(Otolmens has now GIVEN UP on persuading Asmodeus or Abadar (she's not even trying Nethys) to squish the mortal or erase its memories or at least PUT IT SOMEWHERE PROPHECY ISN'T BROKEN and she is instead submitting a LENGTHY REPORT to Pharasma who is going to IGNORE her the same way that Pharasma ignored her PREVIOUS report on Possible Strategies for Handling Potential Incursions From Outside the Multiverse because Pharasma ALWAYS IGNORES EVERYTHING and why bother HAVING a god of reality not being destroyed if you're NEVER GOING TO LISTEN TO HER and it would show them all if this ends with GOLARION and probably the MULTIVERSE lying in COMPLETE RUINS because NOBODY EVER LISTENS TO HER.)

Keltham knocks, then enters through the ajar door looking more hesitant than usual (which is to say, even slightly hesitant at all).

"Hey, uh -"

Right.

"Taldane," Keltham says.  He does remember the name for the language.

She casts Share Language. "How're you finding things?"

Keltham slightly inclines his head around a third of the way to formal apology.  "So before I went to Asmodeus, I wanted to try envisioning and contacting the god that would - fit me, externalize my deepest ideal - and I couldn't manage to talk to it, but I observe I've got healing powers and I infer I'm a cleric now.  Hope that doesn't screw up anything, wanted to check in with you or other domain experts before I tried anything else."

"You - 

- what -

- like, the god you'd be if you ascended, or the - kind of god you think you ought to be a cleric of -"

"Those two sound like the same question to me?  Or no, more the second one, since if I ascended I'd have a lot of properties besides the property I envisioned for the god I tried to contact.  If I've understood your schema correctly, I should now be a cleric of the Chaotic Evil god of Coordination."

"I, uh, didn't know there was a Chaotic Evil god of that. - congratulations? That is not a usual thing to have happen!"

"I am not actually sure whether there was a Chaotic Evil god of Coordination in Golarion before I tried praying to it, but if not, I expect it'll polish the place up a bit, on the margins.  So we're all good with that?"

" - well, I mean, if you can create gods by praying to them that seems kind of important and should maybe change our to-do list. But I don't think it's a bad thing, so long as you're not going to make any gods who, uh, a god of Coordination is probably the exact opposite of the thing I'm worried about - if everyone could create gods someone's god would not be interested in containing Rovagug -"

He's probably not supposed to explain the exact way he tried to pray, or even that he suspects the prayer style could've had anything to do with it.  "Yeah, not going to be doing anything more in that department until I understand things a little better.  I mean, I'm not usually a fan of slowing down to do all the paperwork but I'll make an exception for this case.  How sure are you that there isn't an existing Chaotic Evil god of... people having the extra properties and desires they need, in order for lots of individuals to all get the things they want as selfish individuals, without it taking a huge amount of effort and enforcement for them to successfully execute multiplayer strategies and not end up interacting -"  Taldane doesn't have the word negative-sum "- in ways that destroy more value for others than they gain for themselves?"

" - honestly, 'successfully executing multiplayer strategies' sounds kind of more like a Law thing to me but - we know that the human concepts don't fully capture the god-ones. I don't have anything like a full list of the Chaotic Evil gods but the Worldwound is a opening to the Chaotic Evil afterlife and you'd think if there were a god there Asmodeus could negotiate with He'd do that, instead of us having to stop them from swarming out and eating the world."

"Maybe I misunderstood a thing.  I thought Law was - societies trying to make up their minds as a whole, and everyone in the societies doing that thing - and Chaos was people pursuing their own separate strategies even if that's not perfectly optimal for some idealization of their aggregate" utility function "thingies-that-value-things - and the God I tried to contact would be the God of the property that the individuals needed to have in order for a Chaotic society to actually work?  Or is that still Lawful and Chaos is totally uncoordinated hostile monsters swarming out of a gap of reality?  But then I don't see how 'revenge' fits in as Chaotic... I need a real reference book on theology, the ones in the local library are awful."

