except - that's not at all what I mean when I say something is a person. When I say something is a person I mean it can make moral choices. I'd eat a bird, but I wouldn't torture it. A cat would - I've seen them do it - but that doesn't make the cat evil, because the cat isn't thinking about it that way and never can, it's just being a cat. A human can decide whether to torture a bird or not for reasons the cat can't even imagine. I had a friend who kept mice and she said they'd eat their babies sometimes, even when they had food to eat, and that's not evil for a mouse because a mouse is doing it for animal reasons, but a human who did that would be monstrous."

"It's true that a cat, a regular cat anyway, isn't Evil for playing with its food. Pharasma doesn't judge animals who aren't smart enough for it, like you say. But it's Evil for us to torture a mouse, because we do know better, even though the mouse doesn't. I guess I need two different words here, I know how I'd say it in Sylvan but it's not translating cleanly. There's - people who can make moral choices. And there are people, or however you call them, who can have moral choices made about them. You can't hurt a rock, there's nothing it'd be Evil to do to a rock."

"Huh, what are the Sylvan words?"

"Moral actor, moral patient. They're not literally single words but they're - the expressions my ethics teacher used, he's a very old and wise treant who knows a lot of things. And words. I don't actually know if people in other forests use the same words, just that - they have the concept. If you say 'creatures you can be Good or Evil to' it gets the idea across, it's just unwieldy."

"It's an interesting thought, since like I said I wouldn't torture a bird, but actually I also wouldn't, uh, pretend to torture, a rock? I just don't find destroying things very fun. But there is a thing that's different between the bird and the rock and that's good to have a name for."

"Yeah!" Feather is feeling very validated right now. She just needed to find the actually Good people to talk to. Laia is a perfectly normal and Good person who obviously understands that you shouldn't mistreat birds even though they're not humans!

(She wonders how much easier it must be, to try to make peace between the forests and the humans outside them in a country where most people are Good and not Evil.)

"I'm really glad I met you," she tells Laia. "Not just because you're a nice person and told me useful things. I was feeling like - every other human I've met here is either Evil or - sometimes not Evil, but I just can't understand them. And they can't understand me, even the ones who I think are really glad trying. You're Good and you're also - just a normal person. So I'm happy and very - relieved, to know there are people like you in Cheliax. I wish there were more."

"If you want to try to find me again some time to tell me what's confusing I can try to help! I don't think most people are - incomprehensibly evil, just a little evil sometimes for reasons that still make sense to me."