"Eep!" She startles awake, snapping around. "Oh, sorry, am I too early? They sent a lot of us home, so I thought I might as well come here and wait."

"No, it's fine, I'm sorry I kept you waiting, someone advised me to take a break and eat something and I decided this was extremely wise advice. If nothing's literally or metaphorically on fire right now it's a fine time to explain more about being a cleric."

"I think so, yeah." She shakes her head. "It'd be really surprising if I didn't get any levels out of all of today, so I must've not fallen asleep there."

"Is there anywhere in particular you want me to start or should I just do my best to give an overview?"

She picks herself up and dusts her clothes off. "An overview is good, I think?"

"Okay. So, I'm from a world called Golarion, which has many powerful magical beings; translation magic identifies them as being the same thing as 'gods', except for ours not being dead. Desna is one of them, and She chose you, which again means that you're at least one of Chaotic or Good and neither of Evil nor Lawful, and that you otherwise also resonate with her areas of concern - dreams, travel, astronomy - and outlook on the world. I don't know how well suited you are, since your choosing was an emergency response - I was speaking to my own god, Iomedae, at the time you came to alert me - so it might be only that you are the best suited person in the city who wasn't grievously injured at the time. If you like being a cleric and want a little bit of safety margin on how solidly you are within Desna's sphere - She can't give you powers if you stop meeting the requirements and is less likely to give you more powerful ones if you don't meet them very well - then you probably want to lean in to all of those criteria inasmuch as I'm able to communicate them, which isn't very well. You will probably also want a sturdier butterfly symbol; wood or metal are typical. The butterfly is supposed to have - stars on it, I think? Maybe also a sun and moon - I'll draw some and try to remember which looks right for you but it seems like the unmarked butterfly worked acceptably."

Her ears prick up when he says Desna iz a god. She listens until he finishes.

"If 'good' and 'evil' have the common-sense meanings, that's easy enough to understand? But I don't know what 'chaotic' and 'lawful' mean, in concrete terms. I don't think I've broken any laws."

She hesitates.

"...I'm a [Dreamer]. I have the class, I mean. If I had to guess, that's the part I most resonate with. I don't travel a lot..." but I think about it a lot sounds a little pathetic, and also like making excuses, which is at least the opposite problem she usually has about her daydreaming. "Is that something [Clerics] of Desna are supposed to do?

"Astronomy I know the least about. I know the constellations, of course—well, the Gnoll ones—but that's it. Is it related to using the stars for navigation?"

And she thinks about the paper butterfly, still folded up carefully in her shirt pocket.

"I do. Want to be a [Cleric], even though I don't really know what that means. So I'll listen to what you have to say."

"It might be related to using the stars for navigation. I have never before actually sat down and had a conversation with a Desnan, you understand, I grew up somewhere they were illegal - which they might have gone ahead and ignored but they would have been secretive about it. Good and Evil are I think pretty common-sense. Healing people and defending the innocent and so on are Good. Regarding Chaos -

- I am extremely temperamentally Lawful. I do not understand Chaos except insofar as it involves not doing the things that come most naturally to me and seem to me the most important things for any other edifice to be built on. If I try to explain Law you are going to need to have that in mind, because while I don't think I'm very convincing particularly, Desna will leave you if you're convinced anyway so it's worth being cautious."

"...Sure. It feels the case for law is pretty obvious? If you don't have it people can just go around killing and stealing. So probably there's more to it than that."

"It's not just that - Chaotic Good people don't go around doing random murders, and if they steal it's usually going to be for reasons like 'they don't approve of slavery so they stole the slaves to free them' or 'the person they're stealing from got their money in some Evil way and there is a more deserving owner of the property to hand'... Law is about commitments. Keeping oaths you swear, being a reliable ally even to the most odious people in the world if you have identified a common goal and come to an agreement on it. There is a saying 'Good has friends, Law has allies' - the saying is obviously aiming to evangelize the intersection of the two, but it still seems a reasonable gloss on some of the concepts. As practiced by mortals Law normally corresponds to obeying mortal legal requirements but it is sometimes possible to be Lawfully aligned without those off of sufficiently ironclad personal commitment."

"Well, if you give your word, you should keep it, but if you can get away with freeing slaves, I think you should?"

Having a stick up your ass about oaths and so on has always struck her a bit silly.

"It feels... reductive, to say you can't have allies if you don't sign a contract about it."

"You... can, but they - in my world I spent most of my career defending the border around a portal that allowed Chaotic Evil extraplanar creatures to enter in unlimited numbers. Lawful Evil and Lawful Good people who would never help each other with their more individual goals were responsible for a treaty that allowed them to collaborate on that. Many Chaotic people also abided by the treaty, but they did that because - they thought as individuals that it was worthwhile to them, not because it was -" He can't use the word 'sacred', can he. "Important in its own right, that it be possible to genuinely pass up opportunities to destroy each other and thereby make enormous short term gains for their own faction, to be genuinely trustworthy to do that so no energy needed to be expended on concealing those opportunities."

but what if she doesn't want to

The Walled Cities sign lots of treaties and figure out a way to go to war anyway when someone digs up a new ore deposit, she doesn't say.

"What's stopping those people from betraying each other, anyway, if they want it enough?"

"Law. Which. You do not and should not try to have. Considering."

"Yeah, fair enough.

"So to be chaotic, do I have to break commitments, or is just avoiding them enough?"

"I think not making them will be fine as long as your attitude about it isn't - that you are avoiding making them because obviously they would irrevocably narrow your options since you certainly couldn't break one. If you are avoiding making them because they would be meaningless to you and you don't want to mislead people, for instance, that would I think be a Chaotic Good attitude."

Did she somehow manage to get a class that forces her to avoid her responsibilities and travel around the world

As much as it's fun to think about gallivanting across the continent, having class requirements that contradict her responsibilities is bad, not good.

Still...

"I can work with that," she says, maybe a bit too chipper. "Did you have more on, um, dreams, and travel, and astronomy?"

"I'm sorry, that's about it. I don't think Desna comes up often in the book I have about the mortal lifetime of my god either, though if I find something I've forgotten about I'll tell you."

"I think I'm still not clear on what a [Cleric]... is. And what Desna wants me to do. Like, a [Guardsman] is appointed by the city to enforce the law, right, and a [Knight] is appointed by a lord or king to... I don't actually know what they do, kill monsters? What's Desna appointing me for?"

"To do Good. I think the Good part is more important than the Chaos part. But you can use your spells for yourself or to support yourself too, since She isn't paying you in money."

Oh.

That's... almost like insane wishful thinking levels of fantasy. It feels like cheating, somehow, like having her cake and eating it too. Like being chosen by the spirit of the legendary Blade of Mershi for the purity of your heart. And now, apparently, Keisha Silverfang is being chosen by Desna, her only ask to do good unto the world.

"And there's no—constraints on it—should it be related to dreams and travel and astronomy?"

"I would guess, but only that, that you are - expected to be sufficiently interested in those topics on your own without needing to be paid to align with them further, but if you do happen to want to cultivate more of an interest it couldn't hurt."

"I have to say I don't know how to do good with dreams. I can... escort travelers to their destinations? You said something about romance novels before, but I don't remember what. I should write some of this down."

Does he have any writing materials?

"In my country, the one where Desnans were illegal until recently - here -" he does have writing materials! "they were involved in smuggling subversive literature including romance novels into the country and sometimes people out by similar routes. I don't know how important the romance novels per se were to the project."