"Wrong spell school for imbuing," he says automatically. "I can give other people spells, one at a time, but none of the types of spells I can give are relevant here… if you could get spells from Abadar that would do the trick."

This is a radical proposal, but the more Hej Nazir thinks about it the more he likes it. As a cleric, Tanya would be able to use a Wand of Sending with almost no training at all, giving them a way to securely identify her to her commander before both of them hand the conversation off to technical specialists. It would also come with the usual benefits and privileges of being a cleric, which Tanya might appreciate on their own merits. Clerics develop a stronger Will even if they don't get any wiser, and as a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield it would be better if Tanya had more resistance to opportune enchantments thrown her way.

For any other person Nazir might worry about them being a bad culture fit, or at least modestly suggest that she consider the portfolios and personalities of the other righteous gods for a better mission alignment before making a decision, but at this moment there is no doubt in his mind. Tanya couldn't be a better candidate acolyte if her arrival had somehow been arranged by prophecy for this exact purpose.

So he has a limited version of the method Abadar and Sarenrae use to give people spells? This system is even more permissive than Tanya realized! Anyone can be a mage just by paying some money or knowing the right people!

And there's no reason for her not to be one of those people. Using the spell from Iomedae's ring worked fine. Magically copying knowledge and skills into her brain worked fine, complete with an expiration date for the licensed-not-purchased service. This will presumably feel like a combination of the two? As far as Tanya's concerned, spells are knowledge and skill like any other; it's transferring them to people that's the magical bit. Which, in this case, will be done by an alghollthu, but he's already aware of Tanya so there shouldn't be any harm in keeping him directly aware of progress on the project of contacting Earth. Tanya isn't sure if Abadar is going to allow pure communications or to rule them out like he did the portal, so it might even be best to make sure he can't be surprised by anything that happens.

"How much would it cost? I don't know how many uses of it we'll need, or days of using it if it's accounted that way. Does Abadar have a standard contract or procedure for people who didn't follow the normal training and recruitment channels?" She thinks Iomedae mentioned something like that...

"It's free," he says dryly. "The way people approach the relationship is… very culturally mediated. Outside of Osirion people often think of it as magical patronage, or accepting a spiritual vocation. I tend to think of it as a job. The most basic requirement is that you have a shared interest – as long as you work towards that shared interest, you can progress as a mage. If you— 'retire' is the wrong word, if you stop actively working to build and protect civilization, you can continue to receive any spells you've already qualified for until you die. The, ah, the option value of having people able to act on their convictions when those convictions are aligned with Abadar's exceeds the benefits of depowering them, is my understanding. You will be terminated for taking actions that undermine anyone's confidence in you as a reliable and orderly agent in the world. It's not a stance against crime, exactly, crime is contextual and Abadar doesn't account it misconduct just for violating the legal code of whichever jurisdiction you're in, but— betraying your allies when you know they trust you, taking out a loan without intending to repay it, lying to someone during a transaction to defraud them, these are all fireable offenses. If that sounds agreeable to you… normally you would go through a recruitment channel, but in this case I will simply ask him to consider your application."

Highly irregular, sure, but when you're a sixth-circle cleric you can just do things.

It's free? Please, Tanya wasn't born yesterday. If magic was free, everyone but the children and criminals would be mages! Abadar and his fellows wouldn't pass up such an obvious way to increase their benign leverage over human society. Who would bother spending long years to study wizardry if granted magic was free for the asking? Who would dare use it, if having your application rejected came with the stigma of being opposed to building and defending civilization? Who would oppose stripping a convicted criminal of his magic as well as his property or freedom?

The few dissidents like Mahveen would find themselves unable to build a dangerous tower next to a city, government employees like Nazir wouldn't take their security contracts, and in a few generations the entire tradition of learned magic would die out along with any nonmagical technology that tried to compete with heavily subsidized spells. 

Granted magic clearly has a limited supply. Just as with Commune questions, Abadar might not be paid for it outright but he still needs a price signal to discriminate who to answer. 

