Billions of people?!?

"You may wish to pray to Heru-wer or Amaunator. Heru-wer is concerned with vengeance, rulership, and kingdoms. Amaunator values bureaucracy, contracts, and rulership. Both are also gods of the sun, but this seems less relevant to your interests."

"I don't think vengeance really comes into play but bureaucracy contracts and rulership sounds good! Can I find them or one of their priests around?"

"I represent Heru-wer as well as Neselthia, although to a lesser extent. To find a true priest of his, you would need to go to his district, depending on your needs. Do you wish to apply to him for counsel?"

"Maybe? Is he good at that? If he does bureaucracy and as many people in Arcadia start governments as I've heard maybe he has some paperwork I can fill out to design it more easily and legibly or something."

"Heru-wer counsels many of the bureaucrats in Heliopolis, but he does not counsel all of the leaders in Buxenus. As for paperwork, yes, we do keep paperwork in the temple for the daily concerns of a populace, but not for forming a government, I believe- certainly not one for billions of people, as this has never come up. I would recommend communicating to a priest of his if you want advice relevant to your case, but if you only want paperwork that may be useful in general, he has already provided that to us. We can share it with you."

"Yes please, I'm curious."

"One moment. I will need to retrieve it."

She takes her right hand and moves it over Lintalai's head in a circular motion, closes her eyes, murmurs something in a language Lintalai's pocket everything cannot translate, and disappears up the stairs.

"Sorry for not warning you enough. Priests are weird. That's why I want to be a wizard."

"Why are they so weird?"

"It's like, instead of aligning themselves with concepts like law or good, they align themselves with really small things, like...bureaucracy, or mothers having enough money. I guess bureaucracy is bigger, but...all gods are very small like that, and priests have to...think the same way, right, or else they wouldn't be priests of that god, they have to care about enough of the same things. Small thoughts make people weird."

"I don't think I understand very well what aligning yourself with a thing really is."

"So, you know how you have thoughts that you can't really control, they just sort of happen to you? But you also have thoughts that you want to have, that you think you should have. Aligning yourself with a god or a plane is wanting your thoughts to be more like those kinds of thoughts, and not just the thoughts you have if you're not trying."

"Huh. Why are gods narrow people so their priests have to be?"

"I guess gods aren't really narrow, but they care a lot about their things and they're not always things that relate. I don't think the sun has much to do with bureaucracy, but Heru-wer does. And priests usually pick one of their god's things, since they're so different, and usually only narrow people would focus their whole life on one thing. Also I think they like acting mysterious, which makes them weird."

"I guess that makes sense. I admit I'm not sure what the sun has to do with bureaucracy."

"I don't know! It seems really silly to care about the sun and bureaucracy the same amount."

"I mean, I need sunshine because I'm a plant, but that's probably not why he cares about it."

"How are you a plant, anyway? I don't know a lot of plants that are people, and the ones I read about look like plants. You don't look like one. Do you have roots, or is it all like needing sunshine?"

"I don't have roots but my cells look like plant cells under a microscope and I need sunshine and can't eat a lot of foods and do drink a lot of water."

'Cells' and 'microscope' fail to translate.

"-huh. What's a 'microscope'?"

"Glass lenses that let you see very tiny things clearly." She gets a picture of one on her everything.

Daernir examines the picture in fascination.

And the priestess shortly thereafter returns with 'paperwork'. Most of it appears to be on parchment, rather than anything Amentans would use.

"Shall we sit down and examine it?"

"Yes please!" She holds her pocket everything above it to get a translated image.

Over the next hour, they can examine all of what the temple stores. Most of the material concerns laws governing the average citizen's day-to-day concerns: how the community organizes education, how to embark on infrastructure projects, how best to punish murderers and thieves, how to distribute land...very little of it concerns how jobs are assigned, how to control population, or how to enforce pollution violations.