The nun nods slowly.

"There is a lot to digest in what you said. You seem to think you are from a different place entirely- That the one God, Yahweh, is unknown to you, and instead these judges of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos reign? I can certainly instruct you and would be happy to, my other duties permitting. The Protestant Church holds there is only one true God, all powerful, who created everything that is and all there ever was. Perhaps your world is part of His plan, but has no knowledge of Him. I think that at a first listen, my knowledge of good and evil broadly match what you described- with the possible break of making people do things everyone approves of, and of self-sufficiency and liking people more than others. I don't think I understand your meaning in those. Trade in souls is certainly a sin of the highest order, and consorting with Lucifer and his ilk so is something that none should ever do. Suicide is a sin. Torture and murder are sins.

The things you call Gods must surely be powerful beings, but they are not all powerful, not all knowing, as God himself is. They would be His unknowing tools in shaping the world, rather than gods in their own right. I'm worried you will harm young Waltana in some way, abusing or exploiting her brilliant mind. I'm worried that without spiritual guidance she will fall into sin and despair, never repenting and becoming evil-in-the-way-I-mean-it when she could have been saved, and be denied Heaven in the end. I'm worried about your power as well to an extent, as proselytizing a false faith will damage the souls of many and harm them in a greater way than any other harm upon the final judgement. Preserving lives would certainly be good. Having something to work for would be excellent. But if it includes a break from faith- It's not this world I worry for, but the next. Miss Hampson, you must have faith in the Lord. If you go with Kireh, please at least continue attend mass on each Sunday, and talk to Father Holcomb if anything weighs on your mind. Miss Kireh, I would ask you to allow a priest to tend to your followers should they request it. And you are free to join mass as any of His creations are, of course."

"What if I don't really think God exists. I know, I know, there's a plan, we have to have faith. But... I just don't. I can't believe it anymore, not after everything I've heard. You know, the people in power are more of a threat than anything? They'll lie with a smile and talk down to you. The IEC tried to threaten me into working with them!"

The nun raises an eyebrow. "He exists regardless of your doubt, young lady. Perhaps because you committed a crime?"

"Not according to the chief of police! He let me go!"

"Miss Hampson. Kireh is otherworldly, and possibly evil. I'm not asking you to withhold forever, as you can hear, there are some points of misunderstanding we might come around on-"

"No! I'm not waiting. Have faith. Pray. Work diligently. Good things come to those who wait. That accomplishes nothing! Like hell I will!"

"Waltana Hampson, you will keep a civil tongue in your head!"

"Or what? I'm leaving. Are you going to hit me for it?"

The nun grimaces and takes a deep breath. "Not if you truly are set on leaving. I will have nothing to so with you going forward, if you leave. If you stay, swearing and disrespectful behavior will earn you hits with the switch, yes. You are a child, you don't know what you're doing. It's akin to witchcraft."

"Uh, the way I figure it, Kireh's never tried to screw me over yet, and the British government has, and the Church hasn't actively betrayed me but is kind of useless for what I want to do. So, yeah. What do you say to that, Kireh?"

"I don't know much about your experiences with the government and Church. It's not wise to trust someone's Law based on a single day of low-stakes interactions. Where I'm from, you can verify someone's Law with mind-reading or spells to detect alignment or spells to prevent lies or their endorsement by Lawful gods, to some degree, or by receiving divine revelation, but I suppose none of those are available here."

To the nun: "I have much to clarify, but first, you raise a vital point. What afterlives are available? What are they like? What do people become there? Heaven is available only to followers of Yahweh? - are other afterlives similarly gated?"

"Yeah it's not like I'm not gonna make contingency plans, sheesh! It's just that if you know all the games but one are rigged and the last one might be, that's better than definitely."

"Heaven is open to followers of the true God, who sometimes goes by the name of Yahweh. Hell is the fate of those sinners who refuse to repent, refuse to submit to God and have faith and ask for forgiveness, where they suffer forever. All shall fall to Heaven or Hell, though some may rest in Purgatory for a time before ascending to Heaven. Those who have not heard the word of God in particular, or those who deny it, shall be given time to understand and come to have faith."

"What's a 'sinner'? When you said 'sin' earlier I gathered that it meant doing things which are Evil here, but now I'm confused. What happens to people who do more Good than Evil but aren't followers of Yahweh?