Nazir is saying Tanya, specifically, having magic is valuable to Abadar, or possibly to Nazir himself. Contacting Earth could be very lucrative, but if that were the reason Nazir would simply have said he was funding the cost of Tanya being granted spells, himself or via investors or loans. Besides, Abadar had already ruled out using the portal instead of trying to restrict traffic through it. Talking across the portal would be far simpler and cheaper than using spells!

Does he want to tie Tanya closer to him, maybe as a condition of allowing the project to proceed? She's not inherently opposed, but she would want far greater clarity(*) before she agrees to a lifelong relationship where the other side might decide to 'terminate' her! She's worked in HR but she has, also, worked for the army since then!

"I'm still an officer jn the Germanian army," she points out. "If we establish contact and I can receive orders, I'll be acting on their behalf. And if the portal can be opened, I may go back to Earth. I can't commit to serve Abadar or our shared interests without a very good understanding of what they constitute, let alone commit for life. It would be much simpler if he could grant me the required spells on a one-off or time-limited basis; I can agree to using them in certain ways for the purpose of establishing contact, which is a naturally bounded one."

(*) A contract.

She's taking this commitment more seriously than he did at her age. Then again, at her age he didn't need to worry about a prior oath of service.

"Most professional armies have provisos for this situation. I take it yours does not. You may still meet the hard requirements by virtue of serving in an organized army. If your authority over your subordinates and the authority your superiors have over you is governed by rules, if you are lawfully enjoined from obeying certain orders and likewise obligated to follow others, then being a person who follows such rules is enough. The softer requirements are more to do with brand safety." Brand safety??? "What constitutes being a reliable and orderly agent varies from country to country, so I can't tell you what matters for how Germania's neighbors perceive her, but to pick a degenerate example: if I were to rob a bank, that would be the end of my relationship with Abadar. If you were ordered to seize a bank's assets, or issued such an order, what would distinguish your conduct from that of a bank robber? Is such a seizure permitted? Are the assets going into your pocket or to the war chest? Does this serve a legitimate military objective? There are no universally applicable guidelines, only the local ones for what constitutes the advancement of civilization, the protection of trade, and the growth of wealth.

"Part of why administering and removing powers frequently is more expensive has to do with the intervention costs. Where it happens and to whom communicates information, and people in dire straits almost never receive such favor at the last minute when it would turn the tides of fortune for the same reason that the elderly and infirm still receive spells while in good standing. The budget for communication is more restrictive than the budget for issuing power. I don't wake up in the morning and receive orders, and neither will you. However, you could bargain with Abadar beforehand if it suits your purposes. Demanding to see the bigger picture before coming to an arrangement is rare but not unprecedented. Iomedae made such a request— before enlisting in the Shining Crusade, a long time ago, that is." Different Iomedae. "She wanted a promise not to be used against her own purposes, to only be put to such tasks as would make the world better off by her lights, and got it. That was a fairly sweeping ask, I suspect it was only granted because Iomedae was an unusually valuable recruit and the situation was desperate. Abadar is very amenable to trade, though. If you frame it as a contract I am sure you can come to terms."

Tanya wasn't even thinking about how her service to Germania might reflect on Abadar! She was more worried about the other way around!

"Authority at every level of the Germanian army is certainly governed by rules. To take your example - a bank's assets are the same as any other private property. Or government property, in the case of a central bank, but then it's a more legally straightforward case. The army is allowed to seize private property in enemy nations, as long as this materially aids the war effort and does not harm civilians, for example by causing starvation or dislocation. The same applies when fighting on Germanian territory but in that case we must pay the owners, so it wouldn't make sense to seize money; it applies to houses, vehicles and such. If it's not a tactical decision that must be made by the soldiers on the ground, the government can in a state of emergency nationalize property through civilian channels - again with recompense - but then the army wouldn't be sent to enforce it."

