"They're a little costly, but entirely possible. I can work with mountains, too, generally - I do end up winding quite a bit but it's worth the trouble, if you need it."

"Just to be clear, I am not making any agreements, merely expressing curiosity regarding your nature and capabilites.

If you want to actually make agreements, we'll need to fetch the Arbiter for local matters and the Senator for wider scale operations."

"I don't generally operate on formal agreements with mortals, but if you'd be more comfortable with that, certainly. Not necessarily right now; whenever you'd like."

"What - do you 'generally operate' on, then?"

"Well, if there's another god in a place I want to go I'll work something out with them, of course, or not do it. If there's a settlement in unclaimed land that I want to go through rather than around I'll send a priest or avatar to see how I'll be received, but neither of us will be directly offering each other very much, generally, so there's nothing to make a treaty about, it's not like I'm going to want to have a temple in their main plaza or anything."

"Do you generally operate temples, then? I must warn you that the last few temples that people attempted to build within the Empire suffered a dreadful series of sledgehammer and fire related mishaps."

"Not temples, in the sense of a full staffed building, no - I have a few, but really not many and they're usually not worthwhile, for me. I do generally try to have an offering table available where people are likely to be beginning or ending journeys, and people tend to put up shrines in taverns and things along my roads, but nothing obtrusive."

"Okay. You seem like a reasonable individual, so I am going to give you some basic warnings.

It is a crime, in the Empire, to subsume human will and destiny to any inhuman entity or force. This explicitly includes worship, veneration or exaltation of any inhuman being or power.

As Imperial citizens we are generally quite keen on following the law, and the militia and the magistrates are quite keen on executing people who don't.

This certainly doesn't preclude trading with inhuman powers. We do that all the time. Sometimes that trade extends to things like putting up giant statues of them, although that is looked upon with a little bit of suspicion in some quarters.

But if you'd like to keep this on friendly terms - well, now you know."

"Huh."

"That doesn't sound like we're necessarily in conflict, albeit I'd want to be careful about having a priesthood or selecting any acolytes here - though even then they're more like employees than anything else, with me. But most travelers are just trying to get somewhere, and maybe want a little help with that, and that's fine with me, I don't expect anything more of them - as long as they know who to ask if they do want help that's usually entirely sufficient. ...I suppose I might want a little more from you than that in an emergency, usually I'd call on other gods for aid but I don't know how well that'll work across worlds."

"I expect - although I'm not an expert on this and I would defer to the Arbiter in the first instance - that you are likely to be treated as a particularly odd Herald of an unknown Eternal.

That means you start out with Neutrality; you are not protected by our laws, there are some magical protections that may not apply if you really are apart from the Realms.

There is a political body that makes decisions on which creatures of this classification to exclude and which to pursue further friendship with, known as the Conclave. I expect if you do anything significant, you will come to their attention.

What form does this 'help' to travellers take, and what do you ask in return?"

"Well, the most dramatic is that I can call down lightning, for example if someone is attacked by bandits, or cause earthquakes, though situations where I might even consider that are vanishingly rare - I've done it maybe twice in the last thousand years. Even calling lightning is much less common than anything else I do - for most people I'll give advice about routes or destinations or supplies or any other questions they might have, or give them supplies from the things that other people have given me as offerings, or send someone to travel with them if they'll have trouble doing it themselves, or give them a blessing if they ask, or if they seem like they have need of one - the blessings I have to offer are improved direction sense, improved weather sense, improved endurance, improved memory, poison resistance, and improved recognition of human body language. Occasionally someone will ask for something else, and if it'll help them in their journey and not hurt anyone else I'll do it if I can, but most gods have fairly similar ways of doing things, where I'm from, and people know how we work and mostly ask us for the same sorts of things.

For what I ask, most of the region I'm in has a tradition of giving gods offerings, with an explanation of how they make sense as offerings to that god in particular, and that works fine - it's not the only way to do it but I think you might find it the most agreeable, since it's discrete and individual. The important part is paying me a bit of attention, and some other places do that in other ways - holidays dedicated to gods are also fairly common, for example. In particular I like practical offerings, because it's easier to pass them along to travelers who need things than to make new things myself, so I encourage people to give me any traveling supplies that are still in good condition at the end of their journey, if they don't think they'll want them again, and I also like travel journals and travelogues."

