Nirvana, this rabbit informs him patiently, is a sanctuary and a place of healing and part of that is patient confidentiality.

That is understandable and also very frustrating, and he doesn't even know enough about the situation to offer a compelling explanation of why it's important. 

He thanks the rabbit, courteously, and then casts Fly and takes off over Nirvana. It seems like he's going to be spending the next while aimlessly looking for anyone who stands out, reading thoughts and casting Detect Alignment a lot. Fortunately, Malduoni at this point has an utterly absurd number of spell slots, and he's prepared to keep doing this for the rest of the day if necessary. 

Nirvana is not finite. It does however have a specific area called the Isle of the Penitents that is for evildoers redeemed or otherwise smuggled in, and 'what direction is that' is a meaningful question, and eventually he can find it. It's still very big.

Malduoni tries asking some of the people he sees there about new arrivals, in case they're more willing to answer questions than the rabbit was. 

They are if anything even more guarded than the rabbit. Patient confidentiality is very important. Some of their thoughts are helpful, though. He has to be looking for Alloran. Alloran might consent to talk to him; they could ask Alloran and then pass on his location if he agrees.

Malduoni doesn't reveal that he's reading their thoughts. Rather than looking further afield for 'Alloran', though, he waits to see if they'll decide to ask him, and what the answer will be. It seems like a better start for that conversation to be consented to. 

Alloran turns out to be an entirely unfamiliar species of thing, with four legs and two arms and four eyes and a wickedly bladed tail, who trots up to him that afternoon. <Are you after the Yeerks?>

Malduoni doesn't show his surprise at all. "I think you need to back up several steps. I know very little of what is happening, except that I suspect I am looking for strangers from another world who have suspicious quantities of money and may have somehow offended the church of Abadar. I would like to hear how you came to be here, if you are willing to share that." 

< - sure. I am an Andalite. We are from another planet. - your Golarion orbits a star, and the other stars also have planets around them, and I am from one of those.> He is SO HOPEFUL that this person will not be ASMODEAN and therefore will be persuadable to stop the Yeerks.

"Ah." He seems unsurprised by this. "How did you travel here? Travel between planets around our star is feasible with magic, but the other stars are very far away, and yours must be especially far, I have never heard of Andalites." 

<Andalites have starships that can route through other planes and cover great distances quickly. However, I did not come here under my own volition, I came here as a prisoner of a people called Yeerks. They are tiny oozes that can enter your head through the ear canal and command total control, from there, of the mind and body. They are trying to enslave many different worlds in order to win a war with my people.> Pause. <In their defense I think that some of them do not prefer to enslave the entire galaxy and have told themselves that once the war is won they can adopt different methods.>

"And they are here to learn of our magic and recruit our wizards for said war, I imagine. How did they know to look for us, though? I do not think we have ever had contact with a species meeting that description."

<They found you by accident, while doing experimental space exploration. They kidnapped and enslaved the crew of a ship in Taldor, learned how magic works, and then stole some wizards in Cheliax. At least one they sent back to their headquarters as a slave, to teach magic there and as proof of the concept. At least one they kept here, to use to recruit more of them. I don't know how many others they had at the time, let alone how many they have by now; they can breed quickly when advantageous, and the Yeerk who enslaved me was blocking my access to my senses somewhat routinely, in the last days of our acquaintance.>

"How exactly did you end up here, from the starting point of being their prisoner - were you rescued?"

<Not exactly. I have never known the Yeerk who enslaved me to be moved by any moral considerations whatsoever, but Sarenrae sent a vision to her captured priest about Nirvana and Visser Three - seemed to take it seriously, though it was unclear, and decided to release me in favor of taking the Chelish wizard. She was more cooperative, Chelish people seem to have an ideological conviction that enslaving people is a reasonable thing to do and objecting to slavery is not a reasonable thing to do, and - I have spent fifteen years trying to seize control of my tail and kill him. He arranged to send me here. I am confused about why he did that. The Nirvanan answer is of course that he too is just hurt and confused and doing his best in a hostile world but - he has had lots of people executed, he has had lots of people tortured, he has had lots of people enslaved, I am fairly sure that he intends to keep doing that - it makes sense that he took the wizard but it's confusing he didn't hand me over to someone else, or kill me, when he did.>

Malduoni is having some sort of emotion about the captured wizard being Chelish. He can't name what the emotion is. The rest of the description is mostly making him quietly angry. And kind of irritated, because this is a very inconvenient time to be uncovering someone else's serious problem. He has enough problems on his plate already. 

"Interesting. I am also confused, and I think that means I am missing some important consideration. It certainly seems - ill-advised, from a strategic perspective. Since the result is that now I have found you and am learning of this war." 

He takes a step back, looks Alloran in the eye. "I assume you are wondering, right now, if I can be convinced to aid your people in this war. Is that right?" 

<...the Nirvanan answer is that the whole war is a tragedy and the best thing would be to make everybody realize they're hurting people and stop. But - they are enslaving billions of people.>

"And it is not a trivial action, to make people realize they are hurting others and should stop. I believe you, that this war is awful and that the Yeerks must be stopped. I - have resources I could call on, to try to stop this. I am confused, though, which means I am missing a great deal of the picture here. I want to help, but my first steps here will be to investigate the situation for myself. If there is anything more you can tell me of their planned operations in Golarion, that would be very helpful." 

<I think it was their intent to recruit more people and then get to the Andalite home planet and use mind-control to force the Andalites to surrender. They were mining asteroids for precious metals that could be used for artifact-making and to make purchases on Golarion. They were trying to avoid the notice of the gods because they didn't want interference. The Chelish wizard was trying to convince them Asmodeus would help them.>

Malduoni goes very still, his face unreadable. 

"Did Visser Three seem at all inclined to take up that offer?" he says, slowly, as though picking out each word. 

<He does not say much to me of his intent. I do not think it was his first plan. Probably he would do it if he thought it was the best way to win the war. I do not think there's anything he wouldn't do if it were the best way to win the war.>

"I see." Malduoni doesn't say, at least not out loud, that he sympathizes with that mindset. "Is he, in your experience, often rash or impulsive in his actions? I am trying to figure out if his decision to leave you here is characteristic of his strategic judgement, in general, or an exception." 

<He is not usually impulsive. The conversation with the cleric of Sarenrae shook him but I do not know why. You would think that it would be bizarre to torture millions of people for many decades and then reconsider as soon as someone tells you that it's important to keep in mind how people ought to have the chance to heal. He was doing lots of things in secret with my senses blocked and I suspect they would make sense of it. Maybe Sarenrae demanded it but I don't know why she would do that instead of stopping him from sending slaves back to the big body of his army or doing something about Cheliax.>

Nod. It indicates something, Malduoni is thinking, there's information there, but he isn't sure what it means yet. 

"Cheliax upsets you?" he finds himself saying instead, his voice gentle. "You think someone should be doing something about it." 

<Obviously someone should be doing something about it! I don't know why any of your gods call themselves Good! What are they, napping? The Andalites will do something about it if you stop the Yeerks from enslaving the galaxy while we're busy!>

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. 

There are lots of precautions set up by a wizard who can't be half his level and he can take them all down with one Dispel Magic.

He casts it and prepares a Mass Persistent Plane Shift and then shoves the door open and makes eye contact with whoever is with his wizard agent in there for about a quarter of a second before casting the spell to transport all of them to his personal demiplane. 

Carissa has absolutely no idea who this person is and was not expecting this at all and she has a Slaying hat-pin and Mhalir said he'd get her back but maybe that was a lie so she'd kill herself rather than talk and she'll go to Hell forever and she doesn't want to and what a terrible moment for that revelation. She stabs herself with the hat-pin rather than dwell on it further. 

It doesn't do anything.

She's in a very nice tastefully decorated library, and an old man is looking down at her. He's holding himself very still, not tense but just - controlled, and his face is impassive. It's very slightly reminiscent of how Mhalir moves her body, when he's in control. 

He makes a faintly irritated sound, his piercing eyes fixed on her for a long moment, and then reaches down and yanks at her wig. 

(He can't Detect Thoughts her and none of her magic items should work, in here, which means it's not magic - lead helmets block Detect Thoughts, it's too conspicuous to wear out and about but aliens might have something better...) 

It tugs away - she whimpers slightly in surprise - and then he can read her. 

That was fast. She was hoping it'd take him much longer. It's - still probably worth holding out, if she can, Mhalir will come for her. Maybe. Mhalir might come for her and the worlds where Mhalir comes for her are the only ones in which there is any hope left at all. Two and two is four. Four and four is eight. Eight and eight is sixteen. Sixteen and sixteen is thirty-two. 

She's quick, he thinks. Smart, even with none of her intelligence-boosting magic items working. 

He casts a truth spell. "I want you to tell me who you are working for and what you were doing recruiting in Tian Xia. If you do not tell me willingly I will geas you to do so." 

