"I'm not sure what I think of churches. I suppose there's no denying they can be very pretty."

She waves a hand. "Temples, whatever. They can be more like Shinto shrines or whatever than Christian churches. Anyway, we don't have to write the entire books themselves, I figure, we can figure out more or less what we want to put in them and someone in the bureaucracy or whatever can fill in the rest. I assume. Is that right?"

"That is possible if you three decide to go in that direction."

"Do you really want to trust your divine writings to a team of bureaucrats you've never met? I know I don't."

"Fair...it would be really aesthetic to have some kind of holy text, though. What if I wrote it and then you two edited?"

"I suppose."

"I know having holy books isn't just a Western thing, there's the Dao De Ching and...sutras? For Buddhism? Or Hinduism? Gosh, I know less about this than I'd like. What's Thulic religion like?"

"It lacks holy books in the sense you mean but I'm not inherently opposed to the concept; it seems appropriate to our purposes."

“Do we want to have themes as goddesses? You could be the goddess of beauty and aesthetics-in-general, Naomi could be the goddess of, hm, is it going to make sense if I say hedonics—these are just suggestions but I’m having more trouble thinking of what I would be the goddess of and that seems like not a coincidence, like that kind of thing might be easier to see from the outside, if you like the idea of themes slash specialties please suggest something.”

"I would be delighted to be the goddess of beauty. And, hmm—aesthetics, art, drama, passion and danger. I'm not sure if the common thread there is—visible, to you, but I see it."

"I could go for goddess of hedonics. Hmm. I almost feel like you want to be goddess of... kindness, generosity, something like that? Like... what's the thing you wouldn't want to build a world without, it kind of seems like yours is... safety? Maybe safety is the concept I'm looking for."

“…Yeah, sounds right. Ghys your thing absolutely tracks.”

"So—safety, beauty, and pleasure. Not bad."

Didyme briefly tries to pattern-match that to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but it doesn’t immediately work and then it occurs to her that if she said it out loud Ghys would be justified in being annoyed about completely gratuitous not-her-cultural context. 

“Can I have a notebook to start brainstorming holy text stuff in while we talk?” she asks the angel.

“Yes, of course.” Notebook!

Scribble scribble.

“I’m rethinking the thing where my Dark Secret is that I was accidentally responsible for a space station disaster. For one thing, having space stations be vulnerable to the carelessness of children seems like a not particularly aesthetic way for a setting to be dangerous. Also it doesn’t bode well for our chances in the transdimensional war later.”

"That's pretty fair. Thoughts on alternatives?"

"An observation: if we want them to do well in the war, we should perhaps warn them of it, or prepare them for it some other way."

"Excellent point! We should have prophecies. They can go in the holy books. --What else do we want to prophesy."

"Very little, I don't want any of it to get caught not coming true."

“Well, I was assuming anything we prophesied would come true, like, we have all these mandatory plot beats and stuff.”

"I think it's actually pretty hard to phrase a prophecy unambiguously even if you know what's going to happen, and what mandatory plot beats do we even have that we'd want to warn people about?"

Didyme glances under her eyelashes at Ghys.

”Well, we could prophesy some number of heroines for the coming war, as well as the war itself.”

"Ourselves? Our rivals? Both? How would this prophecy affect the circumstances of our lives?"

"We could leave whether it's us or them ambiguous. Make sure that whoever wins has the societal support and resources to deal with the problem without cutting off anybody's options."