One of the people fills a basin with water and then starts moving her hands over it.

"That's the scry," says Isavel. "Should I take that as 'no more questions, please'."

"I'm... not clear on what my obligations to my command are under the circumstances. If I'm taken as a prisoner of war it's name, rank, serial number, but this is a much stranger situation. It will depend on what you ask."

"You're not a prisoner of war," she says very earnestly. "We're trying to keep you from Cheliax because they are Evil and if Asmodeus knows about your world he might attempt to conquer and damn it, too. But we're going to try to get you back to your people as soon as possible, and it's entirely all right if there are things you can't answer for us. 

Can you explain - how Ibyabek became the kind of place it is today? It sounds like it's unusual among the worlds you know of?"

"It is, yes. The Ibyatok system was originally colonized under the name Sohaibek and three planets in the system were settled. Pheon Naar Am, the original Glorious Leader, was a philosopher and he saw that the way the people of Sohaibek lived and were governed was bad for them, and he convinced the people of what was then Inner Sohaibek to join together and resist the unjust government, and succeeded, but on Outer Sohaibek right philosophy didn't make it to enough people and they started a war, and Old Sohaibek, in between the two, was melted in their crazed attempt to prevent the Glorious Leader's ideas from taking hold there, but we were able to fight them off in the end and keep Ibyabek as it is now." It is almost exactly what he told Carissa; he has it memorized.

" - the world was melted? How?"

"There is an advanced weapon that can do it."

"Does Ibyabek possess such a weapon. Is it - simple to describe, such that once people know of it they too can build it."

"Yes, and - not if you're starting with swords and magic."

They glance at each other. "That might -"

"Asmodeus wasn't with Rovagug."

"I said it might, let me finish, warrant revisiting -"

"I don't think so, the justification there was that this way's less suspicious."

"I just want to pass it along."

"Fine, go do that."

"Sorry," says Isavel after a minute. "It's a lot to take in. The gods aren't ...limited to swords, in the things they can build, necessarily, so it's scary to imagine they might get their hands on such things."

"The weapon also does not involve... prayer? in its manufacture. It's a piece of very high technology."

"...I should hope no god would grant it to us," she says, looking absolutely astounded. "I mean that They could probably build it Themselves. With technology."

"I apologize, I don't know how magic and gods work."

"Not your fault, we should have explained. Gods are ...people. They are very powerful people. They can do much much more than us. Some of them have goals that are very hard for us to understand, because we are so small compared to Them, or because They were never human to begin with. But while we do pray to them, answering prayers is only a tiny fraction of what They do, and if these weapons were dangerous it wouldn't be because of anything to do with us. Does that make sense?"

"Not especially. Uh, Ibyabekan has a word for 'god' but it refers to - ancient superstitions -"

"...and now I am the one who doesn't really know what you mean. You have the word but not any gods? You...used to think you had gods, but you didn't? Did they leave?"

"They never existed, people just - attributed natural phenomena to imaginary beings for some reason until humans learned more about science."

"I....see. And you are - unsure if we're doing that too?"

"You do have real magic, I think. But it occurred to me to wonder."

"The gods raise people from the dead. I have seen them do it. In the Inheritor's divine domain in Heaven, the forces of Good are marshalled for war, and there are people I knew who are there now among them. And a god died, a hundred years ago, and it was immediately obvious to everyone because storms tore apart the harvest everywhere and quakes swallowed cities and countries drowned and his followers stopped receiving miracles."

"People coming back from the dead is very impressive magic - if they didn't die ten minutes ago and gently - but terrible storms can happen on their own."

"The god, Aroden, had announced his plans to manifest on Golarion. Instead, the whole world, places thousands of miles apart from each other, had two weeks of storms and lightning, even in places where such weather was very rare, and five cities were swallowed by the earth, and a permanent hurricane formed and drowned the country that had previously been there below the sea. Two weeks later the storms cleared, everywhere at once. At the same time the god's clerics stopped getting spells from him."

"It's less drastic than the entire planet melting," Kyeo points out. "Which isn't magic at all."

"...I don't really understand the distinction you are making. Things have causes. If the planet had melted with no cause that would be very confusing. Instead, the melting had a cause - a war - so it isn't. Storms all over the world would be very confusing if it happened with no cause, but instead it was caused by a war.

The precise thing we are worried about is that planets melting is the kind of thing the gods might be able to cause."

"That's understandable. I don't myself know how to build a melter."

She nods. "Anyway. After the revolution, Ibyabek stopped using money? To marshall its whole world as Heaven, as an army in wartime, as a single pool of resources to be dedicated as needed?"