What is the suffering in Hell?" She's leaving that question open-ended, but she's thinking like is it closer to Xovaikain or a normal mortal amount of suffering or merely the absence of perfect bliss? The demand to repent sounds kind of Sarenran...

"Can you be more specific about what Heaven is like?"

"Sin is a word for all things that go against the will of God. All evil is sin, but not all sin is evil. Sins can be great or small. As for the precise nature of Heaven and Hell, I am not a theologian deep in such matters. All we have to know are the words of angels and saints in the Bible."

"For example. 'And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell'. - Matthew 10:28."

"So almost everyone is a sinner?

Can you direct me to someone who knows more about Heaven and Hell? I might decide that I prefer people to go to Heaven! Although I myself will probably still be Evil.

If souls are destroyed in Hell, what remains to suffer, something like an animal?"

"Everyone is a sinner, and it's only be repenting of your sins that you grow closer to God and Heaven. I think you should direct such questions to Father Holcomb. My personal understanding of the natures of Heaven and Hell is limited, as a humble sister of the Order of Mary the Mother."

"Okay, I'll consult with him." And maybe he'll have a comprehensive explanation of Heaven and Hell but she's suspicious that he'll be just as vague. Something to do with the god of believing things sticking beliefs into His followers? Implying that He's not dead at all but it serves Him to pretend? Kireh holds out a hand. "May I read your mind?"

"For what purpose, and what benefit does it bring me as opposed to you?"

"To observe your thoughts about Heaven and Hell directly, to aid my understanding."

"I think not. I admit my own ignorance and there's little for you to learn, anyway."

"Okay.

To clarify from earlier, then:

Making people study a trade is usually considered Good. Making them behave according to the rules of their role in society is can be Good or Evil, depending on the rules. Making them behave according to your personal aesthetics is usually Evil, for example punishing them for saying certain words.

Good societies operate on the premise the everyone feels some empathy for everyone else, and trains their children to be vulnerable to the appearance of distress. People who don't have this vulnerability are shunned - which means fined in the social currency, by random people with no authority - until they pretend to have the required empathy or leave or die.

Liking some people more means, for example, objecting to a 'brilliant mind' being exploited but not to a stupid mind being exploited, or protecting your favorite lover from monsters while running, leaving your neighbors to die."

To Waltana: "I think we're finished here. Are you ready to leave?"

"Can I take the pressure cooker."

The nun nods. "You did build it, very well. I still think this is a mistake, and I think we have the same judgement of good and evil, Kireh, and perhaps punishment for swearing is indeed a sin that I have committed. We also indeed assume that all feel love for one another. One's family or friends perhaps more closely. Diverging from this foundation is dangerous... I will discuss the matter with the Father. But it seems you are done here. I hope both of you fare well."

"Great. I only needed the first sentence."

She stands up and leaves the small office, taking a right to duck into a kitchen. She comes back with a backpack sized brass contraption in her arms a bit later.

(Kireh is still annoyed about how Waltana owns the pressure cooker but wasn't totally sure if she did or not. Clear ownership is the base of all transactions!)

"We're going to my inn room first. We can't do much there, but you can look at the supplies I got. At noon I have an appointment to look at a house and I want your opinion unless it would be too costly to break your concentration. If the house is good, I'll hire people to move the stuff. Do you care to supervise the moving?

Do you need to get food now?"

"I don't need to eat right now, I want- I want to get to work, I wanna make something. But I want to discuss the deal again first, make sure I remember it right- Six shillings minimum for a week, or half the profit if it's greater? And you'll do your best to understand and sharpen my, uh, sparkiness? That's the part I'm most excited about, I don't really understand it myself. What are you thinking to try?"

"Yes, plus room, not board. I'm not going to do the best I can to improve your sparkiness, but I will devote my time to it when I'm not working for the police or future employer and when I'm not on urgent business, such as finding a place to live, and without going to 'extremes' like running through the streets when returning from my work." Set a reminder to check what Police Chief McAllen thinks of running - will he pay her not to?

"The innkeeper forbids smithing and chemistry, and I think anything with things hot enough to start a fire outside of the hearth. To be on the safe side - ick - I think no loud noise at all.

So for today I will watch you examine the materials, watch how you respond to suggestions of what to make, and maybe watch you do some quiet work. If there's nothing you can do in the inn, I'll have some errands for you, which I'll pay you for separately."

