She nods, and fades out.

The priestess bows to Puna, then excuses herself to greet another worshipper. 

The motu priest bows as well, more deeply, and leaves the temple to make his way to the next one. The tiny image of Puna fades as soon as his back is turned. 

Puna is grinning as she dismisses the illusion. "That went well!" 

"Was it likely to have gone worse?"

"She...could have refused to help?" she points out.

"You're not her people, you don't worship her - it would be perfectly reasonable to decide it's not her problem. The others still might." 

"What is worshipping, exactly -"

"It's...what our people give back to us, in return for watching over and helping them," Puna explains haltingly. 

"Worship is an acknowledgement that we are their gods, and everything that means. It can be a thanksgiving, or a call for help, or a plea for forgiveness if they've done something we told them not to do. Temples like the one we just saw are special places people go to worship, although it can really be done anywhere." 

"You tell them not to do things?"

"Not me, mostly, but yes," she clarifies.

"Some pantheons have lots and lots of rules about what their followers aren't allowed to do - I think the dwarven gods are like that. But we mostly stick to teaching people how to avoid dangerous things, or things that would be bad for them."

"Since you're not as crowded as we are, are people allowed to move somewhere with different rules?"

"The rules aren't about places, they're about people," she corrects.

"If they don't want to follow our rules they can just decide to stop worshipping us, and say they're not going to be one of our people anymore. Of course, that means we won't automatically help them if they need divine help, and I suppose their friends and family might be mad at them? So not very many of our people do that. I think some dwarves do, though, and plenty of humans and mardik." 

"I see - most laws here don't follow someone who has permanently moved to a country that doesn't have the same one."

She nods.

"That's how mortal governments work; it's just divine law that works differently. We can help people anywhere on the planet, so it would be silly to say we only had jurisdiction over one little bit of it!" 

Nod. "And the system is set up in such a way that - pleading for forgiveness tends to be relevant -?"

"It shows they understand what they did wrong, and didn't do it just to break the rules or to show that they're not going to worship us anymore?"

She thinks about it some more.

"If someone didn't apologise...it would depend on what they did and what the consequences were, but if they did a big thing that's really against the rules, and got people hurt, we'd probably stop helping them like we would if they told us outright. If they did something like kill other motu, we'd - sort of do the reverse of the ways we help people? Give them bad luck, and bad weather when they try to go fishing, and make their crops fail...Raumati might want to hit them with lightning, but our father would probably talk him out of it." 

"You can affect 'luck'?"

"Yup!" 

She bounces. "That's actually one of my specialties! Why?"

"We haven't found that luck is a - thing."

"Well, you don't have magic, either," she points out.

"That's probably why. It's pretty difficult to do anything with luck without magic!"

"What I mean is - presumably you refer to the sort of phenomenon that causes dice to come up in a winning or losing fashion? We've found that reducible to physics to the point where it's odd to think about separating it back out again."

"Well, yes, it's all physical changes, but they're all so tiny that it's trivial for a god - or even a mortal magic-user - to influence them to create a favourable outcome," Puna explains.

"The weather across an entire ocean can shift with the creation of a tiny breeze on the other side of the world a few days earlier, or a little patch of cold air off the coast of one island. For smaller effects, like a die roll, most magic-users know enough about the forces involved that it's easy for them to imagine how it could go either way, and that's enough that the magic can fill in the details to make it more likely to happen."

"Can non-gods use magic?"

"Yes! Not everyone, but there are plenty of different ways people can get it. One way is if someone impresses a god enough with their faith that we grant them a piece of our own magic. They're called clerics, but there are also wizards, sorcerers, paladins, bards, druids, rangers...and warlocks."

She pulls a face at the last one.

"- is something the matter with warlocks?"

"They...get their power by making deals with various powerful entities, mostly ones that are a step below gods," Puna explains.

"Including some that really shouldn't be trusted to uphold their end of a bargain, or set a fair price. Some even drive people mad just by interacting with them. So, warlocks tend to be evil, or mad, or trapped in contracts that force them to do evil things, or any combination of the three."

"...entities like what?"

"How could interacting with something directly cause mental illness?"

"How are the contracts enforced?"