And then there is a tail-blade there. <Hey. What are you doing.>

Why is today like this. 

Aroden takes a step forward, trying to intercept the Andalite bothering Carissa and Mhalir. "If you dislike this plan, I do have a spell I can cast which would turn them both into books containing every thought they have ever had in their lives. Would you prefer that?"

(He cannot in fact cast Scribe's Binding once right now, let alone twice, but he can do it as soon as he's slept, and he's in a bad mood and not at his most patient right now.) 

< - you can what? I - is that survivable?>

"I mean, they are not precisely alive while they are in book form. Theoretically I could undo it later. I am not sure I would bother wasting ninth-circle spells on it though." 

<I think you should neither murder these people nor Yeerk them, but if you're making me choose, sure, kill them.>

"Oh, come the fuck on," she says, sitting up. "The rest of the galaxy does not share your fetish for death, has that not sunk in yet?"

< - here it's confounded by the afterlife situation but Earth human suicide rates are higher than ours, and much higher in places where there's ready access to reliable weapons for it.> someone says.

"- these people are Chelish. These people are my people. Admittedly I am betraying them but -" It made more sense in her head. "I'm following the rules about it."

"- Obviously I would not actually leave them stuck as a book forever," Aroden snaps, frustrated at everyone right now, including Nefreti who hasn't technically done anything here but surely could be saying something helpful and isn't. "After the war. When my ninth-level spell slots are at less of a premium. Right now they are and I would prefer not to burn two on interrogating our prisoners about Hell by turning them into books. Which I cannot even do right now, I did not prepare it in advance because I have not used this spell in the last twenty years. Also one then has to read the books and we do not have infinite time here." He glares at the Andalites. "One of you has a Yeerk morph, no? If your problem is having them Yeerked by Visser Three, surely you could do it yourselves instead." 

<It is the other way around. The problem with Visser Three is that he Yeerks people.>

"I am sure if you ask them afterwards what powerful magic secrets will make it worth their while, they will be able to come up with something. Also among humans it is impolite to start an argument with a knife instead of a thesis."

<And among Andalites it's impolite to Yeerk people.> Curtly. 

"Aroden, you can explain yourself to people or you can stop them from interfering but you usually have to do one or the other, not neither."

"Aroden?" says Carissa incredulously from the ground, though it's not like it was an uncommon children's name in Cheliax a hundred years ago and there's lots of reason to start instead going by Alexeis.

Aroden goes very still for a long moment, then turns a piercing look on Nefreti before meeting Carissa's eyes, with a faint smile. 

"Yes. I am that Aroden. You thought I was dead, yes? I did die, but I - got better." 

- that is terrifying, and too big to fathom, it demands reconsideration of so many other pieces of the world she's dizzy with it, but it also doesn't feel false - she ducks her head, because it feels utterly ridiculous for her to be here, and it'd be a little less ridiculous if she was doing what she was supposed to, kneeling so Mhalir can infest their prisoners and not bothering anyone - and if she's not bothering anyone then she can start to reshuffle all the other pieces in her head around this enormous unthinkable one and figure out what to do with it -

<Carissa, what...?> Mhalir dives into her memories, chasing fragments as she tries to piece them together.

Aroden - patron deity of humanity??? - prophesied to bring about an Age of Glory - but instead he died (murdered by Asmodeus, Carissa thinks?) - the day prophecy stopped working forever... 

Aroden gives the Andalites an apologetic look. "I am sorry, you are missing relevant context on this. I - was a god. For four thousand years. Cheliax was my country. I was going to return to the material plane and - fix everything, but instead I was betrayed by an ally, and killed. I did not find out why until recently, but the other gods saw that my death would break prophecy, and thought this worthwhile. Whatever the reason, though, I was immortal as a human long before I became a god, and I...returned. I have spent the last century preparing to retake my country from Asmodeus." 

The Andalites seem confused and have a thoughtspeech conversation among themselves the upshot of which is, well, you can't Yeerk people no matter who you are.

Aroden was supposed to return in Westcrown, everyone was ready for Him, she doesn't know what He was supposed to do exactly, the Asmodean version was that He meant to, with the Chelish people as the agents of His will in Golarion, reign over the whole world. It seems - better, than anyone else conquering Cheliax. It was His to begin with, right, and He might have little use for Cheliax as it is today, suited to Asmodeus, but at least He'd be aiming for Cheliax at its greatest rather than for some other smaller thing, at least He thinks of its people as His and not just as something to take out of Asmodeus's hands -

- Carissa considers it very obvious that Aroden can do whatever He wants with these prisoners, they're His, but she is aware that other people do not have a worldview in which this claim is reasonable, and she's not sure how to translate it into something that is, maybe Mhalir can figure that part out - it's that you can't expect gods not to use people with a ruthlessness that'd be a concerning sign in a human leader, and what matters with gods is how much of you they can use -

Mhalir isn't sure, Carissa's worldview doesn't quite fit together for him either, and the version of it that does is still vague and unformed. It's, just... 