Proper geas takes ten minutes which would be valuable time she'd be buying them but she's a baby wizard and he can get her with the lesser one. Technically you can throw it off if you're competent enough. She braces herself. 

Malduoni is thinking the same thing. He casts Lesser Geas, and commands her to answer his questions, obey his orders, and not resist his spells. 

She curls up on the ground and covers her ears so she can't hear any orders, which is also not going to work for more than five seconds but she's slightly too panicked to even evaluate the question of whether the slight delays are worth aggravating the powerful wizard-kidnapper. Probably the answer is that it doesn't matter. That was a Plane Shift. Mhalir's not going to find her in time. He'll raise her, or he won't - diamonds are cheap for him, but so are wizards -

He casts Hold Person, which stops her from moving but in her current position, and then he reaches in - with surprising gentleness - and removes her hands from her ears, placing them beside her. 

"Tell me who you are working for," he says, his voice level and patient.

(He's pretty sure he knows who she's working for, but he isn't about to bias his interrogation by telling her what he expects to hear.) 

"Mhalir," she says, and manages to stop talking after that. It's - so the thing about being Yeerked is that nothing you do can possibly matter, that it's over, you can't even really delay them in accessing whatever they wanted to know and it doesn't matter how you occupy your conscious thoughts, the only sense in which they need anything from you is that they'll have a pleasanter time if you stop yelling, and that's not a strategic consideration, not really -

- and this isn't that. Being difficult is buying time, not that she has a very clear picture of what Mhalir can even do with it but it's probably not nothing. It is buying time at the expense of making her kidnapper even angrier at her, and she's sure she'll pay for it, but - but she can trade future pain for the chance to be difficult right now, it's not literally impossible, and maybe it's kinder when it is and you can just give up entirely but she can't actually make herself do that, now, she hasn't been taking care of herself, she hasn't been reminding herself that everything that happens either doesn't matter or serves Asmodeus - she's not at all sure what serves Asmodeus here, but she'd maybe better figure it out, since she's going to die -

Most of Malduoni's mind is very calm, with the crystal clarity that comes in an emergency, when he's driving ruthlessly toward a single goal. One small thread in the background is wishing he could bring Parmida here to give the poor child a hug. 

He can't at all blame her for being difficult. It's impressive, even. 

"What is Mhalir recruiting wizards for." 

"Their magic."

Okay he deserved that. 

"Where is Mhalir from." 

"Don't know what it's called." She would at this point in his place be tempted to light the prisoner on fire. Which would be fine. Good practice for Hell. (His homeworld, he'd said, when he mentioned it. Maybe Yeerks picked it up off the Andalites, who also seem to call their planet 'the homeworld'.)

Well, at least he's confirmed from her thoughts that Mhalir is in fact a Yeerk, and that Andalites are involved, he's going to say that's enough effort toward not biasing this. 

"I know that," he says, still gently. "I found Alloran. In Nirvana. You are the Chelish wizard he kidnapped, yes?" 

Found Alloran - oh. Figures. Could've held onto him a couple more months and killed him with a soul bind, maybe. Mhalir will feel stupid. 

"He kidnapped several."

"Where are the others right now." 

"Don't know." Back with the main body of the Yeerk force wherever it is but she has no idea whether that's a planet or a space fleet or something even more unimaginable. Mhalir is sociable with her but he doesn't tell her secrets for no reason.

"How many other wizards does Mhalir have with him now, and what level." 

Nonononono "Probably three. Two with sixth circle, one with seventh."

"What technological capabilities does his spaceship have." 

"Don't know it all. They have really good illusions and scrying. They mine asteroids for gold and spellsilver and other things - better than lead -" She glances despairingly over at her wig. "They're very fast. They can make diamonds. You should - you should leave them alone. They won't hurt Golarion." Probably. But - but she does think they probably won't. 

He ignores that. “What was Mhalir planning to do next once he had enough wizards.”

"End the war."

“Did he tell you anything more than that about his future plans.”

"Yes."

“Tell me what he told you about it.” His tone is still very patient. He doesn’t appear frustrated at all.

It is really very weird that she is not on fire but some people aren't very demonstrative about being angry. What is the least useful or strategically relevant thing Mhalir said about his future plans. "He wants to invade Hell."

“- What, really? Why?”

Hah, distracted. "I don't know. He has some bizarre philosophy about enslaving people where he wasn't sorry but he also didn't approve of Hell at all." Probably she should expand on this as much as she can get away with. "You would expect that having less free will would be good for your moral development but Yeerks are kind of bizarrely loose about it at least if you're cooperating and so having one is weirdly not very conducive to being Asmodean. Also Mhalir thought that because his cause was righteous he should really try for the Good gods if he was going to ally with any of them, and I tried to explain that actually the Good gods will throw a fit about the slavery and prefer letting billions of people be destroyed forever to allying with someone who actually has goals and is willing to sacrifice things to achieve them. But I think he was still leaning that way. He has a cleric of Sarenrae prisoner, that's what prompted him to give up Alloran."

It’s faintly amusing how she keeps thinking she has him distracted from the important part, but actually this is both fascinating and maybe critical to his confusion about Alloran. Also he wants even more to bring Parmida here so the poor thing can have a hug and a cup of tea, but he nudges that thought aside.

He can play along with appearing distracted and dubious. “Really. Did the cleric of Sarenrae make some different claims to him about the Good gods?”

Shrug. "I don't know what the usual Good pitch is. It was very 'hurting people is Evil! helping people is Good! it's not that hard!' except I know the percentage of people who make Good. It doesn't matter whether you can describe your philosophy in words three-year-olds recognize if only two percent of the population can do it."

He smiles, slightly. It’s a sad smile. “That statistic is from Cheliax, yes? Have you ever wondered if other countries had different rates?”

"I am sure Lastwall is doing fine, what with the only taking Good immigrants and then making sure they mostly die young, heroically, in battle. You know that kidnapping people and ripping their hair off is Evil, right?" In hindsight maybe it is a bad idea to try to convince this person that actually if he has goals in the world then he's evil, in case that's the reason he's not lighting her on fire. On the other hand this is the kind of interaction where she clearly deserves to be on fire and maybe he'll feel better if he realizes he's allowed to do it.

“Oh, I am sure this is hitting me a little for Good.” She’s so confused about everything, the poor child. And scared, but - trying, so hard. 

He likes her, he decides.

And he should focus. “Is your impression that Mhalir had Alloran brought to Nirvana instead of keeping or killing him because he was, hmm, confused by the Good gods’ claimed philosophy? What did he say to you about his reasons for doing this?”

"He was hoping Alloran would be able to think once he wasn't a slave. Alloran was trying to - convert, to become Good, in case he could get the Good gods' attention and they'd save him, which won't work because they don't give a shit about people but I guess if you take the propaganda completely at face value you might think it'd work. And Mhalir thought that if Alloran actually became Good then he'd see that the Andalites shouldn't fight the Yeerks, and - I don't think he thought it was very likely to work. He was probably underestimating the risk of -" Hold Person has worn off. She gestures vaguely at the guy's dungeon which looks like it'd be incredibly annoying to scrub blood out of. Maybe it's all illusioned. "But I think he was hoping that he could, actually, go to the Good gods, and if Alloran converting worked and also made Alloran agree that the Yeerks were right then that'd be a good sign."

Malduoni says nothing for a long time.

“How do you predict he will respond to your disappearance.”

"Dunno. The plan was that I should kill myself and he'd try to raise me but I don't know if he'd really bother. Probably he would. Diamonds are really cheap for him. Presumably at some point he'll cut his losses and rejoin his fleet. He might pay a ransom, if you could get a good intermediary and promised to actually leave him alone after that." He almost certainly does not mean what will Mhalir do about Carissa in particular, actually, no one except Carissa has reason to find that question interesting. "I expect he'll be pretty nervous until he figures out who you are and why you did that. Maybe he'll go try to check on Alloran and figure out this was his fault. I'm not sure. It's probably not very safe to try to kidnap people out of Nirvana even if they belonged to you in the first place. I think he doesn't have enough wizards to end the war yet but maybe he could steal a bunch and run - we were trying to get them consenting, which takes longer -"

“What motivated him to try to get them consenting.”

"Powerful wizards are really hard to hold as prisoners. The magic is ours, not theirs, and they can only use the bits of it that require using our voices and bodies. If a wizard can do a silent still spell their Yeerk can't stop them. If they are conjuration specialists who can teleport with a step their Yeerk can't stop them, and they could probably control whether the Yeerk comes along. And we're mostly talking about adventurers and adventurers are creative and risk-seeking. And it's easy for the Yeerks to pay them! Also I think Mhalir thinks he's in the right and that people should want to help him accordingly." Her opinion is that this is a stupid frame and probably any adventurers buy into it but mostly they'll be stupid ones. Mhalir of course knows this.  

“I see.”

He spends a while longer asking her questions, mostly diving into specifics about the ship’s technology and the magic items she made or purchased. The whole time, he seems calm and unhurried and not angry at all.

