Samora provides her email and says her goodbyes. If Gabby seems like she wants to talk, she's available; if Gabby wants to go home, she'll thank her again and depart.

Yeah, Gabby wants to go home.  But, "Just so you know.  I had the same thought he did.  I've been in this church for maybe a year, I'm not an expert or anything, but.  I had the same idea."

"Uh, anyway, thanks for, you know, everything."  The street's pretty quiet, but still.  "Let me know if you're in Denver sometime, on an exchange or something."

Samora goes home and takes a lot of notes on today's conversation so she doesn't forget, but doesn't turn it into a blog post just yet. She has blog posts on Erastil and Sarenrae and Abadar and Shelyn and Desna and Cayden Cailean to write and polish and upload, summarizing the other churches' doctrines from her best impression of their own perspectives and praying to each god in turn for guidance in making them as true as possible. 

Erastil is perhaps the most humanlike of the gods who were never human, because His concerns are the concerns of ordinary men. If I had to guess, I would guess Erastil hears more prayers from Golarion than any other god...

... Some ask why Abadar is not Evil, when so much Evil is done in the name of money. Some ask why Abadar is not Good, when commerce brings prosperity to so many. To some extent those questions answer each other, but there is a more fundamental answer, which is that money is a tool that can be used for good or ill. Abadar cares greatly about the means by which men pursue their ends, whatever those ends may be, for He sees that by those means both the brave and the cowardly, both the selfish and the heroic, can flourish....

...The greatest gift that mortals have is free will. No matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter what other people expect of you, you can decide at any moment that you're going to do Good. Sarenrae is the goddess of that choice and that hope, and She rejoices when anyone turns away from Evil, no matter how shaky their first steps....

Desna is one of the hardest goddesses for me to explain in a blog post, because She is one I understand the least, but also one who needs the least explanation. She is the goddess of dreams, travel, luck, and the stars, and Her followers understand Her perhaps better than most followers understand their gods. With other posts I have laid out a map. With this post I can only point in the right direction, and hope that for the right people that will prove sufficient ...

... Cayden Cailean knows that mortals cannot see all the consequences of their actions, and so He says, do not bind your future self with rules and oaths. The version of you who exists in each moment knows best how to do Good in that moment. All that is needed is the courage to do the thing you know is right at the moment it must be done.

When a merchant captain takes on a cargo of slaves and betrays his employer to free them, Cayden Cailean rejoices. When a woman flees a cruel husband rather than bear his children and goes off to seek her fortune, Cayden Cailean watches over her....

... Shelyn's clerics often do not fight, for while others protect the world they focus on making it worth protecting. Their strength comes less from spells and more from their wisdom, their skill, their understanding, and their compassion. A true Shelynite teaches people to recognize their own value and the value of those around them....

She also sets up meetings with a Catholic priest, a Hindu priest, a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and thanks Desna that America has all of those available.

On the morning of Samora's fourteenth day on Earth Bet, she arrives at the now-usual place at the now-usual time to Raise the set of Behemoth casualties she Gentle Reposed eleven days ago.

You're in the home stretch; after today, almost every intact dead cape from the Behemoth fight will be back up and at it.

Well, except for the various villains who never made it onto the list in the first place. They did Raise a few on advice from Branding, but the PRT's position, and Armsmaster's too, is that resurrection isn't medical care in the sense of the Preservation Act and they don't have to offer it if they don't feel like it.

Anyway, Panacea isn't here today; she's been missing more and more of these lately.

She leads a busy life, and she had a conflicting appointment, OK?

Also she's pretty much seen every problem Raise Dead can cause and it's getting boring.

Also she doesn't look forward to seeing Samora the way she did when they first met.

It's fine, Samora's Restoration works just as well. That's a more efficient use of both their time anyway, and that's what counts.

Anyway, today you've got five fresh ones. Should be easy, everyone's got their routine down. There haven't been any dangerous happenings since the Pride Incident, and today's bodyguard (Assault again) is openly bored with your miraculous triumph over death.

Sometimes boring is great. Here goes!

The first one comes back just like most of the others, disoriented and confused but cheerful enough once the situation is explained.

The second one sits up sharply, winces, and says, "You guys, there's an afterlife! And it's really cool!"

"You remember stuff? Neat! So, context, I arrived from another planet during the Behemoth fight and I can raise the recently dead. You've been out for about two weeks, there was a bit of a line. You're the first one who got all the way to an afterlife instead of just being unconscious. What was it like?"

He smiles softly. "It was beautiful, I was in this redwood forest, except the trees were even taller and the ground was all this really soft moss, and I could hike as long as I wanted and never get tired or hungry. I heard some other people at one point, but I was avoiding them because I wanted the quiet. And there was this waterfall, it must have been as high as a football field . . . And then I realized all of a sudden that I could go back, and I did because I wanted to see my family again. Are they here?  Where is here?" 

