Abramo isn't sure what to think of Staunton; he won't give the details of what he did, and while Minagho insinuated a lot, Abramo trusts her word as far as he can throw the Wardstone. But... he's open to the possibility that mind control was involved; and if so, Staunton is hardly to blame. Any more than the population of Cairo was; and if Abramo hadn't had the powder-of-moly shells in his back pocket, what would he have done about Cairo? He doesn't know, and is very glad he didn't have to find out... but at any rate, he wouldn't have blamed them for what he and the Jackal did between them.

Well, does he blame Woljif for this little misunderstanding with the guards?

...yes. Yes he does. Abramo despises thieves; they force men to invest in locks and security instead of productive assets. But... there are three guards just sitting here watching the man, and a crying need for armed men to fight the Apparently Literal Demons outside. There's such a thing as a priority.

Yeah look if Abramo will conscript the guy and make him fight, fine, that's one blade fighting the demons and three freed up from watching him.

Eventually he runs out of quest hooks things to do inside the tavern, and ventures out.

Then he can exit into a vaguely-medieval city, with a pall and smell of smoke hanging everywhere and refugees aimlessly wandering about the streets.

It reminds him of Venice, and he doesn't understand why; there are no canals, no skyscrapers, no densely-packed brick tenements... then he realises: Not Venice in general, but a specific day he spent in it. The day before the evacuation, when they were scrambling to get the government and the guns and as much of the machinery as would fit, onto the ships that would hazard the English submarines to reach Egypt. And the week before that, when it became clear that the Alpine forts wouldn't hold, and the English army broke out into the Po valley. The buildings and the smells and the weapons are all different, there's no distant rumble of artillery to mark the crumbling front getting closer by the hour... but the looks on people's faces are the same. Shocked surprise at the suddenness of defeat; aimless looking for something, anything, useful to do; angry hopeless defiance... most of the citizens weren't evacuated, of course. There weren't enough ships. He did triage and got the heavy weapons out, except the immense naval batteries that they had to blow in place so they wouldn't be used against them in the reconquest... had even he believed in the reconquest, at the time? At any rate he's fairly certain nobody else did. He had chosen not to negotiate, to fight on from beyond the sea, not because he believed that Venezia-oltre-il-Mare could win the war but because... what else could he do? By then it had been abundantly clear that there could be no peace with the Jackal, not for long. Even if he'd surrendered completely and given it the spaceships it wanted, it would have been back as soon as it found its lost home. With an armada of its own kind, to reimpose obedience on the rebel subhumans. If peace is impossible then you must fight, with or without hope of victory.

That's... interesting. Iomedae can vibe with these thoughts. But... it appears that they are not the core of the man; Abadar not only got there first, He has the better claim. That's all right, though. Iomedae is happy to have Abramo at the Worldwound; if Abadar is paying for his spells, so much the better - then She will offer to bear part of the cost, because it appears that Her interests will be advanced thereby, and She is not Asmodeus. And because that's true, Abadar would predictably do the same for her if the situations were reversed. Which is how they'll beat Asmodeus, in the end.

Abadar is, as always, happy to make a deal. An extra level for His newfound cleric with the extremely foreign-to-Golarion mathematical understanding of economics? Absolutely.

It's going to take Abramo a moment to notice that. He's still thinking.

It's the first time he's had more than a minute to think, since... coming here. Since dying. He finds a random barrel in a quiet alley, sits on it. He's been running around fighting demons, dissociating, disbelieving the basic reality of what he sees around him, making bargains with Other entities that admittedly talk a good game about gains from trade... time to take a deep breath and think for a while. Even if that does get him rather more smoke in the lungs than is good for a man his age.

This place is as real as Venice, that much is clear... perhaps more so, who knows? He doesn't know that his memories weren't created at the moment he appeared outside the city walls, and by the evidence of his senses he's not in the world he knows. The world he knows does not have - animal-human hybrids, green-skinned people with fangs, apparently literal demons, this language he is thinking in, gods powerful Other entities of trade and victory and minotaurs and music... magic. If he was created de novo just before the guardsmen carried him to Hulrun, the creator has a strange set of priorities. Even as an avant-garde art project he can make no sense of it.

He might as well assume his memories are real, then; it's not as though he has any others. And real or not, there doesn't seem to be any way to get back to his own world. (And if he did, would he be alive? He does, after all, remember dying. Rather clearly, in fact.)

So: For the time being, he will proceed on the assumption that he is in this world for good, and must make his way here. Or... not. Work, beg, steal, or starve, those are the options, always and everywhere; and he won't steal and there's enough beggars here that it would just be starving with extra steps. But he does have the option of starving. Or simply charging alone into a large mass of cultists swinging a sword, that would be faster.

It's not a serious option. The man who triaged Italy rather than patch up one more compromise peace is not going to stop fighting. But Abramo has the sort of mind that always generates all the options, and considers them fairly. "Thou art weighed in the balance", those are some of the very few words the Name spoke directly to His creation; and if some are found too light - well, they must still be weighed, and their true worth reckoned.

