"Purity standard," says Lintalai confidently. "I think if you group a bunch of things together only some of which are death-related - it's actually specifically death-of-people-related, not other living things, which can be gross when dead but aren't polluted - anyway I think the group won't make a lot of sense or have a lot of resonance among Amentans."

Nod.

"As long as they don't have prior associations and we can meet Amentan purity standards, we should be able to integrate them nicely, then. What are the standards like?"

Lintalai can look up the international pollution mitigation requirements for her and have her everything translate them!

"-I think we're clean enough without actually undergoing some of these procedures because of the nature of Arcadia. Mostly. Is that likely to be convincing once people understand Arcadia better, or should we plan on everyone here agreeing to the same requirements?"

"I think convincing people of this should be a high priority, but anything Arcadia might not cover should be handled to treaty standards by anyone else who might want to interact with my colony."

Nod. It becomes clear over the course of their conversation that, while Arcadia's water is self-cleaning, people don't actually need water to drink or to stay clean, so plenty of people walking around Arcadia will probably be polluted by Amentan standards.

"Usir isn't really concerned with purification or cleanliness specifically. I think we might have some advice on how to persuade Arcadians that this is a law they need to take seriously, but I can't help with more than that. You'll need to bring in someone who really values purification for its own sake for a helpful perspective there. We might be able to help with Amentan dead, if anyone dies here before we can find a widespread solution to aging. Using daannaes for that would be too challenging- there aren't enough priests for that- but one of my functions is dealing with the dead, when that problem rarely comes up. It's an infinite plane; I would never need to meet any Amentans if they could just leave the corpses for us to pick up."

"Currently there is a caste for that but it would be better if they could be cleaned by magic and then do something else. I'm a little worried that if you take over for them you'll experience the same stigma though."

"If Usir's priests take on the stigma, I think we can live with that. Are there consequences to that I'm not imagining, besides that we shouldn't interact with Amentans?"

"Clean Amentans are very terrible to reds. I think that would be different if you were - independent and making sure you were yourselves clean and everything - but it would worry me."

Nod.

"We'll work on finding a better solution then that, but even if it's all we can do, taking that off the hands of Amentans sounds like a blessing to them. If we have to, we can make a city for Usir's priests that is far, far away from Amentans, and the problem won't come up for centuries."

"Well, you'd still have to come and get the corpses somehow. Also reds normally do sewer work too."

"The retrieval is easy enough. Leave the corpses in a designated area, and we can use magic to move them to our city. Magic can't pollute if it's only taking things away, right?"

"The reds usually come get the corpses where they die, I think, except maybe in hospitals. Nobody wants to put them in a designated area. I don't think magic pollutes but I'm not a theologian."

"They won't decay- but then that's not really the problem, is it. Well. We're harder to kill than reds, if it comes to that."

"That's good."

"Maybe we can think of something better. Give it time. I'll pray for guidance, and I'll assign some smarter priests than me to the job. Did you have other questions about- the undead, or priests, or daannaes, or anything like that?"

"Why do you avoid daannaes?"

"Most other good clerics rely exclusively on daannaes when they need to draw on energy, so in order to balance the two energies, there must be clerics who rely primarily on deenthill. There are evil clerics who do, of course, but Usir doesn't believe that evil can truly aim for balance- even the lawful evil are too selfish to achieve the necessary balance of energies, because they always choose what serves their needs."

"Huh. Why is it important for the energies to be balanced?"

"It's a matter of principle, for Usir, so it's the same for us. I suppose philosophically it may or may not be true, but practically- in any living person, there needs to be a balance between daannaes, which fills them with vitality and change and which makes them constantly shift into something new and different, and deenthill, which saps them of wild, uncontrolled growth, it prevents dangerous changes and stops them from turning into something they could never recover from. People blame deenthill for the problem with liches, but it's quite a bit more complicated than that. I could go on about liches all day. Think of it like- our body protects us from disease using deenthill, even without any more added via magic, but if deenthill was all we had, we would just waste away as it kept cutting away things that weren't needed. But if all we had was daannaes, we would just keep making new things- we would never stop growing, even after running out of food to make our growing healthy. Things like that. Of course, it's different when we're all in the afterlife, which is why Usir has so few priests on Arcadia- our work is most needed on the Prime. I'm the only priest of Usir in Heliopolis."

"So it's like - death versus cancer."

"...yes, like cancer. Is that something Amentans know a lot about, cancer? It's difficult to heal without deenthill, which means the Prime has serious problems treating it unless there are evil priests around."

"Yes, Amentans can get cancer and know a lot about it though there are kinds that are very hard to treat. They don't have magic so they have to do it with surgery and medicine."

"We can do better than surgery, I think, although it's a new concept to me."

"I've heard of some places on some Prime worlds that do it, but I've never asked."