:Well, it's neat! And it seems to work really well for you.: She is nooooooooot asking about the disruption because he clearly doesn't want to talk about it even though it's taking kind of a lot of willpower not to ask. :And the god-magic is interesting, it's so clean - I don't think our gods can do things in people's minds without leaving an enormous mess behind.: 

:Clerichood and its spells are very standardized across all gods that operate on Golarion at all, it has probably had a lot of careful refinement put into it.:

Nod. 

She pulls Vanyel into the link as well. :Right. So we need to figure out what it makes sense to...do.: 

:Right.: 

Vanyel glances at Blai. :A complication is that - I think the Heralds are preparing for war and I don't know what it would take to convince them to back down. I, er, thought we probably shouldn't be that sure we knew what was going on, yet, and I - left sort of against orders.

...I'm worried that Heralds in general have trouble thinking about - the hypothesis that Leareth might have a point about our gods being not that great. When I learned about his plan to make his own god, I wasn't - I thought I should probably still fight him - but I wanted to think about it first. And Yfandes - panicked about it. In a confusing disproportionate way. She left for almost a week because she thought if she stayed she might repudiate me by accident over it.: 

:Some maybe important context is that Leareth needs a power source for this and wants to kill about ten million people for blood-magic. I'm - he could be right that getting a more helpful god would be a good thing, if it works, but obviously I don't want him conquering Valdemar so he can grow the population and then kill everyone.: 

:Yfandes didn't know that, though. That was the next dream, she left before it. She was panicking about - the idea in the abstract. That anything could justify fighting the gods. ...Makes some sense, if a god or a group of gods made the Companions.: 

:It continues to be incredibly bizarre to me that everyone here thinks of 'the gods' as a unitary force. Even if none of them here are Evil - which I'm not sure of, a lot of Evil could hide in an anonymous mass of divinity doing things no one expects to be able to understand especially on a planet where prophecy remains functional - I would expect them to have more variety of character than has been evident so far. So - Companions come into existence pre-enchanted and once she confronted that Yfandes took a week to throw it off, and this enchantment is making it difficult to construe gods as being, in potential, enemies? And this means you're going to have a war? I can load people up on things that help with saves against enchantment, I can try dispelling it but my dispels aren't that powerful - but also he absolutely shouldn't be allowed to grow the population to ten million and then murder them all to create a god! That is worth a war to avoid! It is plausibly worth killing everyone in Valdemar before he can conquer it to avoid although I use 'plausibly' in a very loose sense where I don't expect I could become convinced enough to attempt it in practice! There are already plenty of gods and sometimes it's worth adding a new one but it sounds very much like his would turn out Evil!:

:I have definitely had the thought that even if Leareth is telling the truth about everything, any god he would create would actually make things even worse than they already are! I'm just - I guess I'm not entirely convinced that, you know, thinking that the way things are is unacceptable and eventually becoming desperate enough to try something insane' is...: 

Helpless shrug.

:Maybe I would end up there, eventually, if I had two thousand years to - get frustrated enough with nothing else sticking. I mean, actually I would probably give up in despair first, but...: 

Does that actually make him better than Leareth, is the question. 

:His messenger thinks he's probably going to call off the entire plan and spend fifty years trying to figure out if your world has better ideas. Obviously I don't know if he lied to her to give her that impression, but I think he would've had to be lying to most of the people in his organization about what his motives are. Her thoughts about it were - very consistent.: 

:If he can get to my world there's a Starstone he can go and try to ascend with, without killing ten million people to do it, except a new Lawful Evil god would be horrendous! Lawful Evil gods are catastrophes! They can operate on many planets and easily kill more than ten million people and damn millions more to Hell or worse! I have absolutely nothing against the stance that things are unacceptable and must be improved by drastic action and if that is really your position on the matter and you aren't Evil you be Iomedae about it!:

:What did Iomedae do about it?: 

:Ascended via the Starstone to become the organizing force of Heaven and its mission to defeat Evil everywhere. - She's had some setbacks since that time; in particular the god who was Her patron in her mortal life and was meant to incarnate on Golarion to bring about an Age of Glory died trying and caused several problems on His way out.:

Having a patron god at all is already a pretty different situation from the one anyone in Velgarth is in, including Leareth.

