"I am hoping to find a peaceful resolution to the situation you have with the cities."

"...Peaceful in what way?"

"...I'm speaking this language by magic and may have some gaps. I mean that it would be best if neither group saw reason to attack the other."

"Our reasons for war include but are not limited to the fact that we are seeking the Precursor stone, which they possess and will not willingly surrender, and the fact that they find uses for our skull gems and other body parts, and the fact that they are edible, and the fact that they have interfered with our attempts to construct the industrial base necessary for a space program to leave this planet, and the fact that we have rendered it more habitable for our own species and less habitable for theirs, and the fact that we have not finished altering the ecosystems here, and the fact that they worship our greatest foes."

"- thank you, that's a very useful list. Would you be starving if you didn't eat people?"

"I will not profess great confidence that an alien's understanding of what constitutes a 'person' will match my own, nor provide extreme specificity about our logistical situation to a complete stranger. I will say that we can eat the flesh of yakows and lurker sharks. The humans of this city themselves eat both, and never sign contracts with either, as neither species has any literate members."

...unfortunately Detect Thoughts is arcane only. What if he does something that LOOKS like he accomplished a good result here and it winds up that it's ACTUALLY the worst atrocity since Tar-Baphon because people start eating a lot of lurker sharks and yakows and they every one of them had hopes and dreams and families! "Ah. I can create food but not enough to support any significant population and it trades off against the magic I'm using to talk to you. Though I can use a lower circle spell to speak to any one person if I can touch them to target the spell."

"What can you tell me of your magic?"

"I am granted fresh spells and healing abilities every day by my goddess Iomedae. They come in four different 'circles' of power. The least kind I can have four in readiness on any given day and cast as many times as I want. I have limited uses of all of the others. I can prepare any spell that clerics - that's the kind of person who gets spells from a god - can cast, but I don't know about all of them. I didn't know about this one before today, I asked Iomedae, but I don't usually do that."

"Are you open to helping either side win the war or only trying to negotiate peace?"

"Iomedae is the goddess of defeating evil. I have spent my career in a military installation. But I would have to be very, very sure, and I do not expect to get that sure. And furthermore I do not think that, tactically speaking, I could actually make a decisive difference on this particular battlefield."

"It is the Precursor stone that makes a lasting peace impossible. I could make the argument that Baron Praxis is more personally evil than I am, but I would only be guessing what Iomedae considers evil."

"Well, I have the holy book if you want to hear about it but I think this spell would not be very good at letting me translate it in real time. I don't have a particularly hard time believing that Baron Praxis is evil. Evil people go to war with other Evil people all the time."

"If you were sure we were all evil, what would you do?"

".........this."

He laughs. So do some of the others listening.

"Would your goddess not rather you kill us all?"

"No. Evil people, when they die, go to Evil afterlives, which are disproportionate for any possible crime and further empower the forces of Evil as the souls there become more of the denizens of those planes."

"...Why do you believe that?"

"Are you asking how I came to learn it or how the civilization I learned it from claimed to know it?"

"Both."

"- I guess, also, are you asking about the facts of the matter or the value statement, but presuming the answer is also both. I learned the facts in school and the values in the book I mentioned, the Acts of Iomedae. In the civilization of Golarion there are a lot of spellcasters more powerful than me, and with those more powerful spells they can view and visit the afterlives, or summon creatures native to them. Gods sometimes grant their followers visions and the things they learn are preserved in their churches."

"I am extremely skeptical of gods, personally, but never mind that. How are you expected to defeat evil, then?"

"I haven't made it to a class by the established church yet. My circumstances were - irrelevantly irregular. So I'm guessing based on the books and other faithful of Iomedae I have met."

"...I see. So you intend to broker peace. We have no need of peace; we could simply conquer their city, devour their flesh, steal the Precursor stone, and remake the planet as a paradise. But do you, Select Blai Artigas, have something better to offer us than that?"

"If you could do that why haven't you done it yet?"