Giri smiles when she reads the prayer strips as she slips into her bunk. Ah, what do these petitioners imagine? Do they think that she'll simply say a few words, perhaps burn a prayer strip and magically everything will be better? Without even being present with the witch whose help they need? The dominion must have some quite odd ideas about magic working for this to be the norm.

But still she smiles because these are sweet petitions from people who are unhappy and after all isn't that what Giriel Bruinstead had dedicated her life to addressing? Now, granted, neither petition seemed obviously remedied by magic (where were all the people who just needed a potion to ease sore feet when you actually wanted the work, hm?). No love potion ever advertised actually [i]worked[/i] after all, and Giri suspected that the discontent writer needed something more than her body changed by magic to address her problems. 

Besides which, she had some suspicions as to the identity of her petitioners, especially the second one (on a barge like this, with the Red Wolf on the prowl, finding someone hopelessly love wasn't so much a needle in a haystack as it was hay in a haystack, which did complicate that matter). 

But it was also late and the petitions were in her nightrobe after all, so discretion was being requested. More discretion than, say, walking across the prow of the deck wearing a jingly jangly collar and asking after who might, perhaps be frustrated with unrequited love and need a witch's aid. No, the thing to do here was to ask the local gods about the matter and go from there. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she might even get some insight from Venus herself. Well, some kind of lucky, when it came to the goddess of love, it was often hard to say if her attention was good luck or bad.

Well, Giri supposed she was opening by burning a prayer strip, but that didn't mean things worked how people thought they did. It just meant it was a good first step and that the gods liked incense. It smelled nice, and consisted of a clear offering, so that was hardly surprising. 

Giri's bells jingle as she bobs her head and her nightrobe flutters loosely in the humid air of the river. But she focuses, and perhaps it is her calm amid these things that brings the gods to her door, calm themselves. She will smile when they arrive and offer the prayer strips and ask what news she ought to know about of these matters.

[Giri communes with the unseen, offering a string to the local gods however they may use it. She rolls a 6+2+2=10. She would like to learn the recent history of the prayer strips she found in her nightrobe and also learn something important from the gods, which can surely be merged together into a general explanation as to what's going on.]