"Well. Maybe they can acquire the knowledge of exchange and diplomacy. I wonder if bringing them a sample of holy water would help. It contains magical essence of goodness, which includes concepts like that."

"I don't think we've encountered conceptual magic which embodies anything that complex before. Do you have any with you?"

"I just have the one pint of holy water, which I can't renew, but you can have a look at it. I also have a renewable source, but it involves transforming into an animal again and poking you, and it could be unpleasant but not lastingly harmful if you're secretly a terrible person? Or it might not work at all because you're soulless?"

"I'd like to think I'm a good person though I'm not sure what definition is being used. I do expect that the procedure wouldn't work with this body but I expect we could find a volunteer with a biological body. I'm not sure if that would count either if what you mean by a soul is based on the presence of positive or negative energy. They'll probably send a Mage-crafter to expedite deciding if it's safe to let you visit the Heart and they all have biological bodies."

"The issue wouldn't be absence of goodness, it'd be the presence of significant evil, which I really wouldn't expect you to have."

"If some of your people have non-positive-energy-based soul-like constructs, I suppose I could call mine a 'positive energy soul' and call theirs some other more specific term. I don't know how the touch-based value-expression effect would interact with those."

"Oh, that's interesting. I haven't had to make any really decisions that would put me at risk of that. The technical term we use is magical interface. Given that our mind magic works on you, you have one or something equivalent."

"It's not … being pushed into a bad situation where you had to kill a non-combatant to accomplish some genuinely important goal isn't a central example of 'significant evil', here? The central cases would be about things like seriously harming people because you either actively wanted to do so or didn't treat harms to them as a cost. For you to be sufficiently evil to be harmed by me using the ability at full intensity — which isn't optimal for testing anyway, I'd use it at a lower intensity that wouldn't even harm an evil person — the way you're acting towards me would need to be non-representative of your overall character."

"Oh, it's based primarily on intent not outcome. That makes sense."

"Outcomes likely matter too, but I don't think they're generally sufficient? It might draw from my specific moral sensibilities some? I don't actually normally study this and it doesn't seem like a particularly promising line of research."

"Agreed, I wouldn't want to intentionally manufacture people who counted as evil and it would take a lot work to arrange a broad enough sample of volunteers, especially since it would likely require pretty broad use of mind magics that haven't been certified as permissible."

"You still shouldn't do it, but it is technically possible to create evil insects which aren't person-ish. If you have a source of concentrated evil-quintessence. Which I don't recommend trying to acquire."

"I don't think that would help us understand what counts as evil. It also seems a bit dangerous. I'm not really sure what I would expect it to do either."

"It would be dangerous. It likely wouldn't be very helpful. If you wanted to test the edge-case behavior of my specific moral-quintessence-generation effects you could in theory generate tiny samples of lots of different quintessence types and observe the reactions, but that would also probably be dangerous. And … this isn't going to help discover new facts about ethics itself? It's just going to help discover how quintessence behaves. We can call holy water 'good', but it works from what the celestial deities call 'good', and sometimes people discover new information about goodness and then the celestial deities integrate it."

She laughs, "See this is why it's good to have local knowledge. I had ideas about elaborate series of experiments that were probably impractical but you just know things I don't think I would have thought to test for. Also, I didn't mean to imply that I thought holy water was objectively right about morality. Just that it was potentially worth knowing what definition it used."

“A complicated definition, but I’m not sure how much it’s embedded in the water. The water is useful for hurting creatures made of evil quintessence, and undead, and treating evil-quintessence diseases and whatnot. It doesn’t tend to react to regular people no matter how good or evil they are.”

"When is the definition applicable then?"

"It's applicable to the touch-based power I can get by turning into a celestial animal, called 'Smite Evil', and to ethics-related spells like 'Protection from Evil'. The latter of which definitely draws from my ethics somewhat, my version shields against psychopomps but other people's might not. Er. The touch-based power is called 'Smite Evil' because it's normally useful for combat but if you do it at a non-combat intensity it can be actively pleasant for, uh, people who like goodness. Which is a lot of them."

"If that works on our biologicals I'll have to swap so I can try it. I'm always looking to try new things."

"If you have to design your spells, er, magic-usage-arrays, yourself you might not have anything like 'Owl's Wisdom'? And if my magic is compatible with your people's minds it'd be interesting if you've never tried anything like it. It makes people better at … resisting attempts to interfere with their minds, noticing faint but important sensory stimuli, modeling other people's behavior, and some specific tasks related to those."

"Ooh, that sounds fun. We have the ability to improve memory, let people think faster and increase attentional capacity though all that works much better for constructs than biological people."

“Huh. If I were a wizard I could do something like that for people with positive energy souls with Fox’s Cunning.”

"Cool, is it hard to become a wizard?"

“If you go to an institution for teaching wizardry, and you learn there for years, and you are issued somewhat pricey task-specific tools, and you are above average intelligence, usually you can learn some. It might also require my world’s sort of soul.”

Griffie frowns. “However, I don’t have even the most introductory materials on learning wizardry.”

"So it's a taught skill, not an inherent ability or something that people can easily derive independently. Is most of your world's magic like that?"

“No, there’s a lot of inherent abilities around too. My sort of person can turn into a plant and back just by virtue of their construction.”