What an interesting system! - oh, that guy is one of Iomedae's. Iomedae can give it directions, if She can afford it. Abadar'll happily facilitate and provide cambistry for the transaction if the Shadowgod doesn't have any of the things She's in the market for. If that would help, for the Iomedae Guy to do anything it's not already going to do. If the not being able to see is, while normally not this bad, still a chronic problem, perhaps the Shadowgod would like to subscribe to Abadar having some guys around, and reporting on what He gets from them and their doings. There seem to be many opportunities for trades here. Lots of parties that want things to be different, and have stuff they could use to buy others' help in making the things be different.

Oh! The Shadowgod would definitely sign up for Abadar having some mortals belonging to Them in Velgarth and then sharing information. If that's an option. There are probably suitable mortals around already, it doesn't need to be someone from Abadar's world traveling there, if that's more expensive. The Shadowgod is willing to pay for this, in whatever resource they can agree on, but would prefer the least expensive setup. 

The Shadowgod was also under the impression, from some successful communication that occurred with the mortal who belongs to Iomedae, that Iomedae really cannot afford to do very much of anything right now? Anyway, Her mortal seems generally inclined to do things that improve the situation (from the Shadowgod's perspective, not some of the other gods' perspectives), apart from the aspect where no one can see what the things will accomplish until afterward. But this is currently patched by the Shadowgod having sent back one of Their especially-legible souls to glue itself to Iomedae's mortal, so now the lack of visibility to the other gods is strictly an advantage for Them. ...If Iomedae could afford to give Her mortal stronger magic, that would help with some of the...limitations...in managing the state of the world right now, but if She would want the Shadowgod to pay for it, that's...not obviously worth it to the Shadowgod right now.

...The Shadowgod is going to consider whether They can afford to have Abadar resurrect the soul currently in their possession on another planet, since They're pretty sure that the soul would immediately start working on figuring out how to travel back, but They doubt it's the least expensive way to accomplish travel between the worlds. There are several other options and the Shadowgod is not particularly bothered about some of them taking a long time. 

Iomedae can't afford to do anything, which is why Someone Else would need to cover Her expenses. She's probably happy to do loads more if those are covered. But yeah, She's not going to do it on Her own recognizance because She is worried about some stuff on Her main planet. Abadar will sell a description of what Iomedaean mortals are likely to do for this very reasonable price if the attached-soul situation isn't cutting it but if the Shadowgod is happy with Their own management of the matter then that's all to the good.

Travel between worlds works by giving a guy one of these here spells, usually, but maybe something local to Velgarth will work, perhaps even more cheaply. Iomedae's guy isn't strong enough for any of the standard spells but could get that way if, again, Someone covered Her costs.

Abadar can sift through guys. He likes... that guy, best of all of the available guys, though this does not actually seem like a very Abadar-rich location. Now, He'll subsidize the enterprise, since He does like having guys, but He would like some local investment both because He likes the concept of investment per se and also because establishing a new church tends to be more expensive than just directing a guy to an existing one. The Iomedaean guy might help, it's been near an Abadaran guy in the past, but it's hard to say how much because that all happened on Golarion which doesn't have prophecy. Say, this much of an expected discount.

The Shadowgod has lots of Their specialized legible and direct-able soul-incarnations nearby! They can all get instructions to be helpful. Iomedae's mortal can also be given hints that way, and has the advantage of knowing how it works to be a mortal under a god from Abadar's world. This seems like the best angle the Shadowgod has on contributing, here; They can also nudge for events with an element of chance to go well for Abadar's new mortal, but that relies on Foresight and the Abadar-magic may end up interfering with visibility. Is that sufficient as an "investment" on Their part? The Shadowgod is a little confused about how that works. 

...If this isn't a very Abadar-rich location, are there any other gods - ones with more resources than Iomedae - who might find mortals they like? And could have the suggestion floated to Them that it's worth looking? 

