"The butchering thing is a good point: maybe that can be the second priority, or even the first if there aren't any techniques available to us that fit my ideal criteria for a first technique.

But I think ideally what I'd want first is a passive improvement to semantic memory. That provides a stronger foundation on which to build everything else: *whatever* I seek to learn, I can do it better. It makes us more likely to be in the fortunate 90% *and* remains useful if we're in the unfortunate 10%.

My *first* thought was enhanced *episodic* memory, but that has more downsides if you don't also have enhanced resistance to intrusive thoughts: by default, having too much episodic memory leads to being more vulnerable to traumatic experiences and to getting overwhelmed by how much things remind you of other things. If there's a technique that *bundles* episodic memory and intrusive-thought resistance, maybe that would be best, but if they're separate I wouldn't want the first until I could also have the second."

"I have no idea if that's slicing things too fine! I was thinking - that seems a lot like a body refining technique that only improves your stamina with the muscles in your legs - but there absolutely are techniques like that, I just don't know why you'd learn one over a full body refining technique. Foundations tend to be - holistic, when they can be. Not broad enough to suit our ambitions, but broad enough that a notional unambitious person could make a life out of them. Maybe if you just enhance something very specific it'll be very strong at that thing, or maybe it'll be inefficient - we'll have to ask the archivist." 

she hasn't even started magic studies yet and already she's getting a bad grade

"Well, if I can get a broader package of improvements, all the better. It felt like about the same specificity as physical exhaustion to me."

"Ah, I see the misunderstanding - I was hoping to get a technique that did that as a focus among other things, or a non-foundational technique for that purpose. Most foundational techniques will deal with physical exhaustion eventually. But eventually might not be soon enough. And eventually we'll have lots of secondary techniques, higher realms have dozens." 

Her initial response to this misunderstanding was embarrassment, but upon reflection...maybe a better way to think of it is like when you get a new math textbook and skim the last chapter before starting from the beginning. You have no idea what it's talking about, but it's a positive feeling: it's anticipation. One day a future you will come back to that chapter and read what was once gibberish and understand it, and you will be more than you are now.

She doesn't know what she's doing yet. But she will. And she will be more than she is now.

"I look forward to it."

"Great! I think we've covered everything that's important to cover before tomorrow's orientation, unless you have any questions?" 

She has so many questions that it's almost like having no questions. It's hard to know where to start, how best to snatch a specific string of words out of the swirl of nervous confusion at being dropped straight into the deep end of an alien world.

Oh, here's a string of words that looks particularly useful to say right now.

"What are some common mistakes that clueless foreigners make when navigating this society, and how can I avoid them?"

"Outsiders always underestimate how much Bankers care about - unity, and the face of the Bank over their personal issues. It's me and my brother against my cousin, but me and my cousin against the world? We have twelve millennia of good reputation to uphold. I think people from sects that don't have that underestimate how many doors it opens, when people trust that you won't actually be using the job they hired you for as a tool for some internal squabble. It's not like we don't have internal politics, we just don't take out the knives for them."

So on the one hand that's pretty lacking in detail, but on the other hand she supposes it's also hard for Jasmine to know where to start on explaining her social customs to an alien.

And...'we don't take out the knives for internal politics' kind of is an answer. Kedri's a clueless foreigner, but she's not hiding that she's a clueless foreigner. She's not in one of those situations some walk-ins end up in, where she'd have to be able to pass herself off (at least for short periods) as Jasmine as quickly as possible in order to not get in trouble with demon-hunters and the like: she's already been there and done that and gotten an official Not a Demonic Infiltrator certificate from the god of security themself. She has her own separate ID necklace.

It's not pleasant to be around noobs, and not pleasant to be a noob and know that you're making everyone be around one. But we forgive each other, because we must, because being a noob is the first step towards not being a noob.

I would not worry about taking actions in good faith, the matron said, and she wasn't talking about this but she wasn't not talking about this.

And Jasmine will be there to help her through.

Also, twelve millennia. She thinks she is having some kind of emotion about that.

"I think that's enough to be getting on with."

"Great. We still have a little time until we strictly need to be asleep, I think, so I'm going to work on switching who is facing for a bit. Ideally we'd get switching quickly down to less than a second or faster if I'm going to be doing all the fighting. You should rest or process or meditate on your Way."

"That sounds good."

So. Today was...stressful, yes, and she does miss her family, but those were to be expected.

Overall, things are going very well! She and her host are well on their way to hashing out plans for coexistence and teamwork; the body is young and seems to be in good health (that was what she'd been most afraid of, that her new body might not be in any less pain than her old one); the people here have invented the concept of electrical appliances already; and best of all, there's a learnable magic system.

Speaking of which: if she were a god, what would she be the god of? What kind of person is she, fundamentally?

