"...so you're like an alien deity person."

"That's not a bad way of putting it. But I've been resurrecting babies on television so that people will listen to me and some people have decided to create murder-suicide cults over this and also people might listen to an alien deity thing less so I've been...eliding over details some."

"This is a different genre than the one I thought we were in, but hey, it was the second thing on my list and I've read more of these anyway. So. I assume you have some kind of big council of advisors somewhere which is advising you on your geopolitical game plan, so I'll, uh, try not to mess up whatever you're doing there? Unless you're trying to institute a different ill-conceived theocracy, I guess, because I feel like that could have some problems, given the last one."

Wince. "I. Don't, actually, I've been trying to find some but...so far what I've got are a random housewife and sorta Fred Waterford."

"Is the random housewife Serena Joy? Because you could probably do worse in terms of advice on how people are going to react to geopolitically significant  apparent theological revelations from aliens."

"No, the random housewife is the person who got the door to Milliways."

"Oh. OK. Well. That's less of a council but I guess at least it's distributed. And random housewives can be surprisingly capable. Sometimes."

"Yeah. I'm just--really scared I'm going to fuck this up horribly."

Her expression suggests that she finds this feeling deeply relatable.

"Well. I'm not, um, an expert in geopolitics, but - do you need a hug or something?"

"That would be really nice."

So Keturah gives her a hug. A good, long, supportive one.

"I don't think you've made any terrible missteps yet, anyway. People like healthy babies, and you haven't made any sweeping theological revelations yet, so you've thus far avoided the 'antichrist appears and leads the masses to hell' class of error, in addition to keeping your options open."

Gosh what a good hug. 

"I can't just...leave things as they are, though. I mean, people are doing things because of me, and a lot of them are bad things, and even if not that, uh, this is still the kind of country that regularly forcibly impregnates people and then steals the babies. I can't just let that keep happening."

"Right! Sure! Of course. You just have to, like, stop and think about what your endgame is, so then you can do stuff that gets you there and not stuff that makes it harder to reach. Do you, like, know what that is right now?"

Wryly: "On Earth as it is in Heaven?"

"This is I guess a sensible goal for some other universe's savior to have. - wow that's going to have all sorts of weird theological implications once people sit down and examine them. But, uh, I think it's a little on the vague side, as policy proposals go? You may want to try adding some bullet points."

"Well, I guess it's not really implementable in full--like, Heaven, at least my Heaven, really doesn't have a...geography? Things have...connections, more than locations. So everything is near the things it's convenient for them to be near and people don't have to interact with people they don't want to."

"That sounds really cool? But the lack of it would probably not be at the top of my list of ongoing things that are wrong with the world."

"Yeah.

"Why won't people stop hurting each other?"

"- well, I think sometimes because they don't know how to not, because they want to do the right thing but there are lots of competing concerns and it's hard to juggle all of them correctly all the time? And I think sometimes because, like - I don't know how much of this world's theology your council of two has informed you of, but we're all, you know, fallen. No longer in sync with the game plan. We chose knowledge and power over being... simple enough, I guess, to only ever do the right thing. And so now we know what our options are, but we don't always have the strength to pick the right ones. Because, um, being good in a world where lots of other stuff isn't is hard, and it gets you hurt, and we're not really as constant as God is? So - it's bound to be hard, starting from sin and pride and selfishness and pain, to become someone who can take all that and only ever dish out love."

She pauses. "I, uh, I'm not like a theologian? I'm like the opposite of a theologian. So that may or may not have made sense."

...She smiles. "People are pretty much people wherever you go. I--the Garden of Eden didn't literally happen, in my world, there was no actual physical Snake and Apple, but people are pretty much the same. All you can do is try to line them up so they don't make too much of a mess when they fall over. Because people do. Everyone does, even me." 

"That sounds like kind of a downer ending, in all honesty. But this isn't the ending. This is, uh, trying to navigate the chapter where space aliens come to visit. Which sounds like it could in temporal terms go either really well or really badly."

"Yeah. Maybe the answer is to go on television, resurrect some more babies, and then come absolutely clean about everything, and then announce that whether or not I'm backed by any kind of divinity I'm not planning to tolerate people being cruel in my name, or for any other reason I can prevent."

"So kind of a might for right deal? I - think I like the concept when Camelot does it. But I think Camelot was less divided on what 'right' was than we are, and it also had that thing where all the key players killed each other off or were forced to become nuns at the end. At least in the movie. I, uh, the point is I don't know how stable or sustainable even benevolent fallible absolute rulers are, especially you don't first win over the people who have to live with them."

"I don't want to be a ruler. I just want to tell people to knock it off when they're doing things that are really flagrantly bad."

"That's - kind of what being a ruler is, actually. Unless you're working in someone else's name, in which case it makes you a cop, a gang enforcer, or a kindergarten teacher. Although the last one is arguably a kind of ruler."