There's plenty of random mortals a bit farther out than this central city that Erastil would probably like. Abadar can tell because these are humans and humans have to eat and they are only yea rich and when they are only yea rich that practically always means they have farms located in rural areas that are harder for Abadar to see except on market day. Erastil likes those, or at least can usually find some to like among a sufficient bunch of them. If they're getting along great with the Iomedae guy, Sarenrae and Shelyn might be able to find guys, but Abadar has very poor visibility on the sorts of things they're into so He doesn't know for sure, just a general correlation where Humans Who Like Iomedaeans Might Also Like... kind of thing. If they go in for nature gods around here maybe there's nobody left for Gozreh to scoop up but you never know. Pharasma's usually a big game, though She's chosen for whatever reason to let the Velgods do something strange here and maybe She doesn't want a Velgarth church for whatever reason. Irori's not out of the question but it looks possibly too... hm... too something, but Abadar's not sure.

It's not like Abadar's finding nothing here, he just sort of gets the impression that this place has been at this tech level for so long quashing so much innovative pressure in the process that the humans have culturally forgotten that things get any Abadar!cooler than market day. Like, do they even have fractional reserve banking? They might perk right up with some attention to the place but it isn't guaranteed.

…Oh. That’s - clarifying. It gets a concept across that the Shadowgod hadn’t quite gotten to cohere from the “build-y” handle alone. No wonder Abadar likes the soul currently in Their possession, this soul is ALL ABOUT the innovation thing. And really difficult to entirely quash. If Abadar looks over that way - it’s somewhere the Shadowgod has almost no visibility and They might actually pay Abadar something not to have any guys there, and also the lack of visibility is because they don’t like gods in general and probably wouldn’t want to be Abadar’s guys, but it has much more of the innovation thing. The immortal noisy soul pushed very very hard for it. 

(The Shadowgod is not inherently disapproving, but...innovation isn't Their thing, They have no particular advantage to seeing it like Abadar does, only the slight relative advantage of often seeing further in Foresight than the other gods, but...that's significantly downstream of not being in a hurry to act. Two thousand years was a perfectly acceptable length of time to wait for the opportunity to nudge the - not the hard-to-steer soul directly, given "hard to steer", but the circumstances - for a version of the plan that benefited Them as well.) 

…If Erastil likes humans outside of cities who grow food, it might help this world a lot for Erastil to see if anyone over there wants to be one of His mortals? It used to belong to Vkandis but, currently, they have a very bad problem and are probably not going to have enough food. And some of them might be mad at Vkandis and looking for a different god to belong to.

The nature god was recently - well, Cayden Cailean seemed to think She had been horrible to some of Her people, and the flavor of horribleness involves many of them being dead but this soul over here is alive. And still seems to want to be Hers but maybe only for lack of any better options? 

(The Shadowgod would not complain about the Star-Eyed Goddess losing more of Her resources, even if She might be on board with Their aims now. It's not guaranteed and it certainly isn't guaranteed to stay true once everything settles down.)

The Shadowgod would definitely appreciate an introduction to Shelyn and Sarenrae, or for Abadar to pass messages, whichever They have to pay the least for. (It may be becoming evident that the Shadowgod does not really like 'paying' other gods for things and isn't used to it.) 

Valid to not want to be Abadar's guys. There's civilizations on lots of planets that do not want to be anybody's guys. Abadar can see okay in there because they're still transacting, but He does not feel urgent about putting guys in there, it looks like that would be maybe illegal and that's usually a huge waste of a guy.

Erastil's guys cannot be of that much help with the food thing until they are about as powerful as the aforementioned Iomedaean guy, which is a major investment, though maybe they can get there with... firefighting...? Abadar will sell Erastil a pointer but it will probably not come to very much. Wow a lot of value was destroyed there for... nothing? Approximately nothing. What An Asshole Vkandis Is Apparently.

If you have some guys you really have to make it pretty clear to them under what circumstances and for what kinds and amounts of benefits you will kill them or it's what We in the business of having guys call a dick move. Kind of like fogging the humans' Foresight? They don't have the real thing but humans actually LOVE knowing what is likely to happen in the future and will spend valuable time/money/spell slots on being more confident about it; that is one of the ways they can vibe with Abadar about Law. Would the Shadowgod like an infodump about prediction markets? And contracts with a detour into the concept of specific performance? Gratis, it's a special interest of Abadar's.

Abadar would be happy to introduce Shadowgod to Shelyn and Sarenrae both for yea much; is nudging the burgeoning trade in chava a good currency, does that work for Them, it's so pretty and looks like it could get big - though truth be told Shadowgod can probably save fifty percent by being introduced to only one of the two and getting Her to introduce Them to the other one.

