"That's not really fair recompense for fixing all our stuff and creating a bunch of food from thin air."

He looks around at the various entrances to the room to check that nobody's there.

"Personally, I think life in this old wreck is a dead end. There's other people out there, somewhere... Maybe, hopefully, a lot more of them. It might be better to go find them. Anyway... A 'cleric'? Do you think someone else could become one of those?"

"...maybe, but they would start out less powerful than me, and would have to align well with the god in question. It probably wouldn't be Iomedae. She is having a busy year."

"I think the Bible had a lot of things like... Feed the poor, treat your neighbor as you wish to be treated, be kind even when it's hard, revenge is bad. There was a bunch of things about God dying to save everyone from Hell... Maybe Grandma Eb still has one, if anyone would she would."

"...there are several dead gods, so if I'm meant to recognize this one you might need to be more specific."

"Grandma Eb was pretty insistent there was only the one. Yahweh, I think? Probably she's just wrong. The world before the frost sounds like it was a pretty crazy place."

"It used to be warmer in this part of your world?"

"Yeah. Used to be liquid oceans and green fields. Then one year had a really long 'winter'," he pronounces it like a foreign word, "And they panicked and built a lot of things like our beautiful dreadnought friend for shelter," He kicks the floor, "And next year 'winter' just never ended. I was born after all that."

"Do you know if it's like that across the whole planet?"

"I don't know. It's pretty dangerous to travel even a hundred miles, and the planet is a lot bigger than that."

"There wasn't communication or travel over longer distances at the time...?"

"Some of the older folks might know. My education has mostly been on hunting and survival, and then I got my arm crushed like an idiot, so I'm just thankful there's enough cleaning and maintenance to do that I can justify what I eat, still."

"I'm not powerful enough to restore your arm, unfortunately."

"My parents and my sister and her daughter aren't gonna die, probably, that's a win."

"I can only do the food thing once a day."

"The broken pump was actually a much more urgent issue than vitamin deficiency. Uh, we'd like as much citrus and vegetables as you can get out of it, instead of cheese and bread. Much as some of the old folk were moved to tears by cheese and bread."

"Yes, I can steer it toward fruits and vegetables. What does the pump do?"

"It takes oil stored in this giant tank at the bottom of the cliff and pushes it into a furnace. The furnace keeps us all warm and powers the lights and so on."

"So it fills something like an oil lamp? How much oil is there?"

"A bit like that, but much bigger. About forty five thousand tons left down there, we measure it occasionally. And there's more old oil cars wrecked across the plain. Whoever built this thing built it huge. Plenty for now."

"Oil cars?"

"This whole giant thing used to move! They would dig up oil from the ground, and then store it in huge steel tanks and carry it where they needed it to go. There were probably dozens of them all strung out behind the big puller at the front. That was the idea, I'm pretty sure, anyway. Now the dreadnought is a wreck and only parts of it are still good for anything."

"That's amazing." Downright Azlanti. Probably worth the god dying and causing an apocalypse if it saves everyone from Hell?

"I want to see New London's Generator some day. It's the same kind of thing, apparently. A huge tower that heats a city and powers all sorts of machines."

"It sounds wondrous."

"Yeah. It's nice to think that people can still build things instead of just hunting and living in old wrecks."