"And before," says Doug, "you weren't allowed to keep trying if it didn't bear fruit very quickly?"

"Right. But that's a matter of Fharlanghn's personal beliefs - he doesn't think it's possible to explain the issue to anyone who isn't already a potential cleric of his, in a way that will get them to change their minds without us having to use force - and not about travel or freedom, so it's fine for us to disagree and possible to get him to change his mind or at least his policies."

"Okay. So clerics are - we'll need a better word than 'fanatic' - about some specific topic, and the god of the topic is a focal point for their practice?" says Jenny.

"Basically, yes. We do also take guidance from them but that's not unique to clerics."

    "The term we usually use translates as something like 'devoted to' or 'personally devoted to'."

        "Churches are also important, for most of us. Fharlanghn's clerics are unusual for not having any."

Raafi nods. "Even for us following the same god helps us work together. It lets us know we're in agreement about things - being devoted to the general topic isn't necessarily enough; if your concept of it is too different from the relevant god's they still can't take you as a cleric."

Jenny nods and writes something down.

"So clerics are devoted to a topic, a god provides a central focal point to make sure they're all roughly of a party about their perspective on the topic, their magic keeps them honest about whether they're still in line with that," says Skip. "Uh, not sure that gets us far on rehabilitating Fharlanghn's image. Maybe we can throw, what's their name, James Hua? under the bus."

"We'd be up to our ears in defamation fines," says Doug.

"Not, like, a double decker bus."

"Skip."

"Right. Pitch me, crew."

"Depends too much on whether anyone jailbroken reoffends. Tosche Station is arresting angel cultists even though it's getting threats about losing federated status but not everyone's going to have perfect enforcement, that's impossible in principle, they could show up on randoms," says Jenny.

"I might like to speak with James personally at some point, I'm not sure if that will help anything. And we're setting up an order to watch for the released daeva taking summons; it's not a complete solution at this point but I imagine it will help. I haven't been able to twist Boccob's arm into giving us a spell that will let us send daeva home yet; I might be able to do it after the physics changes."

"It'd have to work from range," says Ramona. "Assuming people have to be alive and conscious and so on to cast spells."

"Some spells of that type can work through a scry," he nods. "Or I suspect a massed charge would work, with teleportation."

"Massed charge?" asks Skip.

"Daeva are constrained by attention, I understand? If we teleport a hundred casters into range within a few seconds I'd expect one or two to get a spell off. It's not the sort of thing I'd want to do often but it's not infeasible."

    "We'd be honored," nods the halfling.

"Uh, daeva are constrained by attention but they can affect areas and batches of things pretty well," says Doug. "That might work on an angel in particular, they have a meaningful rate limit that they usually have to compensate for with aim, but a demon could just flood the area with something noxious and a fairy could just squash everything in the vicinity flat."

"We have magic to protect against poisons. Physical force is somewhat harder, teleporting - I believe it's possible but I'll have to discuss it with my tacticians."

"It doesn't have to be poison, it could be, like, lava. Ideally you'd just be able to manage it from far away. You should probably be working with - well, I guess not the GCP, but some sort of police with experience liaising with the GCP; our expertise isn't really applicable to this."

He nods. "I'll do that."

"This a good time to circle back to your list of goals for next year or should we tidy up more tangents?" Skip asks.

"I don't think we have anything else?"

They don't.

"Most of this we're not going to be more helpful than a random person with," says Skip. "Danger assessment you probably want to talk to police or military, of various polities. Immigration and migration and citizenship with countries' and unions' citizenship and travel boards. Where we're likely to be able to help is with presenting your attempts at establishing local church presence - ideally after you've gotten your citizenship and migration issues worked out so you're not just going to be embarrassingly evicted a month later - and with describing and explaining your healing services. And the divine assistance assessment part insofar as that's an information gathering project we can help with by getting you some kind of FAQ and web form for asking questions up online and then people can suggest things and you can clarify iteratively what you can and can't do. Plus things like wording a public release about the black hole thing."

"Is it inadvisable for some reason to have your help in figuring out how to talk about those other things?"

"No, of course we can help you talk about them, but you'll need more input on what it is we should be talking about. I can assign you someone to be a sort of cultural translator if you want, for all those meetings - Ramona?"

"Pay me the big bucks."

"Absolutely."

"You're going to need to work out a way of getting local money before too long. I'm not sure how long I'll be allowed to sell spells here and even if I can we're going to run into our own logistical problems."

"Hm, not being able to sell spells is rough - this initial consult is free, it's just so you can be convinced of our value-add, but we don't work for free in the longer run. You can do paid interviews and television appearances if you make sure we can vet stuff first, you could translate books from your world to sell, you - crew -"

"Speaking engagements, we'd look over the speech first."

"Does it count as selling spells if you might have to cast spells as part of completing some work but aren't paid by the spell?"

"Fence souvenirs from your world."

"Tours of our world might not be advisable yet but that's definitely an option, or ferrying people from our world to work here or vice versa, if that's easier than getting me personally permission to operate here. Or between here and Limbo, if people want to see their loved ones. And if I'm allowed to work here, some kinds of work are better for our logistical issues than others - the problem is that my spells aren't, conceptually, mine; If I'm selling them outright I have an obligation to use the money in a way that's suitable to my role as Fharlanghn's cleric specifically. Loaning it to another church that isn't working against us is allowed, and I can take repayment in our world's money, but I only have so much use for that, and it matters, it stops being a loan if I'm not actually getting any value out of the repayment. If I'm casting in the process of work that fulfils my role then what I do with whatever I'm paid for it matters much less - helping people travel, providing unusual experiences or exposing them to new perspectives, that sort of thing. There's also some flexibility depending on how much of a priority fixing Fharlanghn's image and arranging for freedom of movement between the worlds is, but it sounds like things will go better if we don't let this affect our priorities very much."

"We should figure out how to handle this for ourselves, anyway. How hard do you expect it to be to find suitable paid appearances?"

"We can do that, we have relationships with booking agencies for various reasons anyway," says Doug.

"A shuttle service to Limbo might be good. You might be able to get in under the legal umbrella of an existing fairy shuttle service and then they, not you, take it to court if someone objects," says Skip. "I don't know how long you'd be able to operate before that happened, though."

"All right. We can discuss that later. Our next priority is Boccob's spell, I think - he says that it will be locally reversible as soon as someone develops a spell for it - arcane, not divine, you'll need wizards for it and it will take a few years of work. But if it doesn't matter that it isn't available immediately, describing the change as reversible seems least alarming to me. He doesn't care about the other options you gave and I don't especially see that one would be better than another."