"Oh, also electricity, but Leonardo is mostly interested in its effects on metals, whereas I am more interested in its effects on... organic substances."

"Mm!  I presume you've noticed that shocking a muscle makes it contract?  I don't know a lot about the biochemical uses of electricity but I can certainly tell you that electrical potential is a key element of human thought.  Hmm.  What else...

"Oh, of course, water.  As you may or may not know, humans are mostly made of water.  And as you probably don't yet know, water - while not in any sense magnetic on its own - reacts to electromagnetic excitation in specific ways.  ...I forget if microwaves-the-devices are...oh, no, they definitely have to be magnetic fields, I mean, the relevant part is a 'magnetron' and you wouldn't have 'don't stick metal in them' warnings for any other reason...  And those produce the desired effect of reheating cold food by wibbling the water molecules so they heat up, because of the diamagnetism.  ...Speaking of which, on a molecular level motion is heat and heat is motion, or close enough."

"...Wibbling is not a technical term it's just a noise."

"I had certainly noticed the contraction of muscles," replies Elena, "and that a sufficient shock can interrupt the mechanisms of the heart; I had assumed any effect on the mind was due to scarring of the brain.

Humans are mostly made of blood, especially if you count plasm, which I suppose has a considerable portion of water?

Lightning can start fires, but the mechanism is unclear as yet - it does seem to catch dry wood, though, which would suggest water was not directly involved, although I suppose the air does contain water itself..."

"Oh, no, lightning starting fires is just because everything combusts - or melts - when you put enough energy in.  And brain damage...yes, it is mostly lesions.  But the proper functioning of the brain involves little teeny tiny micro- lightning-bolts jumping from cell to cell.  ...There's, like, chemicals that mediate that, but the lightningbolts are the cool shit.  Pardon my language."

"Humans are not mostly made of blood, though, blood, being a circulatory fluid, is just the easiest thing to extract from a human.  The internals of most cells?  Water.  There was a funny little story about that actually, however did it go...

"The beginning of the evolutionary record was all water-breathing creatures, for values of 'breathing' that include 'the ocean just goes along however it likes'.

"And then, evolution, the process of - traits that are more fit to survive the stresses of an environment being statistically - not individually, you can be the best example of your species ever and still get struck by lightning - more likely to be present in future generations of an organism -

"Well, I'm unduly personifying it, to say it 'came up with' anything, because it's a blind idiot god - er, well, not even a god at all, nobody worships it, but like, philosophically speaking - but - it came up with this glorious idea of keeping the fluid it used to move nutrients and signals from point A to point B, inside a sealed system, so it was harder to fuck up the homeostasis - er, the...not dying of heatstroke or poison or suchlike -

"Anyway.  The primitive analogues of blood vessels are still pumping saltwater around, because this is the ocean and that's what you have on hand.  ...I'm not even going to think about plants.  Anyway.  Blood vessels."

"Next, the many-many-times-removed ancestors of today's life start venturing out of their saltwatery homes into freshwater ones, and dying because they exploded.  ...That's a real thing; I think I could probably rig up a demonstration of osmotic pressure from relatively common supplies.  Also to do with why your fingers prune if you're too long in a bath, I believe.

"Anyway - where was I going with that...

"Evolution, presumably.

"Right.  Anyway.  It invents 'pumping extra water out of the cell'.  ...Which is why urination exists, but I'm not going to get into actual discussion of the mechanics there because I hardly know them.

"And then these horrible dumbass creatures stop being satisfied with being in water at all and start flopping around on land, fins into limbs and whatnot - you can see the similarities in skeletal structure - but at no point in this process has it been easier to stop using water anywhere.  It's called the universal solvent for a reason.

"Er.  Might not be called that here.  Still does take most things into solution.  There's no true universal solvent, though.  Not without magic bullshit.

"...Pardon my language again.

"Anyway!

"...What was the point of this even -

"Ah, right.  Water, and how prevalent it is.

"...Actually, y'know what, let's start from the opposite end - a survivalist's adage.

"I think it was once said that you can go three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food - as a rule of thumb, exceptions apply, etcetera etcetera.

