"Ohhhhh. Yeah no they tried that hundreds of years ago and the metal head leader told us to surrender all our weapons and then maybe they'd consider not eating all of us immediately. Or something. I'm not a historian."

"Is there something I could read about that?"

"Probably? I don't think you're supposed to leave here and go to the library because, uh, you could be a shapeshifting metal head in disguise, but actually there's no way you're a metal head shapeshifter because there's no way one could last this long behind the shield wall even if they could get in past it in the first place. I can bring you a library book in a couple days?"

"If it's even a discernible strategic concern that I, who have been working in a hospital with magical powers no one else here has to heal people from the city for days, could be a metal head, then they are probably intelligent even if they're - telepathic rather than speaking aloud or something - yes, I'd appreciate a book."

"Of course some of them are intelligent."

"Maybe several books, if you're permitted more than one at a time."

"About metal heads?"

"Yes, and attempts to communicate with them."

"I'll see what I can find." Shrug. "Kinda wish someone would show up in the middle of dying horribly right now. Want to talk about something that isn't our impending doom?"

"I could teach you chess."

"Sure."

Blai Prestidigitates up a set - it takes him a while - and a board, and explains the rules as pieces appear.

Kaz is attentive and interested!

...Aside from the several minutes in the middle where they need to go run off and deal with a code blue. (Fortunately, stabilize. Unfortunately, fundamental underlying problems not actually solved by cantrips.)

Stabilize is really good for preventing somebody from dying on you while people who know more take over the underlying problem, though!

A couple of days later Kaz brings a history of the metal head war to surreptitiously slip him.

According to the book, the war has gone like so.

First the metal heads appeared and started attacking people and Mar (the book just kind of assumes the reader knows who this is) probably organized the defense against them, though records are pretty sparse about this and are much better even a few decades later. There was an attempt to parlay with the metal heads but they demanded the Precursor stone, which powered Haven City's defenses, as a non-negotiable condition of peace, and also they ate people, so it didn't really seem like there was much point in talking to them. Mar put together a country with several cities and successfully protected enough territory that the population could grow while the metal heads were still poorly established and Mar was around being personally unfathomably heroic and brilliant and so on. In hindsight the metal heads were also prioritizing establishing a civilization and also were at a disadvantage because they didn't know the area at all even to the extent of knowing which things they could safely eat, and back then the environment would have been more comfortable for the planet's native life forms and less comfortable for the metal heads because they hadn't made even the very minimal terraforming progress they've made by now. And the lurkers had something akin to civilization themselves, with such basic and crude technologies as primitive walled forts and inferior attempts at flying zoomers known as dirigibles (reading between the lines the lurkers are definitely people and wouldn't have been significantly out of distribution for a modern humanoid civilization on Golarion, though the author thinks of them as beasts), and when their civilizations fell to the metal heads then the metal heads were suddenly able to turn more of their attention to the humans.

So the era when everyone pulled together and built a great and defensible country and fought off occasional metal heads who attacked travelers and farmers with tooth and claw gave way to an era where metal heads armed with shock-sticks and firearms and jetpacks made a coordinated attempt to destroy civilization. They would overrun farms and salt the earth - sometimes literally but sometimes with dark eco or other poisons - and if they had to run afterward, so be it; the farmland was lost and the maximum number of people who could live nearby shrank and the people...

So, it turns out dark eco is bad for you. Not just because it's caustic. In quantities small enough not to be lethal it warps people into more violent and destructive versions of themselves. The metal heads are dark creatures, creatures that bleed dark eco in deeply toxic concentrations and glory in massacres and atrocities. And, to a lesser extent, so is everyone whose groundwater is contaminated. So is everyone who breathes in dark eco fumes all day every day. (The writer isn't using the same conceptual vocabulary as Blai and does not have the ability to directly weigh in on the question of whether "it makes people more Chaotic Evil" is a good description but it might be.) So the people at the edges of civilization - or at the edges of disturbed areas - become inexorably less capable of coordinating, more inclined to turn on each other, more like the metal heads.

The metal heads slipped in a few people as supposed refugees, shapeshifted. Not many; it's probably not something most metal heads can do at all. And they didn't do much damage, not directly. They revealed themselves, killed some people messily, left surviving witnesses and other evidence. Society was already fraying and it frayed faster.

The country fell apart into individual cities sourcing almost all their food from farming happening inside their walls. And one at a time the cities fell. The metal heads don't take slaves, don't want humans to pay taxes, don't even bother with prisoner exchanges. They just eat everyone.

They seem more like orcs, than like demons, as chaotic evils species go, though they could be like demons with a really effective warlord and attenuated fear of death.

