"It's fine, people assuming a situation is more urgent than it is is a really common cause of grumpiness. Enjoy your beer." Griffie heads back to the infirmary.

Not very long later from Griffie's perspective, she knocks on the door to the infirmary in a new, clean uniform. Her soul is still pretty much the same. Slightly more settled, maybe.

"Hail the medic! I'd like to talk some before we get to healing if that's amenable to you, [polite word for a person whose preferred form of address you don't know]!"

"Sure, I can do talking."

"So where I'm from souls are... Ehhhh. Tricky business. They can be extracted, merged, burned. Fairly nasty stuff. And they're sort of not fundamental to a person? You can lose or sell yours and still be recognizable as the same person. Or have it radically altered and the same. Sometimes, at least. Some intelligent species don't have souls, just brains, and generally the bigger your soul is the more powerful you are. And of course there's lots and lots of non-humans most of whom have souls, brighter or better-crafted ones than ours, all the way up to the [stars/gods]."

"…okay. It sounds like the thing you're calling the 'soul' and that I'm seeing is … not how I would want things to translate … though really that's my native languages' faults for not having good enough case coverage. In my world, a body with a brain and no soul is just totally inert, and souls are the site of personal identity, it sort of sounds like yours are just … some kind of organ that does things but not personal identity things? And souls can be extracted and merged and burned in my world too, I have a merger of a bunch of not-really-soul-level nature spirits as part of mine, nature spirits are fluid enough that they don't mind."

"That sounds... Accurate, probably? Souls do also seem to be partly you, like, I almost get the impression that the brain has some of a person and the soul - hmm, loanword - the 'aether' that we call souls has the rest, depending on the person. You hear stories of like a body and aether fighting each other for control, or of parasitic aether-replacements, or of parasitic body-controllers being fought off by your own aether, sometimes. I'm not exactly an immaterial scientist though, I just know the stories. My best skills have always been fighting things and common sense."

"Fighting things and common sense are pretty good, I normally do those but right now I've been taking a long break from the fighting because Bar would rather I work here than Security. If you're good at nonlethally getting people into cells without being on-call for that disrupting your recovery you might be able to stay here a while just working Security, though. And loanwords are good, you can call mine a positive-energy-soul if that works."

"Yeah, I take Security shifts sometimes." Sigh. "I'm sort of wondering how much of a mess your world is compared to mine. I don't get Milliways that often, but... Hmm, how to put it... The High Wilderness is complicated in ways that a lot of other peoples' worlds don't seem to be, I guess."

"There's a lot of weird stuff in my world, some of which isn't secret. Of the nonsecret things … there's an ongoing war between the Upper Planes and some evil divine factions, namely Asmodeus, Charon, and the Abyss. Ah, none of our gods are stars that I know of. Anyway, of these, Charon seems most concerning, he wants to kill everyone, he's the cause of the thing where everyone in my world ages and with some exceptions dies of it, and he seems to be escalating a lot in his plans. I'm staying in here until I get strong enough to fight him and the other evil gods, because if I come out of here with an advantage that isn't enough to win I will definitely be attacked and lose. And I can stay in here forever because someone else in the infirmary was able to stop my soul from aging, and I can fix my body, and I can work here."

"Oof. The Judgements - stars - that's another disambiguating name since I'm not totally sure these are the same kinds of things - stay far away from each other and only ever come into conflict by proxy, as far as I know. And from what I'm getting about 'planes' I'm pretty sure we don't actually have more than one. The darkness between the stars is either freezing cold or primordial chaos. And the Judgements are also responsible for aging, the old bastards. Not that we little people can't murder each other either, but at least it's not dispassionate harvest."

"The gods in my world normally try to keep themselves to proxy conflicts, but things are heating up again. And they keep to proxy conflicts because the first godwar shattered time, destroyed some concepts, et cetera. We have several planes, but we don't go into the darkness between the stars, do you? And … the Upper Planes Alliance is an alliance of gods and of mortals, they take our advice and work to protect us, and I'd rather have a godwar than have the gods all agree on wanting everyone but them to die. I suppose I look pretty pro-godwar from here, plotting to start and finish one, but I understand that it's a really serious cost, just … if I were you I'd consider trying to start one anyway."

"I'm sure somebody does, there's a lot of people out there, but the darkness between the stars is pretty damned inhospitable. As for god-wars... That's so far above my pay grade I could be exploded just for thinking about it, to mangle a metaphor. Even with my soul so..." She grimaces. "Murgh. It seems probably bad for my health to get involved in that, you know? It might sound selfish but if I die on some crusade there's nobody to protect convoys and hunt down pirates and grave robbers and all the other nasties. I kept trying to find great quests in my youth, and they kept turning into massive disasters. And- It's important, I get it, but... I've seen two or arguably three human wars and just those contained such a vast amount of hate and suffering and pointless atrocities. To take that to the kinds of power the higher beings use... Don't think messing with the affairs of the stars is likely to do anyone any favors in the long run, without a massive game changer, the kind my time in Milliways keeps not giving me."

