"Perfect." She writes it down in an unfamiliar script.

"Thanks so much for this mediating you're doing."

"It's really no trouble. I'll probably need a couple of days to make sure he's got this all down - how much of a hurry are you in?"

    "Well, the sooner the better, really..."

"A couple days, then. Is there anything else he should know?"

"I'm not aware of anything else, but I'm a latecomer to the situation."

"Okay. I don't know how you do things here yet but these guys will probably be able to find me if you need anything."

"On - what timescale?"

She looks to Zanel.

    "If you get a phone it'll depend on how often you check it."

"Most people have their phone make a sound or vibrate for priority messages, some people just check every hour or two."

"I can check it every hour or two. And I can be around when Raafi has meetings, that'll help anyway."

Leonor nods. "Thank you so much."

"Thank you for being patient with him." And she goes.

Meanwhile, Pelor's church is able to buy premises wherever they like.

The clerics are more than ready. They haven't been charging for healing, but they've been taking donations, including online after explaining on the website that that's one of the main ways their church is usually funded, and that's gotten them a few big ones. They check with the PR firm about whether their usual habit of giving patrons input into their decision-making process will be a problem here before emailing to ask if they have any suggestions for the location of their first temple.

"Well, what is your usual habit there, who exactly do you ask and how and about what?"

"Usually we talk to lots of people - the clerics in whatever place will know what's going on with the community and figure out if there's anyone they should talk to, and we'll talk to the local lay leaders - the nobility, or whoever is doing that work - and any benefactors we have in the area, who usually have their own ideas of what needs to be prioritized or included in a project. In this case deciding where to start is the project, so we can't include the locals from the start, but we can talk to our patrons and look at the places they suggest first, unless there's some reason not to. Since we can't start everywhere at once, or even in all the places that have good reason to want to be first."

"There's a risk that if you talk to your big donors and they ask you to set up in their hometowns and you do that, this'll get to the media as you being bought - that is people will expect on this basis that your interests will follow theirs instead of your stated agenda where those conflict."

"I expect we'll get some suggestions like that, yes. We won't take them unless it actually makes sense to prioritize that town, and that doesn't seem likely, I don't think that's the only kind of suggestion we'll get."

"So a thing you could do to avoid that is to choose a large city with a large exurb, like Toronto or New York or Oakland, and then if anyone even starts to ask the question of why you'd be there in particular, you can just point at the city being in the middle of a dense area where you can serve the most people."

"I think that's what we'll end up doing," she nods. "But we still have to pick one, and we like to be in places where we're welcome and supported by the community, and including donors in the decision helps with that, at least at home."

"...So, a lot of large institutions do talk about 'the community' of a city they operate in," says Ramona. "They're, uh, using that as metonymy for fiddly little concerns of their reception in the public eye. But our cities are too big for it to actually be feasible to have any single 'the community' unless the stars align. ...metaphorically, Pelor can't fix this by moving any stars around. You could go talk to the municipal government, and probably should in fact seek their blessing just to tie off loose ends and angles of attack, but most people don't even vote in local elections, so you can't use that as a proxy for buy-in from the average person on the street. I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about 'the community' but you kind of can't mean it, not behind the scenes, it's too unwieldy."

"...do people... want it to be that way?"

"The ones who want to live in small towns live in small towns, those just... have fewer people in them."

"I guess we'll just go with the biggest city, then."

"That's New York. Rent in New York proper is astronomical, though, you might want to technically be in Newark or White Plains or something, that's legible."

"All right."

They have the internet figured out enough to look at real estate listings, now.