She is a wizard, and so the back of her mind goes on analysing. The visitor is obviously nervous about magic. Very sensible. But to be so concerned about what would happen to her brain in particular - is this some kind of superstition? Heathens have those, they say. Or is it just about the augmentations? To be fair, she wouldn't like even temporarily losing Mysterious Thinking Augmentations if she had them, which she very much intends to! There's something she's missing here... 

But she is an elf, so what she actually says is "Oh. All right." It would never even occur to her to try to do anything other than look very hurt. That was rude. Even by alien standards. 

...By alien standards. 

Oh, that was silly of her. 

Because if you don't know Wizardry and you've never heard the Gospel the existence of souls isn't an obvious hypothesis, and maybe not even a true one, because you're from the Far Realms, and so from that point of view (and some Spells can't be prepared except into a mind that really truly contains the right point of view, it's one of the magical skills) the obvious candidate for the locus of your personality is-

"Oh! No wait we need to check to make sure you have a soul!"

"-We have the metaphysical concept of a soul, but I've never been able to observe one. Also, I don't want it to fuck up my Kerenzikov and I really don't know if it will, not without observing it happening to people significantly more than your demo earlier."

One of her long term projects was copying her brain into a blank. But that's something to be exquisitely slow and careful with.

"...If you've never been able to observe one then why do you know what one is? What's a 'Kerenzikov'? Also we're almost there but how concerned are you about whether or not you have a soul? I would be extremely concerned but I'm not from 'Earth' and I need to remember that! Will you be upset about magic to try to divine your soul the same way you were upset about telepathy?"

She seems to have completely moved on from what just happened, she's excited again. 

The Church (there's only one, or rather only one left) maintains a Chapel at Silvermoon. It's called a chapel because humility is a virtue, but it's the size of a cathedral and filled with gold and jewels because those are important. 

The exact spiritual standing of the Academy is not the sort of thing they talk about, thank you. Most people don't ask.

Their role here is to provide moral counsel, and very often physical healing, to the flock, just like it is everywhere. You are not, as a wizard, as special as you think you are, and it is important to be so reminded.

You can, and should, confess all your secrets under seal here. It's important for the health of your soul, and as a wizard you do need to worry about that, quite a lot, in fact. 

Its doors stand open before them. Marble, gilt icons, sweeping wings and stained-glass windows, the smell of incense. 

...All right, she really hopes they can go in and find a cleric so she can try the magic pills first, but even she isn't actually going to insist they prioritise that over making sure Dr Baika has an immortal soul, she's not that crazy yet. She looks at her expectantly. 

Sigh. "At some point I'm simply going to have to trust other people," she says it skeptically. "Telepathy was particularly alarming because I know brains and - well - I thought it was Enchantment, or a route to an Enchantment, or something like that. What is a soul, mechanically speaking? What properties does it have? What operations can be performed on it? What implications does the lack of one have? Anyway, no objection to observing my 'soul' without changing it."

How ostentatious. As a display of wealth, and therefore power, it makes the impression it's probably intended to. Just like Arasaka's cold black walls and real wood furniture. Whoever is in charge of this location, they are not to be trivially messed with.

"Those are excellent questions! Your soul is the rational part of you, the thing it's like something to be! It can exist independently of your body, that's why you're still you even if you're a pigeon. Operations on the soul would constitute Necromancy, which we do study but definitely definitely do not practise because it involves profaning the sacred and violating the natural order of the universe and that would be wrong. I would be surprised if you could be thinking and talking without a soul but then I was also surprised that - lots of tiny lightning elementals? I need to actually study your magic, I'm pretty sceptical of this translation - can do arithmetic! I don't know personally how to check but I know who to ask, does this mean you do urgently want to know?" Please say no, she wants to try the alien magic drugs. 

"Excuse me," says a mild elderly voice in tones more appropriate for 'fuck you'. The speaker seems to have appeared from behind them, and to be speaking formal standard Japanese. "That was not a meet question to ask the laity, still less for the laity to answer. Who are you, child?" He is old but sharp-eyed, and looking at Dr Baika extremely intensely. 

"...Dr. Baika Hasumi, PhD, MD, specialist in cybernetics. From very very far away, apparently." Bow, a deep one; Mid-ranking stranger to high-ranking stranger.

(She doesn't like churches, religion, spiritualism. For most of her life it was obviously a load of bunk. But it costs very little to be polite.)

(Where did he come from. Some dimensional pocket? A stealth field? Sudden additions to company make her nervous; She unconsciously shifted posture to get her monowire ready.)