"-Reasonable. Okay, let's get to it then!"

She smiles, anticipating getting some real work done.

With a hand on Waltana's shoulder and a settled Marra's Inquisition, she unlocks the door to her room at the Roadster's Rest.

The thing with the clampy-paddy-lensy arms stands by the hearth. The bed linens cover piles along the back wall. The pillow, on the bare mattress, seems to be covering something too.

Kireh doesn't say anything right away. Where do Waltana's thoughts go first?

As Waltana focuses her thoughts on tinkering, her annoyance at the odd feeling of the Inquisition fades. What has Kireh gotten her to work with? No smithing, no chemistry, so maybe electricals of some sort? Or just assembly of bits and pieces, refurbishing something? What would be useful- Weapons. A spring loaded blade. Electricity arcing between knuckles on a special glove. Pneumatic pressure to fire a gun without explosive chemicals. (These thoughts are distinctly excited, faster and more intuitive.) ...But no, practical tools first. She thinks about automaton arms a lot, something like an arm-sheath rigged up with wires to control a far larger arm, perhaps? There'd be so many little gears, especially at the hand, to get enough dexterity...

"Ooh!" Examination lenses and articulated arms. Those will be a nice base for the remote-arm! She can play with them to figure out how to translate small motions into large ones - or the opposite - and they're nice sturdy bits of brass already, so carefully balanced, held in place by friction so they don't slide around- She walks over to them and starts picking apart their conditions, ranking them in order of usefulness for her idea of a motion-matching arm, and in order of usefulness as spare parts for that. Wires and pulleys, the first mental image of the linking mechanism comes into her head fully formed, she can take the seams out of the curtains to get some string to work with, and she pulls out a small work knife and goes to start on that, the thought that they might want to keep those intact not even really entering her head-

Where are all these thoughts coming from? In Pharasma's Creation, it would be so expensive for a god to send all that information, and magic is scarce in this world... but maybe it's something like Guidance, or Brigh's obedience blessing for sabotage.

This observation makes it relatively more likely that sparkiness is just an Extraordinary ability. Which means that improving it - rather than improving how Waltana uses it, which is what Kireh is doing right now - will require mundane risk unsteered by pleasing the patron god... which might actually be easier. (Wait, how do souls grow here?) The big upside is that if Waltana doesn't have to maintain her clerichood-equivalent, Kireh can tempt her to Evil! ...But no tempting people to 'sin' until she learns more about the afterlives.

She was already thinking of suggesting a weapon for her rich client - the most discrete weapon is one no one else knows exists - she'll still try it but now it's a different experiment if Waltana has previously thought of it herself.

And now she's pulling a knife on curtains, the thoughts moving so fast - they look cheap, cheaper than the linens, and Kireh doesn't have a good substitute. She could tell Waltana to do a different task for now while she goes to buy some cord, but she wants to let her do a project without inference to get a baseline, that's important - and there go the curtains, no sense worrying about it now.

Without letting go of Waltana, she uncovers the piles of parts and regular junk as much as she can. She was hoping to have a few minutes to observe Waltana coming up with ideas before carefully showing her the materials, but that plan isn't going to work...

(The torch, propane, and chemicals are still hidden, as are the special fun objects under the pillow.)

-She notices the newly revealed bits and pieces, so many little things, wires, cloth scraps, little gears and brushes, and more- Then blinks, and feels a sudden rush of embarrassment and shame, and stops her assault against drapery.

Her thoughts go slow. Damn, that was a strong one! She must have been really excited about it, and it's still there, buzzing, but she can push it away and think about whether to lean back into it or not.

"Uh- Sorry, I just went right to work, didn't I." It usually goes better- Or at least, less random disassembled things and yelling, more predictable results- If she makes a plan first instead of just starting building. "Should I keep going? What do you think of the tool-arm idea?"

Distracting her at all breaks her state of sparkiness? Inconvenient. For a moment Kireh worries that each object can only inspire Waltana once, but thankfully not; she can resume work with previous inspiration.

So Kireh needs to get her a room with a huge variety of materials, nothing that would be bad to destroy, and no distractions? And maybe cabinets that an outside observer, ideally an engineer, can quietly slip additional materials into, so Waltana can reveal them on her own schedule, if that's less disruptive?

