Carissa isn't stupid. 

Lots of people are stupid. She has read their minds and she has witnessed their public confessions and she has watched them die. Attendance at Cheliax's post-church-services public executions is mandatory. She reads minds every day, it's most of her job duties even though ostensibly she was at the Worldwound to look at powerful enchanted arms and armor and learn how to do it herself. The most fundamental fact about the world is that defiance is stupid and idealism is stupid and expecting anyone else in the world to prefer you alive to dead is stupid unless they have a very specific reason.

Carissa isn't stupid. She isn't defiant and she isn't idealistic and she has never ever expected anyone in the world to care about her and she thought that would be enough that she could live her life, which is, if you think about it, its own kind of being stupid. 

Carissa cares about things, in the dimensions where it's not stupid to care about things because there's no way for anyone to use it against you. She likes doing magic research. She likes learning new things. She likes being able to do things that matter. Inventing things, discovering things, making the soldiers at the Worldwound safer. She likes her family about as much as it's not stupid to like one's family, which is not very much. She might have children - there's talk of an incentives program for wizards, because intelligence runs in the blood - and she expects to like them slightly more than it's not stupid to, which is part of why she's waiting on the incentives program, which would make it stupid not to and thus counterbalance it. 

Her opinion about the Yeerks is that obviously they'll enslave as many people as they can and Mhalir is deluding himself if he thinks that they'll stop later, though it seems plausible enough they'll stop specifically the things that make people scream in your head all the time. Charms and reeducation programs, not seizing people out of their beds. This seems worse than a world where it doesn't happen, which she doesn't expect to matter at all.  Her opinion about Andalites is that they seem fundamentally too naive to win a war or else (and more likely) to have lots of complicated intrigue which seems very important to be on top of and which the Yeerks have failed to notice because - Mhalir seems kind of determined to regard working with the Andalites as a hypothetical tragically lost forever when his friend died? That seems like maybe something she could do something about, though she has no idea if she wants to. It's - a pretty hostile move, in the Chelish conception of these things, to ask people what they want. If someone wants anything at all then you have power over them. Asking what they want is asking them to admit that, and to hand you a finer instrument for wielding it. She can't keep secrets, here, but she can avoid thinking things through, she's very good at it. So she doesn't know what she wants. 

Well, she certainly has an outside perspective. 

That's the first thought Mhalir forms fully, and for a surprisingly long time the only thought, as he explores her conception of reality, not yet assessing it either for plausibility or for horrifyingness. 

She's not stupid. He agrees with that. He expects she's smarter than she gives herself credit for, even, because the society she lives in has given her such intensely strong incentives to stay small. 

She thinks he might be making a mistake. 

Very unsurprisingly, she's reacting to her current captivity by, again, staying small. Not using most of herself. He can't force her to stop that, and he can't even really ask her nicely, it's such an understandable, arguably-just-correct reaction. 

<I did not conclude the Andalites could not be cooperated with when Seerow died> he clarifies. <I still tried, for a long time, to open peace talks. I - only gave up on that after the massacre of the Hork-Bajir homeworld, when my attempts at communications were used against me, and when I was close to losing the Council's trust and good regard as a result. ...Perhaps more importantly, that is when I captured Alloran, and learned more directly what he, and in his mind most Andalites, think of Yeerks.>

He pauses for a moment.

<Still, if you think I am making an error of judgement here, I am curious to hear more. Though of course you are under no obligation to help me in this way.> 

What does that even mean. Of course she is under no obligation to do anything. Doing things just has consequences, so does not doing things. 

She's still undecided on whether she wants to help them but it's hard not to think about things.

The view Mhalir has of Andalites feels - immature? It's the way characters in a stage-play behave, it's the way history books tell stories that you're not supposed to believe and in fact where half of what you're demonstrating by memorizing them is that you're loyal to the regime even when it's not bothering to be believable. Andalites hate Yeerks because they are small and kind of oozelike? Are all of the other sapients in the galaxy not oozes or something even more incomprehensible? There was one Andalite who unlike all the other Andalites wanted to give Yeerks all of the advanced technology that had let Andalites reign over the galaxy unchallenged, and the other Andalites let him do it, and then he abruptly decided to turn on his chosen people, and attacked them and immediately died of it, and then all the other Andalites decided to join the war against the Yeerks, and now they're all very uniform in wanting to massacre Yeerks? (Have there even been massacres of Yeerks, outside the context of the war? Maybe that's not a useful question, if all of the Yeerks are involved in the war.) It's confusing, it's not how people are, and it seemed possible at first that maybe Andalites were just very very alien, like the fey, not possible to comprehend in terms of goals and priorities and tradeoffs among their different priorities, which is why she talked to Alloran, who seemed - not human, certainly, but not harder to negotiate with than a dragon or a devil or a genie -

