"And the clerics are... afterlife immigration officers in addition to magicians, or is that separate?"

He stops and thinks about that. "They preach the doctrines of their gods, which affect the behavior of people, which affects their afterlife. But they generally do not have the ability to determine where anyone ends up; Pharasma the judge decides that.

The gods... I think that calling them heads of states is half right. They have alliances and wars, they have servants and obligations. But many kings have little power beyond that provided by the obedience of their subjects, only live one day at a time, can only guess at the future, and only have two eyes in their heads. The kingdom makes the king, but the gods are themselves are fonts of power, minds the size of states."

The last line circles his mind, after he says it.

"So Pharasma is - afterlife immigration flow control of some kind, sending people to afterlives - based on their behavior? Not on the afterlife's capacity, or what skills are in demand there, or anything like that? - and gods are highly magical heads of state, with the states being located in these afterlives?" Ekachta says.

"That's roughly it," he says with 0 ranks in Knowledge (Religion). "And you have... nothing like this? How does your society choose what behavior to encourage, and what to condemn? Who to emulate and who to shun?"

If they're good at reading people, they can tell she finds this much less important than he does. But she's still watching the greens and the blues carefully, tracking their interactions with each other and their questions for Felip.

"- I'm not sure what relationship those things have to each other! Of course if we expected our citizens to move to another country after dying we'd want to make available the information they needed to make themselves - sortable? - into whichever appealed to them, but while they're here in Tapa they need to follow Tapap law which is based on what's good for them and their fellow Tapai."

He considers this. "Perhaps you have managed to match the wisdom of the good gods unaided, and if your lives end so soon, temporal considerations may dominate spiritual ones. The empirical question remains of whether you face Pharasma's judgment, or another's, or no judgment at all, but I fear my magic is not sufficient to settle it, and it does not sound within your power, or you would have settled it long ago." It would be sad if none of these people had souls, but if so they didn't have souls before his arrival either, and it would be cruel to dwell on what they're missing.

He glances at the blues among them. It is too soon to reach towards a deal, he expects; they are still exchanging basic information. But it seems important to keep things even.

"And what Tapap law is most important for us to know, do you think?"

"If our lives end so soon? Did comparative lifespans come up?" asks a green.

Ekachta waves her off to answer Felip's question. "I'd expect for the time being you'll be with people who can warn you if something you want to do would have an effect you might not predict. Of course we have laws against things like murder and theft, but I'd be surprised if that weren't the same everywhere, and the details apply more if you're doing something like running a business or having a child, not just talking to us. Does your translation work on writing? We can get you a copy of the legal code if that'd be useful to you."

"There have been signs we could read," he says after a moment. "The legal code can wait. As for comparative lifespans, I expected my first life to last another fifty years, if lucky, and my afterlife to be measured in centuries."

"After that is there another layer of afterlives?" says a green.

"Fifty years, that's - oh, well, I guess another question is how long your years are," says another one.

"It is... complicated, and we know much less about what comes next. It is challenging enough to have a good showing in one's first life."

He is stumped by the challenge of how to compare their years.

"We mark adulthood at around sixteen, for most purposes."

"A good showing? What does that mean?" asks Ekachta.

"Amentans are adults at four Amentan years and an Amentan year is 1475 days but the days may not match," replies Year Length Green earnestly.

"That suggests one of your years corresponds to about four of ours."

He hesitates a bit. "The afterlives I know have wide gulfs between them; a reward for the virtuous, and a punishment for the vicious. So for us, destination is of grave importance, and the idea that you might be facing judgment unwarned and unprepared was rather worrying."

"- oh, this is the first you've mentioned them being objectively different in quality. Those are... very different political missions than any Amentan country undertakes, let alone any I could imagine springing up that took immigration at the sole discretion of a third party... You're confident the information channels are good enough that this isn't a propaganda campaign of some kind, I take it?" says Ekachta.

"Not all of the gods have human interests at heart, and some delight in tricking and destroying them." he says grimly. "I am confident in the goodly gods and their churches, who oppose the evil gods, and in the Judge, who stands above them and has no reason to lie about her judgments. This morning we were in Cheliax, which many years ago was conquered by servants of Hell, who lied to the populace about judgment and the relative desirability of the afterlives, in an attempt to trick and coerce as many of them into Hell as possible. It was my life's purpose to defeat them, and then restore the country to goodness; we were engaged in the work of restoration when we suddenly arrived here."

One might reasonably wonder what their elaborate LARP costumes had to do with restoration, but--he's not going to notice that inferential gap on his own.

Maybe that's a normal thing to wear, where they're from! "Hell is one of the gods?" asks Ekachta.

"There are widely held to be nine major afterlives, of which Hell is one. It is ruled by a god whose name I will not say, and there are other lesser powers within it who can also have clerics. I personally pursued Heaven, home to Erastil, Iomedae, and Torag, among others, but also respect Sarenrae, Shelyn, and Desna, whose realms are in other pleasant afterlives."

As he says their names, he imagines their symbols, hoping to feel a tug of recognition in his soul.

"Why won't you say it, is there a magical effect?"

"They can see and hear, though their perception is not the same as mortal perception. Their attention can be attracted by their symbols, both name and sigil. I... wish I had studied more, about the gods and the nations and the planes, but I know that the gods vary in which regions they have a presence in, and the cosmic war is balanced perilously. An evil god I know may have ears to hear in this realm, but not yet have heard their name whispered on your world; if so, I would keep it that way."

"....goodness. All right. This sounds very complicated and high stakes and I'm sure we don't understand it all yet, so we'll defer to you on the wisdom of getting all their labels."

The carriage is taking them through a maze of glass towers. Going the other way they pass trucks and vans. On an elevated track among them a train crosses their path.

He's pretty focused on the people in the car with him. Magic can create quite the array of impressive visuals, and he's toured many follies. It will be striking once he realizes that it is mundane--that the trucks and vans are doing the work of porters and mules, not serving as decorations, that the towers are durable and spacious enough to be home and office to a whole town at once, and were built pane by pane by hand and machine, not by magic in a flash.

She is feeling a little nauseated, actually; the movement of the car is subtle but still enough to shake everyone inside, and some of the objects they pass whip by at a dizzying speed. She most expects that the lemonade is sitting poorly, however, and is wondering whether to make a fuss about that.

It's much less jostling than a ship or a horse, if still weird and hard to predict. He's doing fine.

"I am sure there is more we can do to determine whether or not the cosmic war I am familiar with rages here as well, or could, but probably not in this moment in this carriage. I worry that my now-remote concerns may be overbearing your local ones. If heroes had been sent to your world to solve some problem, what would you expect it to be?"

He is not particularly hopeful this question will work--most such threats build in secrecy until they explode--but if they do have a Worldwound, it would be silly to not just ask about it immediately.

The people in the car with them:

- Kash Ekachta, who appears to be taking point on this;
- another blue who hasn't spoken yet;
- three greens who have all piped up with assorted questions;
- one yellow who is deeply involved with some mysterious glowing rectangle;
- up front in the driver's seat beyond a plastic barrier, the purple driver, and beside her a grey;
- in back in a different compartment beyond another plastic barrier, two more greys.

"Well," says Ekachta, "that depends on who you were sent by! Nobody we know about has the ability to do such a thing; if an Amentan were bringing in exactly two magical aliens to help Amenta with something then probably they'd be specialized in one of faster than light travel or terraforming? But it doesn't seem likely than an Amentan did this, because it's not related to any technology we've gotten anywhere near, and we don't have magic, and furthermore it would have been both rude and clumsy to drop you in the prairie dog enclosure without an explanation or warning of any kind."