"Now consider how much fluid the average human needs to replenish per day.

"It's a significant fraction of their body mass!

"...So yeah.  Water.  It's everywhere."

"We know what homeostasis is," replies Leonardo gruffly, "and osmosis, and we call the watery substance within the cell membrane 'plasm'.

Not so sure on the origin of species, and beggar's lye is our universal solvant but I suppose artifice is sometimes considered a branch of magic."

"You come from somewhere that does worship gods, then?" asks a passer-by who had heard the impassioned lecture and paused with his tray for a moment.

Leonardo gets a yielding sort of nod at the note on 'plasm'.

"I can't know what you know, so I'm explaining all the things.  Even the really basic ones.  Anyway - "

She pauses, mid-thought, as she turns to the newcomer.

"...Hm.

"I think it would be wrong to say that my homeland worships gods in the same way people here might worship gods if there is tangible proof of things that fit in the 'god' bucket existing, and then on top of that my homeland is officially in the practice of trying to maintain strict separation of church and state - but there is a dominant strain of religion, nonetheless, and I probably shouldn't start off by telling you about the dickishness people get up to in its name because a lot of the denominations just end up being people who show up at church on Sundays for the community of it and don't really think about whether there's a capital-G singular God like the tenets of the faith say exists.

"Hell, I was raised Catholic - er, that's one of the denominations.  I figured it for an entire crock of shit around the time I was introduced to the institutional weight thrown behind declaring people evil for existing, but I gave up on actually trying to believe in the - y'know what, I'm not even going to try to explain the Holy Trinity, it's the sort of thing even the priests will get wrong if they're trying to explain off the top of their heads - anyway.  I gave up on believing in the omnipotent creative force and his minions - that are also him somehow - sometime around the time I realized that life sucks.  The problem of trying to cram omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience into a nominally singular figure, that.

"...Wow, splitting those three traits across the Holy Trinity is probably some sort of new and exciting heresy, kind of wish I could see if someone's come up with it before.  Would explain all the Old-Testament-vintage smiting.

"Anyway.

"There's a few big monotheistic strains - Roman Catholicism, Protestantism which, uh, this one guy had Some Complaints and then the schisms started coming and they didn't stop coming so now there's a bajillion sects under that umbrella and some are great and some are awful - and then there's the Eastern Orthodox flavor of Christianity that I know surprisingly little about - and then, you have Judaism, which...I think I could not do justice explaining, because they've been through some shit just because they were there and the faith that turned into Christianity and took over most of the English-speaking world - well, no, I tell a lie, it was the Latin-speaking world then and some two-thousand years later English usurped it like the cancerous admixture of language bits that it is," she says with a surprising fondness, "but anyway - I do keep getting sidetracked, sorry about that -

"Anyway, Judaism preceded Christianity as a faith and there has been a veritable ocean of blood shed about that and that really fucking sucks.

"And then there's Islam, as the other Big Monotheistic Faith that I know to exist and be monotheistic; I don't know overmuch about them either except that they yoinked the 'having Jesus Christ' from Christianity - I believe he's officially a prophet of Islam, but not their the prophet - and they've also got a boatload of rules, which rhymes with Jewish practice.  Though as far as I know they don't have the mostly uniquely Jewish trait of taking those rules and rules-lawyering the shit out of them; I really have to admire the people who invented the proverb of a wise man invoking signs from God Himself to try and win an argument, only to have the other side of the debate go 'Well, now it is three against two.'

"You don't get that out of the doctrine of papal infallibility," she...quips?

"Uh.  Right.  And then there's the poly-theistic faiths, like, Hinduism, or Shintō, which I can do even less justice, and the Satanists who are a middle finger given unto Christianity, and the literal parody religion of Pastafarianism, and the two percent of Australians who wrote in their religion as Jedi, which is from a work of fiction - oh, and I completely forgot the Buddhists!  I have a vague feeling that whatever it is you're doing is most akin to them; they do a lot of - meditation and cultivating virtue, and there's a side-branch of - brain-teasers that are meant to make you think about stuff, like 'what is the sound of one hand clapping', or whatnot -

"Anyway.  There's.  A lot of religions, I just named the ones that I'd expect a reasonably sized town anywhere in the world to probably have at least one of - there's a lot of more-local faiths and I haven't even gotten into the revivals of historical mythology - but none of them have an observable supernal force involved.

