Notes notes notes.

"Just like tools and weapons really. Engine can power a 'mech or a combine harvester-"

The jeep suddenly brakes, though not too hard, and comes to a quick stop.

"-Willy!"

"Dirt Lizard on the road, ma'am!"

She peers forward. There does indeed seem to be a twenty or thirty-foot reptile, sullen brown, walking on the asphalt. It's holding a goat carcass in its mouth. A black tongue lolls out of its mouth to the side. She sighs.

"Jesus Christ, that's a big one... And it's got someone's goat. Just go around, we've got offroad tires. Give him a good bit of distance. I'll radio it in, maybe someone can shoot it for stew later."

"Yes'm." He turns offroad. Kira fusses with what turns out to be a device of voice transmission for a bit, and reports this occurrence to someone.

"Sorry about that, where were we?"

A monster crossing the road is a perfectly ordinary occurrence!

"What can you do without magic, do you not have healing? Of wounds, diseases, poisons, curses, blindness, missing limbs... Raising the dead, that's another cleric staple, I can't do it yet but I will someday. Conjuring food and clean water, testing existing food and preserving it. Enduring heat and cold, carrying more weight, there's hundreds of spells and it's hard to figure out which are the most important if you don't have any of them... At higher circles, traveling to other planes - I think you do have arcane teleport, at least on the jumpships - or calling people from them or talking to them without going there, or talking to the gods. A lot of spells work to counter other magic."

"There are a variety of tools to address these things. Ranging from palliative care and hope to chemicals and drugs- We don't get a lot of those out here, it's a problem- To surgical repair. Usually recovery from wounds is slow, imperfect, and not really guaranteed. Oh, except curses, since we don't typically experience those." Is that sarcasm? Maybe. "There's always a few people with cuts, bruises, broken bones and the like around the treatment center in Minnie Downs. Clean water? That could be very useful. Another thing the pirates might try to steal is the water treatment buildings, more to ransom them back to us than for resale. We can make replacement pumps and pipes, but not the fancy 'arr oh'-style filters, and we kind of need it to grow crops. Carrying weight is what trucks and cars are for. Enduring heat and cold..."

She goes thoughtful. Mechs have to manage their heat; She's more a sensor tech than a MechTech but she definitely knows this much. Maintenance on the heat sinks is obsessive and careful and the 'mech boys on the planet's one solitary lance are always talking about heat load when talking about their weapons...

"...How much heat? And is this - removing the heat, or making a person not care about it, or-?"

Life without clerics sounds horribly hard. The southerners think Civilization is built by wizards and indeed they're very good at flying and exploding things, but the traditionalists have it right about divine magic. Rahadoumi self-reliance sounds good in principle, but five minutes' thought should tell you to invent arcane healing before banishing all clerics from your land.

"I don't know what some of those are but if they're on a list that includes 'hope' I'm going to assume they don't work, no offense meant." Hope is an important part of the Good, but usually it's the hope of getting to a cleric in time! "Healing magic is instant and guaranteed to work on most nonmagical injuries - not if you're missing body parts or if it's already old and scarred. ...I have a limited amount per day, obviously. Blindness, deafness, diseases are more expensive, I can only do it a few times per day, it works on most diseases but for some it fails part of the time."

"Making water is free but you'd only have it while I'm here so it's not really important unless you're low right now. The climate spell makes someone comfortable when it's cold or hot and also not harmed by it, making them only not care about it sounds like a terrible idea."

"It's better than nothing, I just meant that people often don't regain full capacity after severe injuries... Right, well, that might actually turn the Mech fight. Pilots get distracted and injured and the mechs damaged when they get too hot, and firing the weapons produces a lot of heat."

"It'll protect you if you spend all day in the hottest sun, it won't save you if you stick your hand in a fire. Or touch red-hot metal. I do have another spell that protects against burning yourself - up to a point, it won't stand up to a fireball - but it only lasts an hour and a bit, not a day and a night."

"Actual burns are rare, I think? An hour is probably long enough for 'mechs to get to an engagement without you being in the line of fire... We'll have to consult with Captain Mercer about if those 'spells' will help his pilots and if you're willing to use 'em or sell 'em. You said these come from 'gods'. What do 'gods' want, what are they getting out of it?"

"Different gods want very different things, sometimes things no human wants. What they get out of it is mostly - the result of empowering people. They see someone they like, or who is doing things they like, and they want them to have more power or safety so they can do more of whatever it is. Clerics usually do things their god likes, and it's hard to say how much of it is in response to being clericed, and how much was the god correctly seeing what kind of person they already were."

"Some gods do order their followers around, and probably uncleric anyone who disobeys. And have a big church that punishes people. But if you didn't want to join them, you could just pretend you were never clericked."

"My god is Gorum. He's the god of people striving, fighting for what they believe in, risking themselves for what they want. And he's the god of growing stronger through adversity, and achieving your goals through that strength."

"Gorum doesn't care about the destination so much as the journey. He's not the god of any one cause. If you realize you were wrong, if you learn to do better, if you have a revelation that your cause was bad, that's an important kind of growth." Does this seem to be landing?

She's making a face. Especially at the 'the result of empowering people' bit. And taking notes.