"- honestly I am not totally sure how Chaotic societies work, I haven't - I've met Chaotic people, at the Worldwound, but they're mostly Chaotic people either from Lawful societies or from societies that are just kind of fucked up and don't, in fact, actually work at all - like, uh, warlords who just kill their rivals, that sort of thing -"

"Anyways.  Cleric of the god of selfish individuals doing the things they need to do to not just step all over each other.  At least if I got a god that was anything remotely like the one I tried to call.  May or may not be a new god to Golarion.  Is there anything time-sensitive I need to do in response to that, that you know of.  Or should I go on to things like - breakfast, either figuring out how to use clerical magic to launder my clothes or asking you to do that, finding out how to get cleric spells generally for that matter, looking at a list of cleric spells to see if there's any sane or useful ones, seeing if I have any talent for wizard spells, negotiating equity and compensation so we can get started on industrializing Golarion, all that."

"Clerics pray for spells first thing in the morning, usually, though I don't know if that'd hold with a new god. It at least might be time sensitive so you may as well do it now. Some people like to look over a list of cleric spells and ask for those specifically, some ask for whatever their god advises."

"Do I have to pray for all the spells at once?  Does it not work at all unless it's 'first thing in the morning'?  Can I pray for a preference-ordered list of spells that might exist and see which ones I get?"

"For normal clerics, yes, you have to do it all at once first thing in the morning - which is to say, at dawn but with an hour or so of leeway. The justification I encountered was that this puts all the clerics of different gods on the same footing, churches can't have an advantage over others due to having spells for the day while the others are still at prayer for them. Probably you can pray for a preference-ordered list of spells that might exist, I haven't heard of anyone doing that but evidently however you do prayer works or you wouldn't have been clericed."

Keltham wonders if that's why nobody has invented functional anti-sunlight shades here, though you'd think non-clerics would still need them.  "Most reliable totally standard method for praying for cleric spells?"  He didn't get results all that great off his attempted nonstandard method last time.

"Uh, you kneel at an altar with some appropriate symbols of your god around - don't know what those would be, if the god's new - and think about how you are blessed with the power to serve them on Golarion, and think about what you believe is the most appropriate for the day's duties."

"Huh.  I don't think it's an employment - 'service'? - relationship yet, especially when we haven't managed to communicate.  I guess I should think about our overlapping goals and mutual benefit, unless there's some strong reason only employer relationships would work?  Why does anybody ever ask for specific spells, if they could just get the spells that an entity much smarter than them with overlapping goals would pick?"

"Maybe for Chaotic gods it doesn't have to be an employer relationship. Uh, adventuring teams make plans for the day that rely on having specific spells, so I think they prefer knowing what they'll get in advance to getting whatever the god thinks is best."

Wait what how does that not violate - "Does the god not know what the adventurers' plans are?  Like, if I don't ask for specific spells, is the god working on more limited information than I have in guessing what will be useful to me?"

" - I mean, gods have lots of attention but they also have lots and lots of clerics, I don't know that they put more thought into a cleric's specific plans than the cleric does. Once the cleric has decided 'I probably want three of Protection from Energy' the god knows that - that's what is meant by picking your own -"

"So my god's smart but incredibly distracted and if I ask for their choice of spells, I'm distracting them even more and might get something weirdly inappropriate... still probably worth a shot on day 1.  Okay, heading back to my room to ask for spells, now.  Oh, something I meant to ask and should have asked earlier - being a cleric of an unknown god doesn't prevent me from trying to contact Asmodeus, does it?  Because that would suck."

"It does not. That said, gods usually have a hard time talking to people who are distant from them in alignment, so if you're in fact Chaotic Evil then you are unlikely to be able to talk directly to Asmodeus. - the priest talked directly to Him, though, last night. That's why everything happened so fast."