"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."

"Stories are cool! Unlike other people who check on me, you seem like you haven't read the really long report about the Rhoswen incident, so I can tell you the story of it instead."

"So, we got invited to someone's wedding because we rescued his sister from slavers. He was actually a retired adventurer, and said he'd give us job advice if we attended, so we did, it was a good offer."

"We went to the wedding. There is a tradition in the region, called the Box Social, of auctioning off desserts the bridesmaids made. The dessert comes with an opportunity to eat it in the presence of the bridesmaid, and the proceeds go to the couple. I decided to attend it because human courtship rituals are interesting. Several rounds of this went smoothly, with the winning bid being up to 10 gold. But when it was time to bid on the gnome bridesmaid's dessert, a partially-bleached male gnome druid – ah, gnomes don't just age, they also have a secondary soul decay issue caused by extreme boredom and such that makes them lose their color – started bidding really highly for it, the bridesmaid looked uncomfortable, I messaged her and she said he was an unwelcome admirer, so I, uh, got into a bidding war with the male gnome and ended up outbidding his life savings. I could afford it but it was kind of annoying? And then afterwards I talked to her on the 'date' – I don't date people who it'd be easy to use as hostages against me and I don't eat most foods and I wasn't otherwise attracted either – about her unwanted admirer, and he seemed to be going kind of insane, but before we could go grab him he ran off into the woods. We talked things over with the couple to be married, and while we were concerned we decided to go ahead with the wedding anyway."

"And then the mad gnome druid attacked the wedding, and we fought him off and won, but not before some weird fog he said we would choke on showed up as well as some spriggans. And I took the warning about the fog overly literally and had people take some crude anti-chemical-weapons precautions, but actually it was an effect of our area being disconnected from the rest of the world and getting stuck in the seal of Rhoswen's realm, which was partially unsealing, because the mad gnome druid had been tricked into unsealing it. So we couldn't call the Upper Planes or Axis about the incident because the same force that was supposed to be trapping Rhoswen was now trapping us with her."

"Ah, there was a thing that was a bit funny, a guest's culture had a tradition of wearing war paint to weddings to indicate willingness to defend the wedding from attackers, and he did not actually expect this to come up! He sure defended the wedding honorably, though."

"Anyway, we did some searching for information, we fought and captured a group of Rhoswen's minions and they turned out to predate the Sealed War of Aiquzall and thus all of known history, it was really interesting and distracting from our original interrogation plans but we, uh, couldn't really get them to give us constructive answers to much stuff, they were very loyal. We found someone who had information but was currently possessed and got the possessor out, we got more information about Rhoswen, we went and retrieved the 'wardstones' that needed to be reassembled in Rhoswen's realm to keep her contained. During this we had another encounter with the mad druid, he had to fight us because Rhoswen told him to and she's really scary but he seemed not thrilled about it."

"Anyway, we and a team broke into Rhoswen's realm, and the mad druid attacked us again, but we were able to talk him into surrendering and going home. He, uh, thought we'd killed some of his Awakened bee swarms, uh, bee swarms that were people and very loyal to him and that he'd attacked the wedding with, and he was really relieved to hear that we'd just disoriented them a lot instead, we try to go for nonlethal attacks whenever possible. So he gave us information useful for getting into Rhoswen's palace. Which we followed, and we were kind of bad at stealth in her castle. But we got caught by the court artist Kenchlo, and the court artist was sufficiently into the thing where actual people who weren't just Rhoswen's crude creations genuinely liked his art, and he said he wouldn't report us and that if we lost to Rhoswen we should tell her he wanted to keep us. Which would, uh, have probably been a significant favor, Rhoswen is normally quite cruel to her enemies. We actually did manage to beat Rhoswen in a fight, though it was quite difficult, and get her resealed, and then we raided her palace for everything valuable-looking and also brought the helpful artist back as well as a bunch of her prisoners who she kept shapeshifted into nonsapient birds."