Vanyel doesn’t say that. 

:I can imagine a lot of scenarios where I - would decide we need to do everything we can to stop him. I just. I don’t want it to be because a goddess killed several hundred of my friends - Her own people! - and made it look like Leareth did it. She could have tried to talk to me instead.:

:- did you become confident it was Her when I was out of the loop?:

:...I'm not absolutely certain, but - I think we should have taken it more seriously that Savil started out thinking it was impossible. He would've had to hide from most of his organization that he has that capability at all, his messenger thinks it's obviously absurd that he could have done it. I didn't think it made any sense, just - felt like the alternatives made even less sense. But the Star-Eyed could do it trivially. I - didn't want to believe She would, but - I don't, actually, have much reason to think She's...good-aligned...and even if She was, that didn't stop one of your world's gods from destroying a city once. And I already knew - or was pretty sure - that I'm meant to be a weapon against him, and the Star-Eyed was - involved in that. 

- also at one point She required that Her people make some blood sacrifices to get Her attention for help, so it's not like it's - entirely out of character.: 

:...that's not a characteristically Good thing to do at all, no, though I suppose if they were volunteers I could imagine there being some local technical reason it couldn't be dispensed with that left Her Good.:

Nod. :I - don't really think She's evil either? Not in - the human sense - I would have said, I think Leareth would say, that gods aren't the sort of thing where human concepts of good and evil can apply, They're too alien for that. It's actually kind of weird that apparently those concepts do apply in your world.: 

:...why wouldn't it? They can take actions that benefit or harm people and they're not dumb animals or mindless rocks.:

:...I mean, humans can take actions that benefit or harm insects, and most people don't actually care to track that or make decisions based on it - and would have kind of a hard time even if they wanted to, if they don't have Animal Mindspeech.: 

:I think people can be aligned Evil for torturing animals?:

How sensible of the alignment system! Jisa approves! 

:That makes sense. - we don't have a way to magically check with the universe whether the things we've been doing with our lives are good or evil, though. I assume our gods don't either. Maybe that's the difference?: 

:I would have guessed that gods automatically knew that sort of thing about Themselves, but maybe these don't. I can't cast a Detect spell on a god, at any rate.:

Nod. 

:...I still don't know what to do from here.: 

:I think it does matter if Leareth is - the person he's presented himself to Vanyel as, or if he's just - saying whatever he thinks might get Vanyel to join his evil organization. If he actually cares about the things he says he cares about, then - I don't want to fight him. I don't want to let him kill ten million people either, obviously, I just - I want to persuade him that his current plan will make everything worse rather than better, and get him to do something else instead. 

- what do you think Iomedae would do?: 

:Iomedae would talk to him. If I'm not enchanted and the messenger is not enchanted and you feel comfortable putting weight on that conclusion I think you need to be in much, much more active conversation with Leareth; the kidnapping was objectionable but he did about-face without too much delay into an entirely aboveboard release and communication attempt. I don't know what your local magic long distance communication options are but the dream clearly does not work in emergencies and you clearly have some adversary, whoever it may be, willing to create emergencies. I am willing to operate in this capacity if we believe that Leareth's willingness to stand down is substantially premised on his interest in my world and we conclude I'd be effective in the role but I would want to check his alignment, or at least find a way to verify his honesty - he'd throw off a Zone of Truth but if I were an Abadaran I'd have something that would work anyway and maybe you have something that would too - and get his oath that he will not personally ascend while he reads Evil nor create a god likely to be Evil.:

:I saw your mind before and after. Even if he somehow had access to some Wild Gift I've never heard of and can do mind-control that doesn't show up to mage-sight or Mindhealing Sight, I would be confident he hasn't left any changes. I can see that the messenger used to have long-term compulsions but she told Vanyel that upfront, Leareth apparently uses them for operational security at higher levels in his organization and he just took everything off so Vanyel wouldn't have anything to get spooked by and because she's supposed to be able to tell us everything anyway. And she's definitely never had a Mindhealer touch her.: