Saint Tabris of Beckinsdale was enjoying a heavenly hot chocolate from a holy mug and gazing across the divine demi-plane of her boss and God: Tasmian. Or at least, that’s what it seemed like to her. Intellectually and from the lessons she’d had in Saint-school, she knew that none of what she was seeing, or perceiving was “real” in a physical, matter-based sense. In fact, strictly speaking, Saint Tabris didn’t even have a corporal body; the illusion of sitting on a balcony and drinking hot chocolate was just that: a trick of the mind, a fancy hallucination. Yes, it was a hallucination that all the denizens of this demi-plane shared, but it also meant that local reality was quite mutable. For example, the cup of hot chocolate she had would never empty, because she simply had faith in the fact that it would not.

Still, Tabris allowed herself these “material” indulgences, as compared to most of her colleagues, she’d only been canonized—aka died—rather recently: only three hundred and forty-seven years ago. When she moved through the impossible architecture and grand spaces of Tasmian’s divine realm, she tended to keep the illusion of a physical body around. Moreover, three centuries after her death, material comforts continued to soothe her mind.

In secret, she rather liked it this way, and wanted to postpone becoming more… strange like the older Saints, Angels, and Archons did over the eons. Essentially, she was still mostly a human soul, but as time passed and one spent time in a non-physical divine realm such as this one, one would eventually lose touch with reality and transcended the bounds of conventional or mortal thinking: Many of her older coworkers eschewed the simulated body she used and favored to simply present themselves as something abstract, like a gust of holy wind, roving patch of primary colors, or wandering locations of emotion.

No thanks, Tabris thought, shivering slightly at the thought of eventually becoming something so alien before another sip of her hot chocolate drove those shudder-inducing thoughts away. Then, another thought intruded: I should get back to work. She sighed. Who would’ve thought that the afterlife, particularly that of a Saint, can be so busy?

Truthfully, she knew she was exaggerating. In the grand scheme of things, Saint Tabris of Beckinsdale was just one minor Saint among thousands, albeit with a somewhat unique backstory: She’d been canonized through martyrdom. During her life, she’d been a priestess at Tasmian’s church in Beckinsdale. Then, one day, Beckinsdale had been attacked by a host of Demon-influenced warlocks accompanying a single demon. She’d played a critical role in bringing citizens to safety, augmenting the completely overwhelmed city guard, and finally eliminating the 12-pace tall Infernal herself: She’d leapt onto the enormous red-skinned monstrosity’s back, wrapped her arms around its neck—her hands barely touching due to the massive circumference—and then she’d detonated herself in a blast of holy energy which had disincorporated the demon, killed all its warlocks, and sent then-priestess Tabris straight into holy scripture as a newly anointed Saint.

Since a Saint’s area of focus was tailored to the deed that had gotten them canonized, Saint Tabris’s Saint-school lessons and new skills revolved around sending Demons back to their infernal Planes as violently as possible. This made her something of an oddity among Tasmian’s followers, because, while all gods focused on smiting demons to some extent, Tasmian’s main focus was often called “home, hearth, and leadership”. Most of Tasmian’s Saints weren’t canonized due to violent and direct combat, but rather exemplary leadership of followers during times of trouble or securing the survival of people they cared for through difficult times.

Stepping into her office, Tabris materialized her favorite chair and sat down to work. First, she checked her prayer-queue and began sifting through unread ones. Her queue wasn’t particularly long—she only had a couple thousand people who prayed to her on a regular basis—but this was one of her favorite parts of the job. In life, as a priestess, she’d often felt overwhelmed or disheartened by the physical limitation that time imposed on her. In a city the size of Beckinsdale, there were too many parishioners, so many people that she couldn’t give individualized attention to everyone. In the divine demi-plane though? Time’s relationship with the material world was a bit weird—she didn’t understand it—but it meant there was always enough time to work through her entire prayer queue and without needing to sleep, eat, breathe, or grow weary: her patience was quite literally divine.

Unfortunately, despite being able to give each prayer and the attached person the attention she felt they deserved, that didn’t mean she could help them all. She had a budget, an energy-allowance that she was permitted to spend on prayers. Overstepping this budget was frowned upon, and she understood why it existed too:

Fundamentally, energy carried by mana particles was the divine currency. When the devout prayed with a priest or other sufficiently skilled clergy member present, they unknowingly cast the most basic of spells: charging their personal mana particles with their body’s energy and sending them out into the space around them. After that, it was a trivial matter for the local clergy member to collect the ambient energy and redirect it through their divine link to their god’s demi-plane. This energy, once collected in the divine plane, formed a pool that was then doled out according to need: some of it was used to answer prayers, some was given out to clergy and other mortals for miracles or used to guide their blessings, and some was used to power the divine demi-plane itself and sustain all the souls of the dead that it contained.