Well, some people like to very calmly plan which cuts they'll make first as they slice you to pieces. She goes back to being as uncooperative as she can, once they're back on strategic topics. It does slow them down, but not very much; he just repeats his questions in more detail until the geas forces the answer he's looking for. 

"You could try out being a Yeerk, you know," she says at one point. "With Polymorph. I've always wanted to but I'm not actually a very good wizard." 

"Thank you for the suggestion," he says dryly, and keeps going. 

Eventually he's covered all the relevant ground, and even her thoughts are mostly repeating things he already knows. He pauses for a while, looking at her with a thoroughly unreadable expression. 

"You do not want to go to Hell," he says, thoughtful. "Would you wish to get an Atonement, if this could be arranged?" 

"You - don't have to kill me at all, really -" It's a very pathetic thing to say and she's very mad at herself.

What an incredibly reasonable inference for her to make. "I am not intending to kill you now, there is no strategic reason to do so. It was a general question."

Sigh. "I think I am finished here. I will politely request that you avoid making a mess in my library." She doesn't have magic, which limits how much of a mess she can make - she can't reach any of his secure records or magic items at all, they're in cabinets locked with his spells - but she could still throw all his books off the shelves or something, if she felt like being difficult, and it would be mildly annoying to put everything back. "You are welcome to read the books that are not locked up." He doesn't offer her one of his spare headbands that work here. It doesn't seem like she needs any more cleverness to plot with right now. 

Nothing about this situation makes any sense. She wants Mhalir back, she wants to relax into the back of her head and have no control over everything but in a way where someone actively prefers that she remain alive and is thinking about how to make it happen. She wants to curl up on the ground and cry. She wants him to light her on fire just a bit and then say 'behave yourself' again but then she could actually believe him. She wishes she had hair, even though probably for most purposes being an ugly prisoner is better.

Does she want an Atonement - she thinks that you have to actually think that Asmodeanism is wrong to get an Atonement, not just that it is right but it would be nice if randomly you also didn't have to go to Hell. "I don't want to go to Hell" isn't really a heretical opinion; the heretical opinion would be that it matters that she thinks that. Which means getting an Atonement would in fact be heretical, which ...would mean that it'd work? She's so tired. 

She's scared for Mhalir. Hopefully he can take care of himself and doesn't enjoy some other wizard's head more than hers.

No one likes cowering prisoners on their floor - some people do, actually, but most don't - and probably someone who has been inexplicably resisting the urge to light her on fire for the last hour is someone who likes it unusually little. She stands up. "Thank you," she says, as blandly as she can to someone who doesn't at this exact moment have a strategic reason to kill her. "Is there a restroom."

"Of course." He points her to it, and to where she can find some water and nonperishable snacks, and then he Plane Shifts out. 

- and lands in his hallway demiplane, and walks out to his office in Rahadoum, and Teleports to his front doorstep in Absalom and knocks on the door. 

Parmida comes to the door after a minute. 

Malduoni steps through the door and closes it behind him and lets the calm controlled state slip away, just for a moment, like setting down some heavy burden and shedding off his coat. "I do not have a lot of time," he tells her. "I found - in Quantium - can you just Detect Thoughts...?" He's not sure he can explain the whole thing and also hug her and be upset at the same time. 

She hugs him and reads his mind.

He tries to think about it in some semblance of order: the recruiting, his wizard agent going in and calling the alarm that he was right, kidnapping the Chelish wizard to his demiplane. The interrogation, this time strongly coloured by all the emotions he didn't give himself space to feel, fully, at the time. The pointless awful wasteful tragedy of someone like her growing up an Asmodean. The confusion, both greater and lesser than before after her explanation of Mhalir's response to the cleric of Sarenrae.

Carissa believing that only two percent of people everywhere weren't Evil when they died.

Carissa's valiant, impressive attempts to delay and be difficult, even when fully expecting she would be tortured for it eventually once he lost his patience. 

He feels exhausted. And scared. Fear isn't an emotion he feels often, anymore, but - this isn't something he can handle alone. Not even just a tradeoff between this or Cheliax. He just doesn't have the resources, period. And it's too important to ignore. 

Mhalir, who apparently believes he's in the right. Enough to leave Alloran in Nirvana with the hopes that his enemy and slave would eventually conclude the same. Enough to prefer asking the Good gods for help over Asmodeus. 

Five billion people's freedom at stake. 

"Is it a good idea to contact this Mhalir and ask him not to do anything rash and say that you aren't either?"

"Possibly. There - is not much I can say that he would actually find reassuring, I think. He is not a trusting person. I cannot reveal who I am, and honestly, even if I did I doubt it would mean much to him, given that he is an outsider. But I can at least say that, for all the good it will do." Shrug. "I think I can prepare a Sending to one of his wizards, I have not met them but the Chelish young woman had detailed memories of them." He shakes his head. "Poor child." 

"Was she working for them willingly?"

"By some definition, I suppose so? It seems this Mhalir kidnapped her and gave her a choice between being an unwilling slave or choosing to work for them willingly. They negotiated for her not to have a Yeerk in her head at all, at first, in exchange for her cooperation. And bribing her copiously with spellsilver and gold. Eventually she did have Mhalir in her head. He asked her permission but I do not imagine she felt she had much choice. Certainly she believed she was - choosing to help monstrous people in order to be treated nicely. Though her conception of Evil is very confused, given - Cheliax." 

Patpatpat. She knows how he feels about the way Cheliax is. 

He rests his head on her shoulder. Gives himself exactly two minutes to just be with his wife, who loves him, who understands what he's feeling right now. 

Then he pulls away. "I need to prepare a Sending and then - ask someone for help." Sigh. "Praying to Iomedae is - probably my best first option. My other idea would be going to Nefreti." His feelings are scaredscaredscared but also determination. 

"Both of those seem reasonable." She has been in favor of going to Iomedae for years.

"...Would you be willing to sit with the Chelish girl in my demiplane, in the meantime? I do not want to bring her anywhere she has magic, but I am also uneasy about leaving her there alone and unsupervised. She might figure out a way to kill herself with my books or something." 

" - yes, but also she might figure out a way to kill me with your books or something."

"Bring those bracers of Mage Armour that I made, they will work in the demiplane. And I have her geased, I can drop you off there and order her not to harm you and to obey you too."

"All right." Squeeze. "Try not to run into too many more worlds that need saving while you're out there."

"I do not think it is under my control whether I do, they just show up!" 

He finds the bracers for her and tenderly puts them onto her wrists. In the process he looks down at his hand and notices the wig he's been absently holding onto. "Oh, this is hers, I think it is a technological way to block Detect Thoughts, but you cannot read her there anyway."

He hands it to Parmida and then Plane Shifts both of them back. He's burning so many Plane Shift slots today but he has an absurd number of Pearls of Power in his Bag of Holding, his day will have to get significantly more absurd than this before it's a problem.

"This is my wife Parmida," he says to Carissa. "I order you not to harm her, and to obey her as you would me."

He unlocks the tea cabinet so Parmida can make tea, and kisses her forehead, and then Plane Shifts out again. 

What? Is he - evaluating her for something - 

- probably she should lean into it and figure out what these people want from their slaves but she's very very tired. 

"Nice to meet you," she says, and dips her head slightly because she doesn't know what the combination of 'introduced with a first name' and 'magically compelled obedience' is supposed to point at, in terms of how much latitude she has here.

She offers the wig. "Would you like this back?"

Yes she would but also she would like to know what to read into that. 

She takes it back and puts it on. "Your husband - he didn't introduce himself -"

"I don't know what he would have introduced himself as. When I met him he was going by Alexeis." The most common Chelish name and totally uninformative.

It is informative in that he's Chelish. She tries to reevaluate everything in light of that and ends up more confused. And the woman isn't Chelish.

Her general impression of Chelish men who take Qadiran wives is not high. But maybe he was exiled. He's very old.

Tea?

- it's not as if it'd be otherwise hard to poison her if they wanted to. "Sure." 

And after a couple of minutes, "Is there something I should be - doing? I don't know what you're assessing me for -"

"I think my husband just did not want to leave you alone in case you decided to kill yourself so your Yeerk could rescue you, or something."

She'd thought about it but what if Mhalir doesn't raise her. Or is captured by the mysterious wizard. 

Who takes prisoners and when done with them hands them over to his elderly wife instead of his guards. Or instead of just ordering her to kneel on the floor until she dies of dehydration. Well, he did sort of imply he was going for Good. - maybe that's the thing they want, here, to redeem her for some Good points. "I thought about it but he mentioned maybe I could get an Atonement," she says, looking down and looking very innocent and confused. "I was very argumentative about it at the time but I've thought about it more and maybe he's right."

"He usually is," says Parmida dryly.

Elsewhere, in his magically protected office in Rahadoum, Malduoni isn't thinking at all about how he's usually right. He's thinking that he feels stupid and he isn't even sure in which direction. It just feels like either it's a terrible mistake to get Iomedae's attention now, or it was a mistake not to ask her for help a century ago. 

