"It might be, on another plane. One of the benefits of living in the Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia is that every person will be helpful to strangers, so expressing your needs is more good than trying not to waste their time."

And now that they've covered all the low-hanging fruit on her stretching exercises, Nue wants to move on to meditation, trancing, and sneaking.

"Because I don't want you to commit too heavily to any one discipline until you can make a more informed choice, I'll show you the basic principles of all three disciplines. Do you have a preference for which we start with?"

"No, any one is fine!"

Nue will start her with meditation, as this skill is good training for higher levels of shezodza. First, she tells Lintalai to stay in her seated position. Then, she tells her to think about the concepts of law and good as she understands them and as they relate to her stretching- without doing any stretching.

"Meditation is about reshaping our minds, to align them better with Arcadia. In someone with a soul, the worry would be that their soul might align elsewhere while their body aligned with Arcadia. That isn't likely to be an issue with you, but I'd like to start on firm ground."

"Is learning to do magic itself lawful or good if I intend to do lawful and good things with it?"

"Typically, on a Prime world, as long as your body or soul were mostly aimed at law and good, your alignment would be lawful good. Arcadia has a different standard- your body and soul must both be aligned with lawful good for magic to work normally. So in your case, I'm not sure. In people with souls, most alignment that we associate with thinking, including intent, happens in the soul. Alignment that has to do with behaving happens in the body. Feeling is usually considered to belong to both. You don't have a soul, so it's possible that only your body will be aligned, in all of those cases."

"So - the process of learning is a behavior but my intentions aren't."

"I believe so, yes. It could also be that your intentions only impact your alignment when your behaviors are lawful good, or something similarly odd. Your case is unusual; no petitioners arrive on Arcadia without souls, and very few visitors without a soul would be allowed to roam freely."

"Are there lots of people without souls?"

"There aren't many, no."

She sounds sad.

"Very occasionally, people will promise their souls to someone or something else. Sometimes people will remove their own souls in an attempt to achieve immortality, but this rarely works out as intended- without a soul, it's hardly the same person, if it's a person at all and not a corpse. The lucky ones end up in one of the Outer Planes, of course."

"What happens to a soul that gets promised to someone else?"

"...it depends on who. I'm not an expert on this. My understanding is that lawful evil khamotzo buy souls for their personal use, and that lawful good khamotzo buy them back in order to free them. Neutral good and chaotic good khamotzo sometimes do the same, although they are just as or more likely to steal them."

"...what are souls personally useful for? Do they let people do more magic?"

"They use them to produce more magic, yes, but they also treat them poorly. In the people of our world, souls separated from bodies can still be made to experience things- lawful evil khamotzo may torture their captives, for example."

"- so then there's two of the person?"

"Oh.

No.

Souls are the part of a person that comes to the Outer Planes. Unless something reanimates the body, the soul will be the only version of the person left."

"So they're - selling themselves into slavery for their kids?"

"-not always for their kids, no. It can be any number of reasons. Rarely for the common good, but sometimes for their family, yes. Again, I may not be- I only know of the most high-profile cases, not of every individual sale. It's widely seen as a failure of the good planes, that we can't prevent the soul trade in its entirety."

Lintalai nods very seriously. "Why can't people usually be bodies without souls like me?"

"Until I met you, i would have said it was impossible- even here...well, you see, I used to be a soul and a body, on the Prime. Then I died, and I was just a soul, on Arcadia- and then I was given a new body, made from my soul.  The Outer Planes can do that, create bodies for a soul that aren't matter, but only belief. You- I don't know how your body is producing beliefs. It's not how people here normally work- or at least, how I understand us to work. I'm just a war-gymnastics teacher," she adds wryly.

"On Amenta people use their brains for that but I'm a plant so I don't know if I work the same way."

"I don't think I know what...brains...are, exactly. This is probably a place where you should talk to someone with more relevant expertise, later."

In which case, Nue will direct Lintalai's attention back to meditation. For now, they'll proceed as though Lintalai's brain is fulfilling the functions of a local soul, and that her brain needs to be kept from drifting too aimlessly while her body aligns with Arcadia. To that end, she will sit in place, with her body very loosely aligning with good or law- by taking on an aesthetically-pleasing pose and holding still- while she mentally focuses (using her brain?) on good and law as concepts, to the best of her understanding.

Lintalai meditates on the rule of law and universal goodwill.

After about five minutes of that, Nue interrupts, speaking softly.

"Well done. Now, do you think you could try to hold those same concepts in your mind while stretching? I'd like to have you try that for a few minutes and tell me what difficulties or challenges you face in doing that."

"Okay." Lintalai stretches. "- the stretching is sort of distracting from the concentrating," she reports.

"Alright. Have you ever found that there were physical activities that were repetitive enough that you could think about concepts like that without this much difficulty? Some people find dancing or walking very useful ways to practice their meditation skills, but- you might have other ideas."