- her best guess is that there is a ton going on behind the scenes to make the Andalites like this? They pick their leaders by an outright, straight-up popularity contest, there's probably all kinds of things ongoing to discredit one's enemies and make one's allies more popular and distribute resources in a way where you get the credit for it and in this context Seerow's ploy makes perfect sense, she'd initially flagged it as a third-son-of-a-minor-aristocrat sort of plan but they don't have the specific concept but - someone who wanted to be notable and wasn't yet and thought that a grand project like this, if it succeeded, would be an enormous source of leverage and notability and easy-to-time good news, and he'd obviously have needed a lot of allies to pull it off but they must've been sort of uncertain whether it'd work, reluctant to put their names to it in case it didn't, and then - something happened, an internal coup on the Andalite side maybe? Seerow's backers got nervous? Seerow himself learned something Mhalir doesn't know about? Someone stood to benefit from a war with the Yeerks, in any event.

She doesn't know any of this and most of it is almost definitely wrong in the specifics but it's the kind of way history tends to actually work when you zoom in.

Huh. 

Mhalir has also spent endless hours being confused about the Andalites' actions. Demonstrably they do seem to hate Yeerks - except Alloran just gave a far more reasonable defence of his and the others Andalites ' choices than he ever has to Mhalir, Mhalir is kind of irritated he didn't do that sooner, he's been spending all these years thinking of Alloran as a very limited black-and-white sort of thinker and maybe that's not true? 

He feels almost dizzy with it, too much to absorb at once, too much to even know what to orient too. Which means it's not the time to orient, yet, he thinks. Just to look, without trying to make sense of anything, because all his avenues toward sense-making involve ignoring some piece of this bewildering new picture and he can't afford to be stupid like that. 

It's...not ridiculous, her interpretation on what could have happened with Seerow, it might even fit together better with Mhalir's own guess, which was that Seerow was substantially more alarmed than he had been expressing and also under a lot of pressure from the Andalite government not to take risks. From his view, Andalite society seems very - conservative? Slow to change either their actions or even just the collective consensus. Humans, at least on Earth, don't even seem to have a collective consensus the way Andalites do, and they make more sense to him. 

<What would you have done, in my position?> he asks her. 

Well, if he's pretty sure he can win the war he's not necessarily making any wrong moves? Wars are costly but they're also a good way to consolidate power and suppress internal dissidents and get people to go along with lots of strict restrictive laws and quietly get rid of internal enemies. If he is confident he can eventually defeat the Andalites then she has no particular reason to believe it would've served him better to negotiate with them. But if she was trying to avoid a war she would've been obsessive about learning who was in power or vying for it, among the Andalites, and when Seerow attacked she'd - reach out to them demanding they denounce Seerow's unprovoked assault on their people or demanding they investigate who undermined Seerow into this or demanding they find the Andalites responsible for coaxing Seerow into a suicidal assault on his own people, depending on their specific angle. Even if you don't know anything in particular about the internal Andalite factions you can do things that probably empower or disempower the ones you prefer, right, like, parading Alloran around is a favor to the Andalite factions that believe Yeerks will enslave all Andalites whereas holding a trial for him over the Hork-Bajir thing and executing him would be a favor to Andalites who are against that kind of nonsense, and she isn't sure what other species there are who Andalites have any kind of trade relations with but presumably you want to get those to issue statements condemning Andalite atrocities or whatever, if you want to strengthen the Andalite factions that are against those. Have a bunch of free Hork-Bajir go to the Andalite home planet to demand justice in a very noisy and conspicuous fashion.

But like, maybe none of this serves Mhalir's interests, it sounds like Yeerks are successfully enslaving lots of planets and have plans to transition to a setup with less host-yelling and your enemies being uniformly chaotic evil is definitely also really politically useful! Just, more to claim than to actually believe, it's good to keep those separate.

Aaaaaaaaaaaa he's so confused, it feels like the world keeps turning inside out and backward around him, or maybe like he's fallen through a cracked mirror into some other world, and again he's not even assessing her viewpoint for plausibility or truth-trackingness, yet, he's too disoriented and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. But it's coherent, he thinks, it holds together as a worldview. 

