"I did not personally verify the king's condition. Gazi petrified and shattered Klbkch, though he recovered later, and she escaped with me via the use of a teleportation scroll of some kind."

Named Adventurers really are no joke, huh. And that sure is a euphemism: confirmed, at least, the reason for the Senior Guardsman's disappearance for almost a month.

"Teleportation to Reim, or just out of the city?"

"To Chandrar but not all the way to Reim."

Nod.

"And that's the puzzle pieces I know of end. What happened next?"

"I declined to cooperate with being kidnapped, on the principle that it should be an enormous waste of time to kidnap me. I cannot decide whether or not someone takes hostile actions toward me but I can often decide that those hostile actions will be strategic mistakes, and when you can cause it to be the case that your self-identified enemies have made strategic mistakes it's usually correct to do so. She was nonetheless able to drag me to the palace of her king. I spent most of the journey unconscious but believe it took about two weeks. There was an effect of some kind on the palace making it difficult to leave; I had some magic that let me make some progress but not to escape entirely. The king's other retainers were somewhat more reasonable, and let me go with those of my possessions Gazi had stolen, a replacement for my weapon which she'd left behind in my home, and some spending money and an escort as an apology. I started on a generally northerly course."

Not cooperating with your kidnappers is a perfectly reasonable thing to do!

"Now I'm a bit confused. So the other retainers—do they have names, or descriptions—countermanded Gazi's orders? Or she was working alone, and they disavowed her, and... just let you go?"

"I didn't retain their characteristics very effectively because I hadn't eaten anything in two weeks at the time. I was told that she acted on her own recognizance, though I have no way to verify that."

"Huh. So two weeks carted across Chandrar without food, only intermittently conscious—she didn't feed you, or you didn't eat?—to Reim, but then Reim let you go, and you headed northward. What are the time frames here, how long in Reim's custody?"

"I didn't eat. I didn't want to legitimize the situation by accepting anything she gave me. I did have a Create Food spell prepared but didn't cast it till we were already at the palace. I was there for - a day or two, something like that."

"What was your impression of Reim when traveling through it? Did it seem—in decline, on the rise, happy, stressed... anything notable?"

"It didn't make a strong impression on me. It was peaceful in the parts I traveled through."

"Peaceful is an impression! You didn't get accosted by any bandits, thieves, no monsters... this was before the King of Destruction reawakened, if I have my timeline right?"

"Yes. I don't know precisely how he was awakened but as far as I know it did not occur while I was in the kingdom."

"What happened next?"

"I joined up with a caravan party. There was one monster fight, some giant snakes, and we diverted from the planned course due to some burgeoning conflict in the region..." He had to have the geopolitical facts repeated a few times before he remembered them so this is not so much an assessment of his state of mind at the time but a reconstruction of the actual situation on the ground. It seems that's the more desired result here. He's got a map around here somewhere to point at. "- and," he concludes, "wound up in Khelt, a wealthy and prosperous place owing to the routine use of undead labor. I was summoned to an audience with the king of Khelt."

"Khelt is a very insular nation; we don't know much about it at all! Famous for its undead labor, like you said... or I say famous, but I'd barely heard of it before the name turned up in the rumor mill. Some writers call it a paradise nation, other people, a den of horrors. You sound partial to the first option yourself."

"I was very concerned at first because on Golarion the use of undead is invariably Evil, but I checked and the king is Lawful Good and the necromancers aren't Evil either. I think it's a lovely place."

"You checked? Do you have a Skill for that, or something?"

"Spells for it. They don't work on anyone too low-level, but most people on this plane have detectable alignments."

"That's fascinating. I havent heard of anything quite like that, maybe some [Guardsman] Skills... is it teachable, or is it a [Cleric]-exclusive thing?"

"Wizards on Golarion can do it too but I can't cast or teach the wizard version."

Nod.

"What does it mean, for some kinds of necromancy to be evil and others not?"

"On Golarion if you raise a skeleton or a zombie it traps the deceased's soul in the body where it suffers until the undead is destroyed, and if you create another sort of undead, or turn yourself into one, this will usually require unrelatedly evil acts in addition to the negative energy involved being corrosive to the soul - vampires prey on people, for instance. It seems like the magic in use here or at least in Khelt is just different in that way."

"Oh, my," she says, unsettled. "I haven't heard of anything about trapping a soul. The second thing I have heard of, that there's all sorts of foul rituals involved, though I don't know what a vampire is. Necromancy is very illegal in most places, even more since the Necromancer—Az'kerash, I mean, do you know who he is, I'm realising you might not—he was a terrifyingly powerful necromancer who tried to destroy us in the Second Antinium War, but that understates how much of an... impact he had, really."

"I don't recognize the name. Necromancy is of course, even if not inherently evil, a powerful and dangerous tool. But the way they have it in Khelt seems to have brought them amazing stability and wealth with no problems I was able to discern."