(An apologetic glance to Naevis, but this is clearly not a person to ignore)

"So I perceive." He glances at the elf. "Then you are not properly catechised for this, as you should have known. It was foolish indeed to try to give instruction so."

Well this is uncomfortable. 

He turns back to the visitor. It might not be obvious to the elf - all humans look strange to elves - but she is indeed obviously from very far away, and correspondingly dangerous. 

He hasn't spoken to many heathens before, but being posted here does require a certain flexibility.

"You have never been instructed. Hear then the word. The soul is the spiritual principle of you. You do not have a soul, you are a soul. The soul gives your body its form, its animation. It is not only blasphemous but a contradiction in terms to suggest you might not have a soul. It is repulsive, not to mention dangerous, to suggest interfering with it. You were made in the image of god, child, you should not lightly contemplate defiling it. May I ask how you arrived at this question?"

"...So I ask again, what is a soul? I am not unwilling to change what I already know, given proof, given agreement from many people who ought to know, given sound and sensible explanations and especially predictions you make that correlate more with souls existing than my prior beliefs. As, so far as I know, people are... Patterns. The arrangement of fat, protein, salt, and water that form a brain, but the brain is the vessel. The person is the pattern of electrical potential in it, the map of connections that fire and form and dissolve as thought and learning occurs, the memories and personality and capacity to learn and empathize, all suspended somewhere in this vastly complex weave I have only really understood the surface of by observing brains. If you could take that pattern and put it in a new body, it would still be the person. Is a soul akin to this pattern which I have observed myself in my studies?"

... Most of that was obvious nonsense. However. He is quite highly ranked, as mortals count these things, and therefore not entirely untrained in the eldritch arts of textual criticism, and so to him some of that sounds uncannily like certain dubious and fragmentary exegeses attributed to the early companions of the Prophet, which it hasn't been found prudent to distribute widely. 

He'll remember that, but he won't give anything away if he can help it, either. 

So he smiles indulgently, but not particularly pleasantly. "Ah. Yes, the Fairview Heresy. Some follies stretch great distances, it would seem. The physical nature of the body, including the brain, is accidental and associated with the soul, much as the position and behaviour of the strings of a lyre are accidental and associated with a particular song, but not the thing itself. There is an analogy to your "patterns", an imperfect one, and there are many learned men* who I am sure would be fascinated to hear what you may have gleaned about the soul from your studies. But no, the soul is a transcendental thing. I do not like to speculate about this notion of moving souls into other people, as that would be foul Necromancy." Also he's fairly sure it does in fact happen and is incredibly horrifying, so he's grateful that he isn't allowed to know much about it. "Now why do you want to know?"

* Common has a succinct, everyday word for "sentient being", but other languages don't for some reason and translation magic is not perfect.

It's not heresy if she's never even heard the teachings, now is it. (Is it? She doesn't know and doesn't really care.)

"I want to know a great many things of course. Eventually. Most centrally things to do with the body, medicine, biology... I've only just heard of owlbears and they must be absolutely fascinating. But knowledge and invention are fun, and are how one moves the world. As for souls particularly, where I'm from it's commonly believed that there is no such thing. Even as others assert that there is, without reliable testimony or any recent proof. I certainly hadn't seen any indications of it until today."

...Technically, no, it isn't. Technically, you have to be baptised to be a heretic, even if you say the exact same things. Personally he doesn't see why, but one of the many qualifications he has is being the sort of person who will actually respect technicalities no matter what he personally thinks.

He isn't doctrinally required to be happy about it, though. 

"Curiosity is not a sin." It damn well should be. "Quite the opposite. We are commanded to learn." Not in the way wizards insist on going about it, though. "Be careful, however. The world may be moved for good or for ill."

He isn't convinced there's been a good invention in seven hundred years.

"The existence of the soul is multiply evident. You can comprehend not only a high mountain, but height; not only a heavy stone, but weight; you can comprehend the immaterial, and must therefore yourself be immaterial. You can moreover desire knowledge, as you do, or love, or justice, none of which have merely material substance. You can in fact encompass Spells, which have no material existence. If you cannot comprehend such lemmas, consider then that a wizard transformed by magic, such that the accidence of the body is entirely different, remains entirely the same person. Do you understand?"