"So... Sort of analogous to inner sphere powers doing schemes involving giving uninvolved people weapons because they'll probably be a problem for their rivals? Which is where a considerable fraction of fucking pirates come from."

Oh good, even in a strange new world there are still debates about religion! These 'inner sphere powers' presumably aren't literally elemental lords but even so, they - rhyme with themes he's familiar with.

"That's partly right. Gods fight by proxy a lot, by empowering mortals. Even if they didn't, different people want different things, and that includes different gods, and more power can create more conflict. Even if cleric spells couldn't harm people, all power can be made into a weapon."

"But not all gods are about fighting someone! There are gods of love, music, beauty, healing, travel and discovery, the sun and the stars. Of knowledge, magic, all the different crafts and skills there are. Of farming and raising families, and of wild nature, the seas and storms. Gods who cleric people for helping others, for raising their children well, for being obsessed with perfection."

"Those things don't have to conflict. When Shelyn gives someone spells because her singing moves crowds, the singer isn't going to hurt people with it, she's going to be inspired to write something even more amazing and also she can make water and heal people now. When Gorum empowers someone fighting for a cause they really believe in, that cleric probably has enemies, that's why he's fighting, but Gorum isn't doing it to hurt his enemies, he's doing it because he likes people to strive and grow."

"Some gods are evil and tyrannical. Some gods want to conquer the world, or kill everyone in it, or to have their followers do that, and other gods spend power to fight them. Some gods are absolutely your enemy, and so are their followers, and even if you don't want to fight them they won't give you a choice."

"But we choose what to do with the power given us, just as with power earned, and for most of us that is the same thing we were going to do anyway, except better. You already chose to fight for your town. You probably wouldn't turn down power if it was offered you, or think it was a bad thing if people like you were sometimes given magic by a god who likes people fighting to protect their home and community."

"There's a country on my planet, Rahadoum, that banned clerics of all gods a long time ago. They're not fighting any big wars, last I heard. They also have most of their children die young, because they have no healing, no clerics to make the plants grow or to stop disease. It doesn't help, to turn away the gods who want the same things you do."

Notes notes notes.

"Right... I don't hold too much with philosophying but if you're saying 'oh, if the boot was on the other foot you wouldn't be complaining'... Sure, maybe. Yeah, I'd sure enjoy being a Duke of whatever and having an army of Battlemechs at my beck and call to keep all our enemies far away. But I'm not, and I don't, and I have to keep piece of shit lasers and one lonely Standard Armor forge from falling apart any faster than they already are and wonder if I'll die of some stupid preventable disease at the age of forty. People fight each other. A lot. Over important things and trivial things, for revenge, to keep them from growing stronger, out of misplaced senses of rivalries, out of greed, out of weird prejudices, and because they can. At least we're defending home, and yeah I would not turn down a magic 'mech-be-gone power or, for that matter, a cache of old Star League weapons if I happened to find one. I had a point when I started this rant..."

That is so very relatable! Gord likes this woman.

"I meant your analogy about gods isn't a good one. Most gods don't empower people because they want them to hurt other people. What you do with it is on you, not the god. A few gods do want to hurt you but you're not dealing with that here, not if your enemies don't have clerics or miracles or mysteriously convenient strings of victories or something like that."

"Like you said, people fight a lot, often for bad reasons, with gods or without them. With the gods around you're at least less likely to die of disease. I don't know if a god is equally likely to be on your side or your enemy's, but I'm pretty sure there are more gods of defending-your-home than of attacking-other-people's-homes, or there wouldn't be any homes left back home. Destruction is easier than defense and rebuilding."

"Also, this is a remote shot, but do these 'inner sphere powers' happen to be associated with one or more of the four elements - fire, air, earth and water?"

"...Hmm. Okay, so it's not that simple at least. I still think I don't get it properly. Well, it's a new thing and not a copy of an existing one to us, I suppose..." 

Maybe it's more like old stories about AIs? 

"Uh- No, the inner sphere powers are the biggest - er, empires is the closest word - around. They're called that because the planets they hold are mostly within the sphere of stars closest to the homeworld, a planet called Earth, or 'Earth' or 'Terra', or well, same thing no matter the language."

They settled enough stars to map them out in three dimensions. What a wild idea. Gord wishes Ramien was here to see this. (Maybe if he Sends Ramien he can convince him to come pick him up? No way to plane shift off a Sending, though...)

On the other hand: these people have a whole planet to themselves but only three cities (towns?). Mendev has three cities, and it's a small backwater on the edge of Avistan sustained by refugees and crusaders.

Maybe interstellar travel is so cheap they settled lots of planets much more quickly than they could expand to cover them. Maybe the local monsters kept them from expanding. Maybe the rest of the planet is full of elves and orcs and dwarves and they just didn't think to mention it. The whole thing feels like a badly written story but Gord's used to planets full of people, for all he knows this is normal and the rest of Creation is full of empty planets. Elysium is supposed to be mostly empty, the empty parts are just too far to get to...

"Are there more people on planets closer to where you started because they're - older? Is that why the empires there are rich and powerful? Three cities to a planet feels weirdly empty, I'm used to planets with no free room for the taking."