"I guess it might be less obvious without clerics around in quantity? Uh, the creator Pharasma sorts beings according to whether they are more rule-following or spontaneous, and more inclined to help or harm other people, with nine possible combined results, and that affects what afterlife you go to."

"...I really don't know where to even start. Uh. Does 'Pharasma' mean the creators of the world?"

"I'm using a singular intentionally but I suppose I wouldn't be surprised if some places she was worshiped as a plural entity."

"...O...ka...y? I... guess? There’s no reason they couldn’t have nine entire afterlives? And sort people? And not just save the city instead? What dicks."

"Pharasma does not claim to be Good."

"I don’t really believe in that kind of stuff. Not like anybody’s come back from one to tell us."

"That's because you don't have clerics. Ones who are two circles more powerful than I am can raise the dead. Though not ones who have been dead long enough to remember anything; you do need a higher circle spell for that."

"Uh-huh. Do they suck?"

"The afterlives? The ones for Evil people definitely do. There is disagreement on the others, one person's idea of paradise will not always appeal to everyone else."

"I’m not evil, am I?"

"I don't know. Even if I prepared the spell, only powerful people register in their own right. I myself am not that powerful; if someone casts alignment detection on me I look Lawful Good, but that's down to Iomedae, not my person."

"I don’t want to go anywhere, I just want to live."

"I don't think you're evil. You work at a hospital, you heal people all day, that's not Evil or I wouldn't be doing it. I just don't have a way to know for sure."

This is not the distraction Kaz was hoping for.

"Right. Okay."

"I'm sorry."

"I can’t afford a country estate with its own guards but I’m thinking about getting work on a ranch. Any work at all, just to be somewhere with fewer tasty snacks for the monsters. The security would be worse but they might not bother trying to get past it, see?"

"I don't think that works on Golarion but perhaps it does here."

"It hasn’t yet but everyone says the city is doomed so what do I have to lose anyway."

"It can't always have been this active a conflict, or the city couldn't have been built - how did it start?"

"They came through a portal from another planet and started trying to kill everyone."

"Do they speak?"

"Maybe if they shapeshift?"

"But they aren't - known to speak."

"Man, I don't know how to tell you this but if you run into a metal head even if it could improvise a sestina about your beautiful eyes it'd eat you first. I think maybe their leader can talk?"

"It's not the poetry I'm curious about," he's an Iomedaean, not a Shelynite, "just the possibility that they could be reasoned with diplomatically."