"And we got out of Rhoswen's realm, and we were like 'yay, we have books and a Kenchlo and such and we saved the day, now we'll wait around until we can call the Upper Planes, and scan some books and hang around and recover and such'. But actually, a bunch of daemons, omnicidal creatures formed from deaths, were hanging around in the area the whole time and ambushed us. They tried to edit our memories and our books and kill everyone but us who had really good information about the incident and stealthily curse the birds' souls. But we tried really hard to hold them off, and had the amazingly good luck of summoning a Jubjub Bird to defend us when normally our summoning spells would not have been powerful enough, and their strongest fighter focused entirely on Kenchlo and then left with Kenchlo's soul instead of sticking around to kill us all. Thus, they managed to kill only one of the people they wanted to kill for having too much information, though Kenchlo was in fact by far the most useful information source, and edit our books not as much, and it was easier for us to figure out what they did to the birds. Specifically, they'd cursed the birds with aging, to hide that before the Sealed War, aging didn't happen to everyone."

"And then we investigated the incident more, and realized that there were a lot of suspicious death-themed coincidences setting up the whole mess, and we had the Jubjub Bird and ourselves and such guard people because some of the daemons had gotten away and might come back, and we rushed really hard to make a report to the Upper Planes as soon as the seal was down enough for that, and we managed it. And then eventually there was a big hearing, which Bar apparently has a copy of the report of, but this was the exciting part."

"That really does sound adventuresome. There's lots of stuff I could ask for expansions on in there - I don't think those bee swarms are going to be much like Chorister Bees but I still had the thought - I think I'll reply with a story of my own to set the conversation, one from the early... Well, earlier days of my story."

"So some basic background. Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God - they insist there's just the one - of the far too many titles, once ruled a kingdom on the Surface of the Earth. She sold London to the Echo Bazaar, and they took it underneath to the sunless sea, a place of far more chaos than the Surface, though not quite the same chaos you know. There's quite a bit of history after that, but she eventually decided they'd reneged on her deal and gathered the finest occultists of the Sunless Sea, opened up the magic gate to the celestial heavens and declared the place she found British, renaming it Albion in the finest imperial tradition."

"The High Wilderness is the place she found. I don't really understand the logic of it, but it's sort of half a different plane and half not, working under rules only the stars know. There's air and floating islands of stone and vegetation and debris, but the light of distant stars is baleful, it risks insanity and mutation unfiltered. Thus we travel in flying steam locomotives lined with stained glass, pushing through the sky and keeping the cold at bay with the endless cheap coal Hell exports, using gunpowder and steel to fight the hostile things living in the sky. But of course Albion is not the only center of civilization. The piece of the High Wilderness we found was devoid of civilization but not life, and by now all the colonies Albion have declared their independence. Following so far?"

Griffie writes down "ask about: chorister bees, hell exports coal?" and then nods.

"When I was young and stupid, I signed up for the Navy. Eventually I figured out that we were the bad guys and deserted and while I could have gone and joined up with the Tackety independence movement, instead I kind of just existed miserably in a big city for a while. Eventually, though, an old friend met me in a bar and asked a lot of probing questions about my views on the Establishment. I said they were cruel rent-seeking capitalists but a war would just hurt everyone more, and that the Tacketies were cruel firebrands resorting to violence out of fear. I said I'd rather fight unambiguous monsters and he said, well, you're in luck because I'm going to Hybras and I need a good gunner."

"Hybras is... A thoroughly unpleasant place. A small outpost deep within entire section of sky utterly overrun with fungi of various kinds, where the light of the stars is blotted out by clouds of spores and any landing is made on suspiciously squishy ground. The kind of place you don't leave the ship without a Sky-Suit on and a damned good reason. It was a week's journey to get to the region at all. Sky-sailing gets almost hypnotic after a while when it's just your duties and mealtimes and watches over and over. At the best of times it's long periods of busywork punctuated by occasional bouts of sheer terror. In worse times replace the busywork with mounting dread and anxiety. Anyway..." She fidgets a bit.