Work, then. If he is to live - and he will - then he must work, and pay his way; at least he has found an employer with a worthwhile job. But while it is now clear to him that the demons are definitely and intensely bad, that does not of itself make the Kenabrians good. To defeat the Jackal he made alliance with Japan - and while he does endorse that decision, he does not blame some Korean slave laborer or conscripted "comfort woman", if they curse his name. It's entirely possible for this Mendev, of which he knows only the name, to be an equally bad dictatorship, or worse. It may be that his best option is to say "a pox on both their housen" and leave, and do his work elsewhere.

...not that he knows where else there even is, at the moment. Strictly speaking he has only hearsay evidence of Kenabres outside of the Defender's Heart and a couple of random alleys, and for all he knows the world is being loaded from disk created de novo just before he lays eyes on it. But if that's true he supposes whatever is doing it can just as well create a non-Kenabres city... Nerosyan, perhaps; the capital which may or may not be sending an army to their relief. That's something anyway. And from there he could procedurally generate learn about other parts of the world, no doubt. It's not actually an impossible project. It just feels that way because... he's more than fifty, and he'd won the war and was looking forward to winning the peace, and while he wasn't ready to retire quite yet he didn't think he'd be starting all over with his bare hands and some magic Extremely Advanced Technology that he doesn't really understand, and trading in a country where nobody knows what the name 'Aiello' means. 

None of that would be any better in Nerosyan.

At least here in Kenabres he knows some people. Even if Woljif is a thief, Lann is some kind of primitive communist, Camellia is an over-privileged heiress, the less said about Horgus Gwerm the better... Seelah is all right, if not the world's most sparkling conversationalist. Irabeth seems kind of cool... but really, no, he wouldn't stay here for the people. Not even Dyra and Rathimus.

...how do you advance the cause of trade and civilisation in a war zone, anyway?

Well, now he's just making excuses. That's actually really obvious: You end the war.

One man? 

David was one man. And he had a slingshot, not... Abramo looks at his right arm, where the spells powerful technological constructs cluster like a pod of rockets under a warplane's wings. There's a new one, he notices, larger and more complex than the ones he's used so far.

...David had miracles. Because the Lord God of Hosts was on his side.

...and who's to say that He would not be on Abramo's side?

"Sh'ma, Yisroel," he whispers, though it is forbidden to speak the phrase outside the inmost chambers of the Aiello palace. It's entirely possible that he is now all the Israel there is, that he is the only one in the world who struggles with the Name. And if that's true, it was equally true of his namesake, who was commanded to go to a foreign land he did not know and make a life there, and became the patriarch of a great nation. It does not change the truth of the next part: "Adonai, elohainu. Adonai, ehod."

Very well, then. Let Mendev be as corrupt or dystopian as may be; Abramo owes it no loyalty. But the enemy of his enemy is, at least, an ally of convenience; and in less than a day, the demons and their cultists have made it very clear that they are hostis humani generis, enemies of all mankind. The navies of Venice fought pirates, too, in their day. That is the purpose of warships, rightly understood: To make the seas safe for peaceful merchantmen. And though Abramo is in his heart a merchant of Venice, though he has sat board meetings and declared dividends and guided cargoes east of Suez... the truth is that his life's work, his most notable achievement, is to be a man of war.

And that, if Abadar wanted men whose comparative advantage is in truck and barter, there's no shortage of them in Kenabres. And hiring good guards is also an important skill for a merchant.

He straightens his back and comes down off the barrel. He is the workman now, and not the capitalist; but the best workers are ambitious and have initiative... and there's evidently no shortage of tasks, in his new job. Ending the war with the demons will be a fine journeyman piece.

(For the record, I was not sure of the outcome when I began writing the above self-dialogue. I knew Abramo would not be joining the demons, but I wasn't entirely certain he'd decide to fight on Mendev's side either; a verdict of "a pox on both their housen" and walking south to make a life for himself as a banker was a live possibility in my mind. In which case I'd have kept playing the game but closed the thread.)

Well then: A capitalist can sit about doing market research in his head all day, and call it a day well spent; but a workman had best be visibly about the boss's business. And though he knows where to find some cultists, and is eager to see what his new Extremely Advanced Technology does - wars are not won by skirmishes any more than they are won by evacuations. Wars are won by productive capacity, by the factories that churn out tanks and guns and aircraft by the thousands and tens of thousands. Wars are won by investments. And investments require money; and he knows of only one place in Kenabres where money is to be had in the quantities he needs. He'll have to see Horgus Gwerm after all. Even if the man does make him understand the Communist point of view rather better than he wants to.

...and before one can build the financial infrastructure, one must have the physical infrastructure in place: The roads and bridges, the harbors and canals, along which goods must in the end move no matter what entries are scratched in ledgers. Abramo has drastically underestimated the effort it takes to simply move in a city which has active house-to-house fighting going on; his first task is simply to make it through Market Square.