Malduoni doesn't say anything for a moment. Some hard-to-interpret emotion flickers across his face. His eyes are haunted, distant, not really seeing Alloran at all. 

(His people his country and it's never stopped aching but sometimes, times like now, the pain of it is sharper, and he needs to lean into it for a moment, let himself feel the full horror of what he lost, of the price that millions of people paid for his mistakes, before he can move on to the inevitable work of doing something about it.)

"Cheliax is not the only evil in our world that needs to be fought," he says, quietly. "But - you are very right. And if we are able to help your people, I am sure Golarion would be eager to accept their help in turn, though of course I cannot speak for the Good gods." 

Tail-swish. <Thank you. Good luck. I hope you can stop them, I hope it's not too late.>

"I hope so too." Sigh. "And - I hope you do find healing here. I am sorry to hear what happened to you. How long were you a prisoner?" 

<Fifteen point one Golarion years.>

He bows his head. Says nothing for a moment. 

"I will try very hard to end this war," he says finally, and he looks Alloran in the eye for another long moment before turning away and Plane Shifting himself back to his hallway demiplane in Rahadoum. 

He walks out and Teleports to Absalom and three seconds later is knocking on the front door of his wife's beautiful house in Absalom. 

She opens it a little while after that. "Oh no," she says.

He steps through the door into his wife's arms, and here in this one place, he isn't Malduoni anymore, leader of a godless country. Here it's safe to be Aroden, the dead god who failed to save his people. 

He doesn't say anything for a long time. 

She lets him have his long time. Then - "what's happening?"

"You know I went to Nirvana to follow up on whatever is happening with the suspicious wealthy strangers and the church of Abadar? I - found something worse than I could have imagined..." 

He explains, in short terse phrases. The two alien species from faraway worlds, the war, the slugs that mind-control people. Their recruiting on Golarion. Their leader's inexplicable decision to leave his slave in Nirvana.

He waits to see what she's going to say. 

" - huh. So the wealthy strangers are...probably slug-controlled? Or at least slug-allied? And - you're going to decide you've got to personally fix this whole alien war, aren't you."

"What else am I supposed to do? It is an awful disaster and no one else is going to fix it!" 

"I love you. I don't know how one fixes an entire alien war."

"The same way you fix anything. One step at a time. To start with, I am going to Tian Xia." He makes an apologetic face at her. "They seem to have moved their main operations there. Perhaps they feared they had attracted notice in Absalom." 

"Clever of them. Too bad you also have agents in Tian Xia."

His lips twitch in a brief smile. "Too bad." He leans in, kisses her. "I am sorry to run away again. The world just keeps having problems in it." 

"It's a good thing it's scheduled to be done with that soon so you can take a nice nap."

Aroden shakes his head at her. "I love you. I need to go hand off some things in Rahadoum." 

He does that, burning another Teleport, and collects a few scrolls of it just in case. Once all of that is settled, and he's prepared a Sending to his contact in Tian Xia, he packs. It doesn't take him long. He keeps his magic items for going into dangerous situations very well organized; he was, after all, an odd sort of adventurer for decades. Much of it in Tian Xia, so he knows the place very well. 

By the end of that day he's halfway around the world, meeting with his main spy-contact in person to hear if there are any updates on the mysterious wealthy strangers. 

They commissioned a Tome of Understanding, the most expensive kind, provided the five required Wish-grade diamonds themselves, and haven't been seen since.

Diamonds are probably easy to obtain for powerful aliens, Malduoni thinks. (Though he goes by a different name, here, several in fact.) 

He reaches out to multiple contacts, some of them people he hasn't spoken to in years. He doesn't explain everything but he can hint at the severity of the situation. He wants eyes in every city in Tian Xia, more than that, in every major magical establishment in said cities, and he wants to know immediately when the mysterious strangers collect their Tome of Understanding, and if anything else shows up that might be them. 

He gets notified when they show up to collect their Tome. He gets notified of a little bit of scattered activity on another coast under a different name. Scrolls of Modify Memory.

Scrying for them afterward is hopeless, they always go in with other people's faces.

What do they want Modify Memory for. He runs through the possibilities in his head. Interrogating people who they don't want to keep captive afterward? But holding onto people is cheap for them, hells, it has the opposite of a cost, they can put a slug in the prisoner's head and have another pair of hands.

...Recruiting, maybe, if they want to filter for cooperative bodies for the Yeerks to wear?

He's very unsure and he keeps up the surveillance everywhere, but arranges to focus it a little more on the sorts of establishment where adventurers and mercenaries tend to hang around to learn about new bounties. 

Then he hears about Quantium. It's a very normal listing. Good pay, highly confidential work, high-level wizards wanted.

Malduoni finds out where the interviews are happening. They're unsurprisingly taking all the sensible precautions against scrying, et cetera. 

He contacts a wizard he's worked with, in the past. Explains somewhat more than he has in general - that he suspects there are powerful nonhuman beings involved here, with capabilities Golarion knows nothing of, and he needs a person to find out for sure what's going on. He suspects they're modifying the memories of people who turn down the offer, and anyone who accepts the offer ends up kidnapped, but - he wants the wizard to go in, sit through the explanation, and if Malduoni's guess is right, trigger an Nondetectable magic item that will cause an alarm to reach Malduoni no matter how many spells are trying to block that. 

And he's going to skulk nearby, invisibly, very frustrated that he can't scry inside the room they've rented for this. 

The alarm is triggered about five minutes later.

Malduoni is unsurprised. He's very calm as he casts Fly for the ten seconds it takes him to zoom invisibly over to and inside the building, and then he's in front of the door, turning his permanent Detect Magic on it, what exact protections did they set up and what does he need to do to walk in anyway.