"How do I start doing it?"

That was the question Latti introduced to family tea time, which, to Afternoon Sale's delight, had swollen to include Yhelm, Madrigal, Latti, Bodo, and Latyzell. That made five. And to Latti's shame, it took her a moment to add that figure up to five. That was the real heart of the problem, too.

Work was becoming difficult. More and more it felt like she was being called upon to create accounting miracles! But she was no priest! She was no god-botherer. Madrigal and Latyzell, however!

Yhelm made a little noise, that was sort of like a laugh but only if an adversary was making it. "You really want to chain under Phyllis? Flip me if I'm ones, but there's way more exciting gods than that."

"It's not about excitement!" Latti said, half-standing in her own excitement. "It's about necessity. Poor Trumblecase lost a ship a week ago and now we're scrambling to find money enough to keep staff paid! To say nothing of investors, and while insurance should cover most of that there's some concern the loss was due to improper handling of Straits, and, well, if you know anything about naval insurance..."

Bodo stiffened in his seat. "You think after all this time someone would do something about Straits."

"Well!" Latti said, "I'm sure after five-thousand years if there was something to be done, it would have been done by now. This is just the mess we are stuck living with."

Latyzell nodded sympathetically. "It is unfortunate the waters are so cruel, but Straits claimed the oceans fairly."

"No," Bodo said, "there's nothing fair about her disregarding Law. That's a founding element! You can't just ignore one of the founding elements!"

"She just replaced it with Authority, and it's all her Authority," Yhelm said. "Law and Authority were already close enough anyway."

Now Bodo hopped out of his seat, but he was short, so he had to stand on it to stay above the table. "That isn't true! Law and Authority are fundamentally complementary, yes, but operate on entirely different modes! Firstly, Law exists on two levels of foundational Law and temporal Law, one of which supercedes any mundane Authority and the second of which is subordinate to it! There--why are you laughing?"

Yhelm was infact laughing. "No no don't mind me, this is adorable. It's like watching a tiny me get angry about Magic."

Bodo pouted, and sat back down, and didn't say anything else.

"... but anyway," Latti said, again, once the whole mess had settled. "How do you get a god to notice you? I have a little statue of her on my desk, I call to her for help when I try to do the calculations, and while, yes, I have even summoned her aspects before on difficult accounts, well anyone can summon those if they pay the fee... I don't want a purely business relationship, though, I want something more like with what Madrigal and Latyzell have. Something intimate and... free?"

Yhelm was the first to answer, adversary that she was. "Leave a letter in her door talking about how cute she is. Don't sign it yet, build up the suspense."

Madrigal, bless their heart, gave an actual answer. "That's not really wrong. A relationship with a god is like a relationship with anyone else. You can just go through the motions of the rituals, but actually having an emotional connection's really important."

Latyzell smiled. "Yes! Yes, that is exactly so. It is one thing to want what a god has to offer, but what do you offer to her?"

"Well! What do I have to offer to her?" Latti asked. "I worship her, right?"

"Worship gives very little of a thing," Latyzell said. "It is how Yhelm says, it is giving love letters, but just that. It is, what is the word for actarige?"

Across the table Latti saw Yhelm go to answer, but pause, and she gave a look at Bodo, who looked down, and he thought for a moment, and then he said, "Performative."

"Hah!" Latyzell laughed. "I am not going to try to pronounce that one. But it is like that. A relationship with a god that is only by ritual and not felt, it is a sad thing, it is weak and it gives little to the god and little to you."

"You have to fall in love with the god," Madrigal said. "Moreso, or maybe rather, you have to fall in love with the part of the god you already see in yourself. You know. If self love's easier for you."

"Wait, wait," Yhelm said, holding up her hand like she was in class. "Go back, what's this about the god you see in yourself."

"Well, in a lot of ways I am like Encore," Madrigal said. "More than just being her chosen race. A lot of her ideas about art, about lies, about deception and performance, those are things I've always felt. The more I learned about Encore's secrets the more I felt I already knew them inside me. It was less about just loving her, but loving the part of me that was her. Awakening it. Owning it. Exercising it."

"Latyzell, please confirm," Yhelm said, oddly excited?

"Yes, this is not wrong," Latyzell agreed. "We embody Argent in her aspect of mercy, and seek to be like her. But we do this because we feel this inside of us, because this part of her is one we hold dear to ourselves."

"And that makes your powers more powerful?" Yhelm asked.

"... yes?"

"I can't--I don't--" Yhelm shook her head significantly. "Like-Must-Be-Is. Even the frelling gods are subservient to Like-Must-Be-Is?"

"What is this?" Latyzell asked.

"The principle that emulation of something is enough to convince the world to conflate all self-adjacing patterns for safe record-keeping. It's the fundamental property that allows half-deads to be created, it's how most pattern spells work, it's, it's how conceptors are created, and now you're telling me you can just limby an entire god to gain its power?"

Bodo was sniggering. "Now who's being the nerd?"

"Hey!" Yhelm stabbed a massive adversary claw across the table at her little brother. "I own it! I own that."

Latti sipped her coffee to stifle her giggles. "So I just need to find what parts of Phyllis Inkroads match what's inside me, and go from there?"

"Yeah but honestly," Yhelm said. "God of Maths. There's so many more exciting gods. Really!"

"I like maths!" Latti said. "It's like a series of puzzles. The rules are always the same, but the problems are all so different and novel each time, and with accounting the answers might never be where you expect, if there are any at all, and that means sometimes you have to make hard decisions, and, well, to be honest, that makes me feel like a grown-up more than anything else ever did."

Madrigal was giggling. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, your entire family is just all nerds, and that's adorable to me."