"No no. Just… all of them. And any new ones it comes up with. Have it flag them, but let them translate by default."

"…is this because they have an elaborate mythology, or because…"

"I'll get back to you on that. And… get me… something to drink, maybe? I don't even know at this point."

"…like stimulants?"

"Like I said. I don't even know at this point."

"I… don't know how to do that, and that isn't my job."

"Well, thank you for trying. Captain Keomans out."

And she taps the tablet and sighs.

"If we've decided to not take immediate drastic action you could go sleep? If not I have some proposals for us both getting more information about the souls issue. Or we could talk more about threats. Also, I want someone on your ship to come up with a series of proposal for productively discussing 'antimemes' of the sort that hide themselves by making people remember them wrong, ideally someone who so far hasn't been involved in this discussion."

"Thank you for your concern, but no. Please, go ahead. You have souls? You have deities? Four elements make up your matter? You cast spells using the power of nature? Antimemes are real? Why not? You go ahead and pick a topic, you know more than me here. I'll tell you when we get an antimemes proposal. If it doesn't wipe itself from my mind. Because I asked for one of those, as captain, and it wasn't a flagrant abuse of my authority."

"Well, let's talk about threats. By name."

"The biggest threat I am confident in is Charon. Charon is the deity of … death in general, but more specifically death via soul decay. Every being in my world with a soul is known to experience soul decay, including the deities, though they can repair their souls faster than their souls decay, by adding more material. Many believe soul decay to be a natural phenomenon which Charon is merely the deity of, in the same way that his ally Szuriel is the deity of death by war, his ally Trelmarixian is the deity of death by famine, and his ally Apollyon is the deity of death by disease. We have encountered reason to believe that soul decay is actually, at least in its current omnipresent form, an extremely powerful curse created by Charon, which he has engineered the Positive Energy Plane to place on every soul during soul production. If you don't have souls, I don't know exactly how he'd react to you, but I know you wouldn't like it."

"All of the deities have created entities that serve them. These entities range from the fairly weak to the very powerful. A weak one might be, say, a teleporting flying creature which can hurt you in ways comparable to how a person throwing poisoned knives could hurt you, and they might have some eclectic capabilities like speaking to anyone who speaks a language, or grabbing the souls of people who die near them. A very strong one would be much physically stronger, and plausibly capable of traveling between planes under its own power, bringing allies along or forcing enemies to do it involuntarily. They would … I don't know which capabilities sound impressive to you and which don't. I also know more about the nice deities' servants because I'm on the same side of the nice deities. There are … ones that can raise the recently dead – if you don't have souls this probably wouldn't work on you. There are ones that can create stuff like tears in space but safer and more useful. There are ones that can create magically binding agreements. A lot of the more impressive-sounding stuff is 'and then they had a spell that is more powerful than this other spell' or 'and then they had powers which were good in combat, not just against somewhat strong people, but really strong people' and I honestly don't think explaining that would be particularly constructive right now."

"Other deities who want to hurt you would be Asmodeus, who wants to conquer the entire universe and have it serve him, Charon's allies whom I mentioned, and demon lords, which are … I don't know, picture a bunch of powerful terrible people who are more terrible than humans are capable of? Demon lords cover a lot of that spectrum. They're bad at teamwork though."

"Arms race, you have bronze weapons, we have iron, you have bombs, we have bombs-by-splitting-the-near-unsplittable-that-destroy-cities, yours go fast, ours go faster, I get it. We will need the details probably, but not important now as whatever this tech tree is we still are apparently at a level where we can't put out what you call ordinary fire."

Leonarda sighs.

"I'm really hoping you are exaggerating how terrible your enemies are, that is a trait us humans and the mercurials have. So, this 'deity of famine', would that be a self-description? Lots of people have caused famines, often for very bad reasons. How do you, personally, know these people are bad? Not what you have heard, or seen brought to your attention, how do you know this isn't just propaganda?"