He prays about it. He spends kind of a long time on this and has to be gotten individually for emergency Stabilizations that day, though he'll do those in batches before going back to his prayers. It seems likely that prayer is entirely about its effect on the individual in ways that Blai would be able to more cheaply achieve with instructions from his superiors but they aren't here and - Iomedae isn't the goddess of civilization, but Aroden was, and She's the Inheritor, and even if this costs Her some sliver of her attention to direct his thoughts it might be worth it? Though presumably if it's not worth it that will look an awfully lot like "keep healing and don't try anything weird" since that's what he's doing anyway and it can be got for the low price of no response at all.

Praying that much won't by itself get him into trouble. Kaz rolls their eyes about it.

The thing is that you only have the resources that you have. Blai can't cast Tongues; having a full conversation with anybody requires that he be able to touch them. He can't call for backup from any ally who isn't already on the board. If you are a pawn tasked with defending your king, and you have the handicap that you are the only defender against a normal complement of pieces, you can advance as valiantly and optimally as you please and you will die and your king will be checkmated. Maybe he could walk out of the city and try to tap a metal head with Share Language. Maybe it would be a noble way to die, and he'd certainly gear up and go for it without hesitation if someone above him commanded it as part of a plan that could succeed - but here, it would be a way to die, not a way to win.

He is not the only piece on the board. There are lots of people here. They are all immiserated in generations of war with orc-y or perhaps demon-y invaders who are eroding everything they care about, and past attempts at diplomacy have broken down as though Disintegrated, and they are culturally very strange to him and him to them. But they're there. Iomedae could probably turn this city into a righteous Lawful army and lead it to victory or peace. She is not present. The Crusader Queen is handicapped away.

Blai does not have the talent to be a preacher or a philosopher. He can only read the Acts to people one person at a time and he is living proof that all by themselves they aren't a particularly clear call to action in arbitrary circumstances. Anything he makes up himself runs a severe risk of being heretical and possibly also just stupid. If there is a way to win here, it probably doesn't run through that.

Blai is not trained in the tactics of the battlefield in which he finds himself. After a certain point your error terms for "weird magic weapon" and "obscure monster ability" overwhelm everything you do know, and some people could be strong enough to change the tide of a fight like that by themselves anyway and Blai is not one of them. If, again, there is a way to win here, it probably doesn't run through that.

So...

There are probably spells he doesn't know about. He's met paladins, foreign clerics, wizards and fighters from all over - you get teams stalking particular demons along the wardstone line, hopping from fort to fort, ready to take it down as soon as it dares, and he has hosted these; you get teleport-capable strike teams, when you pull out a scroll to Send for backup, and they do not always have the spells on hand to waste on getting out of your fort as soon as the demon is down, so he has hosted those too; you get random adventurer teams who are willing to be guests at a Chelish fort, though not as many as the Lastwallers got - he's met these people but he certainly doesn't know, from that, all the spells there are in the world. If there is a way to win here...

Maybe it runs through asking Iomedae to pick his spells come morning. He can try that, though it feels - insubordinate - to ask Her for attention when he has been a cleric for twenty years and knows at least most of the normal spells and also the weird one that turns his beard into cold iron. It was discouraged under Asmodeus. It inclined, he was told, idiot clerics (like himself, it was implied) to blame their own failures on the spell selection of their lord. At most he was meant to feel around in the space of possible magic to check if something he'd seen some sorcerer do was available to him. It seems like - maybe not that exact reasoning goes through with Iomedae, but there might be a similar -

- no. He was expressly told not to attempt a Commune. They bothered to tell him this, before knowing his circle, even though most clerics can't cast it. It managed to be higher on the priority list than giving him a copy of the Acts. If he were obliged to continue to pick all his own spells even when he urgently needs guidance to see a path to peace in a strange civilization, it would probably have made it into that selfsame letter. Probably it is not that expensive.

In the morning, he prays, leaving all his slots wide open.

There's a new spell. It takes his third-circle slot. It feels tricky, one of the ones that even in its organic prepackaged divine-magic form looks like he won't be getting the most out of it if he doesn't get it to go off just so; he makes a mental note to do it under the influence of Guidance.

He goes out of his room, an hour after dawn. Holds out his hand: who will speak Chelish today?

Even though it isn’t Kaz's day off today the person presented to him is a middle-aged woman who does a lot of paperwork in an office and doesn’t interact much with patients. She introduces herself as Kriza.

Kriza speaks Chelish today! "Hello. I would like to arrange to spend my channels early today so that I have time to go for a walk."

"And I would also like to arrange for accidents to happen exactly when it's most convenient for me. What kind of a walk?"

"I'm not asking for the day entirely off, though I have noticed most people get an occasional day entirely off. Are there kinds?"

"Well, if you want to go laps around the block you can get a buzzer and come back if it goes off. If you want to go see the farms or the red zone, I don't think you even have a pass for that no matter what your work schedule is."

"How would I get a pass?"