"That’s good. I'm glad there are people who are okay somewhere."

"There are still-alive people who are okay, too."

"That's also good."

Awkward silence time.

"Is there a way to just... not exist at all?"

"There's things that eat souls. They're all evil, so... I don't know a way to find them that doesn't risk... enabling them to operate more freely, and that would be bad. Plus a lot of them would want to make it really unpleasant on the way out."

Sigh.

"I'm sorry if I made stuff worse for you."

"I don’t know if you did. I don’t know - I don’t have a whole life lined up for if I could just leave the house and talk to people. I have no idea what the upside is if you can fix me."

"There's nothing you wanted to do and just - couldn't figure out how to do safely enough? Go to a - not a movie I guess, a concert maybe, or the zoo, or - anything?"

"All of those things sound fun, I just - the point of me doing things isn't to have fun, it's - I guess it's to serve the Lord and help people. And I think other people spend their whole lives up to my age going to school and learning how they could do that. Like as doctors or teachers or something. Or maybe they don't and I'm totally wrong about that, but - at any rate I don't even have much sense of, I don't know, if I wanted to give to the poor, where would I even find the poor?"

"Your church might have a charity arm? Or I guess you could go to the bad part of town though I'm not sure I actually recommend that in practice."

"I don't know where to find the bad part of town or a church. Because people might use metaphors at church. I actually don't know anything at all about my own religion except what I was told and what I've read just now, and this part of the book isn’t the part about how to live..." Has Bar gotten to the gospels yet while they’ve been talking?

Bar's going in order unless asked otherwise!

Sigh.

"This is a very long book."

"I guess so. - Could you do the part where Jesus is telling people what to do next?"

Bar starts appearing gospels.

"Thank you!"

Genealogy... Christmas... skim skim skim. He'll stop skimming at the beatitudes and invite Bella to read over his shoulder if she wants.

"Sure, why not."

Matthew 5, New International Version, edited to remove some imperatives, actually starts out mostly familiar to Valerie, who has heard the beatitudes before. She tries to make sure it's at a good angle for Bella.

"I think I might be missing a lot of context necessary to make sense of this."

"The part about the law is about how everyone used to have to follow, uh, six hundred thirteen different rules perfectly to avoid going to Hell, but no one managed it, so Jesus came to free us from that, or so I've been told. But, uh... I would totally have said he came to abolish the old law..."

"Yeah, that's confusing. It's sort of reminding me of Khersians but like, the medium-high annoyingness ones, there's lots of kinds."

"I don't know enough to understand that comparison."