"Oh, there are definitely enemies of mine whose terribleness I might be at risk of exaggerating, and allies whose terribleness I might downplay. Have brief summaries of some of each. Curdime kidnapped me and was kidnapping people like me in order to make us teach them things which they can use to build weapons that cause a lot of collateral damage, but they use the weapons to protect people a lot of the time. The– An animal-like entity I once befriended would probably eat you if it was hungry and not care that you are people. It might be nicer now? Axis is … I've defended them to you but I don't actually like them very much. They care about stability, not goodness. They were at one point going to kill my people because my people's existence was in violation of a treaty with they had with Charon and they didn't want Charon to go to war. I do still think you should work with them, though."

Arithnu tenses, giving Leonarda a significant look.

Leonarda nods "Continue?"

"And now let's talk about Asmodeus and the Horsemen. Uh, the Horsemen are Charon, Szuriel, Apollyon, and Trelmarixian. I've actually met all of them. I don't recommend it. Going in order from worst evidence to best: I technically haven't heard Trelmarixian describe himself as the deity of famine. I have personally met him, though. He could have introduced himself by saying 'no, no, I'm not the deity of famine, I'm the deity of … not allocating too much land to farmland? Promoting experimental crops? Locusts, but I told people how to catch and eat locusts and deter locusts from important crops, they just don't listen?' and he didn't. He didn't really talk much."

"Sometimes people willingly take names that sound negative to make themselves appear threatening, or to indicate that they wish to claim power over those that tried to use it against them. Our ship is called the Stopping By Crashing Into Stone. As in, a ship, traveling at great speed, with people on it, crashes into things killing everyone onboard. It is a tradition in our culture to name ships after problems you want them not to have, allegedly it goes back to some idea about it reducing bad luck, but really it is just a funny tradition at this point."

"Okay. I don't have much personal evidence about Apollyon either, then, by that standard. Other than that he's definitely allies with Szuriel and Charon."

"Asmodeus has told us that a person he knows perfectly well does not want to belong to him is his property. He made repeated jabs at my friend for being an escaped slave, and talked about how it is rather rarer that people whom he enslaves escape. And also his … mechanism for talking to us in a provably-secure way … involved horribly killing one of his servants, I am pretty sure. That's almost certainly not required for security, he probably just prefers methods like that."

"That… is not worse than some of the particularly bad humans in history have done, but… granted, that person should not be in power."

Arithnu is now quite tense, hand on his sword, but is remaining quiet.

Boyd just looks grim, and nods, eyes still mostly on Arithnu.

"Szuriel. So, I mentioned an incident where the deity who wants to either kill everyone or do something worse spent a lot of resources on making sure a person with valuable information was very, very destroyed. The deity who I described then was Charon, and he and Szuriel are allies. The person who was destroyed was Kenchlo. That's not tactically important, I'm just quite upset about his destruction and want to circulate accurate information about him."

"Anyway. Szuriel has a kind of particularly powerful servant called an 'Obcisidaemon'. These are broadly referred to as 'genocide daemons', and it is commonly believed that they are constructed by fusing the deaths of genocide victims with the deaths of the perpetrators. The entity that killed and subsequently destroyed Kenchlo was an Obcisidaemon. I was present at the time of Kenchlo's death, and the appearance of the entity that killed him matches records of Obcisidaemons."

"After this incident, the deities had a meeting, because various details of the incident were, in my opinion and my friends' and allies' opinions, suggestive of suspicious behavior on Charon's part. During this hearing, we asked why such a powerful servant had been sent to where Kenchlo ended up being. Szuriel asked us if we knew what an Obcisidaemon is. We described it the way I described it to you, and Szuriel agreed with the description."

"That… that would be… more than…"

"Yadue." Arithnu says through his teeth.

"Sounds like a mercurial name. Who are they?"

"'Were they'. Past tense. And it is no longer a mercurial name. Yadue had many superstitions, many horrifying. I do not fully understand Griffith's description, but I know on multiple occasions Yadue would order a general to kill all in a village and consume the victims."

He looks at Boyd.

"To hide such things would be greater dishonor."