"If they can do it with a Gate it'll be open for a couple minutes and if it takes an Interplanetary Teleport they'll probably do enough of them you can arrange to be on one of them. I think. Needs of the Crown first, of course."

"That makes sense."

"Do you have questions about this place?"

Lots. "Some. I remember you mentioned 'paladins'?"

"Yes. They are - soldier orders. Specifically Lawful Good ones, if you're Lawful but not Good you become a Hellknight instead."

"...if you're lawful but not good?"

"The gods see things in terms of Law and Chaos and Good and Evil. They're - the fundamental kinds of choice that there are, I think. Law is about order and keeping your promises and doing your duty. Chaos is about doing whatever you feel like and not having responsibilities. Evil is about having goals and being willing to achieve your goals even if there's a cost. Good is about - doing things narrowly and properly and very carefully and never stepping off that path. You get different afterlives, depending."

He is about to comment that this sounds very weird in Ibyabekan, which is when he notices that he has not been speaking Ibyabekan all day. Which, now that he thinks of it, she totally told him, but he ignored her because magic is imaginary, except he is pretty sure drugs cannot make you speak entire languages suddenly? That's very strange. He thinks he's... lawful... good...? except these seem to be made-up categories. That were in fact by her own admission literally invented by aliens! So categorizing himself is a silly impulse.

"When you're powerful enough, people can read it off you, and so it's useful for knowing what people are about. Most people don't know for sure until they die, though."

That part still sounds very fake, magic is one (very big) thing but souls and an afterlife is obvious nonsense, but he isn't going to harp on it. "All right."

She waits to see if he comes up with more questions.

"Is going to the paladins the best way to eat while I'm here? My gun will not last through a lot of fights without recharging."

"No. I think it serves Cheliax to keep this a secret from the paladins, for now, so we'll feed you. Out of my stipend, until I have enough to convince someone important."

"Why a secret?"

"We are allied to fight the Worldwound but we don't agree on much else."

"And the thing that's wrong with them is that they are 'good'. - how does this, uh, language magic work. On Ibyabek we think being good is good."

"Yeah, they do well on the propaganda front. Being Good is really really hard and people can only do it if they spend practically everything trying to do that and not doing anything else."

"We don't have any aliens around trying to convince us that we should do alien things."

Well. 

"The gods are - they care about better stuff than humans do. They're bigger, deeper, there's more to them, they can see farther, it's kind of like how we'd feel about people who could never want anything that wasn't going to happen in the next five seconds. Or like how we feel about, I don't know, cows. That's not to say none of the gods care about things that I don't think people should bother with. Many of them do. But - it's a mistake to decide you'll just do people stuff and ignore the gods, you'll be ignoring almost everything important."

That is sure a very emphatic recommendation for completely replacing all his values with those of some aliens he has just now heard of who can't even control their planet's megafauna problem. "Cows. I see," he replies blandly.

"Some people go for ants." Sigh. "I guess if you just dissolve when you die you should be focused on immortality and not on religion. Or are your people immortal already, does the future learn how to do that?"

"No, we don't have that. We live longer than we did when we used swords, though."

"Some people are immortal but it's very hard, is my understanding, and some forms of it might require having a soul, though I don't know how you'd check if you've got one."

"It's very hard?"

"To become immortal. - it's what I'd be focusing on, if I were going to just die forever at some point."