Look, the Shadowgod does not disagree that killing Your mortals - especially the ones who are more “yours” then just living in the right territory - is costly far beyond just no longer having that particular mortal. It’s short-sighted! The resources lost aren’t regained just by picking another mortal. Vkandis always has tended to be impatient, though, and - was apparently very alarmed about something. Maybe learning that the other world lost Foresight in their Cataclysm. …That’s not actually contagious, right? 

(This is why the Shadowgod thinks it was unfair and pointless for Cayden to be mad at Them over recent events. The Shadowgod didn’t even kill the soul They have right now, just declined to continue indefinitely nudging away other gods’ interventions, at an unknown and possibly very expensive total cost, and also this particular soul was not their mortal and should have had no expectation that the Shadowgod would intervene in its favor if there were other perfectly adequate paths to the same goal.)

…The Shadowgod will accept free education on those things, sure. It might even be helpful for understanding mortals better, and buy Them more of an advantage at seeing around Foresight noise! 

It takes a bit of doing for the Shadowgod to grasp what Abadar is pointing at regarding the “chava trade”, but sure, that actually has some levers of visibility for Them! A mortal glued to a particularly high-visibility soul - that one, see, it was never human, it’s constructed specially - anyway, that mortal is involved somehow, apparently? So the Shadowgod isn’t even limited to coincidence-nudging, They can send some input that this is especially valuable. 

...Abadar does not think the Shadowgod fully understands the way in which it is a dick move to kill one's mortals but that is the sort of misunderstanding Abadar is not that interested in correcting for free, it sounds like it would be time-consuming. Anyway, losing Foresight is not contagious.

Cayden is a very emotional sort of god and Abadar cannot be of much help in decoding His opinions on things. Instead He will talk about the fun stuff. Here's how it all works.

That seems like a satisfactory way to make sure the trade lines that human opened up stay robust. Pleasure doing business with you. Shadowgod, Sarenrae. Sarenrae, Shadowgod.

Charmed, She's sure?

Hello, Sarenrae!

The Shadowgod has learned some things, over the course of that conversation as well as the earlier one with Cayden, about communicating in the ways that this other world's gods expect. 

Here is this other world! It has Foresight, unlike Her world apparently, though Foresight is having some problems lately. Here's the current general situation!

One of Iomedae's mortals has been here for a while and doing things, and wandered into the middle of a lot of setup by multiple gods - including this one goddess killing a lot of Her people, like so, which their world's gods apparently frown upon - and things got messy. This soul (that Abadar apparently really liked) is now in the Shadowgod's possession after this other god spent down literally all of His remaining resources and caused quite a lot of damage to try to kill and then permanently destroy that mortal (who was previously not actually mortal but there was a prior plot.) 

The Shadowgod declined to sell the soul in Their possession to Abadar but accepted Abadar's offer to go see if He liked any of the local mortals, and He thought it was possible Sarenrae would like some of them! The Shadowgod can point out the ones in close proximity to Iomedae's mortal, since Abadar thought that could be predictive of Sarenrae liking some of them?

Sarenrae has lots of worlds, Golarion is actually the only busted one.

It is a great wrong to one's people to kill them. It can look like the right choice, but if You find Yourself thinking that the right choice is to smite a bunch of people - like, normal living people, not undead or something - then You have probably made some kind of mistake and should get help or rethink the situation with three times as much of Your attention or something. Was the soul in question an undead or something? It is probably reasonably high welfare for souls that Abadar likes to be purchased by Him, if the Shadowgod was worried about that. She doesn't live in or administer Axis, she's a Nirvanan goddess over here instead, but the people who dwell in Axis like it a lot by and large.

Proximity to the Iomedaean is not that predictive (Iomedaeans sometimes wade into groups of undead, for example, to kill them) but getting along well with the Iomedaean might be, maybe that's what They meant. You can tell when mortals get along well because their presence near each other has an amplifying effect on their efficacy at their tasks instead of an interference effect and they sometimes take actions to continue to be near one another. Anyway, She does like some of the mortals around here. She could pick up a round dozen to start out if She were trying to start a nascent Sarenrite movement here? Should She be doing that? There can be so much strife when there's new churches that do not already understand how to work in their context qua church well. She'd be a bit worried that the mortals would misunderstand something and be expensive to rein in.

