"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.

Amazing. It sounds like some insane mixture of Pan and Eagle's Empyrean and the Blue Kingdom's bureaucracy, foreign and exotic and full of dream logic and alien rules and strange peoples.

She wonders how they'd get along with scrive-spinsters, the sixty foot wooden animated librarian-statues.

...With hypothetical non-insane scrive-spinsters whose celestial library was never destroyed in the first place.

She wonders what they'd make of Bronzewood, that wonder material found growing by the acre in the jungles in the Reach. As far as she knows the trees are not sentient.

What's the deal with this odd emphasis on order, chaos, good and evil? Well, that's something she can ask Griffie when his(?) shift's done. Or maybe Bar has an explanation?

Bar does have an explanation! According to Quintessence Made Simple, when people do things, they produce quintessence linked to their actions: rice-ness from farming the stuff, compassion for community when sharing it with members of the community in need, legible governance when they honestly pay taxes with it, profit-seeking and xenophobia when they overcharge foreigners for it, et cetera, to go with one example that's familiar to many. And then the quintessence groups up with more like itself, and to places it's naturally drawn to, and that's probably where gods and similar powers come from, and they use it to form various creatures. And forces like compassion-for-community and hospitality-to-strangers and collective-truthseeking and such all tend to join up and support each other forming the Upper Planes, which hosts the Good gods, while forces for ordered tyranny are essentially all under Asmodeus, and pure Law and Coordination is less hierarchical but does all join together to form Axis. "Evil" thus ends up referring to the factions the Upper Planes oppose, and the Upper Planes generally opposes factions because they're interested in mass murder or torture or both. It does form a fairly natural quintessence category it's possible to create a Protection spell against. The Lawful components of the Upper Planes form Heaven and, due to their cooperativeness, do not oppose the Chaotic components of the Upper Planes (called Elysium), but otherwise it's a decent approximation to say that Heaven, Axis, and Asmodeus (and his realm Hell) oppose Chaotic quintessence factions, who are known for making things very disorderly.

Well that is... Something. It probably makes perfect sense to someone smarter than her, but it looks like the main point is that good and evil and orderliness and chaos can be semi-objectively measured where Griffie's from. It sure does seem plenty technical and consistent. She'd say that the Judgements are super duper Lawful, and obviously the anarchists and the darkness are Chaotic.

Hmm. What next...

What's next is that Griffie exits the infirmary and waves to Lenora before taking a seat near her and ordering a recommendation from Bar, which is some kind of glowing liquid in a reflectively-walled metal cup.

"Hiya. I did some reading. Have you got a believable way I can check your lawness and goodness? I'm curious about mine too if that's something that you can tell when I'm pretty sure I don't run on quintessence. Also I realized I never got your name, I'm Lenora Lovejoy."

"Nice to meet you, Lenora, I'm Griffie. It takes magic to inspect quintessence emissions and they're fakeable, you'd really just need to look at my history and such. If you want I could make guesses about yours based on history too, but even if you did emit quintessence I wouldn't be in a good position to measure it."

"Let's skip that, mostly idle curiosity. You seem positively referenced and you're part of a charity hospital group that Bar says is legitimate, so that's probably good enough for me once I have a bit more time to unwind in here, medically speaking. We could swap stories, though."