"I appreciate that on both counts."

Here they are back at her house again! Crossing the threshold still has that subtle effect as of everything feeling slightly warmer and sturdier, and this time with no mild evening chill to cover it.

It's such a cozy abjuration. "What else is on the agenda today?"

"Let me see, I was going to get a list written down summarizing your spells and the constraints on their use, right? After that... Chris might want to cast the same protective spells on you that she has on me, if you're going to be adventuring alongside me, and if so she'll probably want to cast a pawn promotion first—her style of magic is chess-based, and a pawn promotion is a divination to find out which pieces suit someone best and in what ways. It's useful for that trick I mentioned where non-casters can anchor parts of a spell for her."

"Chess magic is a terribly charming concept," he says. "But yes, spells. We've been over all the orisons, I think, shall I repeat them -"

"Yes but just a moment while I sit down and get out pen and paper." She fetches a pen and a spiral-bound notebook. "All right, let's hear it."

He lists all the cleric orisons he knows: Guidance, Create Water, Stabilize and Bleed, Detect Magic/Fiendish Presence/Poison, Read Magic, Light, Mending, Purify Food and Drink, Resistance and Vigor and Virtue, Spark.

She writes down both the names and the translations, because she might as well. "And their effects, let me see... Create Water and Light and Detect Things I remember you said were straightforward; Guidance makes someone slightly better at something if they use it within a minute; Stabilize helps a dying person not die; Mending takes ten minutes to mend an object with a weight limit of five pounds; I remember you mentioned Virtue and I found the effect incongruous with the name but I don't remember what the effect actually was. Something healing-like?"

"The poundage limit is another thing that varies by circle. Virtue makes you a little more robust; it's the sort of thing I'd want if I knew I was about to get slightly injured, the injury would take off the Virtue add-on first."

She notes those both down. "Is Purify Food and Drink straightforward? What about Resistance, Vigor, Spark, Bleed?"

"Purify Food and Drink does what it sounds like. Resistance is a brief improvement to saves - I don't know if you have that as its own concept here but there are things you can dodge, or mental influence you can throw off, or poisons and the like you can be impaired by or not, and we call that trio of things 'saves' and Resistance helps all three a little. Vigor makes you hit harder - not more accurately, just harder. It's almost never worth preparing because it takes a normal amount of time to cast and you could just hit twice in that period of time and the situations where that would not be the obvious thing to do are not the sort you know about first thing in the morning. Spark makes sparks, it's for starting fires, mostly you only want it in a camping situation because it doesn't do anything about the need for fuel. Bleed is the opposite of Stabilize.

Note note note. "Spark is as replaceable by widgets as Light is, I'll get you one of those too if you like. Bleed is the opposite of Stabilize meaning, if someone is dying and you'd like them to hurry it up...? Is there a sense I'm missing in which it's not easily replaced with violence?"

"It is easily replaced by violence in most situations, I do not tend to prepare it."

"Sensible. All right." She scans over her list to make sure she got everything down. "Hmm, what does Read Magic do exactly?"

"That's for if there's a scroll I might want to cast from which is hard to decipher, or less commonly a magical glyph that's anchoring some kind of spell. I don't know how to scribe scrolls, wouldn't need it to read my own notation anyway, and don't expect to find any lying around as loot on a planet of hidden magic, though I guess I could be surprised."

"Surprising things do happen but that one would be pretty surprising, yeah." Note note. "Okay, so if I remember right, my earlier recommendation for tomorrow's orison lineup was Guidance, Detect Magic, Mending, and Stabilize, with Mending then being swapped out for something else on subsequent days once we know more about how it interacts with local mendable things? That still looks reasonable to me; does it to you?"

"Since you have - water widgets - they always work?"

"Yes, approximately. It happens maybe once every few years or so that there's a problem with the water delivery system to a house and it needs to be deactivated for repairs, but there would almost always be enough warning to prepare Create Water that day and other water delivery systems in the area would still work - if this house wasn't getting water, Rupert's would be, or vice versa. A bad enough earthquake could disable water delivery to a whole town but this town has never had an earthquake that bad and I don't expect it to barring the sort of supernatural shenanigan that it's my job to prevent."

"Then yes, that seems fine."

"I'm keen to have Guidance available especially since you use it so often, and keen to have Stabilize available because it's reasonably likely to save at least one life this month, but for the two remaining slots I think we'll need to see how Detect Magic and Detect Fiendish Presence perform under local conditions to get a good idea of what makes sense as a long-term default; what do you usually default to?"

"My usual loadout is Guidance, Create Water, Light, and Stabilize, in increasing order of how willing I tend to be to drop them; Detect and Mending and Scrivening duties I typically delegated."

"Yeah. Create Water and Light are both functions that are easy to replace. If vampires count as Fiendish Presences I think that one's going to pull its weight on a nightly basis, but if not, it might not be worth much depending what other local beings it detects. I guess it might not also be worth much if the range is really short; up close I can generally spot a vampire who's trying to pass for human within a few seconds if I'm paying attention, but I would benefit enormously from being able to spot them at a distance in crowds or through closed doors."

"They are probably not fiendish presences unless they are also cultists of evil gods; there's a separate Detect Undead spell, first circle, and a Detect Evil, also first circle. The range on most spells like that is sixty feet, in a sort of cone." Gesture.

"How does the cone feel about doors?"

"Closed doors block line of effect. Open ones don't, but I wouldn't get any result from someone who I would not be able to - connect to with a string through the door. Or you can imagine it as being if I could see them but it doesn't depend on lighting or anything."