"So the answer to 'Do you come from somewhere that does worship gods' is 'Well, that really depends on what you mean by "gods"'!  And if you mean 'the faith asks a seemingly higher power for moral guidance or intercession', yeah, that's most of them - but there's none of them who've ever proven they can, despite the fact that we're pretty sure we know who this 'Jesus' guy was, archaeologically speaking!"

"So, yes, but you're a bit smarter than that? Good to hear.

That doesn't sound like any of the faith systems I've heard of though - it's a little bit Asavean round the edges but they are definitely the polytheistic kind. I suppose the Commonwealth officially doesn't have a religious opinion..."

"We were trying to have a nice conversation about blood and fire and other not at all heretical topics."

"I don't think it's about 'smartness', because the only sort of faith my homeworld could have in higher powers was an entirely ephemeral, intangible, unprovable thing, and that's not what I feel is likely to be the case here.  So I think the entire question of whether my homeland worships any gods must really be premised on your definition of 'god'; I've certainly got the language I'd need to talk about the concept, but there's quite a difference between the average priest and, say, the fantasy cleric that calls power from gods to smite - infidels, or whatever.  Or to draw back to Christianity, there's a series of books set in a modern age with wizards and belief making power and whatnot - and one of the three Super Specialest Swordsmen, whose powers were observably backed by angels - figures of relevant mythical significance and omnibenevolence, if that doesn't translate - was nonetheless agnostic or atheist himself, because he rejected the premise that he should worship this powerful being just because all these other guys thought of it as a god.  Could've just been aliens, for all he knows.  And I'm...mmmm, getting the vibe here that y'all have some Very Important People coming down on the 'gods are just Sufficiently Powerful Aliens and you really shouldn't fucking encourage them', side?  Because if that's the sort of god you mean, then my homeworld couldn't have worshipped any - because as far as we have been able to experimentally determine, despite some accounts of sufficiently improbable, and well-documented, events that some churches have claimed them miraculous - well, there simply are no entities matching that description.  There's not verifiable evidence of supernatural meddling, unlike, for example, the ongoing fuckery with lightning-related experiments.  I half think I could make a grenade by dropping - copper and zinc, I think it was - into citric fucking acid, you know, the stuff from lemons - just because that's not not a battery.  Though of course now that I've said that, it won't work.  Unless it's dramatic."

"...you also have explosives which produce more useful force than a little colour and light and a loud noise?"

"'Gods' don't have actual power, no. It's a pernicious belief system that they do, however, and other entities that absolutely do exist will regularly take advantage of such credulity."

"...Oh, for fuck's sake.  It's in the chemistry too, is it?  Are you even allowed oil?  But surely you must or we wouldn't --"

She pales.

"I think I may have to mark off that line of inquiry as too dangerous, given that to investigate organic chemistry too closely could cause people to start collapsing into mush because they're the material under study.  Fuck, I do not want to create infohazards.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!  Um.  I'm going to turn the topic back to heresy because that'll at least only get me killed if I fuck it up, how's that sound.  Here, try this one - the idea that a being with power is not isomorphic to a god is fundamentally absurd from a linguistic perspective; the being that answers when someone calls, no matter what else it is, is a god to that someone."

"It's a matter of cultivating the correct attitude. Can Eternals pose as gods, absolutely, that's the problem. Should anyone worship them, or cry out to them in an undisciplined and unprepared fashion, absolutely not. Which is why subsuming your agency as a human being to any inhuman force is rightly criminalised by this Empire. If you want to make a well-conceived deal with one, and haven't been banned from doing so for past misdeeds, that's quite a different matter."

"Um, it's 'Will and Destiny', not agency."

"Same thing."

"You know, on the one hand, that makes ever so much sense, on the other hand, I feel like it may be too far on the side of 'not letting people make their own stupid mistakes', from a - hm -

"The consequence of criminalizing things is that the people who do it become criminals.  And that's a harm to society of its own; it's the sort of thing a society should try to prevent.

