"A communication failure and a panicky press release?"

"If they actually thought it was going to scare people to death? When they had an opportunity available to avoid that? Yes, I'd say so."

"He told them that people were probably going to go to Hell if they died later! That's probably worse! Do you even know how that translates?"

"Let's say I don't."

"Varies by religion. This place shares a name in some languages but the thing humans'll hear in context if you tell them 'bad people go to Hell when they die' is 'people who don't obey my religion are tortured! for! eternity! when they die'. Which is one thing when nobody saying it has any evidence for their religion and quite another when your crowd shows up, and, for context, traditional religious mandates backed by threat of Hell include 'don't claim the Earth orbits the Sun', 'don't be gay', 'don't guess wrong which head of this schisming church is the correct one'..."

Pelor is stunned into silence for a moment.

"We aren't remotely like that."

"This is why you need a cultural consultant before you say any more things!!!"

"All right."

"What else like that needs to be cleared up, and how do we do it?"

"The Ganymede situation is illegible and terrifying, people are making fatalistic jokes about what great chests of drawers they'll make and shuttering enterprises that depend on summoning random daeva. The afterlife thing is also confusing, there's different speculations depending where you look, Raafi's blog isn't really organized enough to serve as a single source of truth. Everybody is on tenterhooks waiting for another god to show up and fuck something up, especially since it's known that some of them are evil and nobody can actually fight them. You need a well-managed professional publication to make your own statements from - random interviewers are incentivized to get as much attention as possible and that rewards controversy over clarity - and you need to decide what in fact you're going to announce; I still don't know what constraints you're working with, especially on Ganymede."

"I can face him down about it but it would be - starting a war isn't exactly right but it's the right scale, and I don't think the situation actually calls for it. Nothing he's doing can't be patched up, most of the daeva are going home unsummonable and the rest have agreed to the risk of recapture."

"Then that needs to be announced. Along with how you are sure of that, what's happening to the ones who aren't 'most', an apology for reintroducing the ones with a risk of recapture to the random summon population - the GCP can't guarantee they get them, especially right now, they could turn up on an emergency summon like the one Raafi did or in any other situation. Maybe you can follow up on them somehow magically if they do that? Since there aren't too many?"

"Not easily - I can bring in diviners to watch them and alert me, if we have someplace to put them. How long do you think it'll be necessary?"

"...well, we live forever. I don't know how long they were sentenced for nor for that matter how the GCP arrived at those figures."

"I should know more about the situation here before I set up a permanent order but I'll start with people who're suited to one - I'm doing that now. What do you think should be done about the religious misunderstanding?"

"Which religious misunderstanding? - also, how are you monitoring people to filter them for suitedness?"

"Suitedness to what?"

"A religious order? Magic powers?"

"Granting clerichood is something like reflexive, from this side - I'm often not consciously aware of people becoming clerics at all. The process of trying for clerichood is the filter; someone with an outlook incompatible with the god they're trying to become a cleric of won't be able to do it. Once they are, I have more of a chance to get to know them - I can see and hear my clerics and the area around them whenever I like, though there's a sharp limit to how many places I can pay attention to at once. Favored souls work more like you seem to be imagining - favoring is what happens when a god reaches out to another being, rather than them reaching out to us the way clerics do. That's much rarer but does involve having a close look at their outlook and general approach to life, once I've found a suitable-seeming person, which is - imagine trying to pick a red-haired person out of a crowd, it's a bit like that. For the order I'm going the mundane route, contacting the heads of my larger temples and asking them to tell me about any suitable people in their hierarchy."

"What with how my species works a lot of the privacy ship has already sailed but you should advertise both the extent of your potential policies and your in-practice policies on its use. Uh, the people in your temples don't seem on the face of it to be more culturally competent than Raafi was."

"I don't intend to have them interacting with anyone. I don't know what we will do, if they see one of the daeva take a summons, but they won't be prepared to handle it themselves in any case. And I don't really have specific policies on where I look; do you have any advice about that?"

"Uh, I don't know how simply you could duplicate the amount of intrusiveness that demons can manage. There are specific kinds of computers that are demon proof -" He gestures with his. "And we have to go to really stupid lengths to get audio that isn't recorded; it's theoretically possible but nobody actually does it."

"I don't know how to do anything with that at all. I'll consider deafening myself."

"It has the advantage of being something people are already aware of in the background as a security risk, if you match us or do strictly less."

"I'm not sure that's possible - I'm precognitive under some conditions, and that isn't voluntary in all of them and I wouldn't especially want to give it up if it was - but I'll see how close it seems reasonable to get."

"It seems more important to deal with the fact that they think we're going to torture them, anyway."

"Well, you spilled the beans on the afterlife. Will that be allowed to stand?"