"Congrats!"

"We had a huge party at the temple when it was over. I'm going to use some of the same channels to collect support for the honeypot operation. Right, who's next--ah. The Hespatians. Okay, the two biggest things to know about the Hespatian covens are that, one, they're in general pretty bad news, and two, they're extremely decentralized and operate in 'cells' that are more or less self-contained, so not every Hespatian you encounter is going to be guilty of anything."

"What a ringing endorsement. Are they like, a revolutionary project or something, with the cells?"

"Nnno, it's more like a cult situation."

"Ah. And you have your lowkey edgy cultists who are possibly in it to piss off their parents and the human sacrifice ones in different sub-clubs."

"Yep, that's it pretty much exactly. There is some communication between cells, though, which means even the ones who aren't doing anything directly wrong will still tend to pass information to people they don't specifically know are going to do horrible things with it. I'm not a fan. They've got some cool powers, but, like--not even cool enough to make the tradeoff the kind of thing that would be interestingly tempting in a fictional story, in my opinion." 

"How do the discounts for factional magic work, anyway, like, that seems weird."

"I don't actually know, that wasn't in the 'So Now You're A God, Here's Some Stuff You're Not Allowed To Tell Mortals' packet I got."

"Oh, come on, you can't just tell me that you aren't allowed to tell mortals a bunch of stuff, that's mean."

"--I mean, I prefer it over lying about what I know or letting people think I'm withholding information voluntarily!"

"Yeah, I'm mostly just joshing you. Though it is irksome. How is this even enforced?"

"Uh--the short version is that when I say that I or some other god isn't 'allowed' to do something, what that means is that there's a bunch of things that the majority of gods and god-adjacent beings find it convenient to have be the case, and there's a sort of agreement that if anyone violates these guidelines they get leaned on, and if they refuse to abide by them at all they get ganged up on. Outright combat between deities tends to have undesirable collateral damage, when it's not an overwhelmingly one-sided situation, so we mostly abide by it. Gods like me who hate the status quo say, 'well, I'll flip the table later, when I'm more powerful and can get away with it.'"

"Makes sense. Ballpark on how long till table-flip?"

"Less time than if you hadn't showed up."

"Order of magnitude, though."

"--Too soon to say. I would have said at least a thousand years, before you showed up, but there's just too much about your world that I can't see yet."

"Okay. So quite possibly hundreds but probably not thousands of years and also probably not next August."

"That's about the size of it. And of course there's the caveat that it's not impossible that someone else's table-flipping plans will come to fruition in August and we'll have to react to that. --Unlikely. Very unlikely. But not impossible."

"Anyone looking especially likely to have such plans in the works?"

"Not that I've sussed out yet."

"Okay.

Anything else to cover before I go turn into a triple archmage?"

"We hadn't gotten to Alphazon and the ORC yet. So, those two are the primary 'human' factions, meaning that both of them have significant numbers of non-witch humans who are nonetheless on this side of the Veil, and both identify themselves more with humanity than witches tend to--like, most human witches call themselves neutral specifically to avoid calling themselves human; witches in the ORC and Alphazon do not tend to do that. The ORC is a sort of paragovernmental organization that has ties to actual governments, and Alphazon is a corporate conglomerate that operates openly on the witchy side of the veil and owns several other companies on the mundane side." 

"Are there not major factions of other species, is it just like, human-aligned on the one hand and hunky-dory panspecies harmony on the other?"

"The humans/everyone else divide is the most universal, if you don't count neutral witches as human, which most people don't. But there are in fact frictions between other species--for example, at one point there was a powerful elven empire, in a dimension pretty close to the central one, in which orcs were something of an oppressed underclass and Jotunns were slaves. How much tension gets left over from that varies wildly, though, depending on place and context and so on. And there are parts of Alfheim where friction appears between species lines in particular, and, and, and--but since a human can have lineage from approximately anything, if you take a group of mundanes with potential from the other side of the veil and awaken all of them, you might end up with siblings who are an elf and a jotunn, or a taura and a vana, and none of them will have any associated baggage. At least to start. So it's easier for racial politics to get, like--diluted, as it were."

"What happened to the elven empire? - also don't people ever grow up as some other species and awaken into a different thing?"