Damn it but he misses her. He's trying not to put too much weight on that aspect but it's there. 

Malduoni does not, as a general rule, ever pray. There's a reason Rahadoum is the country that bans all gods. But maybe that will make a loud, urgent prayer from a ninth circle wizard even more notable. She has no reason to pay attention to his mind in particular, except for that - and for the other part - 

Being terrified isn't going to help, so he does his best to let that exist in the background, and float above it. 

Iomedae. This is Aroden. I need your help. Please. 

It takes almost a full minute, and then there's the dizzying falling-into something powerful and incomprehensible and much larger than him -

- and then it stabilizes into a featureless room, with a woman sitting there across from him - maybe it's just because he's spent the last hour staring at Carissa but they don't look entirely unalike -

She is entirely still for a moment. Then - "I don't see the ship. I can ask Sarenrae what the planes She thinks She's doing and get Her to show me."

"I - would appreciate that." He can't stop looking at her face, her sharp eyes. He's kind of shaking. "I - can you tell me if it is safe to go to Nefreti Clepati - was Nethys involved in my death..." And he trails off, looks away. "I am sorry that I was too much of a coward to come to you any sooner." 

"I am not surrendering my chance to yell at you about that but I am going to save it for later. Nethys had nothing to do with it. It - it would break Foresight, if you died, once everyone had poured so much into splitting all the paths into the Age of Glory, and at the last minute it became derivable that it would do that and then some of the chaotic good gods defected. Milani did. Nethys has a workaround for Foresight, if you can get His help. ...Sarenrae says that -" handwave - "Mhalir is making lots of progress at understanding Good and She doesn't think it'll be particularly conducive to his personal growth to push him faster than this, which I don't particularly care about but I guess I can't claim to be surprised She does. She does think She nudged it enough to work out correctly absent other intervention but - at this point we've got some other intervention."

"Milani." He stares into the distance for a moment, then shakes his head and sets that aside. "What does Sarenrae think it working out correctly would look like? I think - events are already somewhat out of even Mhalir's control. He sent a captive wizard back to his own people. And presumably directions to Golarion, though the Chelish wizard he took did not know any more details." 

"She wants Mhalir to realize that it is hard but not impossible to at this point deescalate and that his enemies do not all implacably hate his entire species and it's possible to negotiate with them. She thinks if he realizes this he will have the resources to accomplish it. Probably you'll be better at it, though, and doing it sooner is very important. I do think you'll want to try to talk him around, Sarenrae does have a good eye for when people are tractable to talk around."

He nods. "And it matches the impression I was forming on my own. He sounds like a person who has had very little chance to operate in cooperative rather than adversarial contexts. And - his information state was biased, I think, in a way he did not have the skill to fully account for. Spending over a decade wearing the body of a person who does implacably hate his entire species - even if only as the result of being tortured by a Yeerk for that entire time - cannot have been good for his ability to form true beliefs about - whether negotiation is possible." 

"I can't see him," she says frustratedly. "Neutral Evil, I barely even get a shadow off that. I hope you're right. 

- I'm so glad you're alive."

He starts to ask if she can see Alloran, that seems maybe informative, but - no, it can wait, and probably she'd have said something. 

"I missed you. I–" and his throat is tight, even though this entire place is a sensory illusion it still feels real, maybe his real body back in his office is also threatening to cry. "I - should go to Nefreti, but - it feels so hard." 

Shuddering breath. "I think maybe my fear is - not entirely rational, when it comes to gods. Dying was. Very very bad. It hurt and it went on for such a long time and I was so confused and scared..." 

"I could make you my paladin," she says thoughtfully. It is a joke. Without particularly having crossed the intervening space she is there, hugging him.

For a while he doesn't say anything else. It feels very good, to rest in the arms of a friend, however briefly. 

"I was thinking," he says eventually, "about doing a Sending, to reach one of Mhalir's wizards. I think I could. I do not know what to say and I decided to wait and ask you if you think it is even a good idea." 

"Hmmm. We don't want him to jump back to join the other Yeerks, we don't want him to escalate by trying to kidnap a lot of people - though mostly because I think at some point if he tries that he'll make a mistake and get killed  - I don't know what could be said to him that would prevent him doing those things. Maybe Carissa would know." She frowns, looking through his Carissa memories. " - maybe if you did open negotiations to ransom her but that'd be such a way to start out. You could offer to exchange prisoners, that's - a bit less of one -"

"...That does seem like - not the worst strategy. It would give him an incentive to stay here rather than jumping back, at least. I think she matters to him." He winces. "More than she realizes." 

"Maybe have her do the Sending, as proof she is fine. And get her that Atonement." 

"- Can you see her? It was unclear to me whether she - wanted an Atonement, or would qualify as one, she seemed reluctant and - unsure if she still believed the Asmodean philosophy..." He shudders, burrowing his face into Iomedae's embrace, he hates what's happened in Cheliax so much. 

"I can see her. I think the Atonement will go through."

"Then I think it is worth trying. I will do that, and try to open communications with Mhalir, and talk to Nefreti - actually, do you have a cleric to recommend for the Atonement, I do not exactly have any contacts for that. If not I might take Carissa to Nefreti as well, on the off chance that the whim to help us strikes her." 

"I am not sure she is the right person to help Carissa realize that actually she doesn't really want other people to go to Hell either," she says amusedly. "I will knock someone off course while they are Plane Shifting, it will go fine."

"- I suppose I will have to take your word for that. Thank you." He looks amused. "Where should I bring Carissa, then? They will not be able to cast in my demiplane." 

"And she won't be able to Sending Mhalir. I don't actually know anything you don't about your setup in Rahadoum, it is very effective at making sure I can barely see anything."

His smile broadens a little. "Ah. I was not sure. Can you do it to my office there? It will be convenient for a Plane Shift, I have a demiplane linked to the office exactly for that purpose." He holds up the office in his head, in case that helps. 

"Yes." She squeezes him one last time, steps back. "Good luck."

And he's back in his office in Rahadoum, feeling drained but more emotionally than physically. He doesn't have a godheadache at ALL. 

Malduoni puts his head down in his hands for exactly thirty seconds, and then takes a deep breath and stands up and casts Plane Shift to return to his magic-free demiplane library. He looks around for Parmida and Carissa. "We need to go now." 

They are still having tea. Parmida is asking about Carissa's magic item enchanting which is a reasonable thing to want to know about if you are trying to decide whether to keep someone alive or not. Carissa is trying to sound very capable and very unambitious at the same time; it's a hard tightrope to walk. She would like nothing more than to be redeemed and then live in a cage somewhere making high-level magic items every day.

Parmida walks over to Aroden immediately. 

She does that too.

He takes Parmida's hand, squeezing it for a second, and waits for her to take Carissa's hand. "I order you not to cast any spells or run away," he says to Carissa, gently, before using a Pearl of Power for his Plane Shift back to the hallway. He walks them over to the waiting area next to his office. It's more comfortable in terms of seating. 

"Iomedae is going to send a cleric to cast Atonement for you," he says to Carissa, and for Parmida's benefit as well. "Before I go, are you willing to do a Sending to one of Mhalir's wizards? I wish to say that you are safe and I intend you no harm, and that I would consider arranging a prisoner exchange, with one of the unwilling hosts, perhaps the cleric. - I am assuming here that you still wish to go back to him, if you are offered the option?"  

What. 

Presumably he means that he hired a cleric of Iomedae and just chose the baffling phrasing that Iomedae is personally sending someone.

They're going to kill her if the Atonement doesn't work so she had better figure out how to get it to work. She - wishes it wasn't the case that humans are inherently useless to Asmodeus? It would be neat if he could use - the thing that Carissa is now. Like Mhalir can. She wishes that the Good gods worked the way Alloran thinks they do, where they will prevent a war because wars are bad, instead of the way they actually work. Probably Iomedae will be unimpressed by this opinion. She wants Lawful Neutral, not Lawful Good, and she's not sure if that's allowed. 

What does 'are you willing' even mean directed at someone magically bound to obey you. "I don't know Sending but I can do it from a scroll."

(Mostly it means he's being polite and also kind of absentminded. Also there are various clever ways she could use this opportunity for sabotage, and he can't currently read her thoughts and thinks it would be unnecessary and rude to yank her hair off again.) 

"All right. Then you can tell him I wish to open communications and negotiate some agreement, here, details to be decided. I and various others are displeased about kidnapping wizards to be slaves and will not let this stand, but it is not too late for him to de-escalate the situation with us, and come to a more cooperative solution. I will get you a scroll." He goes into his office to do that, comes back thirty seconds later with one. "You may cast this one spell from the scroll," he adds, remembering that he ordered her not to cast anything. 

Her headband is working again so it's not hard to compose in her head on the fly. "My kidnapper wants to open communications and negotiate an agreement. Objects to you kidnapping and enslaving wizards," only he is allowed to do that, "suggests you de-escalate and find cooperative solution."