"I had never been in the fungal wastes before. I was just glad we were in a nice sealed locomotive and Captain Wheeler had sprung for a thing that mounted the air intakes straight to the furnace, so anything trying to get in was burnt up. But watch duty was still nerve-wracking, because almost everything looked unfamiliar and potentially threatening. I must have called in half a dozen false alarms - bubbling regions that it turns out don't explode or anything, formations that are actually just harmless hallucinations - magic or something - suspiciously wobbling spines. So on. But I'm very glad Wheeler runs a tight, disciplined crew, because when I called in 'fuck I dunno, a bunch of cantankeri fused together or something'... They didn't believe me, but we went to battle stations anyway."

"It was a horrible thing, cantankeri aren't very smart but they're not animals, and the fungus had... Controlled them or something. That was a nasty fight. We kept having to maneuver hard to dodge the globs of acid it was spitting at us, and we went through something like two thirds of our ammunition before it finally destabilized and exploded. And then... AND THEN...!" She smiles and shakes her head. "Cook tried to send me out to gather up some of it! Absolutely insisted that it was edible. We all refused, of course. We did paw through the mess for salvage, but there wasn't much, just some rusty metal."

"Good story. Good for you for not working for bad people, it can be very hard to notice that and quit and I congratulate you for doing so. And yeah, it's easier when you're fighting unambiguous monsters. Or you have really, really good nonlethal weapons. Or both."

Griffie pauses. "Actually, you have non-brain souls, if you're up for it I should try punching you while using my handflowers of merciful fists and you should tell me whether it makes you feel a bit exhausted or doesn't feel like anything, and if it does I should get you the blueprints to see if anyone in your world can use those. Anyway, what are Chorister Bees, and what's your world's Hell like?"

"Thanks! It's pretty nostalgic, remembering that far back. Chorister Bees are dog-sized bees that fly around making hypnotic songs that sound kind of like church hymns and some say are beautiful and sublime with their wings. They make a very valuable mind and voice altering honey, but they also eat people and especially brains, so kind of a bad set of neighbors to have. It's not really clear how peopley they are but, well, they act and get treated about the same as bands of pirates." She shrugs.

"Hell is the realm of the Devils. They're not... Aligned? Somewhat lawful and somewhat evil but they vary and we don't do the thing where those are distinct phenomena, really. They care about souls and almost nothing else. They wouldn't torture someone just because, only if it would somehow improve their soul, or cause them to give up their soul. There are Devil therapists and Devil charities. Rare, but. Almost nobody's allowed in Hell, almost nobody has clear information on the place and they work hard to keep it that way. Now, it's real hard to get confirmation on stuff like this, but what I think is... I think they build Laws in Hell. Whatever Laws they want. When you see a devil with an impossible weapon, a trumpet that sounds darkness or a music box that dissolves bones, it's because of whatever they do with souls. There's probably huge fields of infinitely regrowing coal somewhere in Hell, and, uh, honestly Albion and the Reach are both pretty dependent on cheap fuel by now. We don't really have great nonlethal options. As for weapons testing or whatever... Probably but later?"

"Those devils are really different from my world's! In my world, being known for those impossible weapons would be stereotypically Chaotic. It's … nice that they aren't made of evil and have the chance to do good work? The Awakened bee swarms were physically like regular bees, just collectively forming an intelligent being. And weapons testing can wait, no problem."

"Bar's translation can be curious at times in what it maps to what. Well, Milliways', not Bar's. Say, is getting dumped into different realms by an awakening Power's creepy fog a usual sort of thing to happen? There are a few places in the High Wilderness where space itself becomes your enemy like that, but they're pretty rare."

"This particular incident was in fact really unlikely to happen by chance, and definitely orchestrated by Charon. If you're asking if I expect that kind of thing to happen to me again … well, it feels annoyingly plausible."