"In any case the property would be taken by the army. An individual soldier taking private property is committing the crime of looting - or simply stealing, in Germanian territory - and if caught will face a court-martial. The army serves the Emperor's office and through it the nation, not the Emperor as a private individual. In other words, even the Emperor can't take any part of the spoils of war or annexed lands as his private property." The Germanian state is one of the few that both uphold the rule of law and have actually good laws.

She can give this righteous answer by rote, which gives her a little time to reflect on the rest of what Nazir said.

"Obviously we don't have existing provisos for an officer finding themselves on a different planet and being granted magic. In general, though, soldiers can't be employed while in active service. You say you 'work for' Abadar, but if you don't receive either instructions or remuneration that might be a mistranslation. I would call it a partnership or, considering it's free, a donation or more simply a gift. I can't accept a personal gift intended to influence my behavior in a way relevant to military operations, which is in an important sense the entire purpose of granting me spells even if it's meant to benefit national security." Tanya is acting to facilitate contact, which is in everyone's interests and doesn't conflict with her duty - hopefully a future tribunal won't disagree with her about this - and has no reason to incur liability for a potential conflict of interest. "I could straightforwardly accept a gift on behalf of the Germanian army or state, and use it in their interests and at their direction. Treating the granted spells as a resource, I and the army would of course do our best to learn what Abadar considers to be acceptable use and stay within those lines, even apart from any additional future treaties with Abadar or goodwill we want to incur."

"If I were to propose a contract - and I'm surprised there isn't a range of standard existing contracts for this case - then I could formalize the above. I could even specify that Abadar will not harm or punish me or Germania due to misuse of the granted magic in any way other than withdrawing it. But I don't want to be or appear adversarial, or a maximalist negotiator. A contract is normally drafted by both sides, and I can't fairly propose one without knowing what Abadar's interests are and how to represent them." Abadar has more negotiating power than Tanya and she doesn't really know what he's aiming for, so the best use of her own leverage might be to convince him to advance Tanya's interests directly like Iomedae did. (Iomedae is clearly a very accomplished and unusual person who has led a long and interesting life!) "Besides, our immediate need for the spells is to create value here and now by contacting Germania; there's no particular reason to think it would matter nearly as much through the rest of my life, which is when the obligations would apply."

"Could you or someone else act as Abadar's negotiator in proposing or accepting a draft contract?" She should get Nazir to take as much responsibility as possible. That's a good general rule, it's not even specific to this negotiation.

"'Job' is probably the wrong word for it," he muses. There's a more direct way of phrasing it, but Cultural Adaptation informs him that it would only make Tanya even more confused, so he'll try to describe the thing directly without getting bogged down in terminology.

"Gift is more apt, and partnership is more apt still, but the direction of causality you are seeing is reversed. The intention is not to sway people to the project of civilization by dangling the offer of more power over their head, it is to find the people already committed to the project of civilization and give them more power. Whether you came by this philosophy on your own or learned of it from others, the point is that you are of your own volition pushing the world in a direction that Abadar prefers – giving you the ability to call home only lets you push harder. Incidentally advancing your other goals with that power is a perk, that's all. If that sounds like an inefficient way to manage affairs, you're not wrong. The endpoint of using extremely sophisticated predictions and subtle interventions to steer the trajectory of history is aggressive assassination and hostile manipulation. The intervention treaty exists to solve the dilemma of being disadvantaged by refusing to participate in counterproductive skulduggery, though to what degree it actually accomplishes this is an open question. That's part of why the promise to Iomedae was so unusual – ordinarily one would assume that between the tacit guarantee of alignment and the lack of standing orders that being empowered were solely to one's benefit, but she wanted further confirmation that it was not part of a complicated plot whereby being able to fight in the Shining Crusade, and all of the other things she was predictably going to do afterwards, was not secretly in service of some task she would regret enabling. But, ah, hopefully the commonplace understanding makes sense? Shelyn only chooses pacifists, so all Shelynites are predictably pacifist, and can only be made to serve in non-combat roles because they are the type of person to be chosen by Shelyn and not because Shelyn has ordered them to be conscientious objectors, for a more clear-cut example.

