"I have no idea. And--well, they often get cults built up around them, so 'gods' isn't a bad word, but I don't like to be the first to use it, partly because it has implications of moral valence that I really don't believe apply and partly because announcing myself as a demigoddess sounds so self-aggrandizing." 

"That's fair." Lancir pauses for a bit, like he's regaining his track of thought. "I, er, did want to ask. I can't help noticing that you read as something very nonhuman to my mage-senses. Savil tells me that Mindspeech works and is how you were first able to communicate, but I have another Mind-Gift that comes with Sight. Would it be all right if I take a look? I'm rather curious how, well, differently-shaped your minds are from ordinary human ones." 

"...I can't say I'm not also curious. Sure." 

"If you still want to look at me after Lucy, then alright." 

"All right. Lucy first. I don't know if you'll feel anything – if you do, it should be subtle, all I'm doing is looking." Lancir leans forward in his chair, and his eyes go out of focus. 

Lucy's mind is not a house, as he would categorize such things. 

Lucy's mind is a forest, a single clonal colony of trees, stripped of soil, the interconnected root system laid bare even as the leaves tremble in the nonexistent breeze. Despite the lack of soil, there are other traces of not-tree things--here a nest constructed of twigs and feather down, there a hole bored in a tree-trunk, over there a pattern of scarring on the trunk where a deer might have scraped its antlers. 

Many of the trunks have scars where branches have broken off. The scars look an awful lot like eyes. 

Lancir lurches back in his chair. 

His first instinct is that there's no way he's looking at a mind at all, but...no, it is, the pattern is there...it's not a pattern he can interpret at all, but nonetheless. 

He Looks for a little while longer, and then releases it, and takes a deep breath, mostly recovering his composure. "I...see," he says, a little shaky. "Your mind does resemble what I might expect from a being who is half...not god, but, some type of powerful otherworldly being in any case." He tries his best to offer a description. It's hard to convey in words, sometimes. 

"Oh! I think I recognize that--it's a kind of tree we have in my world, called an aspen or a trembling aspen--for the way the leaves behave. That's what I'm guessing off of, anyway." 

"...How odd. It's not a tree I recognized." Lancir frowns for a bit and then turns to Wilbur. "Were you still interested?" 

"Why not." 

Then Lancir will have a look. He does it with more trepidation, this time. 

Wilbur's mind is a tower of earth and other materials, interwebbed with a complex system of tunnels and shafts and chambers. 

It's...not really less alien, but it is less overwhelming, somehow, maybe just because he's more used to it. Again, he does his best to repeat the description to Wilbur, then sits back in his chair and re-settles himself. 

"All right. Coming to the point. The report that my Companion, Taver, got via Savil's Companion wasn't detailed, and earlier didn't seem like the time to press, but - you have resurrection magic from your world and you think that it'll work here and that you can resurrect Herald-Trainee Tylendel Frelennye and have, er, obtained remains in order to do so. Is that right?"   

"Yes, that's right." 

(She does not say it challengingly. There is no point in picking a fight until and unless he makes it necessary.)

Something resembling a sigh. "And you're sure that this will work? How does it work, may I ask?" 

"I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. I've done a little other magic here, to test, and that works. What I do is I render the remains, through a complicated alchemical process, into brightly-colored dust, and then say an incantation, and the dust turns into an alive person. Also I can cheat some because the incantation invokes Yog-Sothoth, and it's Yog-Sothoth who's our father. There's no personal connection, on account of our never having existed on the same plane, but the magical connection is extremely useful."

Nod. Silence. 

"I hate to ask," Lancir says finally, "but...does this ritual potentially give Yog-Sothoth any other kind of access to our plane? And, er, is Yog-Sothoth the sort of entity that, if I knew all the facts, I would want to have access to our plane?" 

"To the best of my knowledge, which is much better than the vast majority of other people's, Yog-Sothoth does not give a shit about this, my original, or any other conventionally material plane. Yog-Sothoth is a being with an intelligence that is completely, fundamentally alien from humanity's. If Yog-Sothoth has ever taken any action with regards to humanity whatsoever I've never heard of it, and I've heard lots of accusatory rumors that definitely aren't even true. Now, if it was C'thulhu, that might be another matter, but I am extremely confident that nothing I'm liable to do is going to give C'thulhu any form of access to this plane." 

Lancir looks...slightly reassured. Maybe. Sort of. "What is C'thulhu?" 

"C'thulhu is...another being who could be called a 'god' insofar as he has worshippers and magical power--in fact, there are a lot more C'thulhu cultists than Yog-Sothoth ones--but he's a lot closer to our reality than Yog-Sothoth is, and is capable of manifesting physically without bringing forth some sort of cataclysm. Not...immediately, at least. I'm not sure what C'thulhu wants, but it clearly does give a shit about humanity in some way and I'm not entirely comfortable with that. Anyway, C'thulhu is bound to a sunken city called R'lyeh, which rises from the sea when 'the stars are right,' which refers to some astronomical arrangement but I'm not sure what, I know a lot less about C'thulhu than I do about Yog-Sothoth. He can be unbound if people reach the island while it's above water, but so far every time that's happened someone's managed to put him back before anything too destructive could happen. If I wanted to give C'thulhu access to this plane, which I don't, I'd have to wait for R'lyeh to rise again, find it, unbind C'thulhu, and then bring him here. Which, in addition to being very hard to do by accident, I don't actually at this time know how to go back and forth."

Nod. "Interesting. And Yog-Sothoth – do you know why it's possible to call on Their, or Its, power, to do things like...conceive people like you and your brother, or raise the dead? If Yog-Sothoth doesn't even care about any material plane, why is it possible to summon even a tiny fraction of Its power?" 

"I think it might be a little bit like mosquitos drinking people's blood, except that Yog-Sothoth is a lot more bigger than people than people are than mosquitos, and also drawing magic from different entities doesn't transmit diseases between them." 

"What an analogy." He doesn't seem to know whether to be impressed or nauseated. "If the ritual were to go wrong in some way. How could that look? For example, is it theoretically possible that instead of the resurrection, you would get, er, some poor nearby woman pregnant with a child like yourself? Or any other possible misfires." 

Snort. "No. The two rituals bear no similarity, at least not enough to possibly be bridged by accident and misstep. If the ritual were to go wrong somehow...it shouldn't happen, it's never happened to me, because, as I said, I can cheat, but it has been known to happen to more ordinary practitioners...he...might crave blood for a while. Uh. Animal blood is fine. But it does make people look more foodlike. I've been told it's unsettling to experience. Uh, if it went really really badly wrong, which, again, it shouldn't, but if it did, I might get...something...not entirely human--I don't mean like I'm not entirely human, I mean like, um, if you told a god to make a human and they had no idea what they were doing and also didn't realize humans were supposed to be people. But that's not going to happen! I never once messed up that badly, even when I was first learning. My teacher didn't either, it's actually kind of hard to mess up that badly by accident. Most of the ways you can possibly mess up either get you the blood thing or just an inert lump of dust that doesn't do anything." 

Lancir looks deeply unnerved. It's a while before he licks his lips and speaks again. "What would you do. If it went badly wrong enough to give you a result that wasn't human. And...would it be him?"