"As far as I know, we don't have 'souls', unless you mean our brains. It doesn't make sense for us to. We can observe brain damage, simple extrapolation suggests that the complete destruction of the brain, or even a fair bit less than that actually, would be the destruction of you. Well. Us, at least. Your dictionary suggests you have brains. How does that work?"

"Brains and souls are different, yes. The brain is a marvelous vital organ. Animals and people who reproduce just … grow brains, for their children! The brain serves as the focus of the ritual for giving the child a soul, and anchors it. So, you know how— Actually, you maybe don't know how there are expensive tools for making people better at some kinds of thinking. But anyway. A brain makes a soul better at thinking for all the kinds of thinking I have words for! And it lets the soul easily operate the body, too. Do you know how hard it would be to operate a body if you didn't have good intuitions for it? The brain sends the signals, and does lots of signal processing for that, and collects input from sense organs and interprets it. The eye can only focus on a small area at a time, but people tend to see large areas of their vision in crisp resolution. That's because of their brains! I could draw you some neuroanatomy diagrams if you like and we could compare?"

"Either such a diagram will match or it won't, and honestly I don't know how to respond to either of those possibilities. So… based on this, and the other stuff we read, it sounds like your souls and brains together act rather like our brains alone. So… that at least sort of makes sense. You have access to other resources, and some of them are involved in your ability to think. I suppose we could envy your durability, a mere rock to the head can destroy everything we are in an instant, but at least… I can sort of wrap my head around the concept. It doesn't sound completely like superstitious nonsense, just… a different way of building a person, using different resources. The mercurials' homeworld has a different material composition, their skulls are more brittle than ours, you have access to… that special substance that our translator is translating as 'life energy' and so you get something… much more durable. Unless I've misunderstood? And… should I just be saying that and letting the translator translate it, or is that translation wrong?"

"You could translate it as 'life energy', but the technical term for it is different. So. You're construct-makers, you should have advanced math, right? Right, you used that sequence that's a generalization of the cicada numbers at first, the one that goes '1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19…'. So you probably know how you can generalize from the counting numbers to what are called 'negative numbers', numbers representing quantities that are less than the absence of something. So then if you want to distinguish the numbers representing quantities that are greater than the absence of something from the negative numbers–"

"–we are familiar with a lot of mathematics, yes, including positive and negative numbers. And including one in that sequence is… actually quite troublesome as you advance further. We saw the various translations, we weren't sure if it was electrical or life related but… 'positive energy', then?"

"'Positive energy', yes. It has nothing to do with lightning, that I know of?"

Leonarda nods.

"And the rest?"

"Well, it does sound like our soul-brain combinations form a more durable store of personal identity than your brains do, but also … nobody knows all the steps by which souls are made and I am increasingly suspecting that Charon has tampered with the process. The people in the area where souls are produced don't let other people inspect it. If the components that make you you are entirely produced in a process you can observe, that has its own advantages."

"Also the ability for people to exist who need neither Positive nor Negative Energy is … unprecedented. There's only one known case of people running entirely on Negative Energy, and they're rather strange and hostile. I suspect your brains are much more complex than ours. It may suggest interesting medical avenues: I know a spell for preserving the body that preserves organs including the brain, but it only lasts eight days and I can only do it so many times per day. And it's easier for me to repair organs than souls, though my usual methods involve the use of Positive Energy, which you don't have, so we should maybe test them. On plants first and then animals and only then people, unless there's an emergency and you want me to try weird stuff because someone is badly wounded."

"If you are confident that it will not harm you, we could give you plant samples. My primary concern was that some planets have life that has developed far less defensive capability, such that they are prone to being digested by even cells that are typically incapable of meaningful aggression against lifeforms from their own world."

"I have spells for destroying unwanted microscopic other life forms inside people's bodies. I think they would work, or if they didn't I could figure something else. Your lifeforms sound alarmingly defenseless, from my perspective? Also I don't know what they would eat if they attacked me."

"All right."

Leonarda taps her tablet.

"Arete? Get Griffith some plant samples, maybe keep some other samples ready. Whatever they ask for, within reason."

Arete comes over.

"What would you like?"

"It doesn't matter much yet? Something where it's not a problem if I injure it, I'd want to injure it for tests. And that you don't object much if it gets killed, that might happen. Whatever's convenient works. Unless you have really durable plants that can't be scratched with normal amounts of sharp things, I don't want to bother with exotic methods."

Arete brings over beansprouts.

"Okay. Before I start active testing, I actually want to mention another ability of mine. I can see souls, positive energy, and negative energy. The fact that I can do this with lots of details, quickly, as many times as I want is a secret. The fact that I can perceive the mere presence or absence of souls is not. And these plants do not have the tiny soul-like positive energy structures that plants I am used to have. They actually don't look alive at all."

"…do I have one?"

"Get within 60 feet of me and I can check?"

Arete moves closer to the box until she is within range.

Arete appears soulless and not-alive, similar to the bean sprout. "I'm not seeing any soul or any other usage of positive energy, you look just as not-alive as your bean sprouts do," Griffie says. "In theory the barriers between us could be blocking my detection-ability, but that seems unlikely to me."

"I see."

Griffie looks contemplative, then concerned.

"Actually, we need to talk more before I do active tests on the beansprouts, I just thought of a big concern. Leonarda, you said that our deities who hurt people sound like someone took the flaws that people sometimes reach, and turned them into actual people, who are the very worst traits made manifest. That's actually a very good summary of the process by which they draw power and create their realms and servants and whatnot? And the helpful ones are the moral opposite of that. We technically don't know the exact origin of the deities that existed prior to the big war, history broke, but it would be unsurprising to me if that was involved in their origins as well. Basically, people produce quintessence of things like love, hate, blacksmithing, the desire to defend each other, lots of stuff. This process depends on positive energy. Technically, animals and plants participate some too. I want a better model of this before I touch positive energy to one of your plants, or at least we should think about it more."

Leonarda takes a deep breath "So… you may be able to create deities, and that might be an outcome of this experiment?"

"It'd be an extremely slow process, and the feedback loops of 'a little bit of goodness-quintessence is used for goodness, which produces more goodness-quintessence' might converge, not diverge."

"Is there some way you can test?"

"Or predict the sort of deity that would result."