His mandibles rustle when he hears the appropriate resource deployment of one probably irreplaceable cleric is different from that of many who can be refreshed with new entrants.

"Not at this moment. However, I would like to understand more about your use of the terms, 'good', 'evil' and 'lawful'. What would be an environment 'with a lot of obvious evil around'? What do you consider a good institution, and a bad institution?"

"Those are alignments; Good opposes Evil and Law opposes Chaos. Good is about helping people, showing mercy and permitting redemption where it is feasible to do so, protecting and nurturing the innocent, charity and healing and so on. Evil is the opposite, hurting and oppressing and corrupting others, cruelty and such. Law is about keeping commitments, establishing incentives that support keeping commitments, order and predictability and honesty and responsibility and clarity. Chaos is the opposite and has its partisans but I'm not one of them and would probably misrepresent them."

"Those definitions make sense to me." Click. "However, I still do not understand how this relates to your goddess as described. Another approach: can you give an example of a goal Iomedae tried to achieve, and how she achieved it?"

"Of course." When he's working on the language one thing he sometimes tries to do is translate bits of the Acts, consulting with his tutor about it via Share Language to make sure it's not connotationally wildly wrong somehow. He pulls out what he's got of the Tenth Act. "While the heirless lord of Kantaria, a city in my home country, was missing, Iomedae - still a human, almost everything in this book is about when she was still a human - ruled the city herself for a year and a day until Lord Narikopolos could be found and reinstated. She had to battle many shapechanging monsters that threatened the city, protecting its people; when Narikopolos was available again, she stood aside to let the rightful lord take possession of his city again. It wouldn't have been Lawful to keep it and it wouldn't have been Good to abandon it. Does that help?"

"Did she have a pre-existing obligation to the city of Kantaria?" Klbkch asks.

"Not such a significant one that she couldn't have Lawfully let it be."

Klbkch thinks for a minute.

"Why did she rule the city instead of only protecting it? Is it more lawful?"

"In general civilizations under stress need some kind of governance, and the lord had no heir or regent. She was well recognized, trusted, and respected, and the people were able to accept her rule peaceably."

"So she administered the day-today operations of the city? Is she specialized in rulership? Did she coordinate the defense of the city, or did she slay the monsters personally?"

(Blai said "she had to battle" but it might be a mistranslation.)

"- on Golarion Skills don't work the way they do here, if that's what you mean by 'specialized in leadership'. The city had functioning departments for day to day operations, but they needed someone to report to, to coordinate between them, to adjudicate confusing or novel situations, and Iomedae did that. She slew many of the monsters personally but had help with that."

He files away 'on Golarion Skills don't work the way they do here'.

"Understood. Then, is her relationship to her 'clerics' such that you are bid to be commanded by Iomedae as in this story?"

"She is overwhelmingly unlikely to ever give me an instruction directly but I am to follow the principles she laid out and the main resource I have on those is this book."

Klbkch looks like he doesn't quite know what to do with this information.

"By your example and previous statements, I understand Iomedae to be pleased by the lawful and good institutions, such as one which administers a compliant population and skilfully coordinates it for productivity and against external foes. She intervenes when these requirements are not met and the wellbeing of a population is at risk. However, she is respectful of prior claims to authority and pre-existing structures. Am I in error?"

"- she does not reliably intervene in that at all, because now she is not a human, and now has constraints on how much the can operate including by giving information or commands to those who serve Her. You should not expect Her to do anything directly in any given decade other than picking clerics and paladins to give spells to in the standard Golarion fashion, and this is not a good decade for that for Her. You are correct about what pleases Her and what She respects, though."

Then why did she become a god—to become able to grant classes to her minions, presumably.

Klbkch is unsure what to think about that.

"Is she a standard example of a god in your world?" is what he asks.

"She is unusual in many respects, like having been a human - not the only one but it's not typical - and in having her own theocracy - again neither unique nor typical."

Not the only one but it's not typical.

"Please tell me more about the theocracy," he requests politely.

"It's called Lastwall and its capital is Vigil. Its principal national project is to maintain security around the sealed prison of the evil lich Tar-Baphon who Iomedae defeated in her lifetime but it also supports defense of the border of the Worldwound - a now closed, but open for nearly a century, portal to the Abyss, through which unlimited numbers of demons could come through - and is the seat of Her Church on Golarion, though there are branches in many other places as well."

Klbkch looks alert.

"Where you previously described 'defeating evil' and 'making the world robust against future incursion of evil', are these central cases of what is being referred to?"

"- demons and liches? Those are central cases, yes, and much commoner on Golarion than they seem here. Most ordinary mortal evil is - tractable in less violent ways."

"In what senses are Tar-Baphon and the demons from the Abyss evil?"

"Demons vary a lot but they enjoy things like torture, eating people, enchanting people into attacking their allies, doing experiments on prisoners to get magically interesting results, and destroying cities. Tar-Baphon had a trick that allowed him to control unlimited numbers of undead and if unchecked could have easily taken over the entire world and turned its living population into his revenant slaves."

...

"And Tar-Baphon is unusually cruel and harmful such that it would be evil for the world to become his revenant slaves?" he has to clarify. "Or is world conquest considered inherently evil?" Drakes and humans seem to think so, but inexplicably only when it's someone else doing it.

"Creating undead is inherently evil; it traps the soul in a damaged and suffering vessel in all forms, and in many forms it requires initial or ongoing harms to others inherently. Slavery, of the undead or otherwise, is usually either Evil or a terrible risk and temptation toward it. I think that is also true of world conquest. Tar-Baphon was unusual mostly in his expansionism. A ghost-archmage Geb rules a country of the same name full of vampires and skeletons, and while this is wicked he does not tend to operate beyond his own borders unless provoked, and it is considered unwise, including as I understand it in Lastwall, to so provoke him."

"We may be using the word' undead differently," Klbkch notes, "or our necromantic practices may be different. According to my understanding, some necromancy involves the soul, but most merely animates a corpse with death magic.

"Is Iomedae heuristically opposed to conquest, then? I notice that your examples so far are all defensive. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for Iomedae to call a war of aggression?"