She thinks of herself as being someone who...goes out and does what needs to be done, so that others don't have to. Not as a resentful sacrifice, but as a joyful protector. She transmutes dead fish into clean, safe food; she spends most of her time outside the sanctuary of home, earning money with which to maintain that sanctuary in the ways it cannot (or cannot practically) be maintained from within. She is outward-facing even if she isn't customer-facing, shoring up the food supplies of people she will never meet in exchange (once all the currency's said and done) for computers and air-to-waters and banana chips and so on made by people that she will also never meet.

Maybe with another couple of centuries of introspection under her belt she'll give a different answer, but that's what she's got so far.

Jasmine has been through a lot today, but it's not the sort of lot to fundamentally shake the foundations of your personality. So instead of engaging in deep introspection, she will shift from her desk to sitting cross-legged on her bed, and after performing a brief self-check, will engage in some more immediately pragmatic meditation, trying to chase that sensation of relaxing out of control of her body while spiritually pulling Kedri forward to the front. 

It takes her a while, possibly longer than she really should have taken trying, but she gets it, giving up control almost as she falls asleep and leaving Kedri with command of a body itself half asleep on top of her bed. 

(If Jasmine had been inclined to introspection tonight, she might have said, to herself, that the core of her being is a hunger - for security and luxury but also for love and esteem - and that hunger is tempered and channeled by Bank discipline and Banker ethics but it's still the fire in the pit of her soul that fuels her ambition. She's read enough philosophy to feel like she's avoided most of the obvious traps, so when she imagines herself as a god, she imagines herself a dragon, surrounded with things she loves and people who love her, her hunger fundamentally and worthily sated by deeds of deep strength on good foundations. But you know, she's 22. She doesn't really know where her life will lead her. She just wants to be sure, in her heart of hearts, that she has ends she wants to see achieved, because she's read too many stories of hungers like hers that ate and ate and ate until someone had to put them down lest they eat the world.) 

Hmm? Oh, it worked, good.

She stretches, smiling.

"Congratulations," she sends, but there's no response. Maybe Jasmine didn't switch so much as just fall asleep before Kedri did.

Well, either way, they can sort that out in the morning.

She closes her eyes.

They wake not long after dawn, light filtering in from the small window of Jasmine's room to a greater extent than would seem mundanely possible.  

Jasmine will wake not in control of her body, fail to scream, and then remember yesterday and calm down.

"Uh. Good morning?" 

"Good morning!"

Kedri stretches again, gets up, and looks out the window.

Outside, the sun rises over a view of a glittering lake - or is it a sea? It's hard to tell, when it's wider than the horizon. The lake's shore seems to be host to a vast city, built from stone and red bricks and roofing tiles of innumerable colours, where people in the distance like ants are going about their early morning lives. Already the winding road up the hill to what is presumably a gate in the fortress below, as wide as a highway, is crowded with carts and wagons, some pulled by regular oxen and horses, but many pulled by stranger things - tigers, creatures made of fire or water or jade, great lizards or giant beetles. The view isn't perfect - there are several other towers rising from the fortress to obscure portions of it - but it's pretty impressive.  

She grins. Magical aliens.

...very densely settled aliens. Maybe that's what happens when people have had thousands of years to adapt to the existence of mass disease-wards.

"So many new species to get used to," she says wonderingly. "We don't have dragons or beetles-of-burden where I come from."

"... huh. I suppose if you didn't have lots of active qi you might not get dragons. They're not actually a single species, as it happens, the shape of a dragon is just a local optimum for a bunch of spiritual processes, so lots of powerful monsters and cultivators and spirits all convergently arrive at the same body plan. But the human form is one of those as well, so now I'm wondering why you had humans - you were humanoid, right? You didn't seem worried about having switched to a different body plan or anything." 

"Now that I think about it, it *is* suspicious the way dragons are a recurring feature in a lot of places' folktales. Maybe we used to have them, or we've always had them but rarely enough that none have turned up since we developed more reliable recordkeeping, or they're all hiding in the fae realm. For that matter, fae could probably take the shape of dragons if they wanted.

And yeah, this is essentially the same body plan. I keep double-taking at your right thumb not having the little triangle of freckles on it that mine did, but I expect I'll get used to that.

On my world, as far as we know the only creatures--as opposed to spirits--that are sapient are humans. There's some other creatures that have souls, but they never develop into people: their souls stay like the souls of infants."

"More evidence your world has a lot less qi than ours, then. Souls and cultivators produce more qi as they cultivate, meaning that in the very long run the process is positive sum, so I guess it's not surprising that we have a lot of it. Most animals and many plants here have souls, I think? But it's still fairly rare for them to awaken to sentience - many of what we call monsters are just animals who have cultivated without civilization rather than true qi-dependant species. But there are a lot of sapient species other than humans - the common ones around here are tongwan, who are sort of giant olms. They're 'true monsters' - they need qi to live and reproduce, and they are born already at the start of the second realm. Probably we'll see a couple in class today." 

"It must make for fascinating psychology, getting to study so many different kinds of person.

I'll try not to pester the tongwan students about it too much: I'm sure there's books."

"I'm sure there are myriad books! The archives are very extensive, even if people tend to focus on our technique library."