"It is - drawing on the same underlying features of the world as arcane magic in the material plane but most of how you approach it is different. And it's slower. There was a balance of power agreement across all of the Outer Planes, and it's better for us for it to be slow, even though it can be frustrating. The thing to keep in mind is that you have eternity, it's okay if it takes a couple hundred years to learn the magic you knew in the Material Plane."

It doesn't seem okay at all for doing anything to take hundreds of years, actually, but - he can see her point. It does sound absorbing, and better than dwelling on things he wants and can't ever have even here, like 'Seerow being alive'.

He tries to notice whether or not he actually wants to start learning magic. He's noticed a few times now that he can see it, here, probably he could figure out how to play around with that even if Caroline doesn't know... 

Not really. It seems good in the abstract, but not appealing in a right-now way. 

"I seem to just want to sleep," he says, irritated. "I assume I do not even need to sleep, technically, since I am dead." 

"You do not need to sleep or eat, technically, but many people like to. I think that if you want to sleep that is information about what will help you with trauma recovery and what will help you is sleep." She offers her wing.

He snuggles up under her wing, with less hesitation this time. Maybe if he sleeps enough then eventually he'll wake up to a world with something different in it. 

The world looks pretty much the same in the morning.

Mhalir considers whether he wants to try learning magic, or fly around, or learn birdsongs, or go ask questions about Alloran's search engine. It's not that none of those sounds good but they do sound very hard, like there's a wall in the way, and maybe actually what he wants to do is shuffle around and hide from the light under Caroline's wing and sleep MORE, since apparently no one is going to stop him from doing that and it's not like he needs to eat or drink. 

No one is going to stop him from doing that at all!

In that case Mhalir is going to do SO MUCH sleeping. Nothing hurts when he's asleep, or in the half-conscious moments between sleep and waking - though sometimes he has nightmares, but that's different - and on some level he's being stubborn about it, daring the universe to do something to him for his obtuse refusal to do anything or make any plans or be clever or careful at all, because surely there's nowhere in the world where he can be safe while refusing to try to be. 

Eventually, it must be multiple days later, he wakes up with the sun and considers immediately going back to sleep and concludes that he isn't, actually, tired enough to do that. 

He checks if Caroline is awake before starting to sing. 

She is! She's moving motes of magic in the air and will sing with him.

He sings and watches the magic, expecting the whole time to be suddenly tired again, but eventually concludes that no today seems to be an awake day. 

"Maybe I want to fly over and visit the place where the lawyers have Alloran's search engine," he muses. "How far is it?" 

"It's about a mile. I could go with you. You'll want to take breaks along the way."

"All right. I would appreciate if you came with me." 

He glances back to check if she's ready, and then jumps from the nest again and beats his wings, trying to gauge if he feels stronger this time. 

He does! Which is a little odd, since he's done nothing but sleep, but maybe Nirvana works like that. 

They only need to take a couple of breaks to reach the place. It's a stunningly pretty wood building built among towering thousand-foot trees; there are hundreds of animals gathered there, more than he's seen in one place anywhere in Nirvana.

Mhalir wonders how long he would have to practice to be able to fly as high as the tops of those trees. 

He doesn't try now, though; he flutters down and lands and tries to see what the people are gathered for, which is hard because most of the other animals are less tiny than him. 

There's lawyer training! There's a separate lawyer training for people who are his height right now; when he lands, he gets directed towards it.

Interesting. He watches, curious what the lawyer training here involves. 

They explain the process for court cases. People who die get a trial, though they can waive it; trials and trial preparation happen in magic time dilation so the sheer numbers are manageable at all; even with that, there are substantial delays when there's a sudden surge in deaths, as there is now. Nirvana sends people to every trial. It takes years of training to be competent to argue a case, but you can help with research right away, and helping with research is the best way to learn what you'll need to competently argue a case. Running trials can be very demoralizing; by definition most of the time you will lose, since the majority of people are not Neutral Good. You'll see lots of people condemned to Hell or Abaddon or the Abyss, and separated from families and things that would help them heal. It's very frustrating. But it's still important that everyone, even if they look like an open-and-shut case for Hell, has someone in the room who believes they deserve to be okay forever and is going to do whatever they can.