The reply comes shortly. "Received. Interested in talks. Will direct further replies to Carissa." 

This does a little bit to calm all the panicked buzzing in her head. 

Then there's a pop and a woman twice her age in plate armor, carrying a very magic sword, appears in the office.

"Welcome!" Malduoni smiles brightly at her. "I am so glad to see you! This young lady would like an Atonement. I can provide the material requirement for it - just a moment, please..." He ducks over to one side of the office, where he unlocks a cabinet and hunts around in it. 

" - uh," she says, confused, "I - you were expecting someone?"

"It is somewhat complicated. You are a cleric of Iomedae, yes?" He finds a wooden box at the back of the cabinet, and sets it down on his desk. "Oh, good, I knew I had the things for this somewhere." 

"Yes." She turns around to look at Carissa, reaches out and takes the box. "I'd like everybody else to leave the room, please.  You should get anything you might need - the spell can take several hours."

Malduoni doesn't need anything from his office right now, having just gotten here and not taken anything out of his Bag of Holding. He nods to Carissa, with a hint of a reassuring smile, and then takes Parmida's hand and slips out. 

"Would you like a Teleport home, dear, or would you prefer to wait for her to be done?" He wants someone to wait for her either way but he can Sending one of his wizards about it and have them Teleport here if Parmida would rather not be responsible for that. 

"I can stay here. How was Iomedae?"

"Helpful. Frustrated with Sarenrae. Glad to see me. She politely held off on shouting at me for not talking to her but I am sure it is coming, when the timing is better for it." 

"Did she know who -"

"Yes," he says, tersely. "Can tell you later. Not relevant now." 

Squeeze. "Good luck."

"Thank you. I will need it." 

And he takes a few deep breaths, and then steps away and Teleports to Sothis. 

"What's your name," the woman in the armor says. 

        "Carissa Sevar." She doesn't apparently have a truth spell up but it's probably a bad idea to lie to someone who is about to do a ritual that requires your sincere participation. 

"Are you here of your own free will?"

        " - that's very complicated."

"I thought it might be. If you take my hand I can Word of Recall you to Vigil. You would be safe there. You do not have to be Good to be safe there, and you could leave if you wished."

         That's bullshit. Also if she says that she is geased not to run away the woman might take that as impetus to do it without permission. "I don't prefer to leave."

"Okay. I can't do an Atonement for someone who doesn't want one. Are you worried they'll be upset if I tell them something went wrong?"

         " - probably. I told them I wanted it. And that's the only thing that can go wrong."

"No, it's not. I can get called away on urgent business before I finish, and promise to come back in a week or two."

           Carissa looks kind of startled at her. "I would appreciate that. It - doesn't seem very lawful?"

"Different churches have different concepts of Law. Well, I would come back in a week or two. And I do have urgent business elsewhere."

           "You can go to your urgent business."

"It is not that urgent. The Church of Iomedae holds that part of our Law is that people are safe, with us. And keeping people safe requires flexibility. The flexibility does not undermine the Law; the Law is about the result, not the methods."

           " - my understanding is that Good is very - you can't torture people even if it's useful."

"It would be pretty hard to torture people in a way that produced the result that people who are in our power are consistently safe."

            "You can only have one thing. If you're going to be like that. You can say 'we do whatever produces people in our power being consistently safe', but if you've got other things and you can't let them trade off then you can't do anything that isn't dumb and - constricted -"

"Yes. If you were trying to kill me then you wouldn't be safe. If you were trying to kill someone else then you wouldn't be safe. If today were a day when I had even more urgent business then you'd have to make a decision very quickly because I couldn't stay to talk."

            "I don't want to go to Hell so he thought I should get an Atonement and I thought he was going to kill me so I told his wife that I wanted to atone but I don't actually think not wanting to go to Hell is wanting to atone I think it's just a normal way to feel about Hell."

" - probably. I am not sure how Asmodean people usually feel about Hell because it's not usually safe for them to talk to us about it."

            "Or vice versa, right, don't you get hit for Good if you hang around Evil people?"

"No. We get hit for Good if we do Evil things and some peoples' motivation to do things has a lot to do with the values of the people around them but also often the best ways to reduce Evil involve being around or even working with Evil people."

            "You've got very smooth answers."

"Lawful Good is a challenging alignment and requires spending a lot of time thinking about what Law is and what Good is. I know people who have abandoned it for that reason."

            "No kidding."

"They usually end up neutral good and it is not a failing. It is a decision that the things they care about are easier to achieve if they trust themselves more and the systems around them less. This is often a correct judgement so everyone should be prepared to make it if they need to."

           Carissa doesn't say anything. Everything about that seems wrong but she's not sure where to start with it. "I don't want to be Lawful Good," she says. "If you could do Lawful Neutral I could maybe want that though there's still the problem where - I don't think I am actually very atoned and I want to go back to Mhalir, who is Evil, and that'll just sink me again."

"Why's he evil?"

            "Uh, enslaving people. But he's trying to stop. And the guy who kidnapped me plans to make him stop. He did it because he was scared that this other, uh, tribe of people was going to slaughter his, so he needed more power to stop them. I think this is very reasonable but I think the Good thing to do is probably to lie down and die."

"The Good thing to do is rarely to lie down and die because then you cannot improve the world at all. It is admittedly also not to enslave people. Why do you want to help him?"

            "He's very rich and pays me well and it's obvious what he gets out of having me alive and I think I'm too disloyal to go back to Cheliax and also they think I deserted."

"Did you?"

             "No! I was kidnapped. But now I can't go back."

"If there were someone else who was neutral and paid very well and - also got the same things out of having you alive - would that solve this problem?"

            "Hypothetically, sure, but I think there is actually no one else who can pay as well." Maybe the mysterious ninth circle wizard who just kidnapped her but he plainly does not get nearly as much out of having her be alive. Also she'd be upset to abandon Mhalir but she acknowledges this is stupid and wouldn't be decision-relevant. 

"That does sound like a very Lawful Neutral worldview though I don't know if it's sufficient for atonement. Probably you would need to regret - helping someone enslave people?"

             "I mostly haven't. We were doing voluntary recruitment. All the enslaving people was before I joined."

"What changed?"

            "I think the guy I work for had a change of heart? He might actually want an Atonement, maybe."

"Well, we would be happy to help."

            "You get Good points from it?"

"- that is not actually how Good works."

            "Sorry, sorry, helping people atone is a metaphysically Good act, right?"

" - helping people atone seems pretty likely to make the world a better place. Doing things because you correctly think they're pretty likely to make the world a better place is usually a metaphysically Good act. I think the distinction is important. Not helping people in order to be Good, helping people because you want things that are achieved by helping people, which is a Good set of goals and priorities to have."

             "Can we stop talking about Good, I am trying to think whether I can come up with the right thoughts to atone but I don't think I will get all the way to Good and it's distracting trying to figure out what's confusing there."

"Of course. What thoughts do you imagine would be the right thoughts to atone."

             "I regret serving Asmodeus. I actually want Asmodeus and his servants to be destroyed. I regret not pushing harder for Mhalir to stop enslaving people. I regret not asking him why he didn't offer any of the other prisoners the freedom he offered me. I regret reporting people to the Chelish secret police for disloyalty. I regret ...not spending Mhalir's money on orphanages and cripples?"

"Do you actually believe those things?"

             "I don't think so but usually I can believe things if I need to."

"Do some of them feel more believable than others?"

            "I guess so. I don't want Asmodeus and his servants to be destroyed. I'd be really upset about it. I - kind of do wish I'd asked Mhalir why he wasn't treating the others better. He wouldn't've been offended and - and I could easily have been in the batch he found less interesting, if he'd come here a couple years ago or something. I do kind of feel that spending all the money on expensive magic items reflects...some trait that I would not really admire another person for. But I also don't want to spend it on orphanages and cripples, I know it's a Good thing to do but I don't really get what it would feel like to be motivated to do it other than for Good points."

"I think the feeling is - that someone is hungry, and you could change that, and it's better when people aren't hungry."

             "Yeah, that thing is the thing I don't really have, I don't think I directly have goals that are about how many people are hungry."

"What sorts of things do you have goals about."

             "I want to stop being kidnapped and forced magically or otherwise to make myself satisfactory to random powerful strangers."

"That is a very reasonable goal and also it is not surprising that if that is your top goal you would not have a lot of room for goals about how many people are hungry."

             "I don't know what you mean by that."

"Well, usually our goals are a product of our experiences. If you grew up hungry, or a friend grew up hungry, or you watched a starving child die, you might care about people not being hungry. If mostly you get kidnapped and forced to comply with random powerful strangers then probably even your goals that are not about your immediate circumstances will be about - what things make life tolerable under that set of circumstances."

            "I don't think that really happens to other people more than once, I think it's mostly just me."

"Slaves that are sold repeatedly often have similar experiences, I think."