"If you think the formality of representing Germania is unavoidable… Khemet does wield his power on behalf of the state rather than his own person, but he was already at the second circle when he became the pharaoh and had been for some time. And I believe Iomedae was already chosen as well when she made that bargain? I can't think of any examples of people who wanted a contract to begin with, because they were already chosen before making a more formal arrangement with specific performance criteria. There's no shame in quitting, and being renounced is only stigmatized because it's indicative of a serious character flaw; there are no other associated penalties. Having said that, I am happy to help you draft a contract! Did you have any other concerns about the role, apart from Abadar's interests in it?"

Empowering whoever is already aligned with your goals is a reasonable strategy. It incentivizes people to serve those goals in return for having power to use for personal benefit. It's not a standing open contract: supply is limited and power is granted to those who most promote Abadar's goals. It's an inducement prize, creating a market in innovative solutions for the project of advancing civilization.

If Tanya only knew for certain what Abadar (and Nazir) mean by those words!

"I hadn't realized quitting was possible. I thought it cost Abadar to withdraw the spells granted? Although, I suppose publicly committing to not use them anymore would effectively constitute quitting... In that case I can accept, on behalf of Germania and for the limited cause of establishing contact and promoting peaceful relations between our worlds, with the intention of quitting in case of an irresolvable conflict of interest or renegotiating for continued use once this goal is achieved, by which time I may come to better understand Abadar. Does that work?"

"It has an associated cost, but it's one Abadar will pay if you ask him to. The best explanation I have ever heard for why, since it doesn't leak information, is… as you advance as a mage in a particular tradition, whichever circle you eventually reach is as much a property of you as it is of your patron. If you reach the sixth circle and quit, you are still a sixth-circle mage, you just have no source of spells. A different patron can then partner with you at that level using the same expenditure it ordinarily takes to bring a novice up to first. The theory goes that a tax on 'quitting' helps to stop anyone with a high degree of power and correspondingly restrictive intervention commitments from subsidizing the development of allies with less power but greater freedom with cheap mages."

It's only a theory, but the existence of a tax on indirect coordination between mutually trustworthy gods sounds an awful lot like a clause written into the Compact of Creation by the forces of Chaos. The bastards.

As for the proposal: "On behalf of Germania, but as a citizen under extraordinary circumstances rather than a statesman… establishing contact, promoting peaceful relations… preemptive discussion of potential conflicts is good… if you plan to renegotiate in the future I would specify whether it's because you want better comprehension of the philosophy underpinning the whole enterprise before proceeding or if you're proposing milestone payments tied to deliverables… otherwise that all sounds very measured and reasonable."

A no-poach agreement between the alghollthu is a strong incentive to bind people to their lifelong employer, which matches the way they divide Golarion's countries between them and run them under different policies. Like any anticompetitive pact, it gives them more negotiating power overall while foregoing mutual benefits in many individual cases. This is a sensible policy if they value stability and predictability more than overall growth.

"Our immediate objective is to enable communications and that doesn't require me to be of a high circle, so that's exactly the kind of consideration I'd like to put off. Any future renegotiation would be to ensure the relationship continues to benefit our mutual interests; I simply want an amicable exit clause in case I learn something that causes me to reconsider or Germania makes other demands of me. If neither happens, Abadar can keep granting me magic without any new terms."

"Then there should be no issues. Here's how it will work: you need to find a comfortable position you can maintain for an extended period of time while focusing on everything we just discussed in enough detail to make it legible to a telepathic observer, while also addressing him by name. I will ask Abadar to reach out to you as soon as possible, but that could take anywhere from minutes to hours depending on his priorities and he'll have an easier time of identifying you if you're actively trying to signal him. Sitting in a chair, kneeling, standing, lying down, anything that's conducive to focus. Once you feel the connection – it's hard to describe but it's unmistakable once it happens – you should be good to go starting tomorrow morning. I'll have someone show you the basics of requesting spells and using wands, then we'll get on with the Scrying."

