"So it softens it to, like, tell them when to come back?"

"Mmhmm. Or that you'll come find them when you're free, or you can tell them where to find what they want to know themselves."

"Maybe I will attempt to deputize someone back in Hell to answer gnome questions and conjure their replies on a routine basis if I find myself buried in gnomes at some time."

He chuckles. "They'll love it, I'm sure. Usually they'll eventually hit a point where you have to tell them you don't know something."

"I wouldn't want to disappoint them! I'm trying to be a cleric of abundance over here!"

Hee. "Sounds like an excellent approach."

Wag wag wag. "I should design my holy symbol before I'm swamped, actually..." He spends a little while in an art program and comes up with a classical goat's-horn cornucopia in a circle. "Does this look in the correct idiom?"

"You should probably differentiate it a bit more from Yondalla's, hers is a cornucopia on a shield. It's good aside from that, though."

"Huh, what's her deal as a fellow cornucopia enthusiast -" He replaces the cornucopia with a stylization of the locomotive of the Limbo train.

"It represents the bountiful land, for halflings - they don't keep farmland, but that means they're more dependent on luck in some ways, if there's a famine too widespread for them to migrate away from they'll be hit worst by it since they don't have much stored food. That's rare, but they're still very aware as a species that it's part of how they live, taking risks like that."

"There's humans back home who think it was a massive reduction in quality of life when agriculture was invented." He tweaks his locomotive, replaces it with one of the cargo cars, plays with the colors for a bit, and finally materializes the entire thing in enameled ivory and hangs it at his hip opposite where he clips his computer.

"Huh. This world had agriculture before it had humans, we're the youngest of the common species. Elves and dwarves both claim to be the oldest."

"Huh! I could check that, at least if knowing the answer wouldn't start a fight. Does that mean no hunter-gatherer types among humans even at this tech level?"

"It probably would, but I'm curious anyway. And we do have hunter-gatherers; it's not common for a whole society to be set up that way, but some places the land isn't good for farming or herding."

"How old do elves and dwarves claim to be?"

"I'm not sure exactly - more than ten thousand years, probably less than fifteen?"

Cam will make little models to settle the question.

It turns out that dwarves are the oldest, though only by a few decades. "Huh."

"But they could have been far apart or something, maybe they didn't meet immediately so the elves just figured they were first."

"That's what the scholars think, yeah. They don't favor the same sorts of terrain, it wouldn't be surprising for them to take a while to notice each other."

"Anyway, how do you normally distribute things, can I fold some stuff in there soon?"

"Lastai's and Pelor's churches both do food distribution to the needy, if you'd like to start there - they have different policies about it, Lastai's clerics focus on higher quality meals and will turn people away rather than compromise on it - the idea is that it's important for people to have nice things in their lives even if they can't have them as often, they make sure they're getting meals to as many different people as they can - and Pelor's church focuses on making sure there's enough for everyone even if all they can offer is bread."

"Will it be more suspicious if Pelor's suddenly got a lot more variety or more suspicious if Lastai's suddenly got a lot more plates? What infosec do you need me doing anyway, exactly, I know you don't want Revelation to be common knowledge but do I need to be pretending to be something other than what I am, from somewhere, with some limited version of my real powers..."

"It'll be less obvious here but not very suspicious in any case, at least to start with, Pelor's church gets food donated often enough. You could do both; we'd want to head over to Pelor's church soon if you want to do that, they'll need time to figure out how to distribute it. I'm still thinking about what kind of cover story would work - you could pretend to be a higher-tier cleric, actually, we sometimes have surprising powers."

"If I'm called upon to heal people then, while I will be able to help with a lot of things, the difference will be obvious."