Diana doesn't remotely care if it takes a while. The practice hasn't been this much fun since she was doing it with her mentor.

Oh? Where is he now?

Aaaand much less fun.

"He's gone. Conquest killed him."

"—oh. I'm so sorry. ...why?"

"The Drunk was making a play for the Lordship. He traded favors and used some Dionysian flavors of mind control to make sure other people's sympathies were on the right side, plus a lot of people just don't like Conquest. His line with Doug was that Toronto would be much safer for me if he won. I was barely more than a kid, I knew this world could be dangerous but it was always out there, you know? Not close to home.

They lost. Jeremy got off with a promise never to try to unseat Conquest again, but Doug had dealt him an embarrassing injury along the way. The Lord was much less forgiving. He said he'd come after me next. Doug bargained with him, so I'm safe as long as I don't oppose him. And my mentor's dead and traded away his afterlife, with his ghost in Conquest's trophy room."

"...oh. His—ghost? I'd thought those weren't—sapient."

"Conquest had the Shepherd by then. He said he was having him ward away whatever it is that collects people's souls. Maybe that makes sense and maybe it doesn't, but it's him, it's Doug, I'd know him anywhere."

"I'm—oh. I'm so sorry. That's terrible."

And if he wasn't sure he was going to overthrow Conquest before now he is.

"I don't know whether to hope it's true or not. For all I know he's better off than if he hadn't made that deal..."

"...maybe? I'm—very confused about what the afterlife deal here is." Sigh.

"The Shepherd might know something, but he's not talking and I'm not asking.

I'm holding out hope I can get him back somehow. Other people don't have Conquest's promise protecting them, they get by fine by not having his malice, but he doesn't seem the type to undo a deal like that."

"What a terrible magic system this is."

"Some of it. Some of it is fun, but we could do without a certain Incarnation."

"Or with the slowness."

"Slowness?"

"Everything takes forever, everything's status quo, the spirits hate any kind of change."

"It's all old-fashioned, yeah. If spirits followed election results instead we'd be much better off."

Snort. "Wouldn't that be grand."

"Maybe! But then I'd have to pay a lot more attention to politics. At least it's better than the, ah, local equivalent."

"That's of course not the only part where it's terrible, anyway."

"What else are you thinking of?"

"Ghosts, vestiges, Lords and the way it's all medieval, the fact that ideas incarnate and that includes things like Conquest or, I don't know, Suffering, sapients that eat other sapients, demons..."

"I think it's just drawing from a much wider variety of possible minds. On a scale that runs from angels to the spirit of some specific rock, humans are basically all the same. Isadora is relatively close. Human societies work by assuming you can in general rely on people to act normally, and there might be an Incarnation of Heroism but there probably isn't an Incarnation of Effective And Well-Run Bureaucracy."

"I'm not sure I'm super happy that more possible minds exist like that. From a human perspective, most minds are horrible."

"Most everything changes to fit what everything else is doing, so there has been a lot of human influence. It's not quite as random as that. But now we're back to change being slow."