"Is 'exploded for thinking about it' part of the metaphor, because if not Bar might be able to get you something to cause short-term memory loss if you ask her right now."

"Mostly a metaphor. I know I've forgotten and made unthinkable something. But not what it is, obviously."

"…alright then. I'm glad you don't have to wipe your memories of this conversation too. I'm not going to call you selfish for working within your capabilities, it's good to know your limits, and war is awful. If we can patch whatever causes you to age, though, maybe you can stay here long enough to get a massive game-changer, by working Security shifts?"

"The world is broken and we live in the cracks! Gotta make the best of it, and maybe make things a little better. And I do have ways around aging, though they're expensive to run. As for some soul tinkering, maybe maybe. I'm sort of trying to feel you out with this conversation, you know. Kind of obvious but, yeah."

"Sure is broken, alright, just gotta go forward from there. And you can also just go ahead and ask me a bunch of personal questions if that helps, there's some secret information I won't share but I don't think any of it is really relevant to my personal character or trustworthiness as a healer."

"Geez, now all I'm thinking of is simplistic surface-level philosophical questions you see fancy college people debate at fancy college parties. What is beauty. Would you murder one person to save ten. I've found a great way to get to know someone is to swap stories or nerd out at each other about something each of us is interested in... Though I also sort of feel the professional context is a bit awkward here, since I'm pretty friendly by default and, well," she gestures around the infirmary vaguely. "You get off shift eventually, right? Maybe I should just go sit by Bar until then. Then again, professional conduct is more relevant to soul doctoring than personal bond or whatever... I'm rambling on you. Sorry 'bout that. I'll get out of your face for a while."

"Yeah, I'll be off-shift soonish. See you at Bar!"

She wanders around outside for a while. Does her stretches and exercises.

Comes back in and asks Bar for an English breakfast and some light reading about Griffie, if any's to be had. She has newspaper articles about her, at least, so there's probably something.

Bar is happy to offer a good English breakfast! Bar can offer some documents thanking the Resolute Reclaimers (an adventuring team including Griffie) for rescuing multiple small towns as well as their "very generous donation to New Redwoodbury Friends of Trees for urban health", and a note reading "If you're wondering where I am now, I'm a member of a mortal adventuring team, the Resolute Reclaimers! They helped uncover some really bad stuff Curdime was doing and are otherwise doing good stuff, and I wanted to do something heroic, so I'm joining them! —Liel, transcribed by her sister Felice the Joy of Sharing Books". Griffie's also mentioned in the Healing Hands records of volunteers as soaring high in the ranks on correct disease diagnosis ever since ey got a pair of magic disease-screening glasses. Would Lenora like anything heavier than this?

Yep, good press in newspaper clippings... Ish. She checks to make sure the healing hands is a charity hospital or whatever and asks for something about Friends of Trees.

Healing Hands is a medical charity, though they often get patients in and out without them ever seeing a hospital bed. Friends of Trees is an organization of people who are friends with the gigantic sapient trees that in the Temda region who allow people to hollow out and live in their cores because they like hosting cities. They take the term 'urban health' very literally.

Wow cool! It's like Traitor's Wood except in literally almost every way!

She gets distracted for a while reading about tree cities.

You might think that tree cities would oppose wood products, but Temda trees actually need to get rid of wood to have apartments, so the region is a net exporter of wood.

As for the method of organization … it's not anarchic, but it is decentralized. Neighbors will often hire different defense organizations which enforce different restrictions on their members, and defense organizations are often linked to guilds and fraternal orders and such. Temda is one of the rare regions where paladins (champions of the lawful sort of Goodness) and demon cultists (practitioners of disorderly Evil) can openly live side-by-side without being in a state of total warfare.

Unlike some cities, the landowners in Temda are the trees, and they are very much in favor of there being more of their kind of trees. Rent prices are thus pretty low.

Temda cities use engineered plants for things. The trees themselves have an incredibly powerful circulatory system that gets used to provide apartments with running water as needed, as well as operate hydraulic elevators. They also choose to host parasitic/symbiotic bioluminescent plants that draw on the host tree's sugars to provide indoor lighting, though it has a distinctive yellowish hue. Sewage is handled via a pitcher-plant-like system (of which lesser versions even exist in the wild) which even offers toilet flushing, but other forms of garbage cannot be flushed and must be removed manually. Perhaps less excitingly, the trees also host breadfruit grafts and similar.

Temda can be pretty confusing to interact with, especially for outsiders, who may make lethal mistakes! Civilized people will adhere to the rule of three questions and let you ask three questions before they, say, retaliate if you behave in a socially inappropriate manner. It is advisable to have the first question be "What do I need to know for talking to you?" or similar. Norms vary wildly between groups within the same small geographic area, and the rule of three questions is intended to allow you to either discern those norms or notice you've failed to back off. Many reputation-tracking organizations exist. Spark Connections distributes accurate information about other organizations people might be interested, Reliable Markets makes a few guarantees whose absence gestures at the presence of really, really weird market systems, et cetera. Additionally, multiple 'path' organizations exist which provide information on safely navigating a city, implying that members of different factions may experience a physically different set of connections between locations while within the same city.