"Let's go look at them a bit."

Then they can head up to his room. 

Aala isn't there, and has left a note on Ma'ar's bed saying that she's going out to do things with her friends tonight and won't be back until late. 

Ma'ar reads the note out loud to Azabel, and smiles. "Look at her! She's popular. I'm so proud of her." 

"She's doing really well!"

"She is!" 

Ma'ar sits down on his bed, feet tucked under him, and unpacks the books from the bookbag, spreading them out across his bed. 

Aza grabs one pretty much at random and sets to.

It's a book describing all the various rites and rituals for seasonal festivals, marriages, births, deaths, coming-of-age ceremonies, etc etc, as well as for other rarer and higher-stakes occasions. For most of the ordinary day-to-day ones, invoking the Goddess's presence or blessing or whatnot is purely a formality; for some rites, though, like the ones associated with trials for serious crimes - for which the punishment, if convicted, would be formal  banishment from the Kaled'a'in people - the shaman is required to actually summon and speak with a spirit avatar. 

What do the spirit avatars say about potential banishments?

They...give advice, it sounds like? Well, sometimes; in many cases they'll just say that the Goddess trusts Her people to carry out Her will. And when they do give advice it's often cryptic, but it's always taken very seriously. There are a couple of historical cases given. For example, once a man was pardoned after raping his wife's sister while very drunk (he claimed afterward that they looked very alike and he was confused), partly on the spirit avatar saying that 'the fruits of forgiveness will feed our grandchildren'; a couple of years later, the pardoned man was the only able-bodied man in his village not taken ill by a plague, and his work with their livestock and crops was the only thing that saved the rest of the people from starvation. 

Aza presumes that if she turns the page it won't explain why the goddess didn't just not have there be a plague but hope springs eternal.

It does not! At least not for this particular case study. 

The book does have a few footnotes with advice for shamans in training, though, and this includes some mentions of the Goddess's limitations as understood by their people's lore. She is very powerful, obviously, compared to any human, even a Gifted human - but not infinitely so, She still has limited resources. It may sometimes feel inexplicable and dispiriting, the author of the book writes, for a young shaman faced with the Goddess's failure to help in some situation that seems very important. But they need to trust that She is the one who sees the world world at a glance, and that She is allocating her strength as well as She possibly can. 

Do they have any reason to believe that though.

The book does not seem to answer the question of whether they have any reason to believe it. It's taken for granted. 

"Anything useful?" Ma'ar asks her eventually. 

"The Star-Eyed is basically their eccentric neighbor who helps them out sometimes. She says things that don't make much sense that they read into with an admittedly decent track record - I'm not sure exactly how you get that result, it probably isn't 'speaking a human language like a normal person' but if She were just being bad at speaking a human language like a normal person I bet they'd misunderstand her more... those incidents might not make it into the book. Though I didn't notice obvious gaps in the jurisprudence timeline so maybe She has a way of making herself understood anyway. - could be Foresight, I guess, you could try Foresight on - combinations of sounds? Or meanings, if they're usually Mindspeaking, it hasn't specified yet. And see which combinations of sounds or meanings get the right decisions made, which would let you skip past accidentally claiming the sky was plaid but you'd stop looking for rephrases around when you had something cryptic and sufficiently relevant that people derived what you wanted them to."

Ma'ar nods along; he giggles slightly at 'claiming the sky was plaid'.

"I think we need to learn more about Foresight, but that does sound like - about the right level of weird and alien, or something? For how different you'd expect a god to be from people."

He glances down at his own book. "This one is about the Kaled'a'in history as a people. I - skipped through a lot of it, it's kind of repetitive, it's mostly genealogies of when various clans split off or when groups of them moved to a new part of the world. The footnotes are interesting, though. Since they talk about the Goddess sending visions to shamans, or having a spirit avatar give them advice. It's also pretty cryptic but I think if I'd been them I could've guessed if it were a yes or a no, for a given move? And it generally hasn't turned out badly for them. Although I don't know if that's really Her work, or - if it could've been better in some other version where they just made their own decisions about it..." 

"Yeah. And - I think she's more talkative than most gods? I'm not religious but Ranara tries on religions occasionally and I think the Star-Eyed is the one with the most spirit-avatar-type behavior. If this is as talkative as they get it's hard to - negotiate, if all you can do is follow the advice or not follow it and following it works out fine..."

"It really makes it feel like she doesn't actually want to have a back and forth conversation? Then again, I guess we don't know how hard they tried, it - doesn't seem like they think that's a reasonable thing to ask for here." 

"Well, if my guess about how She talks is right that would make it really hard! Foresight can tell you to say cryptic things and not to say the sky is plaid but I don't see how it would help you understand at all. From that perspective it's sort of impressive she's aware people prefer having enough to eat and not being plague-ridden."

Grimace. "That makes it sound like it'd be so frustrating to - be a god who did care and want to help people, but you wouldn't even be able to figure out what they needed, you don't speak the same– not even language, it'd be all different concepts too... Not that we can exactly tell if She does want to help, or not." 

"Yeah. I mean, most of the things She does seem like they could be helpful, She isn't - acting randomly with respect to helpfulness - but it makes it really tricky to figure out if She's like, doing it because She likes and respects and appreciates people, or if it's incidental to something, or if they're farm animals to Her."

"Do you think Lionwind or Summerhawk are - actually curious, which of those it is? It...sort of doesn't seem like it." 

"Honestly the way Lionwind was talking about it was at times SO weird I made use of my standing permission to look at his gears. - I didn't see anything very out of the ordinary though, I guess it's just how he thinks about it. I think maybe they don't care? Which would be one thing if they were going - okay, there's all kinds of reasons the Star-Eyed could be doing us favors, but they're still favors, it'll tend to go well if we take them, we may as well do that like we may as well put out rain barrels even though the rain is not certified benevolent. But it seems different if they're having all these feelings about her as a person - if she's even a person, which I'm getting less confident of! - based on those favors while having no particular reason to think the regard is mutual."

"Do you figure Lionwind actually does have a lot of feelings about it? I couldn't tell whether or not the shaman actually did, in a feelings about another person way -  I guess maybe you only become a shaman if you have some feeling about it though." 

"They aren't very - active obtrusive feelings but I think they are feelings."

"Hmm."

After a long pause. "People's feelings are really confusing sometimes. Is it confusing for you too?"