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She is safety; she is refuge; she is protection. She is the enfolding embrace of night, in all its gentleness.
Her name is Stella.
She doesn't remember where she came from, but she can feel that someone needs her. More than one someone. A lot of someones, actually. Some of them are outside her domain, but that doesn't matter, not when she can fix things for the ones that are.
She reaches out to help, to heal, to safeguard.
You would object if I did something obviously bad, right? I want you to be honest with me, not just rubber-stamp whatever I say.
"Um, of course?" She looks a bit surprised for a moment. "I trust you not to smite me for talking back, so of course I'm gonna speak up if you have a bad idea. Also just... part of loving people is wanting them to be the best them they can be, and that means calling them out — gently, ideally — if they make a mistake."
"Gladly, Goddess."
She posts the prioritization statement on the website, and then sends quiet-wings a quick check-in.
Hey there. How's the afternoon going so far?
Better than it could be.
Selling miracles, huh? Guess there goes Stella's claim to the moral high ground. Invest in goddess stocks today. Preparing for the Divine IPO, valued at $AllTheMoney. Seriously, what are you people thinking?
We're thinking that we have to engage with the existing economy, because we don't have enough social infrastructure that we can afford to break it, and we need services we can purchase through it. Selling a few miracles that Stella rates morally neutral — due note that we retained her right to refuse any miracle request for any reason, and thus she won't grant anything that goes against her principles and values — pays for utilities at Temple facilities, buys land to build free or cheap housing for people, commissions the design of new material objects for Stella to conjure without copyright worries, pays the authors of media Stella's already conjuring, buys land to build soup kitchens or safe injection sites, and more. Money hires accountants to keep the government from finding ways to declare our donations illegal. If you have a feasible idea for how to pay for all those needs without selling miracles, we would sincerely love to hear it. We don't want to do it this way, but the world runs on incentives, and this is the best idea we have.
Sorry if I got a bit sharp, there. Honestly not a fan of the plan, but I can't think of a better way of engaging with the existing economy.
Because we need to be prepared with a plan, and don't expect the world to give us time to think on this subject. People will just keep dying while we waffle about the ideal plan. There's a saying about "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" that I think applies here. If someone comes up with a sufficiently better plan, we'll pivot on a dime to that, but we don't want to lose time to analysis paralysis, y'know?
This is going to be really, really messy. I can already hear the prayers going up.
People are offering me money now. They already were before but now they're doing it more. I'm having to refuse a lot of people who are trying to bribe me into things I'd do for free. Naturally now the more unsavory characters are trying to bribe me even harder. It's a really good thing I can filter based on the intent of the prayer, it cuts out a lot of people who are... praying disingenuously, let's put it that way.
Patricia's not wrong. And we're moving awful fast.
Still. All we can do is our best.
I'm scared, though. Already we're compromising with the existing power structures. I don't want to become just another queen with bad advisors. The prayers help; it's easy to see what people really want, this way. But how to fix it is much more complex than just handing out material goods.
I think it's time we slowed down and tried to negotiate a little. I may yet reverse my decision to do commercial miracles, but for now let's try it and see how the incentives work out.
Any thoughts on how to approach the EU? They've got people praying to me already, and even in a sincere way, wanting to shelter their people from my 'wrath' such as it is.
I'm doing the obvious things I can in Africa right now - healing people, preventing violence, making sure there's enough food and infrastructure for food, eradicating some of the endemic parasites, dealing with some of the brush wars - you know the drill, pretty much. I don't know the culture well enough to intervene in less obvious ways but I'm doing what I can.
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