"I don't know what the Dark Tapestry is?"

"My understanding, which I did not get directly from a god and may be flawed in any of the ways mortal knowledge can be, is that Pharasma's Creation including the Material Plane is defended from interference by - other entities as powerful as She is, or at least on that order of magnitude? But that this defense is not absolute, which is why I've even heard of Yog-Sothoth. The gods popular on Golarion have treaties amongst themselves limiting the extent to which they work at fruitless cross-purpose. If this planet is particularly reachable by Dark Tapestry types they would have no real interest in that treaty and maybe they are too strong or not destabilizing enough for Pharasma to act to stop them."

"I have no idea who Pharasma is so I don't know if that's true or not."

(He's too sober. He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a flask.)

"The Creator and Judge, goddess of birth and death. Neither Good nor Lawful but mostly benign."

"She hasn't made her presence known here." This isn't what he's supposed to be thinking about, but-- "What's the kind of powerful that matters for the alignment spell?"

"...if I say 'the same kind of powerful that matters for everything else' is that going to be very unhelpful?"

"Like, you rule a country, or are a sorcerer, or are widely beloved by millions, or--"

"Being a sorcerer doesn't do it till nearly third circle - it's exactly third for wizards, sorcerers lag a bit. Martials who never learn to cast any spells can read if they're... the kind of martial who hangs around third circle or better casters, in adventuring contexts, though my career was a military one and that has a different distribution. Ruling a country or being beloved by millions would tend to correlate with having achieved this amount of power on Golarion but are not themselves forms of it."

With surprising intensity: "can you check me?"

"...I don't know but I can prepare for it tomorrow if you'd like. It's something where I could check everyone in a room with one spell so if many people will want to be checked that should be arranged."

"Most people won't believe you. I shouldn't but I have-- a gut feeling. You don't feel like a cultist."

"You might still want to have people checked so you have the data for later if the evidence mounts satisfyingly."

He sounds like he's quoting. "Police officers are not to voluntarily become targets of magic without approval from Magical Resources or a bona fide emergency situation as defined under subsection whatthefuckever."

"The spell targets me, it just lets me see a thing about what I'm looking at that I usually can't. But if that's immaterial to the regulation I can cast it and look only at volunteers approved by Magical Resources - are you in that department -"

"Oh, they'd never approve it unless it's to solve a case. I guess I could pack you off with Dr. Aarons to be a test subject-- he's the one who cast the spell."

"...I do not really want him to cast more spells on me. At any rate I don't think I had better go around breaking or helping people break your organizational regulations."

"Why?" he says in genuine bafflement.

"I'm Lawful."

"Remember we don't have that on my planet."

"...are you asking for more explanation of Law or trying to assure me that no one will hold me to it."

"The former. I wouldn't dream of telling you to go against your values unless your values involve sacrificing humanity to the Great Old Ones."

"- so, you could tell me that this rule is fake, that it hasn't been enforced in thirty years, that three other rules which do get followed contradict it in routine situations, that the Magical Resources department was co-opted by cultists of some tentacled thing at the time the handbook you quoted was written. Someone having an idea for a rule and writing it down isn't the thing that can make it important, on its own. But if any weight is being put on the regulations you operate by at all, I don't want to be the force that destabilizes them. I don't want to make it necessary for anyone who actually cares about the consistency with which they describe reality to spend effort and resources on checking and following up. I don't want to make it harder for any other organizations you work with to trust that you hold to your self-description. I spent twenty years regularly trusting my life and those of the men I commanded to the strength of a treaty between dire enemies with a lot more weight behind that enmity than someone getting their alignment read without asking their superiors for permission. It held. Things like that should hold and I will hold them."

"It's not a bad rule. Most people should follow it. --That's not the kind of relationship any cop has to the rules, really. The difference between a good cop and a bad cop is that a good cop knows why the rules are there and when you ought to break them. A bad cop takes bribes or fakes evidence or gets scared and shoots someone and says they had a gun. A good cop-- knows when you should enforce the law and when you should pretend you don't see things-- or when to clock out and then keep working, because it matters--"

"Well, it sounds like you have good cops and bad cops and not very many Lawful cops, and I'm not a cop nor such an expert on your work that I'd presume to say how you should do it. There exists Good work that can't be done Lawfully. But I'm not going to break your regulations for you and if I come to expect that you're concealing them strategically I will accordingly get less useful. - I think we've gotten onto a tangent from whether it can be arranged that it be legal to worship Iomedae."

"I'm not going to hide the regulations now that I know, I want to be on your side."