And sometimes you win. They go through some examples of some cases where Nirvana rules-lawyered particularly cleverly, shared now with permission of the subjects, mostly from hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And they're winning more often now that they have a reference tool called a search engine; up to about 15% from 10%, and they're not even done feeding the search engine all the transcripts or figuring out how best to leverage it.

And they explain that you form ongoing relationships with Pharasma's judges, over time, and while it might be tempting to be misleading or to be rude or to refuse to concede a point, that makes the judge respect you less and listen to you less; earning a reputation for being right and being worth listening to is more important than dragging your heels on any given case, what with that not being a winning strategy anyway. 

Trial work is not recommended when you are new. It takes a lot of healing to get to a place where watching people be condemned to evil afterlives all the time because you didn't know how to convince anyone otherwise isn't really really bad for you. It is reasonable for that to take a lot; it is awful. It is traumatizing. It is something everyone should hope to eventually be in a positiont o do at least once, because it's an important part of understanding the world, but for many people that takes thousands of years and that's fine. Nonetheless they're grateful for the interest and will train anyone who wants to try to learn.

The explanation leaves Mhalir with a lot to think about; he spends the first few minutes once the lecture is done just doing that, standing by one of the thousand-foot trees and trying to fit his mind around the worldview that seems to be universally agreed-on here. That everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what they've done, deserves to be okay forever.

'Deserves' is a concept that hasn't previously fit well with the rest of how Mhalir thinks, so often it seems to be trying to slice up the word along a purely subjective angle that reality doesn't care about and that's mostly based on the viewpoint of whoever's making the claim, right now, about what's fair and right and ought to happen, and so you get Yeerks who think that their children deserve to have eyes and hands, and Andalites who think that all Yeerks deserve to be dead or at best trapped in pools forever, and there's no resolving that, because it's not a fact you can prove by logic or by measuring objects in reality. 

- but there's something almost objective about Nirvana's concept of it, there's an elegant symmetry to it - the sense that they do mean something that he understands. And they're not like Iomedae, but they are, in a sense, ruthlessly trying to do whatever it takes to win, in this one specific game, and it's a long game and so the best strategy is a patient one... 

He tries that on for a while. 

- He's not going to argue with their claim that he isn't ready for trial work, Mhalir decides eventually. He isn't, and that doesn't just mean it would hurt him to try, it means he would be more likely to lose. 

He does, however, eventually go looking for the instructor who was explaining the search engine, to tell them that he's also knowledgeable about search engines and would like to help them figure out how to use it effectively. 

The instructor is happy to show it to him and explain what they're doing so they can help! The interface they're using looks like a set of matched rings for correspondence over a distance; you can speak words into it and then it replies with a list of potentially relevant court cases. 

Oh, interesting! He had been wondering how they were implementing it, and fortunately it looks like magic lets them skip over a lot of the really annoying interfaces of early-stage computers.

He explains that humans on Earth tend to use search engines with a visual interface, because it's easier to process a lot of information that way, and particularly while they're still figuring out keyword categorization, the search engine is likely to often misfire because it doesn't quite understand the query. He's curious how they're indexing the records, too, whether it's all manual coding by people or whether they're feeding transcripts to software which finds patterns and organizes them, either way he has ideas for how to improve it. Ideally they would have users able to add metadata to files when they're incidentally pulling them up, so that over time the system gets better and better categorization just by being used, if that makes sense? 

That sounds really useful! Right now it is all read into one of the rings by people, and they're only about 5% of the way through all their files but they prioritized the cases likeliest to be relevant so they think they're getting around half the benefit already. Their understanding is that the software can do some finding patterns, but it'd be really valuable if lawyers could mark cases as unusually useful for one another. A visual interface would be great but no one has yet figured out how to build it. 

Reading it into the rings sounds very slow and he's impressed they've made it through 5% of the backlog already! Probably he should talk to whoever knows how the magic they're using works. They might want to use something like a crystal ball and adapt the scrying spell to scry 'objects' that are in the search engine rather than physical space. 

Talking about this is interesting and fun but Mhalir is also finding that he's very tired again. Can he come back tomorrow? 

Of course! Or whenever is convenient for him.

He thanks them for their time and looks around for Caroline. 

She is perched on a tree up above and can accompany him home.