"How are they dangerous?"

"A lot of the entities that are handing out power are not aligned with human goals. Some of them are intentionally evil, some of them are just concerned with totally different non-morality things, and some of them have really alien conceptions of which things are good. A lot of them want to be worshipped as gods. Contacting higher powers is not a thing to be done lightly, even if you do it without any idolatry, and picking up stuff that they've enchanted is only a couple steps shy of contact. The necklace is OK, though, I checked on it, the worst it'll do is give you excessively idiomatic translations of things."

"Or so the necklace tells me you said! So you don't have any way to enforce truth-in-advertising laws on higher powers, huh?"

"Not generally, no. It's very buyer beware. Also the government - it would be incorrect to say that the government is not aware of the concept of God or lesser gods, a bunch of them are religious and we all learn about some of the lesser entities in school, but they think the lesser entities are fake and think that God is..... less likely to act on the world in concrete ways than He actually seems to be. In my experience. Anyway, even if they knew about them, I don't think it would occur to anyone to try to bind Thor to a particular human legal system, and I don't expect it would work if we did."

"I don't know who God is and I don't feel like going and threatening him for you."

She bursts out laughing.

" - sorry - sorry, I know that was serious - I think it would make celebrating Christmas hard - "

"Yeah, I've heard that wars are awful for the economy and stuff."

" - no, I - oh, man - "

Eventually she is able to get ahold of herself and stop giggling. "I'm sorry. OK. From the top. God is the being that created the universe. Probably all universes but I'm not super clear on that. Some people are not super clear on the God thing at all, but then some people are not super clear on vampires and magic, so - working with what we have. Doctrine is that He's omnipotent, so I guess you could declare war on Him but I don't think it would go very well."

"Doctrine?"

"The word doctrine refers to the formal teachings of a given religion. In this case I mean the doctrine of the Catholic Church - though all Christian churches are agreed on this point, plus I think Muslims and - I don't know enough about Judaism to say a hundred percent, though they totally agree that He created the world. I am going with what the Catholics say because I'm Catholic and because Catholic religious things are the only ones that consistently repel demons. - wow you are gonna be missing so much context on so many of those things."

"...Yes. I have no idea what any of that means."

"OK. So. Hm. A lot of people think that God created the world. It used to be more, before people decided magic was all superstition, but now some of them think God is a superstition, too. Most of them still believe in Him, though, on some level, even the ones who think magic is fake. But people disagree on the specifics of what He's like and what He wants, and we group the people with similar understandings of this into classifications called religions. Did that make sense?"

"Yes. And you can't just find out because you don't have knowledge magic. Wait, why can't you just ask God what he wants? Did he go away?"

"I think He talked to people more in the past, yeah. He still talks to people today, but not as clearly as He has at other points in recorded history. At least not for most people, I guess I've totally heard that George Washington Carver had regular extended conversations with Him. But not everyone can, even if they try. For me He just, like - sometimes He'll tell me things. But not, like, in a conversation like the one we're having right now. It's sort of like - like I know something, really certainly, that I shouldn't be able to know. But it's hard, sometimes, to know what He's telling you, and a lot of people don't know how to listen to Him. If you don't think He's real, I guess you'd just think it was your brain playing tricks on you."

"Okay, and you don't think it's your brain playing tricks on you because the things you somehow just know are right?"

"All the times I was really sure of them they were. But I also separately have magical prophetic dreams, which is apparently a slayer thing? I am deeply unclear on whether slayer things come directly from God or whether there is some other entity involved. I think the dreams are a different thing, than, like - you're going to die but then you pray and suddenly you know where to go and wind up at the exit of the building you're in, it just occurs to me that I am not the most straightforward evidence case. I know a lot of other people who've heard things, too, but it's.... personal enough and in some circles looked down on enough that people don't all go airing their stories to everyone."

"Where I'm from lots of people can just know all kinds of things. Like where the nearest exit to a building is, or what color something behind a wall is. They're always people who don't have any of the other kinds of magic and they can generally decide what they want to know and when they want to know it."

"Huh. It super doesn't work for parlor tricks, though, it's very need-to-know. For me, anyway, I dunno about whatever George Washington Carver was doing."

"That sounds less useful than the kind we have but I'm glad you can do magic after all."

"I mean, it's not me doing it, really? It's God giving me stuff. Anybody can get superpowerful entities to give them stuff, it's just usually ill-advised."

"But if you have to specify what you need from him carefully enough maybe it's basically like doing magic."

"Maybe sometimes. I guess I could see situations where it would be kind of comparable. I do have to vote against declaring war on Him, in either case."

"Yeah, that doesn't sound like a great idea."

"Yeah. You need anything else?"

"Not that I can think of. Ready to show me the outside of the house now?"