<I was very young when the attack happened, and thus I was inexperienced and naive> he confesses. <I knew little about Andalite politics. It had not seemed as important as doing scientific research together. I - tried to catch up, afterward. And I did push for our leaders to send a diplomatic messenger to the Andalite homeworld - we have its coordinates - rather than going fully on the offensive. I did not want there to be a war, even once that had happened. I...do not think I had a plausible enough story for why that would work and be better than pursuing the war, though, and I did not yet have as much political influence as I do now.> That, too, had seemed far less important when Seerow was alive.

<...Would you guess that Alloran is chaotic evil or something else?> he asks her. <The way you talk about it - do you have a way to tell what someone is, in the alignment system?>  

There's a spell to check and it's third-circle so she can learn it but she doesn't have it, and it only works to detect people who are powerful, though Mhalir and Alloran might both count. (She was saving for a Ring of Sustenance and a headband for intelligence and not buying spells in the meantime, spells are not very expensive if they're low-level but they add up.)

Alloran's not Lawful, he was basically saying as much, that he'd betrayed talks on the Hork Bajir planet in a desperate last-ditch effort to come up with an alternative to murdering everybody, a reasonable tradeoff but Law is the sort of nature where you wouldn't do that.  - Carissa isn't sure herself if she'd do that if it came up but it hasn't and Pharasma mostly doesn't judge you on hypotheticals. Alloran will be Evil because of the killing a million people, that's Evil, Sarenrae got away with it but the gods aren't quite as subject to Pharasma as humans are. Mhalir is probably also Evil, mostly if you try to do important things you end up Evil. Carissa is herself Lawful Evil, third-circle is powerful enough to know and she got it checked, just out of idle curiosity. She might guess neutral evil for both Mhalir and Alloran, they don't seem chaotic exactly, but she hasn't met a lot of chaotic people so she doesn't know for sure.

...The fact that her system judges him as probably the same alignment as Alloran is so uncomfortable. It sounds like it's not quite the same thing as ethics, even conventional morality rather than his own view on it; it's whatever this one god, Pharasma, thinks is Good or Evil or Lawful or Chaotic. 

<I have not betrayed any agreements> he says. <I do not think I would. It seems - deeply harmful, like it destroys something. Mostly the Andalites have not given me an opportunity to make any agreements. Perhaps I should have, before Seerow attacked us, but...well, there are many things I should have done then, and did not know to do.> 

He hesitates. <What did Sarenrae do?> Mhalir is more curious about Sarenrae than the other gods, since they happen to have one of her clerics, who received that very confusing vision. 

Carissa's education on the other gods is all from the perspective of the church of Asmodeus, but Sarenrae is one of the Good gods, and cooperated with Asmodeus in getting Rovagug locked up, and then there was a city of her followers built atop the crack in the world where Rovagug was sealed away, and Rovagug's power leaked out and made them all Evil, and Sarenrae sent her herald to warn them to stop but they murdered the herald, at which point she smote the whole city. They mostly went to Hell. This is generally told in Asmodean theological education in order to make the point that the good gods do lots of things that everyone else gets judged Evil for, and also that Asmodeus is the only god who'll take all souls, even those that defy him and try to oppose him.

Mostly it's very horrifying! Also it seems like a somewhat understandable decision on Sarenrae's part, murdering a messenger is a pretty hostile act, and he doesn't know what other options she had for containing them, it's still horrifying but, well, he's done monstrous things himself. And, in this world, it's not like the people all stopped existing. 

Mhalir wonders if it's true that they mostly went to Hell. It doesn't seem like it was really their fault, what happened. 

Focus. 

<I think I have seen enough and can leave your head soon> Mhalir tells Carissa. <We are coming from very different worldviews and backgrounds, but I suspect we can work together - in a way less unpleasant for you than being in Hell with Asmodeus would be, even. I would like someone who can do magic research, I think, and later we can talk about your helping us recruit other wizards. I am willing to buy spells for you - in places that are not Cheliax, you can tell us where else you speak the language. And we do of course have the ability to watch you closely, and will do so, but if you agree to help now, I do not see any need to keep a Yeerk in your head.> 

It is not like doing this gets her out of being in Hell with Asmodeus. But - but if he wants her to do magic research for his war to enslave the universe then she is not right now in a position to stop him or even make herself much less useful to him, and it seems doomed to try to sabotage him. She will probably run, if she gets the chance. But if she doesn't - maybe she is in fact trading all her ability to do things for the chance to have her slavers smile at her but if so she's not doing it when there were lots of other things she could do. 

