"What sort of person usually decides to become a cleric?"

"Mine are mostly interested in helping their communities, either in general or with something specific - healers have the easiest time of it, but I prefer to have a variety of perspectives in my clergy, since my followers are so diverse and they have to deal with such a wide array of situations."

"What are some examples of non-healer community projects in your world?"

"In rural areas we do a lot with the harvest, and with making sure people are safe from various threats - anything from wild animals to badly placed wells to overgrazing of the commons. We handle organizing the community for a lot of one-time needs, too, say if someone's house burns down and they need a new one built, or someone goes missing, or things of that nature. In cities we do a lot more specific charity work - in towns and hamlets a child being orphaned is a rare enough occurrence, and the clerics know everyone well enough, that it's almost always possible to find someone to take them in, but in cities it makes more sense to have an orphanage, for example, and we'll do that. Or formal programs to feed and clothe the poor, or to ensure that all the districts' concerns are heard by the leadership. And of course we offer counseling and advice everywhere."

"What's the philosophy behind the counseling?"

"In general we try to help people figure out what the right thing is to do, according to their and their community's values, and how to develop the strength to do it. In some cases we also advise specific things that are known to work - for example, in areas where I'm not worshiped it's fairly common for humans to believe that spanking children makes them better behaved, and more moral as adults, but I've had the chance to observe places where that was common and compare them to places where it wasn't, and in general the places that treated their children more gently and find other ways to solve problems with their behavior did better over time, so now we advise that even in communities where it's not popular."

"Huh. Can you tell me how that squares with the zero tolerance policy that Ganymede recently encountered from your colleague?"

"There are some things I don't tolerate, but being wellmeaningly wrong isn't one of them - forcing people to live in a way that they believe is harmful to the people around them causes harm, too."

"What are the other things there's no tolerance for?"

"From me, or more broadly? There are lots of gods, I haven't met them all personally."

"Is the complete list of intolerable things not common knowledge? I'd think it would have to be."

He makes a confused, concerned face, and turns to Raafi. "Did you not warn them?"

"I did; they wouldn't work with me."

    "Ah. Well." He turns back to the interviewer. "'Intolerable' is a bit of a strong word for it, in most cases. There are things that we won't let pass unchallenged, but most of us will take circumstances into account and work with you to come to an agreeable solution, if you're meeting us in good faith - good gods moreso than neutral ones but they generally see the wisdom of it even if they don't have much of a natural impulse in that direction, with a few exceptions."

"Is there something viewers aren't hearing about the Ganymede situation?"

"The morning of the day they sent out that press release - my time, early evening of the day before for them - I met with them, and told them that this could happen and that the way to avoid it was to have a plan in place for switching to some way of containing their daeva that Fharlanghn would find acceptable, possibly using our magic. They were upset, understandably, and after a few minutes it was clear that we weren't going to get anywhere on it that day; I told them that they should contact me to talk about it more when they were ready, and instead the next thing I heard from them was the release. Which was especially insulting in light of some of the things they'd said to me in the meeting - I'd prefer not to discuss it, I don't know if we'll need to work with them in the future, but it was very clear that they weren't going to work with us at all at that point. And there's really not much I can do with that, especially so quickly."

"What do you mean when you say 'work with'?"

"We would have needed to come to an agreement on a plan for giving the daeva some alternative to staying in the Ganymede prison. I proposed using our magic to make them unsummonable and releasing them into their realms, and I think that would have worked, but they didn't agree to it."

    "That's what he's doing now, anyway, mostly. The ones who are summonable have agreed to the risk of being reimprisoned, he won't care as much about it the second time."

"Did they say why?"

"Not as such - we did discuss what amount of proof they'd need that our magic would work as described, and didn't come to a conclusion about it, but a plan that depended on us doing that to their satisfaction would have been better than nothing, and they didn't seem interested in making one. I'm not sure they understood that this wasn't something they could stop just by disapproving of it loudly enough."

"Do you do a lot of 'working with' people back home?"

"Personally? Not especially. But it obviously wasn't going to work to wait for someone better-qualified to come by, and I don't think I did a bad job of it considering."

"Will there be more clerical traffic soon?"

"I'm sure there will - I'll be sending some to help with healing, even if I don't establish any temples here. And you'll have native ones soon enough. We'll clearly have to be thoughtful about who we send for diplomacy work, though."

"Do you have free migration treaties in the works with any of our governments?"

Pelor looks to Raafi to answer this one.

"I wasn't aware that we'd need them."

    "It's not how things are usually done in our world."

"Your world sounds very different. Can you tell me what else you've noticed?"