".....Yeaaaah, I see it. That, um, certainly is a thing."

"I also tried mapping out the politics of the evil spirits as best I could since, uh, we're embroiled in it. --The fact that we're involved in deadly intrigues between a bunch of superpowered, probably evil beings where we don't even know most of their names is, uh. Also not my favorite. Possibly even more not my favorite than the extra eyes thing."

"And it's not like the Beholding will be actually helpful enough to give us more information about them at any point."

"Look, I'm just glad I'm the servant of the one power that appears to be True Neutral instead of Chaotic Evil, especially since I'm definitely qualified to be a cleric of either."

Martin understood some of those words! "Neutral is, uh, definitely better than evil, yeah."

"Someone doesn't play D&D." Kiss. "I am sorry you have to date an enormous nerd."

"Well I think I'm lucky to have the opportunity." Kiss.

"Anyway I am really baffled by the fact that all the evil spirits are evil. And also the-- way they're evil?"

"Oh?"

"So, like, most things that don't care about humans at all are going to be evil from our perspective, I think? The same way that we're evil from the perspective of ants. We don't care about ants one way or the other, we're just very powerful so we can bulldoze their colonies to build houses. And if something doesn't care about humans it is going to bulldoze our houses, metaphorically. But magic has this aesthetic, and the aesthetic isn't a 'doesn't care about humans' aesthetic, it's a 'specifically doing all the things humans hate most' aesthetic. --What's particularly weird is that the Hive and the Beholding are the two spirits we understand best and both of them seem... to think of us the way we think of ants. The Hive wants to infect people with parasites, the Beholding wants people to be curious, neither of them is trying to do all the things humans hate most particularly. Which makes it even weirder that magic has that aesthetic."

"Right. That... kind of ties in with what you were saying before, I think? We don't get ants to be our servants because we don't need them to be."

"Yeah, it's super weird. --I'm not actually sure if the Hive wants to infect people with parasites. Jane Prentiss's statement implied it was all about connection and intimacy and I don't know if that's what the Hive wants or what Jane Prentiss wants out of the Hive, and if it's the second thing I don't know what that means for my assessment that the Beholding wants me to be curious."

"--Yeaaaah, it's also probably important for me especially to keep in mind that all my information on what these... spirits... want is coming from, um, biased sources. No offence."

"Yeah, that's a good thing to consider! --Also, the Beholding is our source about which statements are true, and it might have some agenda of its own. I mean, it definitely has some agenda of its own, but I don't know if the agenda leads it to make statements digitizable or non-digitizable based on some criterion other than its truth value."

"...It might be the source of what statements we even get, if it's powerful enough here. Make people turn around and leave the Institute if it doesn't want us to hear what they have to say."

"Yeah. For practical purposes we have to work from the hypothesis that the Beholding is telling us the complete truth, but it's important to remember occasionally that actually we face a black void of complete and utter ignorance and doubt."

(He seems cheerful about the prospect.)

"You sound happy about that..?"

"I'm a psychologist! I'm used to it! And now I don't have anyone telling me that actually we totally do know that using smaller plates makes you eat less."

"You're really cute, you know." Kiss.

"Speaking of psychology, my guess about what's up with the spirits being evil is-- let's say there's one immaterial world, right, and minds come from there, and evil spirits come from there. And maybe there's a fixed amount of-- friendliness to human values. Well, there are lots and lots of humans, so we probably used all the friendliness up, and so all the spirits are unfriendly to humans. That's my theory. It's almost certainly wrong."

"It's better than no theory at all, which is what I had, so there you go, I guess. Hopefully we live long enough to find out whether it's wrong or not?"

"Is the Beholding going to betray me like that when I've been so curious for it? --My other theory is that maybe the spirits are all just personifications of objective evil. Parasites are super evil! The Beholding is kind of a problem for my theory but it could be, I don't know, the Personification Of Watching Curiously When Bad Things Happen To Study Them And Not Doing Anything About It. This doesn't seem very evil to me but maybe objective evil is-- a different thing than how much suffering a thing causes. Certainly a lot of people agree that reading true crime books is bad."

"People do also do bad things out of curiosity, too. Maybe it's--different motivations for evil, like the Hive is intimacy, the Beholding is curiosity? Or maybe the universe just doesn't care about that and it's something else entirely."

"Maybe. --At least your system wouldn't imply that spiders are objectively evil."

"...I guess the spiders might be a problem for it either way, I don't think many people are exactly motivated by spiders to do evil. I guess they aren't motivated by eyes or parasites, either, so maybe the spiders are more symbolic? Seemed like pretty literal spiders, though."