"What an incredibly unfortunate problem to have." 

"Intelligent enemies are really inconvenient! I think there is also widespread and unwarranted optimism in Cheliax about not in fact being damned. Our statistics suggest it's very rare to escape it but when we talk to expatriates they often say that they don't think they've participated in that much evil personally and probably they'll make Axis. And then they don't."

"Interesting - I think that must say something about how your system assesses what is evil versus not, but I am not sure what. Is there misinformation in Cheliax about what kinds of actions are evil or have evil consequences indirectly?" He looks down. "Also, that is...very sad." 

"Yes. It is. Owning slaves is a risk factor and most humans in Cheliax do, but far more Chelish slaveowners than Osirian ones are damned, and most Chelish nonslaveowners still are. Though the slaves typically do all right. Cheliax encourages the killing of children in the womb if you don't want them, and encourages activity that makes that inevitably somewhat common, and probably doesn't tell people it's Evil, though it is, but we don't actually observe a big gender disparity in Chelish afterlife outcomes so that can't be the primary driver. .

Conceivably Pharasma could be doing something where she considers it mildly evil to do things that produce some risk of subsequently killing a child - the way it's evil to light buildings on fire even if you suspect they're empty, if you haven't checked - but that isn't how we observe her to work on most ...irresponsibility. In Osirion's own statistics a man who frequents whorehouses is risking Chaos but not particularly Evil, though the women are often Evil.

And of course, all of this is hard to infer. We can ask people to answer lots of questions about their life and activities before they die, under truth magic if we wish, but the set of people who will agree to that is unusual, and then we only get a little bit of data from the eventual scry to see where they show up. We can identify risk factors - being Chelish is a risk factor, owning slaves is a risk factor, being a soldier is a risk factor - but it's guesswork whether the situation is 'living in Cheliax is inherently mildly Evil' or 'some routine activity in Cheliax that we don't know about is actually Evil - maybe Asmodeus is selling snacks made from human flesh and cannibalism is Evil?' or 'Chelish people have done a lot of Evil things that we know perfectly well are Evil but they haven't confessed to' or what."

"I think I would put more probability on some or many routine activities being Evil, rather than people doing things that are obviously Evil to you and would be to them if they considered it - it seems easier under that setup for most people to think they are beating the system and will not themselves be damned. I suspect Asmodeus will have set up something vey clever here, which I would hate very much if I knew it. I would very strongly prefer he end up not in charge of Cheliax anymore, but...well, that is difficult to achieve no matter what, even if I am right about Rahadoum sharing this goal." 

"I do not actually see how it could be done, though of course I wish you the best."

"I mean, if I were thinking to attempt it on my own, it would be - fifty years, at least, of preparation, likely inventing some entirely new fields of magic for it. It is a very hard problem; if it were easy, someone else would have done it already. But, I generally do not conclude something cannot be done until I have spent more than five hundred years trying and failing. My experience is that, going by that definition, almost nothing is actually impossible."

"Huh. I will confess those are not timescales I'm accustomed to thinking on."

"Fair enough, it took me many centuries to become accustomed to thinking on those timescales." 

"Only Elves live that long, around here."

"...Elves? What are their main activities?" 

"I regret that I can't introduce you to any; they typically dislike cities, and prefer land that they can live off, and their population centers are all on the northern continent. Their population is in decline, and has been for thousands of years; I think they number in the tens of thousands in total, now, though they don't advertise it and I could easily be wrong by a large margin if there are places I don't know of. Despite their limited numbers many of the most knowledgeable wizards are elves, as they have more time than humans. They're not native to Golarion; there used to be a portal to another world, and they came through it. At some point the portal failed or was lost."

"Odd. Your world feels - very big, is how I think I would describe the difference relative to Velgarth. We also have multiple sapient species and regions very different from each other, but...less." 

"Huh. How far back does your world have recorded history -"

"Maybe three thousand years. Almost four thousand if you count a very small number of stone tablets and such from dead empires found later, but - most recorded history before eighteen hundred years ago was lost during the Cataclysm." 

"Cataclysm?"

"There was a war between two powerful mages that - at least partially via misunderstanding and accident, I believe - led to one of the mages using a weapon that destroyed most of civilization at the time. Some of our land is still damaged from it." 

He nods. Looks sad but not particularly surprised. Doesn't give any indication of thinking there might be more to that story. "It has been eight thousand years since the last tragedy on that scale in our history, so perhaps miscellaneous oddities have had more time to accumulate."

"Maybe that explains it, though you also seem to end up with more portals to various other places, I have never heard of that happening in Velgarth." Leareth also looks a little sad, and then neutral. 

(He is suddenly feeling that maybe the pharaoh is extracting more from this conversation than Leareth is, and maybe Leareth would prefer to avoid that happening with the Mage Wars in particular.) 

"Is interplanar travel impossible with your magic, or was it just never discovered? I think interplanetary travel routes through other planes, so all our portals rely on that one way or another."

"Unclear. I would be surprised if it was completely impossible, but - harder to discover, yes. I think our Gate-magic is more flexible and useful for cross-continent travel at the cost of being much more difficult to scale; in the most straightforward implementation, the energy required increases with distance, and other planets are very distant. There are some ways around this - for example, it is not true of permanent Gates where both termini are linked already - but there is a chicken-and-egg problem, there, nobody can build a permanent Gate-terminus on another planet if they cannot get there." 

"A problem quite efficiently solved with our magic."

Nod. "A very convenient collaboration." 

"I am eager to see what fruit it bears."

And he doesn't, really, want to press him further even though he would like to know more on several of these topics, so if Leareth doesn't seem to have anything he wanted to say he'll wish him a good night.

Leareth is finding that he does on some level want to share more, but he's not sure how much this is an artifact of the pharaoh being very likeable and it definitely requires more thought, so he holds off, bids him goodnight in return.