"That argument requires that you accept several premises that I don't consider self-evident. It is like saying that a dog can comprehend food, and so therefore it must be food. Perhaps so, if one likes dog meat, but the latter fact is not connected to the former. It is true that it is a mystery to me how a transformed body, as I saw before my very eyes, could remain the same person despite an entirely different body- We were discussing that very topic before we arrived here. I have encountered before, people with extraordinary abilities that do not seem to have any obvious material source, magic of a sort different to what Naevys here has shown me. The soul is quite a possible candidate for these phenomena, and you and many others say it is so, so I should believe it is so, at least as much as the evidence I have seen and heard so far supports. It surely is commonly believed to be so! But it's a very new idea to me. So I instead wonder about what properties souls might have, how to observe them, what implications this has on other things I believe to be true."

Yes, of course you are Just Asking Questions about the properties of the soul out of innocent curiosity, just wanting to understand, of course. Like the last dozen heretics and witches. 

A dog cannot actually comprehend food, animals lack the rational faculty, but the first and most important principle if you're going to be a confessor for wizards is to never let them sidetrack you. 

"Only the gods can truly observe the soul entire. Wizardry claiming to involve the soul is dangerous at best, sinful at worst. As far as you are concerned, the important properties of the soul are immateriality, transcendence, rationality - the soul is the part of you closest to the divine." He finishes as though that's a satisfactory answer. 

This is quite upsetting! She looks between the priest and Dr Baika. She would consider talking to her telepathically, but she's not actually sure the visitor would be all right with that now, and she's a bit hesitant about keeping something from an actual cleric, that sounds like the kind of thing you look back on and regret while you're being burned as a witch. "...So Dr Baika if you have practical wizarding questions about the soul I'm sure we can find someone among the faculties!" Can they please move on to the part where she gets to try the magic drugs now.

She's watched a dog associate lots of different stimuli back to the sensation of 'food', in a variety of ways, on her monitors when researching neurology! And her shard agrees! They're capable of assessing a new object and deciding whether it fits the same category! They're capable of deciding whether or not to eat, and of deciding to share food! It may not be the way a human thinks of it, but - well, perhaps they're talking past each other. She wants to keep arguing the point, but this man clearly does not.

(And what is the divine, she wants to ask, merely powerful extraplanar beings?)

"Sir, I'm sure we wouldn't want to take up too much of your time. Perhaps you could recommend a book for me to read, or a more appropriate time to learn about this subject. Miss Naevys merely led me here as a safe place to be treated in case she has a bad reaction to a potion of sorts that I know is safe for humans, but do not necessarily know so for elves."

He has reports to write, and he has a sense that he has fallen far short, but this at least he understands. 

"Of course. There is indeed a book on the subject." He can produce a worn, simple copy of the Testaments from - apparently nowhere (a pocket that looks too small for such a thing, if, say, you have superhumanly good senses and can replay the last few seconds a few times). "This is such a place. Administer your potions." It's showy and spiritually perilous but on this occasion - he raises his hands, and his fingertips glow with a light like candlelight. 

She takes it and respectfully doesn't immediately stuff it into a pocket, holding it reasonably carefully.

...Alright, here is one corpo-grade stimulant pill, handed carefully to Naevys. And another from a different bottle.

"The peak effect should last about four hours and take about two or three minutes to begin. I've used them frequently myself and it is a feeling of alertness, physical energy, improved reflexes, better working memory - that is, faster and easier to remember things relevant to whatever you are thinking about, and increased neuroplasticity- That is, better learning. This does include both formal study and less deliberate forms of learning, like learning from the attitudes and emotions of those you interact with. Practice what you wish to become, it is said. Common side effects include elevated thirst, heartburn, dry eyes, and elevated heart rate. And difficulty sleeping for up to eight hours after a dose. Not to be taken with opium-based painkillers. Not to be taken more than twice a day."

All right, good, heathen responsibly introduced to priest, awkward conversation over, Dr Baika probably has is a soul, time for INTELLIGENCE DRUGS. She swallows them both. 

What she wishes to become is the most powerful wizard in the world, obviously, why does anyone else ever want anything else?

"Those sound fine! Elves don't sleep in exactly the same way humans do but I'll sleep outside tonight just to be sure!" 

Wizards. 

When it goes wrong, if it's not going to kill her, could he maybe let her suffer for a while before burning the poison away with holy light? No, no he couldn't, no mortal for hundreds of miles around has the authority to dismiss him but that's not actually a great comfort when you work for Whom he works for. 

Also it would be wrong, naturally.

It's not like they ever learn anyway. 

He stands ready, again, to rescue a wizard from the consequences of her actions, again, at a moment's notice (using power that could otherwise theoretically save a dying child in heathen lands somewhere, of course).