The Shadowgod has to puzzle out what 'undead' means and - no, the soul in question was not exactly that, although it was complicatedly not-exactly-mortal via a mechanism that involved killing other mortals to take over their bodies.

(Not that this was really Anyone's main objection, just something that made it possible to end up with a lot more total god-enmity toward this specific soul. The Shadowgod would ideally like the soul to stop doing that, but that wasn't the top reason for deciding to nab it rather than trying to avert the Vkandis plot entirely. ...The Shadowgod would in fact, to be clear, have tried very hard to stop the plot if They had any real lead time, but there...wasn't much warning, probably because it was precipitated by something downstream of Her world that none of Them can see, and it was already quite significantly expensive intervening toward it killing fewer additional mortals for no reason.) 

...On the one hand, it probably is a good time to have a dozen mortals with Sarenrae-magic. The Iomedae-mortal's magic is so limited and the Shadowgod has managed to figure out that the situation - and the less-expensive and less-long-term paths to the mortals finding their own way to travel between this world and Hers - would definitely be more tenable if it was stronger, but apparently Iomedae is broke and can't intervene to make that mortal's magic stronger even if it would help significantly. On the other hand, while the Shadowgod didn't entirely follow the thread of reasoning about Her concerns, Their concerns about this making it once again impossible to see anything still stand. They agreed to pay Abadar by providing local investment in the Abadar church and that's going to become difficult to impossible if Foresight goes back to being as noisy as it was at some points recently. Technically They can pass instructions to this particular set of specialized reincarnated souls fairly directly, but They haven't relied on it nearly so hard in the past and it might end up garbled. 

It's good that it wasn't an undead. You mostly just can't get anywhere trying to redeem the undead. Though She does disapprove of the bodysnatching behavior. Why didn't Vkandis leave any opportunity to talk Him down? Do they not have legible ways to make agreements like "if I bring this idea up with you, you can't use that information to stop me unless you convince me"? That's very important in normal theopolitics.

Iomedae is broke, yeah. She's still making Her cleric stronger! Just, only in the usual fashion where the cleric gets experience doing things in the world and creates more room in himself for more power that way. That's the way they all do it almost all of the time.

Sarenrae does not think that clericing locals will be as noisy as importing extraplanetary visitors (of any class) from Golarion. The histories of the new clerics will still be local and the clerichood mechanism itself is well understood. Garbled visions are only one potential source of uncertainty, though. Even with prophecy in perfect working order, it is often (as the Velgods seem to have noticed) more effective and efficient to smite people than to support them, to get the result You're aiming for. Sarenrae tries not to smite people, or even renounce them, She really hates it, and this ties Her hands somewhat. She's got schisms for days, countries that love Her keep doing war and empire and slavery even when She gets pretty good turnaround on individual people giving those things up because new people keep finding their way into the mechanisms that create those things, and of course even if She very clearly instructs Her people to practice the strictest of nonviolence unless there is an undead or something this may result in a) people managing to confuse themselves into thinking their enemies are undead or something, or b) enemies who are not undead or something rolling right over her people. She still thinks Her churches are a force for good, but there's not even undead around here? ...also She thinks the whole "Nirvana is for everyone" message may suffer somewhat with the whole no afterlife thing this planet is doing, She'd need to workshop a new holy book with some angels to come up with a reincarnation-oriented doctrine.

N.....o? They do not have that. The– actually the Shadowgod is having substantially more trouble figuring out what the thing is than with Abadar and the already-very-odd method of explicitly trading godresources of various kinds for another god doing the thing You wanted. Here they pretty much just have...figuring out which set of the things You want overlap with what other gods with nearby-enough remit to be relevant is, and pushing in the same direction on those, and slipping opposed goals in sideways on angles where They aren't looking as closely. 

Maybe Sarenrae can choose one or two mortals for now? It makes sense that people native to the world becoming one of Her mortals would be less disruptive than importing interplanetary visitors, and that should mean that the Shadowgod can...try...to nudge things so that particular mortal is not backed into corners where killing a lot of the other mortals is the clearest path forward. The Shadowgod has noted that very few mortals are completely unsteerable into killing a lot of other mortals, but for some of them it takes quite a lot of doing to wedge them into it and for others it takes significant steering to get them not to. Is that the kind of thing Sarenrae can see about mortals?