"You're in Brockton Bay. I'm not sure if they told your family when you were scheduled to come back, you're here in your cape identity, but they're going to put you on a plane home soon."

"Did you know about this? Is that what happens to everyone when they die?"

Explaining this to someone who still has the peace of Elysium reflected in his eyes hurts more than usual. "I wish it did, but no. Different people go to different places, and some of them are much worse. There are people working on fixing that."

"This is the weirdest Endbringer fight I have ever heard of, and I know a guy who lost a leg in the building where they make prosthetic legs."

Over the next few days, things begin to happen.

A retired schoolteacher who has raised five foster children to adulthood reads the blog post about Sarenrae while his two current foster daughters sleep, and closes his eyes. I really hope you exist, he thinks. I hope there's someone out there who has power and uses it to look after the folks who have nobody else to look after them. I hope you'll keep my kids safe, and all the other kids out there who need someone in their corner. I want them all to have some reason to believe they're loved. What he feels in response might just be his own emotions, but maybe it isn't.

The next day, when the kids are packed off to the bus stop in the pre-dawn gloom, he folds a piece of paper into the shape of an angel, and prays, and reports still blinking to the local hospital to say he has healing powers and would like to pick up a few shifts.

An insurance adjuster whose true passion is his unprofitable Etsy store of hand-made greeting cards reads the blog post about Shelyn, and paints the holy symbol at the bottom of the post, and prays over it at dawn, not really knowing what he expects to happen. An hour later he practically flings himself down the stairs to tell his girlfriend, and together they run down the street to tell his brother.

A women's self-defense instructor gets home from another day of telling her students that it's not just okay but actively good to make a scene when someone tries to hurt you, and pours a shot of whiskey to wash down her microwave chili in her studio apartment. A friend sends her the blog post about Cayden Cailean. She stays up late reading it, and drinks two more shots, and rants at the ceiling about how if Cayden is real he can fucking prove it, by giving her powers or by smiting a certain member of Congress with lightning or by smiting her with lightning, what fucking ever. And then there's laughter out of nowhere in her head, friendly and boisterous, and she's laughing too, and in the morning she prepares Protection from Evil and Burning Disarm and Remove Fear and starts thinking about cape names.

A seventeen-year-old boy who knows there has to be more to life than school and college applications reads the blog post about Desna between writing chapters of Warrior Cats fanfiction, and rereads it instead of doing his homework, and dreams of the milky way as an open road. In the morning he steals his sister's butterfly hair clip and skips first period English to pray for—he's not sure what. Spells, freedom, understanding, the possibility of Someone who understands him. He gets all of that, and spends second period math searching Craigslist for used vans.

The blog posts on Pharasma and Irori go up. The blogzone server hosting them briefly goes down to the Hug of Death.

Every morning, Contessa asks her power a standard list of questions for her personal safety, then branches out into a much longer list intended to help stabilize the cape scene and the world at large. She usually doesn't find anything, but Doctor Mother told her it was a good idea, so:

Path to a Tinker with a dimensional specialization

None found

Path to a Tinker with a nuclear specialization other than Linac.

None found

. . .

Path to prevent a cape from being shot with a battle rifle in the next 24 hours

None found

Huh, that's a pleasant surprise. Path to a cleric other than Samora.

Four steps

Uh oh!

They did make a plan for this contingency, so Contessa switches tracks:

Path to an Evil cleric.

None found

Path to a cleric who can channel negative energy.

None found

Path to kill a cleric other than Samora

Five steps

Only slightly tougher than a normal civilian, and vastly weaker than Samora, all as expected. Not, therefore, a crisis. She finishes her usual list of questions, then goes off to tell Doctor Mother about it.

Overall this sounds not too bad? In their best-case scenario all the new clerics would be partnered with Iomedae, just to keep the number of scary extradimensional players to a minimum, but failing that "clerics who can heal but are still easy to kill" is a reasonably encouraging way for things to develop.

She'll have Contessa Path-interrogate all the new clerics, so they can get a sense of how the conversion process works and suss out any surprises from their new powers, but if nothing surprising comes up they won't intervene.

It turns out there are nine new non-Samora clerics this morning, all English speakers who read Samora's blog. They all deliberately prayed to their god of choice, and they all had some kind of representation of the god's holy symbol. Outside of those two points the conversion processes -- and the converts -- are pretty idiosyncratic.

Ah, here's a question they forgot to think about before: how many new clerics are being made each day? And is it getting faster or slower over time?

The total number of non-Samora clerics rises to twenty-two over the next two days, and then the growth rate slows. Each conversion story is broadly similar to the ones you've already heard.