Enough indeed for everyone to get lost in.

Some time later, Pascale appears again.

"Anyone hungry? I know some good restaurants down by the wharf."

"I could use some food, yes. Lead the way."

Everyone's in favor of food.

"I figured that was a safe bet. Ellayania doesn't need to feed her body, but she still likes food."

"The similarities are rather fascinating!"

The restaurant Pascale takes them to has as its primary offering a fish-and-rice dish with a cream sauce, apparently a local specialty.

Food!

"What's living in this world like?" Hisame asks. "I'm very unfamiliar with gods, for one..."

"I only really have experience with the one world, so I'm not sure how best to explain! Gods are generally- distant but helpful? Benign's a good word, I guess."

"And offerings are important to them somehow?"

"Gods live on attention, on us thinking about them. Making an offering is a way of focusing, sort of. A concrete reminder to spend some time thinking. And they can use the offering itself, either directly or by taking it apart for raw materials."

"I'm curious if time spent thinking about alts fuels them as well..."

"That has never come up, as far as I know. And it'd be pretty hard to test. You'd need either a very small god or a lot of mentally disciplined people."

"Might be worth it, someday."

"Maybe someone could write a book about it."

She hums. "What does it mean, for the goddess to be her land?"

"Basically exactly that. Gods are in the land. The sort of god it is determines what the land looks like. Ellayania is a fen goddesss, so this area is swampy. There used to be a mountain god to the east, he's dead but the mountains are still there. There's ocean gods, plains gods, volcano gods, desert gods, river gods..."

"Interesting! We had myths, in my home world, of gods of mountains and trees and such - but they were hardly supposed to have caused those."

"I think it'd be very strange to live in a world without gods you could talk to."

"It certainly sounds like it helps your world, in some ways. Most of the ones we visited had more warfare, I think."

"There used to be holy wars and such, but those gods all died off due to uh, their worshippers dying off. Or running away to gods who wouldn't make them fight."

She nods. "That makes sense, given how this world seems to work."

"So what sorts of things do you guys like to do?"

"Reading, learning new magics, meeting people, sowing chaos here and there - though I wouldn't dream of causing my girlfriend's alt any problems."

"Yes, we would very much appreciate a minimum of chaos. Here or really anywhere else while you have Ellayania's blessings. That would have, uh, reputational effects."