"I'm perfectly fine with telling everyone I'm omnibenevolent. But I take your point."

"We want everyone to have a very nice world because we, ourselves, are going to live there," Naomi suggests. "That's true enough."

"We established that we want a true religion," Didyme points out to Ges. "I'm not going to go around telling people true things and then lie about that. Although I guess as long as we don't try to say which mortals the goddesses became it wouldn't put people's guard down about you specifically...if I were writing a story about three goddesses, who were us, becoming mortal, I would say that Naomi and I sacrificed our own divinity to protect people from yours. But that is not, in fact, true. Hm." 

"Yeah, we're going to have to get creative if we want to spin the thing that's actually happening in an interestingly religious way... hmm. Can we make, like, angels? Something in between gods and regular people, so people have something to worship that's not us? And then I guess elves are between even-more-regular people and angels."

"We could...we'd want to be careful, though, this lady is an angel and she doesn't seem to have too high an opinion on her bosses." 

"My bosses made me for customer service and it didn't occur to them that liking people would cause me to develop ethics," the angel says dryly. 

"I definitely want our angels to have a positive opinion of us but I think that won't be that hard? At least collectively. Coming up with an angel who has a positive opinion of all three of us individually might be a bit much."

"You said earlier that you could make... other versions of us... into goddesses. But not me. I don't expect making other versions of us into angels to work any better, but what about other versions of other people...?"

"I can try, but before you ask, you cannot have Hitler or King Leopold."

"I really do not think either of those would work well as an angel for our purposes!"

"Some people make really questionable life choices."

"All right, is there anyone you do think would work well as an angel for our purposes? Cause I gotta say, I don't know anybody I'd angelize."

"I admit I don't have any flawless candidates in mind."

"I guess I would angelize my siblings if I couldn't have them as siblings if the reason I couldn't have them as siblings wasn't that I couldn't have them at all. But, uh, that's not how that works. Can you...recommend people?"

"I would need desirable criteria," she says, glancing at Ghys.

"Since I am, it seems, doomed to be the black sheep of this pantheon no matter what I do, it follows that I should probably ask for angels who are very forgiving."

"Angels should be in favour of people having nice things," Naomi contributes. "But, like, in a way where they have a sense of fun, not in a weird stuffy repressed way where people only get to have the correct nice things, you know?"

"Literally nothing you have said has suggested that your wool is paler than midnight," Didyme points out.

"I acknowledge that reality, but, supposing that I decided to have a change of heart and become a kinder, gentler version of myself, would either of you believe me? I think not."

"It's nothing personal, I'm just naturally paranoid. And we should maybe be thinking about angel criteria and not about your moral character."

"Yeah. Angels should...protect people."

"Hmm. I'll see who I can think of," she says thoughtfully. 

"To be clear, I totally can think of things you could do to convince me you'd had a heel face turn, I'm just not gonna tell you what they are because then you could fake 'em."

"So assuming for the moment that we get to have angels and that they will fulfill our criteria and stuff—"

"Not quite yet," Ghys interrupts. She looks at Didyme. "What precisely are you imagining angels will protect people from? Because if we are all intended to be villainesses, we should exist in a world that is capable of sustaining plots in which someone plays the villain."

"--I didn't have anything precisely in mind. But even if everyone is laughably naive, people are going to hurt each other. My parents weren't acting out of malice towards me, exactly. I want--someone who could have saved me, if they had been there."