"Also if it does, somehow - I don't see how it would but I'm clearly missing something about the situation - I am open to adjusting how I do things. I just don't see how anything I'm proposing I do is a problem."

"If you are telling the full truth about it - which you might not even know yourself, the full details of the soul's passage through the Labyrinth are known only to the Paragons - then what you propose to do isn't the problem, it's how people will react to it."

"Which there's much less I can do about." He sighs. "I suppose it might help for me to get an explanation of the Virtues? And anything else that might be different here; I know the magic isn't the most important but I am curious about it, and the Eternals you mentioned."

"This sounds like your job, Sextus." Arbiter Gallius heads off to get that message to the Senator composed and sent; he really would like some good political advice on hand, instead of their wild guessing and the prospect of a mob coming to knock down the shiny new bridge.

"The Virtues are - hmm, let me actually look up the wording of the Doctrine, there was an important update recently - " Sextus pulls a pile of papers out of a hidden pocket and sifts through them to find the right one. "Virtue lies in choice and action. Virtue's power to exalt transcends the boundaries of soul, spirit and species, guiding and inspiring both orcs and humans to their highest destiny. Through the practice of Virtue, orcs and humans develop the strength, knowledge and enlightenment which marks their highest potential as thinking beings," he reads out.

"Essentially, a Virtue is a spiritual force that helps guide the spirit through the Labyrinth of Ages - which is where we go when we die - or across the Howling Abyss, which is where orcs go when they die.

The seven that the Synod recognises are Ambition, Courage, Loyalty, Pride, Prosperity, Vigilance and Wisdom. I can go into more detail or we can do an overview of Magic and Eternals first, and come back.

Someone who sufficiently exemplifies one of these Virtues to be helpful to others would be termed an Exemplar - there's a whole process for the Synod recognising them - and one who does so enough to perform miracles, transcend the Labyrinth and leave the cycle of reincarnation, is known as a Paragon. The orcs instead have Ancestors, who successfully cross the Howling Abyss and then directly advise their descendants and anyone who establishes a sufficiently close relationship."

"I think the main question I have is how you can tell whether something is harmful to peoples' Virtue."

"That's the problem, you see. A wide variety of things are theorised to be harmful to people's Virtue. The only ones we have any clear evidence for are malign spiritual forces, such as Hatred; confusing people as to what actually constitutes Virtue; and things that promote inaction or the abdication of responsibility, hence the prohibition on gods. But it is widely considered, especially outside of Urizen, that any inhuman power - and I use inhuman judiciously, because a lot of these people are also prejudiced about orcs, although that is getting better - may have deleterious effects."

"I see." Ugh, xenophobia. "Might it help to point out that there's not much involved in having me around that wouldn't happen normally, if somewhat less often? Humans build roads and mine stone for each other to use, and I'd expect a human traveler who ran out of food to be able to get help from other humans, or a human who ran into trouble on the road to warn other humans about it. The tolls don't have a direct equivalent in the same way but they're not dramatically different from giving another human a gift and telling them a story."

"It might once they are acquainted with your services, which is why it's probably best to start small. The first association of most people with an unusual individual showing up with coins that will 'claim' an area is that they are going to do something nefarious with that area later; demonstrating you aren't on a limited set of areas is less likely to cause a problem than offering the service to everyone who'll accept it." Also if he starts small, there might be some way of containing the problem if it does turn out to be a problem, Sextus does not say.

"That makes sense but I am pretty worried about people causing problems trying to convince me that their choice of where I should expand next is the best one; that's not an issue I'm used to dealing with."

"I'm a lot more worried about people causing problems trying to persuade you to not expand at all and go away. The Empire is very used to limited opportunities from Eternals; some of the Eternals attempt to be deliberately provocative with them, attempting to get bodies of state to judge who is the 'best nation' or what have you, so people are quite used to not rising to that bait. If you show up with half a dozen tokens and auction them for money, or announce a poetry competition and pick whichever entrants write your favourite poems, or anything along those lines, that will be entirely unremarkable. Once those projects turn out well, future projects will be less controversial, although anything that hints that supply might not, in fact, be limited, will be suspicious."

"That's reassuring. How important is the auction part? If I wanted to distribute the coins evenly, is there a sensible way to do that, or would it cause problems?"

"You could offer them to specific nations, or really any criteria you come up with, as long as there's clearly a sufficiently limited supply that somebody is missing out.

People have learned very well that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and that any deal that looks unusually good will have a sting in the tail.

Given you just built us an essentially free bridge - I'm sure you'll collect something in that toll booth but nothing like the actual cost of something like this, especially created instantly like that - I'm inclined to believe you are, in fact, attempting to hand out free lunches because your value for things is just that different, but in general everyone is going to expect it is too good to be true, and start hunting for the catch."

"Making roads is really just not very costly for me; I expect the bridge to make back the resources I spent on it within twenty years, and more likely within ten, it'll help that it's a bit of a tourist attraction. But I understand what you're saying, the math of it is very different for humans and that's how people here will be thinking."

"One of my associates at home suggests that I could award coins for the best offerings, to help people understand what I'm looking for with those; does that sound like a reasonable approach?"

"Frame it as 'bring me something that pleases me', but yes, Eternals do that all the time. Or at least Sadogua does, and everyone lets him get away with it."

"The Highborn don't like Sadogua very much about it, but it hasn't stopped him commissioning songs about how great he is."

"That should work, then. Will it also be a problem if I'm free with boons?"

"Depends how major a boon, what kind of boons do you provide? Eternals do hand those out a bit more freely than major building projects, but it depends on how major they are, and it's still always either in return for something or in the expectation that it will make someone behave as the Eternal wants them to."

"I have six I can offer - direction sense, weather sense, improved endurance, improved memory, poison resistance, and an improved understanding of human body language. They're strong enough to be noticeable, but not too dramatic. In this case I'd like to give them out in exchange for offerings good enough to be useful but not impressive enough to earn a coin; I don't like the idea of taking offerings with that little chance of people getting any real benefit in return."

"As long as they're not all that dramatic, those all sound like good consolation prizes. How long do they last?"

"They don't seem all that Autumn themed, although I suppose if you've got a good explanation about how they're linked to travel and roads, that won't cause too much of a problem. We could really do with an Autumn Eternal who particularly likes roads, travel's meant to be an Autumn resonance but we don't have a specific one the Empire's in touch with."

"They'll last indefinitely, and they're all meant to be useful on journeys, yes - direction sense and endurance should be obvious; improved memory helps with getting lost and with retaining the experience of your travels, which I value; weather sense helps with day-to-day planning and also gives a bit of an intuition for the climate in an area, which is sometimes useful when exploring; poison resistance makes foraging less dangerous and helps with snakes and bugs when people are traveling in wild places; and the body language one helps with communicating with strangers, for both avoiding untrustworthy ones and avoiding miscommunications with well-meaning ones."

"...'indefinitely' is not usual for a minor boon, if they're not limited uses they're normally year long."

"Uh. Should we check the magical signature on - whatever comes out, on someone with one of the boons on? And, uh, do you have the liao for an insight, Sextus? He reads, like, pretty weird to detect magic..." 

"That's a good point. An odd magical reading on you probably isn't too much of a problem, Kiraavi, but leaving an odd reading on lots of people, especially if there's an odd spiritual reading, that is going to cause alarm.

You'll probably quite like being Insighted, it involves paying you very close attention."