Prayer only seems to work when praying for something ambiguous (such as wishing someone luck) or for something that would likely happen anyway (such as someone recovering from illness), in which case the rate of success is comparable to chance alone operating as a factor, all else being equal. Pray for something specific, that can only have one explanation, and it never works. Throw in the "sometimes the answer's no" fudge factor and all bets are off, because now you have a game so rigged that the house can never lose and even an outcome diametrically opposed to the one invoked in prayer becomes a hit. The phrase "the operation was a total success but the patient died" could have been coined especially for that.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
