Say you’re a goddess who’s been assigned an impossible task: to recruit the greatest acolyte your religion has ever known to undergo a nigh-impossible quest that will take decades of their life.

You know all the best monks will be meeting at a grand mass but the problem is, nobody knows that you’re a goddess.

Your earthly form is that of a leprous monk. Your body covered in open sores, your possessions all but non-existent, and in the eyes of the organized religious in-group, you are simply “uncool”.

So what do you do?

In the Ming Dynasty Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, Guan-yin, faced just such a problem.