Still inconvenient. If Waltana can't be interrupted, Kireh can't give her real-time feedback.

"The curtain is fixable. If the innkeeper allows it, I'll fix it between interviews with the police today.

I think our first exercise will be tolerating interruptions, but I want to see you finish a project first, as close as possible to how you would normally do it, before we actually do that exercise.

Let's talk about your plans. My intuition, from a different world, is that the tool-arm would be commissioned by an individual customer, not made speculatively. Is that true here? If you can use it yourself, you can go ahead and make it, though, and you can buy it from me for the cost of the materials.

Are there other materials you need to make the tool-arm? Are there other things you can make starting from this object? Don't worry about remembering your thoughts, just list out whatever ideas you have and I'll keep track of them."

"I don't really have a normally. My previous projects worth the name are- The pressure cooker, a new automaton routine, improving the orphanage's furnace, fixing a broken lamp - I barely count that, it was just a loose wire, only I maybe knew exactly what the problem was without checking? - And some old toys I made before my mom d-died that I don't have anymore... Um, the tool-arm I'm thinking would be made on commission, yeah, or join my toolkit. My thought when I chose it was, um, I wanted to mimic automata arms and get a better understanding of prostheses," and it was COOL, "I need to change the idea to make it more practical though. There's not the heavy stuff here for a large work arm, but a really little, really delicate one for working on jewelry or something, that would be useful going forward."

It could have TINY KNIVES and maybe a SUTURING THING, that would crawl along disturbed skin smart-quick to fix it up, sewing machines can make very fast stitches with a clever little wheel, that piece she saw out of the corner of her eye IS such a machine's doohicky, so why not sutures, not that she really understands medicine but she's done sutures on George when he split his head on a rock-  "Hmm, and a thin tube to dispense disinfectant perhaps? Tiny, steady tools might be wonderfully useful for medicine now that I think about it, though I'm not a doctor and it kind of grosses me out... Hold on. Hmm."

It's stupid to just go with the first thing that pops into her head, no matter how COOL it would be. Maybe if she were playing around or relaxing, but this is serious. Work. Self improvement. Come on, isn't MAKING MONEY cool? Think! What else could the articulating arms become? Some sort of prosthesis? They're not that strong, not that sturdy. The lenses themselves are mostly good for getting a close look at things, or perhaps you could direct a filament's light all in one direction with mirrors and lenses? She read about diffraction, it won't keep going forever, but that'd still be handy. Maybe something to reach and pick items off distant shelves, to inventory-keep, though the useful part of that one would be all in the automata-controls, to control what to grab and when. She's not thinking of all that much to use them for, they're just too small! But if you break them apart, what do you have? A bunch of smoothly adjusting rollers that can lock in place, some lenses and levers and tiny adjustment-arms and clamps, and brass rods.

Her mind wanders, picturing a cooking-automaton. Thin clawed limbs from above scoop and mix flour and nuts, beating it for however-many cycles before flattening, cutting vegetables and adding water- There's no MOTIVE FORCE in this thing, it's entirely PASSIVE, which just isn't good enough! Even for her tiny-tools idea, she's going to need ways to apply force to the rotors. The balancing they have going on is wonderful, she doesn't want to be bothered by the weight of whatever sticks on the end, tiny adjustments for tiny motions- Wires in tension, or string in tension at the very least-

"I should probably make a bunch of SKETCHES to work out the best way to hold it together." And as for the actual arms on the end, she'll need to shape them into a hand-of-sorts... All she has useful for this from the orphanage is the cooking ball (the tiny boiler inside would be enough for a small tool like this with the right sort of conversions...) and a small bag of hand tools. What does she need? Metal and wood pieces to carve, string and wire, little springs to hold the tension just so, gears to translate the motions down in scale- She'll need tools to actually go on the end, maybe a little saw or sandpaper wheel or drill? And a way to get power to them in nice, safe amounts, that means either some sketchy business with tension or twisting string and wire, or more electricals, copper wire, and either expensive standardized parts or improvising them with lead and acid and wool or whatever else, electricity is SO INCREDIBLY FINICKY but she'll be able to figure it out, you'd need something to coat the wires with and woven wool still catches FIRE sometimes and rubber is expensive but it comes from a tree so maybe you could make something else into rubber, life is just chemistry in the end, honestly the twisty-wire might end up being easier even though it sounds very delicate-