"Just to confirm, I thought Abadar can't - cheaply - tell me something directly over telepathy, so I will feel something but not receive any message? I hope it's really unmistakeable, then. ...I haven't ever needed to focus on a specific thought for several hours, I expect I'll slip up occasionally, how much of a problem would that be? Will he keep looking for me for a few minutes, or do I need to be thinking about the right thing at the moment when he checks? ...I'll write it up and sit looking at the paper, that will probably help, but I don't expect to keep up perfect concentration on my first try." Tanya has no experience with meditation and this doesn't sound quite like the kind she's heard about.

"You will notice. The standard advice is to spend this time contemplating the ways in which Abadar's portfolio of interests – trade, civilization, laws, wealth – are reflections of a single underlying… agglomerated concept. Using his name while reflecting on the subject is a good way to both catch his attention and demonstrate that you are a good candidate for the job. It shapes your mind into a form that is more easily visible to him. Unlikely to be necessary here, I will be indicating you myself, but it doesn't typically require the sort of intensive mental focus that monks practice while seeking perfection. If you notice you weren't thinking about your concerns immediately after being chosen, while your attention wanders, just reiterate them while he's still present with you."

What is the concept underlying these four things? An interview question after all, or just something applicants are expected to know at this point? If she's meant to relfect on it, though, it means she doesn't have to obsessively hold a single though in her nind for hours on end! That's simpler than she feared.

"Understood. I'll get comfortable and put my thoughts in order." If Nazir doesn't object, that means Tanya will leave briefly to fetch some light refreshments before settling into one of the comfy chairs in his office. A cup of coffee, and maybe some pastries? She isn't sure how long this might take and it's always better to be prepared. 

Nazir has no objections. He's going to go back to doing paperwork in silence while Tanya prays.

Tanya writes down the key points she needs to keep in mind. It's too terse to be a formal contract proposal, but it's gesturing in that direction.

From: Tanya von Degurechaff, officer of the Germanian Army, planet Earth. Not officially representing Germania.

To: Abadar, alghollthu patron of Osirion, planet Golarion

I request a grant of spells, which I will accept on behalf of Germania and use to facilitate contact between our worlds and nations, to enable peaceful relations to our mutual benefit. Cicerone Nazir has further details.

Once contact is firmly established, I will confirm terms for any continued or personal use. In the event of a conflict of interest, I will stop using the granted magic pending renegotiation.

She considers adding 'if you do not wish contact to be established, please don't frame it as my personal failure', but if Abadar isn't the kind of person to be considerate of her then asking for it won't help.

Now, while keeping that in mind, she also needs to think about the single concept underlying trade, civilization, laws and wealth.

All of them are good things, and all of them are mutually reinforcing. So are some others not on the list, most obviously technology(*). Well, Abadar isn't interested in the unlimited development of technology on Golarion. But what about, say, governance, civil rights, education and other things pertaining to human capital? You could say they fall under civilization, but then so do laws.

'Civilization' in Osirian means taming new lands. Going out into the wilds and making them fit for habitation: building cities, establishing institutions, making people comfortable. (Tanya has no idea how this works when the wilds are a desert but apparently not all of the riverbank is farmed yet?) Civilization clearly needs laws and governance, and it doesn't strictly need wealth or trade but they are pretty inevitable results. So why are trade, laws and wealth listed separately, but not (say) agriculture?

She could ask Nazir, but he explicitly said she's meant to contemplate the question for the duration. She gnaws on this conundrum fruitlessly for a while.

(*) Broadly construed, including magic.

Alright, put that aside for the moment. Why those concerns at all? What's the single thing that unifies them but not other things like agriculture (your city needs to eat) or technology (you need to know how to build it) or... entertainment, say, luxury, everything people spend their money on beyond subsistence? Maybe that's counted as wealth; it's easy to argue that any of these things is either very narrow or very broad, except possibly trade. But then, you could also argue that the object of trade is wealth. And you can't get far without specialization, which is a form of exchange of value even if it isn't formal, so really trade is everywhere.