Due to the nature of Tabris’ Saintly focus, most of her prayers were less concrete than those her colleagues received, and this made them often hard to fulfill. Instead of praying for confidence or wisdom in guiding their house, most of the prayers directed at her were from people who had a nebulous fear of Infernals in general. To grant those prayers, there wasn’t all too much Tabris could do, besides remotely sanctifying spaces or amulets subtly to ward off lesser Demons or Infernal influence.

What was more interesting to her were the blessings and the occasional miracle that she was directly responsible for. Most blessings were obviously automatically handled by the mechanisms behind the demi-plane itself; blessings existed because most mortals couldn’t preform the complex calculations and the fine manipulation needed to, say, remove unwanted contaminants from a wound or apply a precise acceleration vector to a rapidly moving object. Obviously, mortal mages could reach those heights of skill, but blessings gave an easy shortcut for the faithful. Furthermore, theoretically, any mortal that made the right gestures and spoke the right words could invoke a low-level blessing, and permission rights for higher levels were frequently given out to mortal clergy.

Still, unrestricted access on blessing-enabling computational power or even miracles—which dipped into the divine plane’s energy pool instead of the invoker’s—was a bad idea. That’s why when high-level blessings were invoked on the material planes, someone had to at least check that some mortal wasn’t up to something they shouldn’t be. Most of the time, this check involved a Saint or divine automation simply looking at the blessing-invoker’s trust level: an internal metric assigned to every follower which gave a rough estimate of how responsible they were. If they didn’t meet the trust level requirements for a specific blessing, then Saints could take a closer look and search for extenuating circumstances: for example, if the invoker were in a life-or-death situation before deciding to grant—or not grant—the blessing’s pattern to the invoker.

Miracles were slightly different: Only high-ranking mortal clergy could attain blanket permission to use low-power miracles, and for anyone else, Miracle requests had to be individually reviewed by the Saint they’d been made to or from the general Saint’s work queue.

When a Miracle was asked of Tabris specifically, she always found it exciting. It was rare, but when it happened, it was usually because some paladin or priest found themselves in direct conflict with one of the Infernals: something she had personal experience with. Furthermore, as Tasmian wasn’t a god dedicated to some form of combat or Demon-slaying, when one of his followers invoked something of Tabris, they were typically in a unique situation.

Of course, Tabris was a professional. Demons had to die, and it was her job to enable those still living to send them back to their hellish planes… but, over the years she’d picked up a love for stories and grand tales (despite Narrative’s reputation) and the afterlife could get just a bit monotonous over the centuries. Yes, she always wanted the brave Paladin to win in the end, but if the fight dragged on a bit, well, that wouldn’t be too bad. After all, if she wanted to end it quickly or her champion found themselves in dire straits, her miracle budget was woefully underused, and she could spend it to make sure that the brave warrior or priest facing down seemingly insurmountable odds was given a fighting chance.

As if her thoughts had been prophetic, at that moment an alert interrupted her perusal through the prayer queue: Someone, a Paladin named “Haddral” was unexpectedly fighting a Demon and judging by the power of the particular Miracle he’d called upon, losing badly. Tabris checked over Paladin Haddral’s profile and was moderately surprised. I could’ve used someone like this back in Beckinsdale, she thought. The man’s trust level was high for a Paladin and according to the brief summary, he had a long list of accolades from the church for combat-related successes.

She paged further through Haddral’s activity log and found that a minute of local time ago, his blessing usage had spiked to quite elevated levels. He was already on the border of what his trust level would let him invoke without requiring Saintly approval. Fortunately, inferring what the problem was from the log’s lack of healing invocations and the specific Miracle he’d asked for was quite easy: He was fending off a demon but both parties were incapable of landing a blow.

He needed her. Specifically, he’d invoked the Miracle commonly referred to as “Divine Mind” which allowed a mortal to directly channel the “soul” of a Saint or other divine figure to assist them. In this case, she was being asked to perform a mental attack on the foe. How the Miracle actually worked was a bit out of Saint Tabris’ knowledge base, but she knew that it would open a mana-particle-only link to Sir Haddral’s mind and then allow her to cast her consciousness to his mind and then out to attack the Demon.

Tabris was excited. Yes, she wasn’t physically incarnating or anything fancy, but visiting the material planes was always fun. Even better, she’d be going straight into combat against a Demon and she’d collect a story about a brave Paladin who, against the odds, was able to defeat an Infernal.

Reclining on her summoned chair, she prepared to transfer her consciousness. While she was incorporeally present on the material plane, her simulated body in the divine demi-plane would appear asleep, and even though it couldn’t get injured, it would be undignified to awake as a heap on the floor.

Realizing she hadn’t been bothering to breathe, she summoned some air in her simulated lungs and breathed out a calming breath to gather her focus. Then, she closed her eyes, and accepted the Miracle request from Sir Haddral, Knight Paladin, Hand of Tabris.