"I wasn't thinking of signing on, but--if cities, where lots of people live, aren't safe to live because the air makes people sick, then that means something needs fixing, and probably lots of things need fixing, so in order to fix more than just whoever I can personally shine my light on I need to know what the levers of power are to pull on them." 

"I say 'signing on' sort of loosely to refer to, like, letting someone else handle annoying logistics in exchange for letting them capture some of my value, not, like, swearing eternal fealty, to be clear."

"That's fair. It may be that's necessary, I don't know. It never came up in London; there were people who knew to bring things to my attention and people I trusted not to do anything awful if I paid them to handle something for me, but I never had to affiliate with any one faction unless you count the Bazaar itself. Which--is complicated. Anyway, I was mostly trying to--imagine levers, and think about how I might handle them." 

"Levers like?"

"Important people who have dead loved ones."

"Oh, that makes sense. How hard is it for you to do your magic, anyway?"

"Not very. If the corpse is very damaged, I might need to use a word of Correspondence, but just to glow is no more effort than opening or closing your eyes." 

"But you do need the corpse?"

"The soul works too, but I need something of the person." 

"...how do you normally handle souls?"

"Either I temporarily kill myself to find them before they cross with the Boatman, or if their soul was taken pre-mortem and is in a vial I can use that. The latter doesn't work if they're still alive, though."

"The boatman. Wow. It's something of an abstract question whether people in my world even have souls."

"Not all people in my world do. Cats don't, or rattus faber. But humans do, and Rubberies, and Devils--although Devil and Rubbery souls are different in some way it hasn't been worth my while to deeply investigate so far. Souls--at least human souls--are--well--they're sort of..." she drums her fingers. "They're kind of--they let people persist after death, unmolested, but that's not what they're for. What they're for is being part of how Judgments reproduce. Every soul has the potential to ascend to a Judgment." 

"...cats are people? What's a rattus faber? Also by what... framework... are souls assigned a purpose?"

"Rattus faber are rats that are people. I don't know if all cats are people or just some of them, they won't say. Souls are assigned a purpose in the sense that they are created, in a process involving a Judgment, and then implanted in a population, after which their descendants will have them. I'm not saying people continuing to exist isn't more important than the creation of baby Judgments, I'm saying that souls are a thing which was done, on purpose, and baby Judgments are the purpose that they were on." 

"Okay, so we probably don't have them and people here probably don't either."

"Probably, yes. Which makes raising the dead here and in your world much higher priority." 

"How well do you scale? There are probably billions of people in the system. Live ones, with a commensurate number of dead."

"...I will scale better when I have my iterated improved light worked out." 

"And then, what, you co-opt the big star and be a star and shine on everybody?"

"No, I--keep in mind that I don't have it finalized yet, but--the idea, as it currently stands, is that the light shines on plants and the plants produce fruit that does immortality and resurrection, I know it's possible in theory because there are gardens that grow near my father and there's cider made from the apples therefrom that if you drink it, not only does it prevent aging but even if you've died in the past you can go out under Judgment-light on the Surface without going back to being dead."

"Oh, I like that idea! Can you make the trait of the plants breed true the same way having a soul does?"

"--You know, I hadn't thought of that but probably yes!" 

"Happy to help!"

"You are so helpful! At some point we should sit down and go over my long-term goals in general and see if there's anything I've overlooked that's obvious to you in other areas, probably after getting our hands on paper though, actually maybe we should do that before going to investigate books so we can take notes."