...anyway. What's common to these four things? How could you express them with a single concept? (Ignoring for the moment the obvious question of why, if you could do that, you would list four things to begin with.)

Can one of them substitute for another? Wealth and trade are linked. Wealth is, arguably, value-to-you as enabled by trade, and trade exists to create wealth. As a single concept, they are - cooperation with specialization? Value through cooperation? Mutually beneficial cooperation? ...ah. Commerce is the word she was looking for.

Then, what links commerce with laws? Well, commerce needs good and well-enforced laws to flourish, but so does approximately everything else. In the specific context of commerce, laws are necessary to build trust and reduce risk. But in the context of, say, civilization, laws are necessary to incentivize the right behaviors, solve tragedies of the commons and encode Schelling points. Those things don't reduce to commerce. So what's the more general concept that unifies commerce with all the other reasons to have laws?

Commerce is self-interested behavior that arises naturally; you don't need to pass laws to create it, only to enable it. Indeed, legally mandated exchange is not commerce in the free-market sense of the word. That's not to say legally mandated exchange should never happen; taxation and eminent domain laws both serve the public good. And what about money? It's a foundational concept which isn't obviously included in any item on the list, but neither is any kind of mathematics and it's not as if you can do without that, either.

If you conceive of laws as collective agreements chosen by the community, then they are a kind of trade. Yes, that feels like she's on the right track. The trade is the act of passing a law; the law itself is the artifact, like something you buy at market. In which case, the common idea behind commerce and laws is simply - deals. Mutually beneficial deals, freely entered, within some larger framework like a constitution or contract law or the free market. (Osirion isn't a republic and enslaves all its women - never mind, that's not even compatible with 'trade' and 'wealth', so let's conveniently ignore it for the duration of this thought-exercise being read by Abadar.)

Finally, what unites deals-under-a-framework with civilization? Civilization is something people want and will make deals to achieve. And it's a framework or collection of frameworks for living and making deals in. Possibly a specific one, magically knowing Osirian doesn't make her a walking encyclopaedic dictionary, but that's the most obvious quality of civilization - and it's also the end result of people living in that framework, making deals, passing laws, trading and growing their wealth. Civilization is what you get at the other end. Civilization is human sapient flourishing.

It's hard to give a name to the unifying concept, which is both a process and its result and so much of its structure. Some famous philosophers gave up and simply called it the Good. Tanya will call it - 

Community rationality sanity wisdom enlightenment the Way cooperative flourishing.

Humans are a social species. It's only together that they amount to anything, and the more they cooperate the more they can build. Abadar must think so, as well.

The lives of mortals are small and confusing and rarely consequential, from the perspective of a god. To inspect them individually is to make a study of the ants rather than the ant colony. It is the rare mortal that swims against the tide of fate, both able and willing to advance the world-state in a desirable direction along the relevant axis if given the slightest nudge. Every moment of consideration spared for the supplicants is attention that could have been spent elsewhere – often to greater effect, which is why most prayers go not just unanswered but unheard.

This is part of why clerics pray for spells at dawn. The fragment of the god that hears and replies need only do so at a predictable time, reading the thoughts of the faithful at regular intervals like a long-exposure photograph of the planet's surface. Granting spells and channels to a first-circle cleric takes no more conscious effort than a vertebrate needs to continue breathing.

But for clerics, an advancement in rank is more than a simple investiture of more power. Senior clerics have greater insight into their god's portfolio, and a measure of the trust needed to represent Their interests on the Material Plane. Of the 4,294,967,296 servants Abadar is permitted to retain in this cluster of Creation, only 4,194,304 may be of the fifth circle or higher. Clerics entrusted with the powers of life and death produce status reports with a marginally less abysmal signal-to-noise ratio, which means that when one of them tries fervently to communicate something to Him the balance of probability shifts in the direction of at least hearing him out.

So, what is Hej Nazir praying about?