Is Alloran there, too? Sorry, she thinks at him, vaguely. It makes sense that his people are fighting the Yeerks and she would help them, too, if they'd captured her.

They wouldn't have kidnapped a random innocent person out of her bed, Alloran thinks angrily, because they are against slavery. If his people had found this place they'd be figuring out how to fight Hell. 

Mhalir is, in fact, thinking about how to fight Hell. It seems like a very hard problem. Convincing Carissa that Asmodeus is actually horrible and helping the Yeerks is morally better and also that she should pick actions according to ethics at all, rather than according to what will get her tortured, seems like almost as hard a problem. 

...There is one thing he's noting, which is that in many senses Carissa has an outside perspective he lacks, but there's at least one area where the opposite is true. She...seems to take for granted that Asmodeus' philosophy is true? Or not even be assessing its truth value, maybe, it's unclear, but she at least seems to think she's doomed to go to Hell, and this is also not obviously true. 

And one thing he knows, from Earth and from various other civilizations, is that philosophies vary a lot, even within a single species. 

There are other countries in this world. Other gods, and presumably their churches have their own philosophies. Unfortunately Mhalir finds all of them terrifying. ...Or, well, at least the Good gods sound terrifying too, and the Chaotic ones are pretty alarming. Maybe there are Neutral - Lawful Neutral? - gods that just wouldn't be interested in interfering with the Yeerks, because they're pursuing their own sideways interests.

<I want you not to lie to me on factual questions> he tells her. <Your motives are your own, and you need not pretend you are cooperating out of anything other than self-interest, or that you do not intend to flee at the first opportunity, and I have no expectation that you will tell me of your plans if I ask. But if, for example, I ask you about Golarion's geography, I want you to tell me honestly what you know. Can you agree to that?> 

And he watches her thoughts carefully. 

Huh, do they not have truth magic science after all? She absolutely expects to be caught lying, which is why she didn't do it yesterday just told a lot of very partial truths, and honestly she's still considering it pretty likely she'll be punished for that? She's trying to think under what circumstances she'd decide that was worth it, on the assumption that he would if he caught her at it probably torture her for a while and then put a Yeerk in for good. Maybe if she was pretty sure she could successfully escape that way. 

<I am not going to punish you for telling partial truths yesterday. I will be doing a lot of cross-checking, and if I suspect you are lying I will not hesitate to temporarily go into your head again. If you expect you can successfully escape by lying I would expect you to lie, and I am taking that into account. I feel it is really quite reasonable for prisoners to try to run away, and if I want this to not happen it is on me to avoid giving you the opportunity. Anyway, there are more questions about Golarion that I would like to ask you, but no particular reason to do it from inside your head. So I will leave now.> 

And once again he directs the crew to watch her incredibly closely and be ready to intervene if she tries to do anything while he slips out and one of his people catches him and carries him out of the room to demorph elsewhere. 

She holds very still, again. She feels sick and dizzy and terrified and - confused, about things it doesn't seem safe to try to resolve her confusion about, but - she flexes her hands just slightly once they take Mhalir away. She still has some options, somehow. 

Most of them probably involve taking options away from other people, but there's no good reason for her to feel sad about that if it's a reasonable way to get what she wants.

Mhalir comes back once he has Alloran's body in Andalite form again and has updated his people's instructions for watching her very very closely. He's nervous, leaving her un-Yeerked is pretty scary, but he thinks he has her grudging cooperation, and - it seems very promising to try to obtain more of it. She's so good at lying, even to herself; if she were Yeerked, she would also be very good at not-thinking answers. 

He calls up a display of the map they've been making from the orbital and shuttle imagery. <We have some information on Golarion's geography, but much less on its geopolitics, and the books we obtained in Cheliax included little on other countries. I would appreciate if you could tell us about the other countries you know of, what they are like, and which gods are worshipped where.> 

"Sure." It's a really remarkable map, incredibly detailed; science scrying must be amazing. "Uh, north of Cheliax -" she gestures - "that's Nidal, they worship Zon-Kuthon, god of pain. That's Molthune, it used to be Chelish but broke off during the civil war, and north of it is Nirmathas, which broke off from Molthune after that. That's Lastwall. It's the headquarters of a bunch of paladin orders - mostly of Iomedae, and Sarenrae - paladins are lawful good warriors with divine magic and because lawful good people basically can't tolerate the conduct of any other people they have to only hang out with each other. Iomedae is the ascended Lawful Good god of fighting Evil, Sarenrae's the Neutral Good god of, I don't know much detail, Good stuff. Iomedae was a Chelish woman, when she was alive.