             "Sure. Do you want me to - regret slavery - I don't think I even have very much to do with slavery -"

"I am trying not to have goals for this conversation aside from providing you with context for the things you're talking about which your background might have not provided."

           "I am not clear on why you're doing even that, really?"

"One of the goals that I have is that people know what Good is so they can decide whether to choose it. If I only tried to explain what Good was in the context of getting them to choose I think my explanations of it would be worse. Shopkeepers trying to sell things are worse at explaining them than - craftsmen, say. I want to be a craftsman of Good not a shopkeeper of it."

          "But presumably if you could - magically make me be good, if Atonement changed how you think and not just how Pharasma assesses you - you'd want to do that, right -"

"The forces of Good disagree on under what circumstances this is an acceptable or desirable thing to do. My personal thinking is that it is a great wrong to you but justified under the same circumstances as, say, the circumstances that'd justify murdering you. Certainly it seems much worse than you deciding to do good things for your own reasons that are part of who you are."

          "- worse in what way?"

"Well, do you want it?"

          "I am not sure. Maybe it would stop all of the changing the shape of person I am because I'd be stuck with a single shape of person and have to work with it."

"So normally I would say that the ways it is worse is that there is lost information, because the things that you non-magically care about are part of what Good is and if we move you towards a more central kind of what Good is we lose the things specific to you, and that it is a violation of something you want, and in general it is desirable that people get things they want, and that it is a strategy that works just as well when you're making a big mistake and it's a good idea to employ strategies that work better when you're not making a big mistake, as a hedge against big mistakes. If you want it that changes all three of those, in complicated ways."

          "I kind of feel like you should talk to Mhalir. I think you two would have interesting conversations."

"You can tell him where to find me."           

          "Well, I can't actually talk to him right -" She realizes that maybe her microphone and tracking device will work as soon as she's out of this shielded room. "-now. I think that was all of my questions for you. Thank you."

"Of course."

Sothis is much bigger and much louder and more crowded than the last time Aroden saw it. It is just as hot and dusty.

He lands two blocks from the temple to Nethys. He could have arrived in front of the doors, of course, but he needs the walk there to clear his head and brace himself for this.

- on reflection, being kind of traumatized about the concept of interacting with gods is inconvenient and maybe he should have dealt with it decades ago. Oh well. It’s not like the undercurrent of scaredscaredscared is doing anything to change his actions, right now, it’s just there being kind of irritating.

He reaches the temple. It’s very big, and beautiful. Impressive. He’s never seen it before. He looks around for someone to talk to.

Someone at the front door starts towards him -

And then there's a pop and she's there. 

The person at the front door looks startled and backs away. 

He looks her in the eye. "I - am sorry, about everything, but if you could bear with me and save the shouting and watching me grovel until later, I would appreciate it very much." 

"I actually think we should go kidnap a bunch of Andalites right now and am willing to delay interpersonal conversation until we're done with that."

Malduoni spends about a second wondering how far he's willing to trust her, and how paranoid he wants to play it here, and then decides that whatever his uncertainties with Nethys still are, they're far smaller than the stakes of this situation. Which Sarenrae thinks is still possible to de-escalate but there's no guarantee of how long that will remain true.

"Of course," he says, levelly. "I am curious to hear your reasoning there but I can ask questions later, or while we work. What do you need from me right now." 

She takes his arm and hops them along to her office. "I am going to try to explain, but you will be frustrated, because I am seeing different things than you are seeing, and you will think, Nefreti, explain in terms of what I see! But if I could see enough to infer what you see I couldn't see the things that I see! There is a story, and it is a very tragic story, and most of the pieces of it can be retrieved even late into the tragic story but there is a piece that can only be retrieved very early and I can't see quite when so now is the best time. Kidnapping Andalites will retrieve the piece but I don't know if they are the piece or if they would otherwise destroy the piece. When I meet them I might know that. All the other pieces have more string to play out. I can Gate us there, but I don't know where there is. The piece could be destroyed in the fighting, that's not the kind of thing that can't happen."

He is, in fact, very confused! He nods, though, and tries to be patient. He was a god, once; he knows what it's like, to see things from another angle that can't be explained in human language. Sometimes he's tried to cram those thoughts back into his poor human head and it's left him debilitated for days. 

"I think I am confused whether you can Gate us 'there' right now despite not knowing where you are Gating to, or whether you are asking my help to - do some detective work, or something, to figure that out?" 

"I can take us there right now but I don't know what we'll be doing when we get there and the Gate will be visible. So it would be good to know where there is and what we will be doing there once we arrive there, if you can figure that out, so there is less that we have to improvise. Or if you know how to do a silent invisible Gate that would also be a solution."

"I cannot think how I could begin finding out where this will take place and what needs to happen with that little to go on, from the angle that I see things. I - cannot currently cast a silent invisible Gate but - perhaps I could figure it out. It would take me some research time, and then I would need to prepare the spell."

His lips move into a faint smile. "Would you like to come with me and help with spell research? I have a Rod of Security, I can pause time for us while we do that, and your help would make it go faster. I have missed studying magic with you for the last ninety years." 

"I think I would like that."

The Rod of Security is in his Bag of Holding, because just about everything he might possibly need in an emergency that wasn't specified to him in advance is in there. Malduoni asks Nefreti if she needs to pack anything, waits for a response and for packing if packing is needful, and then takes out the Rod. 

About a minute later they're in a demiplane outside the normal flow of time. There's a pretty meadow, and a stream, and fruit growing.

He takes out some paper for notes. "All right, so we have two problems to solve - I think the part where it glows is trivial, I can rework that in an hour or two of staring at it, but the part where there is a Gate there and you can see through to the other side is less so..."  

"We could get up an illusion very fast if we knew what we were getting an illusion of up. Since we don't -

- you could maybe do with another Gate -"

He looks confused for a moment and then sees it. "Oh! Yes, of course. Two Gates sort of - back to back, superimposed in just the right orientation that they see exactly what they are supposed to see. And then we can simply go through invisible. It will take something to make sure we both know how to put our Gate in exactly the right place for that to work. And then we would have to do something clever to retrieve anyone through the same Gate, since otherwise they would step through both Gates and end up exactly where they would have been anyway if there were no Gate..." 

"Yes. The two Gates don't have to open to the same point in our world for this to work, just the same point in theirs, that should help -"

"Hmm - does that - no, I think you are right..."

He stops drawing on his paper and instead just closes his eyes, holding the shape of the spell. Looking at it from an angle humans cannot generally see. The ways human spells can stabilize are very arbitrary, from a god's-eye view, but there should be nearby islands of stability, and some of them will be what he wants... 

Elsewhere she steps out of Aroden's shielded study, which apparently does not count as trying to run away if she is firmly intending to look for a bathroom and only incidentally expecting that Mhalir's tracking devices will work.

There's a restroom right there! 

Elsewhere, Mhalir has been asking the wizards to scry repeatedly and staring at the computer indicator for Carissa's concealed tracking device, which stubbornly remains offline. Since receiving the Sending he's been even more on edge. He hasn't quite succeeded at composing a response. He stares at the tablet screen, frustrated, trying not to focus on how terrified he is. 

- until suddenly and apropos of nothing, the tracker is showing up again! It takes a moment for the signal to resolve, and then - 

"Rahadoum," he says tightly. 

Carissa - has been in enemy hands. He doesn't know what they've done to her, and Golarion has copious mind-control magic. But the ship is well outside Teleport range even if she could Teleport, which she can't, and in terms of technology there's nothing she can do to harm him from there. Theoretically his signal could be tracked, but she doesn't have the equipment to do it, or have any idea how such equipment would work, and none of her extensive knowledge of Golarion arcane magic suggests a way to do it with wizardry, so it's unlikely her captor can either. 

He remotely toggles the recording device and transmitter to two-way mode. 

"Carissa. Status report." 

"I don't know who he is or what his angle is but he's ninth circle and had me in a custom demiplane and arranged a cleric of Iomedae to come chat on extraordinarily short notice. His wife is named Parmida and gave his name as Alexeis. He'd talked to Alloran. I told him everything." She has an impulse to defend herself, about this, but doesn't. "He had me do the Sending you got earlier and then he wanted me to do an Atonement with the cleric which he thinks I'm still in the middle of, I think. The cleric left. I am under a lesser geas to not cast spells and not resist his and obey him and his wife and not run away." Which means she's a totally useless host, now, but they should have people who can prepare Break Enchantment. "I do not know if he desires or intends that you come rescue me."

"Do you want me to rescue you right now. If I try and fail it might - go worse for you than otherwise - I think we have better than even odds of succeeding but am reluctant to put it higher than that." 

"He's going for Good and didn't torture me even when I was very rude to him, I don't think I have very much to lose. - unless you kill his wife. My read is that he will in fact be real mad if you kill his wife. If you have some plan that doesn't involve that - I would prefer it."