Nazir has been a cleric for so long that the concepts he uses in prayer have worn grooves into his train of thought. He has prayed for Bless and Protection From Chaos so many times that they are no longer strings but formless data, composite scenes of triumph and defeat from the past, wordless anticipation of challenges in the future. He no longer relates his challenges to Abadar out of need for guidance or to bounce ideas off a silent conversational partner but simply to keep Him appraised of the situation.

This morning is different. Nazir is thinking about a SPECIFIC PERSON who is GEOGRAPHICALLY QUITE CLOSE TO HIS LOCATION. She has a NAME and a SPECIES and some PERSONALITY TRAITS, which he has carefully desegregated from his gestalt impression in case any of them are more or less distinguishing on their own. She is also EXTRAPLANAR, that part is especially important because it means she has a HOME COUNTRY with which they would like to ESTABLISH CONTACT.

For this purpose, Nazir thinks as clearly as he can, it would be very useful if she were a CLERIC. She is already very ABADAR-INCLINED, which may be a feature of the plane she hails from. Installing this capacity would SERVE ABADAR WELL by enabling them to reach her CIVILIZATION which is clearly quite LAWFUL and, according to her, may have a great deal of UNTAPPED CONSUMER SURPLUS. In order to access the MUTUAL GAINS FROM TRADE in a timely fashion she will need to BECOME A CLERIC, which is why he has advised her to RENDER HERSELF VISIBLE to Him for the specific purpose of ORDAINMENT in the near future, ideally VERY SOON PLEASE.

This is a HIGH VALUE PROPOSITION, in case that wasn't clear.

Trying to interpret this prayer is like listening to a beloved friend with Broca's aphasia try to explain what they want to eat for dinner. There are only so many possible dimensions to the subject matter, and yet it's always a struggle to follow along. It sounds like there is a new candidate acolyte in Sothis that Nazir wants to intervene for, citing reasons beyond her suitability. 'Why' is not entirely clear, but He trusts Nazir's judgement in matters such as these; and it does sound important, from the perspective of the ant as it surveys the anthill.

Abadar will turn His gaze towards Tanya von Degurechaff.

… it is not orthodox theology, to describe Abadar as the god of cooperative flourishing. There are other gods whose claim to that title is much stronger than His. It takes a very particular kind of person to ascribe that as the trait-of-Abadar rather than the trait-of-Erastil or the trait-of-Torag, to point directly to the meta-institution of having institutions as the true expression of The Good. This petitioner conceives of herself as living inside a world where entertainment is a form of wealth and specialization is a form of trade. The assumptions she makes about how agents relate to one another, shaping their actions to maximize reward and minimize punishment, run deeper than her conscious thought, in ruts that Abadar can trace as easily as He can feel a cleric's request for Divine Favor.

He can even, just barely, make out the form and function of the instrument she means to use between them. It lacks even the most rudimentary formal specification of the agreements made between proper gods, but mortal commerce is Abadar's domain. This too is a highly unorthodox view of clerichood – but it's a self-aware one, made with appropriate caveats and a commitment to gracefully unwind the deal if necessary.

That is more than enough for Abadar! Gently (very gently, for this mind bears the hallmarks of rough handling in the past), Abadar will bestow His first circle. He will be so gentle about it. The gentlest.

Having done so, He sends out some notifications, sets a reminder to reward Nazir appropriately for brokering this excellent deal at the next opportunity for it, and allows this fragment of His attention to move on to other matters.

Tanya's contemplations are interrupted by spontaneously becoming a Cleric 1 (Abadar). It feels like being herself, physically; but also her soul set loose, the fragment of her after she died, bodiless and alone before the throne of a being that called itself God. It feels like straining for enlightenment, only for the master to speak the turning words and throw open her mind to understanding in one violent burst. It feels like coming home.

A pair of burning silver arcs appear in the air over her head.

That's not normal telepathy!!! Which she was warned about, of course, but it's still a shock in the moment; Tanya jumps to her feet reflexively.