The paladins fight the undead in Ustalav, and they fight at the Worldwound, which is up there. Next to that is the Hold of Belkzen, it's full of orcs, orc societies are mostly chaotic and hard to have treaties with and I don't know their gods. On the coast there is Varisia, which also used to be Chelish, and still has lots of our people. Numeria is where a spaceship crash-landed ages ago, is it one of yours? Razmiran is run by a loon who pretends he's a god. Andoran used to be Chelish and now they've gone full Good and hate slavery and everything else people do, I don't think you'll get along with them. Galt used to be Chelish and then repeatedly executed its entire government and now it's run by some megalomaniac who has conquered up to there - and down to there - and out to there. Places that used to be Chelish mostly worship Iomedae and Erastil - god of family and farming -  Abadar - god of commerce - and sometimes Irori - another ascended god, I don't know much about him, I think his main teaching is that you can control what happens to you if you just do things that achieve your goals and don't do dumb things that don't - Andoran will add the other major Good gods into that and Galt might add some Chaotic gods but I don't know which ones...

That down there is Taldor, it's the only other thing in the region that's a global power but they didn't rival Cheliax at its height and I don't think they really do even now. On the other continent that's Osirion, which is Abadar's, and Thuvia which is just some desert city-states and Rahadoum, which bans all the gods. Garund has more of a presence for the churches of Nethys - god of magic - and Pharasma - god of the dead - and Sarenrae. I think Osirion officially tolerates all non-Evil non-Chaotic gods but they go hard for Lawful Neutral. Lawful Neutral's not hard to get the majority of your population to be if you just make sure they aren't ambitious or have any meaningful goals or anything. Qadira I think also follows Nethys and Abadar and Pharasma and Sarenrae but I don't know much about them. Women mostly don't have rights in Garund or Casmaron so I wasn't super planning to visit."

Mhalir listens closely, recording it all on Alloran's brain chip as well. 

<Is my guess that a Lawful Neutral god, who tolerates many other gods in his country, would be less likely to interfere in my operations there as long as I do not break any local laws? It seems promising to obtain books on magic there, and even recruit mages as long as I do not kidnap them, which one assumes Abadar would have objections to. The other alternative would be Rahadoum, which has no gods to worry about.> 

"Probably? They allow slavery there so I don't think they'd be upset about your hosts. I don't know all the local laws, though."

<What do you mean about women not having rights in Garund or Casmaron? Would that be all right in Osirion, if I sent you to buy spells there? I would probably wish to accompany you, in morph, but you are the one who knows what you are talking about.> 

"Uh, humans come in two kinds, men and women, and men can get women pregnant which means we grow a baby, I will be pretty frustrated if you have anyone do it to me and it wouldn't even have a payoff for decades. Anyway babies are a lot of work and there are three things you can do about this, one is have your government pay for people to take care of all the babies, which is what Cheliax does, and two is have a lot of babies starve because their mother was a dumbass who had a baby when she couldn't feed one, which is what lots of places do, and three is force all of your women as soon as they're old enough to become the property of a male stranger in exchange for him promising to feed all the children he has by her, which is what Garund and Casmaron do. I don't know whether I can buy things as myself at a magic shop in Osirion, they might want my husband's permission for me to spend money, but I have Alter Self and I can go as a male wizard and then it won't be any problem. Or you can go as my husband, I guess, if you want to use the way the locals work in order to make it harder for me to run away."

<- Oh, Andalites also have genders and pregnancy for the females, although they have sufficiently advanced technology that they mostly do not do natural pregnancies anymore, it is apparently quite unpleasant for the women, and they are also post-scarcity so the cost of childrearing is less of a problem. Yeerks do something different. Anyway, it seems inefficient to force you to have a baby and I am not planning to do that. I will consider whether it makes more sense to send you as a male wizard or for me to accompany you into the store; I am somewhat worried about magic shop owners casting Detect Thoughts on people who actually enter, and I could still watch you from outside the store, if I use a morph that has good eyesight and hearing.> 

"They might do that, yeah, especially if you're neutral evil."

<Do magic store owners regularly read alignment? And would they find Lawful Evil less problematic?>