...Here's one mortal that the Shadowgod thinks will only kill other mortals under quite a lot of pressure, and even then, directing this mortal to be somewhere usually means that fewer other mortals will die than if it were a different mortal on that path, and that's more true if this mortal has more steering-power, when often the opposite is the case. The Shadowgod previously had a lovely plan to have this mortal end up with a lot of steering-ability and wedge the not-undead-bodysnatching soul into accomplishing its utterly unsteerable aim, which the Shadowgod does not inherently object to, in a way that killed fewer mortals in Their territory, which They did object to. But the plan didn't work out; Nobody's plans have worked out since the Iomedae-mortal appeared on the scene. (The Shadowgod also does not inherently object to this, and the Star-Eyed Goddess might be coming around on it too, She seems convinceable on the point that She should not have smited so many of Her mortals in the leadup to the plan that the Shadowgod had been intending to wrangle into Their mortal soul getting lots of steering-power.) Isn't it an excellent soul, though? 

Oh, Sarenrae can see when people do not want to kill people. This is just... not... as predictive... as you'd hope. Especially since She often does want people who want to kill undead and stuff like that and then later they can get confused, or turn out to have neglected their soft skills and not have them when they would have been called for.

That is a pretty nice soul but, hm, not quite Hers. She could pick it up if it were really important and they'd do fine together but it's not centrally Her type. It is less The Shining Clear Principles and more like... well, Shelyn would probably like it. It has a Shelyn-esque squidginess. Shelyn's great, hopefully the Shadowgod will like Her. She's over here, not too far in conceptspace from Sarenrae, but (weird god concepts that boil down to "Shelyn is bouba and Sarenrae is kiki".)

(Hmm, the Shadowgod doesn't think that the thing They see is what mortals want to do? They are trying to learn how to do more of that, both Cayden and Abadar explained different angles on why it's relevant even if it doesn't show up directly in Foresight. But the thing the Shadowgod can see is very much...what happens, in Foresight, in the absence of particularly contrived path-narrowing optimization to push a mortal in a pretty direction, and how much Foresight-attention and nudging it takes if They want mortals to be killed, or conversely if They want mortals to not be killed.) 

Oh, well, if there are other souls that She would rather pick as Hers then probably She should do that. The Shadowgod expects They will like Shelyn! So far They have found all of the gods They've interacted with perfectly pleasant, except for Cayden on specifically the point of being mad at Them for using Vkandis' smiting plot to grab the not-undead one's soul rather than expending a frankly unreasonable amount of resources to try to prevent it from working at all. Hopefully Shelyn will be less unreasonable on that point, it was tedious. 

What mortals want even when they then go on to have abominable moral luck is of great importance to Sarenrae because it can matter in their soul trials, it makes sense the Shadowgod would have less focus on that. Cayden is not very budget conscious, which is understandable but does make Him hard to talk to about some things. If the slain were all going to Nirvana or somewhere else nice He might chill out about it a bit more. Hint hint.

Hello there new friend!

(The Shadowgod did not really follow what that hint was about but They noticed that a hint existed! That's actually quite a lot of progress in Their ability to receive communications from other gods, They're starting to figure this out, the gods of the other world have clearly invested quite a lot more in it. They have other priorities right now but will perhaps wonder more about it later.) 

Hello!

The Shadowgod has now gotten Their explanation down to a nice concise packet. Here is this other world! With working Foresight and gods that seem to be different from Golarion gods in these ways and this nice efficient soul-reuse reincarnation setup instead of whatever Her world has (the Shadowgod has also not entirely pieced that together yet). Things were at a delicate juncture with some steering related to this one soul currently in Their possession, which has these traits that Abadar and Sarenrae commented on, and then one of Iomedae's mortals landed here for no clear reason and things got very messy and there was a lot of smiting! Abadar was interested in picking some mortals here and now the Shadowgod is talking to other recommended gods about whether They also want to do that. Here's this lovely soul that Sarenrae thought Shelyn might like!

Oh Shelyn LOVES that soul. She loves most, arguably all, souls, but that one is very friend shaped and aligned. Is this soul friends with the Iomedaean? ... kind of? The Iomedaean is - oh, the Iomedaean got redeemed recently and is still learning how to friendship, that explains it - what is the Shadowgod steering for here precisely at this point?

