"Friendly causality. I like that," says Parvati. "Why wouldn't godhood hold up against it?"

"Well, I don't know. I don't know how gods work or whether they need the causality partial to them in order to work that way."

"I'm starting to think this question is more trouble than it's worth. I suppose I could have said 'what would you do if you were transported into a science fiction book' or 'what would you do if it were safe to come to my world,' but those questions come with their own set of complications."

"Yes. Although if we picked a specific science fiction book I could answer the question, at least."

"You can go ahead and pick a specific science fiction book if you're willing to explain the setting to me so I can understand the answer. But, again, that would be putting forth quite a bit of effort just for the one question."

"Yeah, maybe not worth it."

Parvati sighs. "By the way," she says, "out of curiosity, could you technically be reading my mind right now? Based on the conversation thus far, I can infer you're not, but could you be?"

"I'm not, but I could, yeah."

"Oh, that's fascinating," she says. "I don't want to poke at the underlying mechanics too much, in case they're inconsistent and make my brain hurt, so...what's it like to read someone's mind?"

"It varies from artist to artist, but I have a passive awareness that you're there and have a mind, and I'll have that awareness unless there's something weird going on with one or both of us. Reading you would involve focusing down on that awareness - it takes a lot of concentration to sustain but not much to start. Sort of like staring really hard at a small point."

"Huh. So you don't have to put forth significant effort to stop yourself from reading my mind. That's good, I would've felt bad if you did," she said. "Do you get thoughts in words, images, or a mixture of both?"

"Some subtle artists do accidentally read minds, but I'm not one of them," Bella clarifies. "I get - thoughts. People think differently, so what I get varies, some people have lots of mental imagery and some have almost none, some are wordy and some aren't."

"Interesting. I wonder what my thoughts look like," she muses. "What kinds of career paths are available to subtle artistry majors? It feels like that would be a useful skill in a wide variety of fields."

"It is widely potentially handy, but I'm probably going to wind up being a therapist."

"Yes, you must have quite a bit of insight as to how the human mind works," says Parvati. "Impressive. I never could wrap my head around psychology."

"I'm not actually in any therapy classes yet," Bella says. "Just prerequisites. And general education stuff."

"Oh, that makes sense," says Parvati. "What are the prerequisites on your world?" A thought strikes her. "Do the rules of math change on your world? You aren't going to wake up one day and find that two plus two suddenly equals five, right?"

"...I don't think so, but I haven't done any elaborate math, it might get weird up in the complicated bits? Two and two is four; in any situation I can readily think of where that would inconvenience the universe it could just make a thing appear or disappear instead of changing the underlying numbers. Anyway, I'm in my second semester and I'm taking Utility Psionics 2, Intro to Mental Healing - there's basically no therapy stuff in there, it's like part law-and-liability, part shoring up shields so people's trauma doesn't bite us, part these-are-the-kinds-of-mental-healing-subspecialties-that-exist-now-memorize-them - and Arcane Defense and Intro Cognition and Wilderness Triage. Last semester was Utility Psionics 1 and Basic Knife and Intro Psych For Subtle Artists and Continental History."

She giggles a bit at "these-are-the-kinds-of-mental-healing-subspecialties-that-exist-now-memorize-them". "Oh, that's a relief, at least numbers are the same. Wilderness Triage is a necessary core class?"

"It fills my survival credit requirement. You take any one delving-and-discovery course - or one that's been put in that section of the course catalog and doesn't strictly contain any delving - and then it's out of the way. Supposedly supposed to reduce the number of campus deaths, I guess the weapons policy and the weapon proficiency credit weren't doing enough for that."

"Are campus deaths really such a significant problem?"

"It's really not that many, but every time there's one, they have to snug up regulations even if the snugged-up regulations wouldn't have helped."

"Ah. That makes sense. Legal issues and all that."

"Well, the campus isn't that liable, it's more PR."

"It seems odd to me that your school would be required to make self-defense and survival skills course requirements," she says. "But then, inter-world differences. I suppose you have to be on your guard against...demons and whatnot, instead of ordinary humans."