"You may get a better reception if you call your blessings 'boons', which is the term we use for gifts from Eternals that are often along the same lines. If you can refer to yourself as an Eternal - and this avatar as a Herald - you can gain attention by people calling on you in ritual - either for rituals we already know which involve travelling, I expect once you're known it will work as well as anything else with the right concepts involved, or new ones that do whatever you're interested in doing for people.

Offerings is a little more difficult to incorporate, but 'the Eternal of Roads, Kiraavi, likes it when you leave your old kit and notes in these places and this makes him more inclined to continue to sponsor the minor rituals he's handed out, which cost no mana while he's happy with the Empire' is something that we could plausibly sell."

"Uh, should we get the Arbiter? I know you like solving problems but, uh, this seems like an Arbiter kind of thing."

Despite having insisted Adolphus come along, Sextus totally ignores him.

"I won't mind speaking to an Arbiter if you'd like to go get one," he says to Adolphus. "I do think I'd like to know more about how things work here before I make any plans as wide-ranging as that, but I don't see any obvious problems with any of it. What kinds of things do your existing rituals do?"

Adolphus scurries off to fetch the Arbiter.

"Directly relevant to roads, the largest we have codified is one that causes armies to find the best path to their destination and arrive much quicker than would otherwise be possible. There's also the Dance of Navarr and Thorn I suppose, that links up magical pathways to the Vallorn so that its strength is drained and people have an easier time travelling on them.

Our major roads are generally either those pathways or built of white granite, so they don't usually take direct enchantment very well. Most of the minor travel rituals are aimed at ships, rather than travellers by road."

"We don't have magic at home other than from gods, and I've described almost all of it - boons, being able to move my things around, I can see my whole domain and tell people what's happening in other places, changing the weather and terrain in my domain; there's also my personal power, the one I share with acolytes, but that's just an extension of my senses. I'd guess I'll be able to work with the magic here but I don't have much to go on, yet, about that. Rituals that are just intended to get my attention and ask me for something I can already do will work fine, though."

"Fortunately one of the styles of magic we use calls upon the names of Eternals - usually it's just a focus for the magic that is happening, but 'a boon that makes these particular rituals not cost mana' is not outside the course of things.

Do you have a geographic limitation on where you can be paying attention? Rituals usually work everywhere, if you've learned them correctly, although ones sponsored by Eternals can come with assurances that mean they stop working if used incorrectly.

I'd advise consulting with the Senator of an area before rearranging the weather and terrain - people tend to get quite excitable about that sort of thing, otherwise."

"Unfortunately I can only see and hear within a mile of my domain - the roads I've claimed - or if someone has a vial of my dirt or some other special object of mine I can see and hear within a mile of that, and speak through it. I am usually only carried like that by my priests, but it doesn't have any magical significance, it's just a bit of an intimacy.

Weather and terrain I can also only affect within my domain, and that's not very useful for weather - it takes a lot of concentration to stop a storm blowing in from just outside my borders, and I'm practically all borders. Terrain, you're right, might be more of an issue, I do sometimes re-grade things when I move into a new area... I'd usually send a priest to check a new area out before I expand there, and asking about terrain changes would be part of that, but I'm not sure I'll be able to have priests here. I'll think on it."

"If you can avoid calling them priests - it doesn't really sound like you want to subsume human will - there are folk wandering around calling themselves things like 'the Chosen of Janon', picking someone you like and giving them a fancy title and a nice enchantment is not too unusual as Eternal behaviour goes."

"I really don't, and it worries me that that's such a concern here. I suppose 'chosen' will work for priests, and I'll find something else if I end up choosing an acolyte here."

"People really like abdicating responsibility to whatever funny shaped bit of rock they can blame for their misfortunes instead. It's important for the improvement of the human spirit not to let them."

"I've known gods like that, I suppose. It tends to go badly on the road, though. - I might go with 'fellow-traveler', for priests, in that case, and save 'chosen' for acolytes."

Adolphus is up in one of the towers, having a sufficiently impassioned conversation with an unimpressed Sentinel outside the Arbiter's office that the Arbiter comes out of his office to see what all the fuss is about.

"The Synod and the Conclave are likely to scrutinise whatever you do for cult formation - we do know that some Eternals really like to play god and let humans serve them, rather than merely partnering with them.

What brings you here, in any case, and are you still planning to stay?"