'Friendship' is...the thing Sarenrae said, "You can tell when mortals get along well because their presence near each other has an amplifying effect on their efficacy at their tasks instead of an interference effect and they sometimes take actions to continue to be near one another"? Mostly the Shadowgod thinks that these mortals have been under very steep other constraints when it came to what they could steer for and 'taking actions to continue to be near one another' was maybe not something there was room left for? 

The Shadowgod was until recently steering for...more ability-to-steer without needing to expend a lot of steering-power on working around this god and that other god, who were responsible for this and that smiting lots of Their mortals to, in the event, not even achieve anything. The picture is now a lot cleaner and They can steer for more specific things than that! In the near term They are trying to find ways to nudge for less ongoing disruption from the more recent smiting. It was a very big smiting, and the advantage of allowing it to happen is that now that god is approximately no longer a factor, but the Shadowgod did not actually prefer for huge numbers of the other god's mortals to die. They also want to steer for this in a way that doesn't immediately make the Foresight picture horribly messy again, but it seems like any noise introduced by the gods of the other world picking some mortals in this world will be mitigated by the fact that They can see Their mortals and trade information with the Shadowgod about what's going on? 

Oh friendship is more complicated and beautiful than that but it's not Sarenrae's Thing so She doesn't see it as brightly as Shelyn does. Friendship is... the thing that the Shadowgod sometimes hooks up on purpose when gluing souls together like this or like that. Mortals can do that themselves too, they can get that way just by approving of each other and choosing to support each other's goals. It's SO pretty. Look! Look at these beautiful things You did, Shadowgod, and You weren't even trying for it, they love each other so much, it's so sparkly. Look at it from here, and then again from here, see it's almost symmetrical but in a pleasing organic way - these examples are really clear because of the soul gluing, but Shelyn can see it without that too, it's Her favorite, look look look how pretty - oh, She got a prayer about keeping this one's body safe, is its soul safe too? Will they be able to put it back so it can be together with its friend again? They're so sad when they have to be apart. The lovely soul the Shadowgod showed her has two glued-on friends and only one of them is alive! That must make it so sad!

Anyway yes that disaster looks very disastrous, there's a lot of grieving going on up there. Are those departed souls safe? Will they get to go somewhere nice and rest and heal? Will they see their loved ones again?

Shelyn can work with people whose own personal loved ones are lost forever but it's really, really hard, it takes an incredibly special mortal to do Shelynism correctly while suffering from a problem like that.

Shelyn is talking about– oh, yes, of course, that one! The Shadowgod has that soul right over here - it's one of Their special souls, with these modifications, see, to make the soul Shelyn likes more legible, the Shadowgod is quite proud of the whole setup - except that this modification got undone because it turned out to be a problem. Anyway the Shadowgod is in favor of having it put back as soon as it's feasible for the mortals to figure that part out themselves, the Shadowgod can do it but it would be too expensive to do it anytime particularly soon, given that They already used that lever as a one-off to put this soul here to be glued to Iomedae's mortal and make it visible and at all possible to steer. 

...The dead mortal souls are with Vkandis. Only some of them belonged to Vkandis in any sense when they were incarnated, but no one else had stronger remit for the ones that died over here, and Vkandis had been trying very hard to grab all of the souls there in order to be sure of getting the particular soul it wanted. The Shadowgod managed to get that soul by arranging for it to be moved here before it died but it wasn't practical to do that for all the mortals who died over there - which is in any case a small fraction of the total deaths, there were fewer mortals than in Vkandis' territory proper and most of them got themselves out - and the Shadowgod wasn't aiming for it. Anyway, Shelyn would have to talk to Vkandis. Good luck with that. 

Okay, as long as they'll be able to put it back! That's probably why they're keeping the body safe. The Iomedaean isn't big and strong enough to do it alone though. It was very good of the Shadowgod to give that Iomedaean a soulgluefriend, it doesn't know how yet because it used to be in a very bad place, it will help a lot She thinks.

She will... certainly have to talk to Vkandis about what He does with souls, yes. She doesn't think She's ever once seen a soul from here wind up in any normal place where souls go. It looks like the reincarnation thing can sometimes be very sweet, c.f. the living soulgluefriend of the soul Shadowgod is so proud of, but being mortal is mostly not actually very good for souls and they should get to rest eventually.