"I will keep that in mind. I do not actually prefer killing people. Stay where you are. Alert me if your situation changes." 

And he mutes the microphone on his end and summons the wizards again. "We have her location." It's pinned down to a very precise spot on the map, now. "Can we get her out with Teleport." 

" - kind of depends what they've got there with her," one of the wizards says. "If they are at all competent they're redirecting Teleports into the area, and probably expecting us."

"What are our options for working around that, magically speaking? - I suppose it might be easiest to bring the cloaked shuttle in rather than use magic at all. If I do that, you can cast Invisibility and just walk in, right, unless there are physical barriers against that?" 

"Yes. We could at least take the shuttle in and get a look at the precautions but it seems overwhelmingly likely they're expecting us to do that. 

...honestly I don't think you should rescue the girl. It sounds like she's fine and this is approximately the most obvious trap I've ever seen."

"- Yes, I know, just..." Mhalir doesn't know how to finish that sentence; all of the possible ways are stupid. He wants Carissa back now, she must be terrified and that feels deeply wrong. He wants to understand what's happening again. He's yet again almost dizzy with the confusion. "I - am going to think about it. How likely do you think it is that this ninth-circle wizard intends to keep the terms of any prisoner exchange we agree to?" He doesn't especially want to hand any prisoners over, but, well, the operation is already blown wide open, or at least fully known by this mysterious wizard. 

"Well, is he Lawful?"

"How would I know?" 

"Detect Alignment sometimes functions through a scry. Ninth circle wizard's gonna be unscryable but we could try to get the wife. More description would be useful."

He wonders why it's only sometimes but doesn't ask, just toggles the microphone back on. "Carissa, can you give us some further description of the wizard's wife?" 

"Old, probably at least...eighty? She has a headband as nice as mine. Keleshite or maybe Garundi, wearing very fashionable silks. She has a cheerful kind of affect and mostly quizzed me about the magic I know and about the wanting an atonement, while we drank tea. She gave me my wig back - they'd ripped it off for the interrogation."

"I can try," the wizard says, sounding dubious, "but it's not a good bet."

"I understand that. Thank you." 

He paces, which is probably not his poor human host's favourite occupation, it's much more suited to an Andalite body. 

"We could....fly over in the shielded shuttle and try casting Break Enchantment down into the building through the ceiling. Normally you can't do that but with your technological scrying maybe we could, if you can get the location exact enough. Or if she can get to a window then it'd be much easier. It'll be warded against hostile casting but possibly not against abjuration. It might set off an alarm, though."

"If we get the shuttle close I can send in a tiny drone with a camera to get footage of the inside, it is about the size of an ant when folded up and would be able to slip through very small cracks under doors and such as long as they are not magically sealed. We should all wear the helmets against Detect Thoughts just in case someone has unusual range with it, a ninth-circle wizard seems like the sort of person who might." They have lightweight caps with osmium now. "And maybe if I can get drone footage of the wife, it will be easier to scry her and find out if she is Lawful? For whatever that is worth." 

It's something to move on, anyway, which feels better even if maybe it shouldn't. Mhalir is wondering why he feels so strongly that losing Carissa and not getting her back would be the worst outcome in the world. He has higher level wizards. It doesn't completely handicap his operations or anything. Her capture was a serious hit, but the damage is done, she's already been interrogated, getting her back now won't undo that.

Ten minutes later they're on the shuttle with equipment both technological and magical, and spare Yeerks, flying toward the planet. 

They work out how to do non-glowy Gates and then how to do two Gates that open only a millimeter apart from each other angled so that there's nothing apparently not where it should be. It takes a couple of days but Aroden has a very nice time dilation demiplane. 

"I think we are as ready as we'll be until we see what we are doing."

Malduoni is feeling very well rested after his requisite two hours of sleep, and has prepared all his spell slots - he has over eighty - keeping in mind that he doesn't have much idea what he'll need to do. Plenty of enchantments, though, because that's his specialization, he can prepare them more efficiently.

"I agree." And he can drop them out of the demiplane and back to her office. "- Should we be somewhere else for the Gate, or is dropping some aliens into your office fine." 

"I don't know anything about these aliens, are they dangerous to themselves or each other?"

"They have very sharp tails, which I suppose they can use to do whatever damage they want to anything - and I got the sense from Alloran that they are rather willing to use it to kill themselves, if they suspect they are about to be enslaved by a Yeerk. They also have instant healing, though, with some form of shapeshifting they use." 

He can show her a Silent Image of Alloran grazing in the field in Nirvana. 

"Hmmmmm. So then we can't do something that only gets most of them, in case the ones it doesn't get decide it's Yeerks. But we should be able to clarify pretty quickly that we are not Yeerks and are in fact going to stop the Yeerks. I think ideally we would be something that doesn't have the kind of body a Yeerk can interact with, like air elementals, so that it is very apparent we are not prisoners of Yeerks."

"I think they will have no idea what air elementals are, and they have their own form of illusions that could perhaps fake the visual evidence of bodies that Yeerks could not infest. It might still be worth trying, though." He makes a slight face. "This point against using enchantments, since those - could more easily be mistaken for the feeling of being enslaved by a Yeerk, and so I fear would be read as very very adversarial even if it does not result in any of them killing themselves." 

Pout. "They're the best way to disable a large crowd all at once, though."

"I know, right? Also I have more spells for that." Sigh. "We do not know what situation we are walking into, which makes this difficult. If it is something chaotic and urgent then I think trying to explain anything we are doing to them is a lost cause - I could cast a Mass Hold Person, the version I figured out that will work on non-humanoids," human arcane magic is so stupidly arbitrary, really, "and then use enchantments once they can no longer resist. They have never encountered our magic, probably few of them will throw off spells? But I am not sure of that. Anyway, if we go through and it is instead a relaxed - picnic in a meadow, or something, I suppose we could use Charm Person and try to explain. It cannot exactly be mistaken for a Yeerk's control. And I prepared Gate twice, in case we need to let the first one lapse and use a second to get back. You did as well, right?" He also has Wish and Time Stop, taking up all four of his ninth-level spell slots. 

"Yes. I can also cast Mass Hold Person and I can do it twice at once, whereas you have to do it one spell at a time."

He smiles at her. "Indeed. Perhaps I will let you do the heavy lifting and cast it twice, and I will keep mine in reserve."

"All right. All set? Are we being air elementals - or fire elementals, fire elementals are also fun - or are we just being ourselves."

"Probably better to go as ourselves? They are familiar with humans, and unfamiliar with any elementals. Fire elementals are fun but might be especially alarming." 

Pout. "All right." 

And she prepares to raise their Gates.

So does Malduoni, and they raise them together, perfectly aligned like they practiced - 

- what do they see on the other side? 

A big grassy field sloped like an auditorium and full of Andalites. They're not visibly doing anything of course but he can read their minds and they're arguing. 

<The line between dissent and treason is not, actually, particularly ambiguous, and it behooves us to stay on the correct side of it> an Andalite in the center of the whole thing is declaring. 

- that one is an important one but not the most important one, Nefreti thinks at him through the Telepathic Bond they cast.

A shuttle lands on the grass behind them and another Andalite lopes out of it, he's thinking that he watched that exchange on his computer, it was public, and that he's not going to murder the first one but he really should - maybe he will but probably he won't but he really really -

That one! We want that one and we want to take him to the palace - oh, this is beautiful -

Malduoni spends a moment evaluating the situation. Battle: no. Calm picnic: also no. Tense situation, that might be about to explode into violence, but hasn't yet. 

We could go through openly and be a loud distraction asking for help with a Yeerk invasion, he suggests. That might defuse this. And if that does not work we could Hold Person them and grab just him - do we want any of the others, I really hope we do not need to kidnap all of them. 

I want as many of them as possible! I think we will not have to kidnap any, though, we can just be very distracting. 

And she walks through the Gate into the Andalite world and, telepathically addressing everybody in the vicinity says Hello, is this the Andalite homeworld? Our planet is dealing with a Yeerk invasion and we were hoping that maybe you could help.

- the Andalites are indeed all immediately distracted by this! They tighten into a herd and bristle.

Malduoni casts Mass Charm Person, because why leave any of this to chance. (Technically it's a version of Mass Charm Monster that works on non-humanoids, who are ALSO PEOPLE anyway.) He adds his own piece. 

Some number of weeks or months ago, a Yeerk force led by one Visser Three found our world. Based on what he read in Alloran's mind, he expects this to cause OUTRAGE.

We do not have starships as you do, but we do have other capabilities, such as the one we used to come here, and we have - highly advanced Powers we refer to as gods. He's not sure whether the Andalites are even familiar with the concept. 

Visser Three infiltrated our planet in secret and kidnapped some highly capable soldiers to enslave. I have retrieved one of them and we are negotiating, but we would deeply appreciate your help. 

The Andalites are suspicious! These people might, themselves, be Yeerk prisoners. Also, what capabilities even are those.

