"I'm not sure if that would help him, if he approved of it overall he wouldn't be willing to help undo it."

"That sounds like a really rough position to have to do interuniversal negotiations from, and that doesn't start out easy."

"Yeah. I do think we got pretty lucky in who our one cleric of Fharlanghn is, plenty of them would be totally untenable to work with, but there's no easy solution here. Or no fast easy solution; we might be able to bring another one in, but that would be at least a month, maybe two or three, to find one we'd trust enough and get them here."

"What's the risk with unfiltered ones?"

"Uh, philosophical objection to keeping a new place secret. That's our first line of defense, right now - if our whole world finds out about this one before you have defenses set up here, Shining One will be too busy keeping you from being overrun with zombies and fiends to do anything about daeva."

"Zombies, wow. I get the sense that the... range of philosophies people have, or at least have and find respected in mainstream thinking, is wider there than here in some ways?"

He considers. "That does seem to be part of it, yes. And doubly so for clerics, even at home there's an understanding that we're not going to be following the same rules as everyone else."

"And especially for gods, who don't follow rules so much as set them?"

"Yes, exactly. It barely makes sense to try to think of a god as the type of being you could enforce rules on."

"And you're all having a hard time adjusting to our more egalitarian setup, and the expectations that come with that, and the backlash that comes when people resist being seen and handled in the mode of mortals relative to gods."

"I suppose? There are a lot of things going on that don't make sense to me, I don't know if that explains any of them. It might."

"I could easily be wrong. What things aren't making sense, I'd like to try to help."

"It's mostly... everyone is so suspicious... and that makes sense, at least somewhat, we're new and everything is strange and frightening, but it seems like nothing we do to help helps. Half the time it just makes it worse."

"What things have you been trying that were wholly or partially intended to allay all that suspicion you're noticing?"

"I'm not sure there's anything we've done that hasn't been. Bringing Raafi here, as the most recent example."

"Can you be more specific about how exactly the things you're trying are supposed to help?"

"-I really feel like I've explained that in particular already, was something unclear?"

"Well, if you want to stick to that example, whose suspicions was Raafi's arrival supposed to allay, and what made it seem likely that he'd be able to help there? Or any other examples of things you've been doing - who are you aiming at, and how?"

"We're trying to take care of what needs to be done. It wasn't about making anyone less suspicious exactly, though I don't see how not trying to do things how he wanted would have been any better that way."

"How - who wanted?"

"Luiz. I only asked Raafi to come because he wanted to have the GCP handle the daeva instead of us."

"Hmm. If I were talking to Luiz, admittedly with the benefit of knowing him pretty well and him already seeing me as on his team, I might have said something like... 'The bad news is, we have no leverage against Fharlanghn at all. Our only point of contact is Raafi and we know already that he doesn't have a lot of patience for people who don't see things his way. It might still be possible to buy time, but here's how you'll have to phrase things to get through this guy's head.' And then I'd coach him on how not to provoke Raafi, and have a draft of what he could say about what he wanted which would be more likely to go over well, instead of asking that he improvise, but I don't know what that draft would contain. If you skip that, I'm worried Luiz saw it as you being frustrated with him because he isn't giving over military intelligence for the asking - that's one of those really big asks I mentioned - and handing him to someone he was never going to be able to make progress with, almost like a setup. I can tell him for you if you like that you meant to be helpful."

"I'd appreciate that. It blindsided me a little, too, how badly that went - you really just don't speak ill of a cleric's god in front of them, not unless you are trying to provoke them. Even we've been running afoul of that a little, but this was - Raafi's going to feel like I set him up, I'm sure, that he went out on a limb for us and that happened."

"I think for people who aren't used to the custom it's really hard to talk about how to go forward at all without speaking ill of Fharlanghn at all. People usually want to feel that there's agreement on what parts of a situation are problems before they try to work together on solutions, I think? Without that they expect they can't come to agreement on what tradeoffs are right to make. It's an old saying that a good compromise leaves everyone angry, but you do want to minimize it."

He nods. "I think... this doesn't generalize, necessarily, but I think it's probably safe to talk about what he did, and how that's not okay. It does seem obvious that Raafi agrees that far. Just don't treat it like that's all there is to him."