Well that sure is a chaotic mess. She's not done with the book by the time he gets back but she puts it down to let him in. "Hey, sweetheart, how'd it go?"

"They didn't let me in; one of Pelor's researchers will have to go."

    "Oh well." She leads him over to the bed and they sit, snuggling up a bit. "The book is pretty good. I guess it makes sense that they'd do things differently without any gods."

"I didn't get that far into it, what do you mean?"

    "It doesn't mean anything that they call themselves the same religion, usually. Since there's nobody telling them they have to do things a certain way to keep using their name."

"Ah."

    "Yeah. Sometimes it does, but there's no real pattern, you'd have to study it, or figure it out each time. So what happened with this disease?"

"I don't know the details. It's - did I tell you - there's another me, here. In Limbo, he lived a couple hundred years ago. Looks like me but a little younger, that's how Limbo works, and we're just the same in most ways that aren't about the world being different. And when he was young, there was a disease that affected gay men - a few other kinds of people too, but mostly us - that a lot of people died of, and the religions - I don't have details, he didn't want to talk about it, but they didn't help, they approved of what was going on."

    She squeezes him tight. "Is he okay?"

"Not really."

    "We should visit sometime."

"We should," he grins. "He has a Kat too, but I don't know what you'd be like without Lastai."

    "Oh, that'll be fun."

"I'm sure." He kisses her cheek.

    "So what were you trying to figure out?"

"Well, Pelor wants to work with the local religions - something about making his church easier to understand, I think - but he needs to know if that's something they'd do, now."

    "It's not going to be possible to say, I don't think. Not just from a book, anyway."

"There's a historian I was talking to, but we didn't get anywhere, I couldn't figure out what to ask."

    "A historian isn't going to be very helpful anyway, they aren't consistent enough to guess from what they did before."

"Oh."

    "I'd start by asking the people who'd be affected if something like that happened again, they'll only be able to guess too but we can still learn something."

"I'm not sure who that would be, here."

    "If you don't know I definitely don't. Is there someone we could ask?"

He considers. "I don't think so."

    "Okay. You can keep an eye out. But the advice I'd give right now is that even if we can figure out what they'd do tomorrow, we won't know what they might do in a few decades. He'll want to keep his plans short."

"All right, I'll tell them."

    "I'll come with you, they might have questions."

"Sure. Now?"

    "Sure, why not."

They go to Earth.

Ramona is helping the clerics shop for decor and arrange it so the place is "locally legible as a professional and welcoming environment".

"Oh, hello."

"Hello, how is it going?"

"Pretty well! I had a meeting with a summoner from the GCP this morning; we had to pause while they look into whether the demons really need to be gagged but it was pretty productive up 'till then. -this is Katrianne, my spiritual adviser." He turns to her and says a few things in a different language, and she grins and nods at Ramona.

"Your - spiritual advisor? What does this mean in this context?" asks Ramona.

"It's an imprecise translation, you don't seem to have the exact concept. Lots of people in Oerth will have a particular god whose moral teachings they primarily follow, even if they pray to all of them, and it's common to have a particular cleric that they go to for advice and help in figuring out how to follow those teachings. Fharlanghn doesn't offer moral advice, so his clerics usually find it elsewhere, just like a layperson; I found it with Katrianne's god, Lastai."

"Are we likely to be talking about Lastai in public at all, should I get the rundown?"

"Maybe not soon, but probably eventually. Kat explains her better than I do, one minute." He takes his translation necklace off and hands it over to Kat, with what's presumably an explanation of what's going on.

Ramona gets ready to take notes.

She gets the necklace settled in place. "Do you want me to start anywhere in particular?"

"What is Lastai the god of?"

"Ah," she grins, "pleasure. Yes, it's what it sounds like, though it's not just that."

"...oh boy. Do I get to spin 'sacred prostitution' for the public, or is it not quite that much what it sounds like."

Her grin widens and she gives Raafi a little squeeze. "It's pretty close."

"That's - probably not the only thing I need to have a writeup cooking on but it's definitely going to get outsized attention, anything to do with sex does, how does it work, in principle, in practice, in general? I probably don't need particularly intimate details."

"That varies from one person to the next anyway, Lastai's chaotic. The underlying principle is - people need things, you know? The obvious common things like food and clothing and shelter, of course, but other things too, things that aren't the same from one person to the next and that society doesn't necessarily approve of or want to allow, but that are needs all the same. Sex is a pretty common one but not the only one at all. Beauty is another one, we're big on art. Creative outlets. Certain kinds of relationships, it looks like you're better about that here than at home but there might still be some things you consider taboo that can be done safely if you're careful enough. Drugs, sometimes, we're careful about encouraging that but if someone is already addicted it's still a need to be met and managed. More unusual things, sometimes - Raafi likes us because we're equipped to handle how his clerichood affects what he can do, for example. With all of those - people do best when their needs are met. It hurts them, when they aren't, or when they don't know how to meet them safely, and they'll end up hurting other people, too, if that gets bad enough. So that's the principle we're working from. The details of what we do vary from one place to another, but we give classes, we host events, we have resources for people to use, we do harm reduction and help manage the fallout when something does go wrong - we try to handle whatever our community needs, the same as any church, really."

"That's a good, uh, values statement, but you really do need a wording prepped for the sacred prostitution part, it would be really easy to mishandle."

"What am I supposed to be explaining?"

"If you don't answer, at least implicitly, the question 'can people show up wherever you wind up and get you to have sex with them in some way', then somebody's gonna ask."

"Ah. Not just for the asking, unless someone happens to be in the mood. We might refer them to a professional, or if something complicates that we'll try to get it straightened out. It more often comes up in the context of something else we're doing; if it seems like it'd help someone to have something like that be part of how they interact with us, we can, but it's usually very specific to the situation and more about the connection than the sex exactly."

"Hm," says Ramona. "Pity I don't think you can describe it by way of fiction reference. I'll think on it."

"We have that problem at home, too. Since we're dealing with needs that society thinks can't be met, of course people aren't going to be familiar with how we're meeting them."

"Sex work's legal here, so are drugs for the most part, how do you see that affecting operations?"

"I haven't had time to look at the details of those yet. Sex work being legal is great, but it's really not the bulk of what we handle - not from the direction you're asking about, anyway; we do a lot of work with prostitutes in our world to help make sure their needs are met, and it sounds like they have lots fewer problems here, which will be a relief. We do less with drugs, and we might still do some of the same things - we offer trip rooms and trip-sitting and safety counseling, we have spells to remove addiction and we offer counseling to help people stay off drugs they don't want to be on, some temples keep some of the safer recreational drugs on hand - we don't usually sell any dangerous drugs but we try to keep an emergency supply of ones that aren't safe to miss doses of, in case someone runs out when we don't have the right spells prepared for that."