...so the entire thing that ruthlessness means, is being willing to weigh two different options, both of which are horrible in some way, and coolly weigh up the tradeoffs, like numbers in a ledger, and choose the path where the numbers add up to something better. To hold nothing as sacred, which just means that no single item in your ledger is infinite, no cost is high enough to outweigh a smaller cost multiplied by a million or a billion or add however many zeroes it takes. And - it makes obvious sense to Mhalir, to think this way, that it - almost doesn't matter if being Yeerked for half an hour is a million times worse than death, if there are a billion lives on the line, right? 

And the thing about that kind of reasoning, that he spoke about with Iomedae, is that it's not robust to making terrible mistakes, and people will make mistakes, and the point of Good is to protect against that - though Good isn't the opposite of ruthlessness, Iomedae is plenty ruthless...

The thing about Good, though, is that it's meant for people, ordinary mortal people, who are limited and imperfect and missing key information about the world. The update to him, here, is that Aroden isn't just a brilliant wizard, and...that means ruthlessness is safer for him, probably? Because he knows more, he's seen millennia pass, he's not going to make the kind of stupid mistakes that Mhalir might, and that's why him exhibiting ruthlessness ought to be less concerning. 

Mhalir thinks he's the worst possible person to try to explain this to the Andalites, though, even if he were at the point of having a coherent argument, which he isn't. 

The Andalites have finished their internal arguing and Matirin has come forward to gently nudge the one whose tail-blade is at Carissa's head away. 

<We don't understand your gods> he says. <I am aware that when there are lots of things we don't understand it is unusually important to act cautiously. But we are trying to build an alliance with Yeerks on the condition they stop taking nonconsenting hosts and if it instead means 'stop taking nonconsenting hosts, except when the people of Golarion want to use Yeerks for interrogations or in wartime', that is very different and would have different implications.>

Aroden holds up a hand. His expression is very, very calm and level. (He's furious, and also exhausted, and trying to contain both of those." 

"I did not explain my reasoning here, because we are short on time and I am in a hurry, but I suppose I ought to if I am asking you to make an exception on this," he says, directed at Matirin. "I think we disagree on exactly how Evil it is to Yeerk someone for a few minutes instead of conducting a prolonged interrogation - and on whether being Yeerked in such a situation is literally worse than death - but that is not the even the point. It is not just the lives of millions of Chelish citizens on the line here. Asmodeus has stolen my country and nearly all of its people go to Hell when they die, where they are enslaved and tortured indefinitely. Can you tell me how many years in Hell you would choose over being Yeerked for a few minutes and then freed? How much lower a chance of winning this war you would ask me to accept here in exchange for using an alternative interrogation method you consider less distasteful?" 

<I have the job of convincing my people to accept an agreement I did not have the authority to negotiate, negotiated with the Yeerk whose record of crimes is most detailed and horrifying to us, so that our ships may be deployed to a war in a place that they did not know existed five minutes ago. They need to be persuaded of this as quickly as possible. I would trade quite a lot to be able to tell them that this kind of use of Yeerks is something that Golarion's leaders abhor and would only consider if there were no alternatives, not as a first resort while in time dilation after precisely zero attempts at asking questions normally.

We have been at war for decades with the stakes as high as they get. We are not incapable of math. But we do not have perfect information about whether your people understand that slavery is bad, what with how all of your countries permit it, and so the best signal we are going to get about how seriously you take this and what result to expect if we throw our weight behind you is whether you are willing to sacrifice anything at all to Yeerk people less, and if the answer is 'no', then we need to consider what that means for whether this alliance gets us what we care about.>

Aroden takes a deep breath. 

"...All right. If what you are asking for here is a show of good faith, that we will try to understand and respect your people's values, then I will do that. We have," his eyes play over the group, "twenty-two people here, right now, and we have been here a day and a half, so we have a maximum of about seven days remaining if we do not try to bring anyone else here. I - will give it one day of trying something else." He turns. "Carissa. How long can you maintain Detect Thoughts."