"...What's wrong with it?"

"Well, if they're Evil they might go to bad afterlives and also most evil species still have children and stuff."

Sigh. "You didn't want to hear the good news about our lord and savior Jesus Christ but he personally died so his followers wouldn't have to go to a bad afterlife even though people are all evil."

"Oh, are humans one of the evil species on your plane? That's really nice of him then to pave the way to a special afterlife for you guys."

Shrug. "Uh, supposedly. I kind of don't believe anything at all right now."

"...that sounds like it sucks. I don't think you have to worry about me, on my plane humans come in lots of alignments and I'm neutral good and only have the corresponding small risk of a bad afterlife."

"What's being neutral good like?"

"I... don't know if I've spent significant periods of time as any other alignment. I guess I probably spend more time being dismayed about bad things happening to strangers than I would if I were just neutral?"

"How much time do you spend being dismayed about that?"

"Depends on the day. And the month. Sometimes there's nothing too bad on the news for a long while and then somebody's smiting a village in Kharol I never heard of or somebody's kidnapped a random kid for ransom and it ruins my day even though I can't do anything about it."

"I don't... know anything about news. Since I can't watch TV."

"Yeah, I guess that stands to reason. Sometimes there's good news. Museum opens up, somebody leaves their fortune to a nice charity, peace treaty on the other side of the planet."

"Those things do sound good." Sigh. He skims the rest of the Noah story.

Bella finishes her milkshake and gets a book of her own.

Read read. Skim skim. Lots of stories here... people being evil, skim skim skim, God offering Abram something...

Why is it so strangely troubling that Sarai has a slave and gives her to Abram to have sex with? It obviously sucks not to have your own will - though Valerie's pretty sure that's not the usual way it works, anyway.

Valerie sighs and asks Bar for something healthy to drink.

Big ol' vegetable juice.

Yay.

Hard to tell if Bella is interruptible and looking her way might get her book in Valerie's field of vision so Valerie isn't watching to try to figure that out just yet.

Bella's actually pointing the book so that the book jacket is all Valerie will see even if she looks up!

"...Hey, I have another question," Valerie says eventually, staring into the empty vegetable juice glass.

"H- okay back to paying a lot of attention to what I'm about to say, my language has an idiom that renders an invitation to say something as an invitation to do violence, why do we even have that. Go ahead."

Well that's a better order than it could have been, apparently.

"Do the, uh, evil species where you're from like to... change... things? About themselves? Because they don't accept how God made them?"

"Uh, there's ones that practice scarification? Goblin mothers who survive rearing their children often do so down a few body parts? Most species don't have any gods directly participating in making them. I guess nymphs do and I think they are pretty consistently how they originally start out but they're not an evil species."

"But it is evil to do things like scarification?"

"I don't think it is in itself? I'm not an expert."

"Why not?"