"Then again, cults are bad enough when they're not having mystical powers about it.  Especially when they're - unaligned.  Like somehow I don't imagine you have - I don't know, even something as dubiously aligned to the values of civilization-as-a-whole as an entity that really wants all trades to be fairly valued.  To take a - fictional - example that has its own pitfalls but is generally prosocial in practice.

"On the other hand I should hope you also didn't get stuck with any entities that terminally value Making Everything The Most Worst For Everybody, as another equally-fictional example.  ...Right?"

"You see, thinking Ephisis is 'generally prosocial in practice' is how you get damaging cults in the first place. As a Prosperous citizen of the Empire I am of course all for fairly valued trade - but there have to be, in practice, some limits - it was a Herald of Ephisis we killed at the heart of the international slave trade.

And yes, Agramant also exists - don't look at me like that, Leonardo, being superstitious about the name just confirms your lack of fundamentals on the laws of magic - and sufficiently desperate people will turn to that abomination, too, especially as his values make him very keen to offer survival and superficial comfort, before the other shoe drops."

"Ah."

She sighs.  "Yeah, that's one of the failure modes I had in mind, when I mentioned the fictional analogue.  Though not quite like that!  I wouldn't write Abadar allowing a cleric of his to facilitate international trade of slaves in any but very - specific circumstances; debt slavery basically but with - strict welfare concerns - but even then, you couldn't pay them enough to go facilitating slavers that touch a single country where it was illegal.  They'd get smote if they tried."

And then, she turns to Agramant.  "...Just, bloody hell.  Why is this my life.  You don't even have any Good gods, do you, but noooo, you have fucking Zon-Kuthon analogues and even your pale emulation of Abadar is pretty much shit, because slavery is pretty much never a fair trade.  Especially when it's completely illegal in a lot of markets!  Ugh, this is such bullshit.  You need better gods.  ...Excuse me.  You don't need any such thing, but - the evident lack of any grand-scale entities concerned with sapient flourishing is just - whoever came up with this world, I have words to have with them!  Needs some fucking Aroden.

"...Anyway.  ...Out of vaguely relevant curiosity, are there any - ascended mortals?"

"Yes, we have the Paragons. They're not at all the same thing as Eternals, but that's really all to the good."

"There was that Flint fellow who took over Basilisus Kade's portfolio."

"That is not at all the same thing. At best Flint left an imprint of himself on the Eternal, while his soul went off for a good old stint in the Labyrinth. More likely it was just another trick and the Eternal was wearing his form like a puppet."

"...Well has anyone found his soul since?

"That said, a), what is a Paragon, then, and b), which Eternal with what portfolio, anyway?  Depends on the portfolio, whether they're likely to try wearing a human meat-suit, y'know?  ...And c), more along the line of philosophy, what is a person except the way they are and act?  Souls, evidently, exist, but I wouldn't say I consider a reincarnation of whatever my soul is to be more than kin to myself, whereas a copy of my thoughts and memories would be me at the point it was made, no matter the underlying substrate."

"Nobody has found his soul since, but we wouldn't expect to just yet. I suppose it did show some modicum of Ambition, but generally subsuming yourself into the Realms is not considered a particularly Virtuous action.

A Paragon is a human who has sufficiently understood and embodied Virtue to be capable of miraculous actions, displayed a number of signs of the Paragon such as leaving a great Legacy, and who then transcends the Labyrinth and escapes from the cycle of reincarnation. Some of them are held to have provided miracles from wherever they go after that, especially Vardas of Vigilance, but it's not at all clear whether that is actually the case or whether people inspired by their example attribute their own miracles to the Paragon. Certainly they are usable as a focus of magical power, the Highborn do it all the time, although it's not very fashionable elsewhere; I think that's just because nobody other than the Highborn bothers to study them in sufficient detail, though.

In general you'll find people here identify with their souls; what is your deal anyway, have you crawled out of a regio or something?"

"Appeared mysteriously like a Tulpa, although doesn't identify that way."