"Aaaaaaaugh," says Kytar, and then, "I'm going for a walk, and then I will come back and figure out how to put this better." And he gets up and heads out of the house to circle the blighted lemon stumps. Finds a non-lemon tree to sit under grouchily.

Daron looks out at him through the window. "Maybe he's prepping druid spells," he says.

"Maybe. I'm not sure if we should go harder on alignment with the plan or just on - conversation patience, like he said."

"I guess we can wait and see what he has to say when he's, uh, chilled out. Drat, he didn't finish writing his arcane spells down..."

"We should definitely get those before he runs off to be a druid even if that's what he wants to do."

"I don't think he'll give us a hard time about it, he hasn't even gone out of sight."

"Do you get what he meant, that what Nirvana wants with people is the wrong question -"

"Hm. Well, I guess it could just keep them as pets? And then the question would be are they nice to their pets, I suppose?"

Nod. "And are they - committed to continuing to be the kinds of gods who keep pets, will they at some point be like 'that's all the pets we wanted' or 'wow the pets aren't as much fun as they used to be' -"

"Never having had a pet I couldn't say how common that is in humans, let alone gods."

"Lots of people have a pet and are fairly attached but then they get a new apartment with different rules, or it grows too big, or they're low on money, so they kill it. Which is a fine thing to do with pets, but if I were the pet I would be pretty concerned."

"Yeah. Oh, I guess it could be like Abadar's library. A people library."

" - yeah. That'd be - I'd feel pretty safe about that, I think, Abadar's not the kind of thing that'll stop having His library. And He'd fight someone about it, if they tried to steal it. - I think. I acknowledge several deficiencies in my theological education but secondary worship of Abadar's permitted, I've read some things about Him."

"Yeah. Should we be aiming at a people-librarian god? I mean, provisionally, until we know what Kytar's getting at."

"Maybe. A god who is a collector of souls and wants to have all of them in Their collection and wants them - doing the sort of things they did in life, maybe, not the kind of collection where they're on a wall with a pin through them. Ideally."

"Sounds good to me."

"We're really far away from being able to pull it off but it's maybe suggestive about what kinds of expertise we'll want next and stuff."

"Yeah, and what kind of philosophical range to aim for."

Kytar comes back after an hour under the tree.

"Is Nirvana like a people library?" Daron asks him promptly. "Like Abadar's but for souls."

"...I... guess you could think of it that way," says Kytar.

"Do the people get to move around and talk to each other and study magic and stuff?"

"Yes," says Kytar. "I think so, anyway."

"So it's at least a route worth exploring. Does Nirvana want them - as they come, or are they supposed to get improved somehow first -"

"I think they conceptualize it as 'healing' but I don't know what that's like in practice."

"Ah huh. Put that on the list," she says to Daron. "Common knowledge in Nirvana, if we can get it, how does Nirvana want them 'healed', how much of them is left after it."

"I worry this won't work for the same reason I couldn't make him a half-elf," Daron says, but he does write it down.

"Maelstrom and Elysium also get good press some places," says Kytar. "They have alignment filters but, again, this is also currently true of Hell, and I don't think they have projects of deliberately shaping people any which way, though it does happen as an environmental consequence."

"I was taught that in the Maelstrom you don't have a physical form at all, just - senses - and the input to those senses is totally incoherent so the part of your brain that forms expectations about the future breaks and eventually you morph into a chaos beast. And that in Elysium the environment just stretches on forever and it's pretty and holds together a little bit better than the Maelstrom but it's not human-scale, you can't do anything with it, and the gods mostly don't want you or not for long because chaotic gods just do things on whims."

"There's people in the Maelstrom with physical forms but they do eventually tend to turn into chaos beasts. Elysium doesn't have much in the way of gods recruiting people for stuff but that just means they can do their own thing. Heaven does recruit people, though I don't know if it drafts them."