Oh, that's a really reasonable question! Nefreti is going to telepathy them all a vision from Nethys that is an attempt to explain the TRUE NATURE OF MAGIC, and then an explanation of how magic actually works as used by limited people who need to be able to hold it in their limited heads. Magic is SO COOL which is why it's VERY BAD how the Yeerks might get it.

- that is actually incredibly cool. Some of them are still suspicious but the one Nefreti has pointed out as the most important one to grab, who was ready to commit murder a minute ago, is now totally absorbed in how cool it is. He has an int score that does not naturally occur in humans at all ever and he is trying to figure out enough to cast magic himself from what Nefreti said.

Oh, I like him, he thinks to Nefreti. Probably it's best to wait and let them think now rather than keep pushing? 

They confer!

They want to know if the newcomers will consent to a brain scan to check if they have Yeerks. 

Malduoni has some idea what that is from interrogating Carissa about Yeerk technology. If it's not dangerous to them then sure, he'll agree to it. (Golarion healing can probably fix a lot of side effects but he doesn't want to count on that.) 

It's not dangerous! They do have to stick their heads in a metal box, though.

Sure all right he'll stick his head in the metal box, while watching it suspiciously with Detect Magic and all his other permanently-glued-on senses, not that they're likely to be that informative here. 

Nefreti will stand guard for him though she's substantially distracted by trying to give all the Andalites telepathic magic lessons. 

The box whirs. It confirms that he doesn't have a Yeerk. 

She will take her turn with the box too.

The Andalites, by their thoughts, are relaxing considerably and trying to think how to help.

Their previous Gate-pair has been down for a while.

We wish to return to our planet with some urgency, Malduoni says, once both scans are done. He glances at Nefreti, and tries to convey earnest trustworthiness through Charm Person. Would any of you be willing to accompany us and help us with the Yeerks?

The Andalites would be delighted to do that but they need confirmation from their command, which they've sent a message for. 

I think we should hurry them since we don't actually want their command involved. 

She makes a Gate. It will stay up for about two minutes, she tells the Andalites.

Aroden isn’t actually sure what his ideal contribution is here, so he just steps across the Gate and looks back at them, trying to appear very earnestly desperate. (This is not an affect that comes especially naturally to him.)

The Andalites confer about the procedure for military emergencies and decide it applies and many of them step through, including the one Nefreti pointed out as important and a tightly knit pack of his allies. 

I am going to go herd them all over to the palace now, Nefreti says to him. You can come if you'd like but Carissa is escaping so you might want to go deal with that.

He gives her a look, not quite a smile. Oh, all right. Have fun. 

And he Teleports back to the waiting area between his office and hallway demiplane, where he left Parmida. Glances around. “Where is she?”

"Washroom. She's been in there for a while but I wanted to give her her space. Is something -"

“Nefreti just dragged me along to kidnap - or recruit - some aliens and then informed me she was escaping. Nethys - sees everything... Could I ask you to check on her, I think my barging into the restroom would be frightening and rude.” And unfortunately she’s back to being invisible to Detect Thoughts.

"Of course." She goes into the restroom. 

Carissa is sitting on the ground rifling through her purse. She tries not to visibly startle when Parmida walks in. Smiles at her. ...casts Gaseous Form and streams through a crack in the wall.

Malduoni is reading Parmida's mind for simplicity, and sees this happen. All right, are you serious -

Unlike Carissa, who apparently somehow had her geas removed - probably by her allies? - even though this should not have been possible and he doesn't know yet what he forgot to cover - unlike her, he has the ability to Teleport out of his own office. 

He doesn't even need a Teleport for this, though. He casts Quickened Dimension Door and is on the other side of the wall and casts Dispel Magic prepared in a seventh-circle spell slot at everything in his vicinity. 

The shuttle is hovering, cloaked, a few hundred yards off the ground, and Mhalir's crew and the wizard he brought with him (the other two wizards are back in the ship in case this objectively stupid plan which is somehow about to work anyway goes horribly wrong) all have orders to immediately incapacitate anyone pursuing Carissa. The Dracon beams are set to five times the usual power to stun a human, which probably still won't kill an ordinary human instantly but should get most adventurers. 

Carissa turns solid twenty feet above the ground and catches herself with Feather Fall -

The Dracon beams fire on the man suddenly appearing on the other side of the wall. 

Malduoni is a ninth-circle wizard and this does not work at all. 

He allows the Feather Fall, since he doesn't actually want Carissa to break her neck, but he does start casting another Lesser Geas for her to stop trying to run away and obey him. 

This time she's not cowering in a demiplane with all her fancy items disabled and she focuses her mind and throws it off and feels an astonishing burst of pride even though her extremely fancy cloak of resistance was definitely doing some of the work. She considers whether to go invisible and concludes that this asshole ninth circle wizard won't even be inconvenienced but her people might be impeded in rescuing her.

She casts Raven's Flight, and bolts for the shuttle in the form of a tiny black bird, even though probably he's just going to dispel it again and presumably at some point she will figure out what gets him to actually be angry.

Malduoni is operating mostly on instinct, at this point, casting Feather Fall himself as his eyes follow her trajectory - 

- and the shuttle is obviously very shielded or something, by technology rather than magic, and the minds inside are blocked from Detect Thoughts, but Malduoni has a number of permanent spells for various magical senses, and there's something there. 

He casts a second Quickened Dimension Door to what seems like roughly the centre of it, and his reflexes have him ready to transition instantly to casting Mass Hold Person as soon as he's in. 

That seems...not great...but there's nothing she can do about it. She goes invisible now because while the one guy can probably see through it his guards probably can't. Drifts groundward. Casts Alter Self to look local once she doesn't want to be invisible anymore. 

Runs.

Nobody follows her, because Malduoni's building security are confused by the very fast fight and can't find her, and Malduoni himself is distracted, looking around at four humans successfully restrained on the shuttle floor with Hold Person and trying to figure out which one of them is Mhalir - well, technically Mhalir's host with Mhalir inside. He can't read their minds because they're all wearing goddamned lead helmets or something. 

- not that one, he's wearing Golarion-style clothing and a headband. Two of the others had weapons in their hands and were firing on him, again without much effect, until he took them down. 

He rips off the fourth one's helmet. 

Mhalir is SCAREDSCAREDSCARED and so confused and also his host hit her head when they fell and it's making him dizzy too. 

Is the host all right, what is she thinking. 

Much more impaired by getting her head hit than Mhalir. It wasn't a knock that would even make an adventurer flinch but this person is basically the equivalent of a random commoner.

He'll get her some healing as soon as he figures out how to safely land this thing. For now it seems to be hovering fine rather than crashing, at least.

First things first. Lesser Geas on Mhalir, who is not a wizard with a dozen fancy magic items, to stay put and obey his orders and answer his questions, this should just work. 

And then he prepares a Sending to Nefreti. "Carissa got away but I have Mhalir. Advice?" 

"I think the fastest way to solve all your problems is to put him in your head," she replies immediately.

Aroden does not answer 'have you lost your mind' even though this is very much what he's thinking.

"I will not. Could bring him to Andalites? Might be messy." 

"No, no, don't do that, why would you do that. Just talk to him!"

Responding to that does not seem worth another fourth-level spell slot. 

He asks Mhalir how to land the shuttle, but Mhalir seems too panicked and disoriented from his host's concussion to think the answer clearly, so he pulls the helmet off another of the enslaved humans and asks the question again. A geas doesn't prove necessary, reading their mind is plenty, and the controls are designed for humans to operate and aren't that complicated for someone who regularly does immensely complicated magic research by intuition in his head. 

Malduoni lands the shuttle outside his office building in the centre of the city. Hold Person is going to wear off soonish. He casts Sleep, which is enough to take out the three regular humans and their Yeerks but not the wizard. He peers at him, considering. No, probably he'll throw off an attempt at a Lesser Geas, and regular Geas takes too long. 

He doesn't want to disappear off to his demiplane himself without talking to Parmida, but he can Plane Shift the wizard there without going along himself, and then figure out how to get the door open - he can't figure out how to un-invisible it - and yell telepathically to Parmida that he needs help out here. 

Parmida comes on over. Wow. Is that - an alien spaceship?

One assumes. I have Mhalir and two of his personnel plus hosts. Sent a wizard with Yeerk to the demiplane. Carissa got away. Nefreti said I should put him in my head and when I politely did not tell her she was crazy and just said no, she said to talk to him rather than take him to the Andalites at the pharaoh's palace. 

The 'help???' at the end is implicit. 

I have no idea how to conduct interrogations, dear. Unless you mean you are stuck on - basic practical elements of the situation? You could polymorph them human if you don't want to scare the hosts or make them keep hosting.

That is a good idea, thank you. I need healing for Mhalir's host and perhaps the others, but I could leave the humans with you and you can sort that out? Actually, first I need to go collect some scrolls of Polymorph Any Object from my office, I do not exactly prepare it routinely. Can you watch them? They should stay asleep for a while. 

I can watch them. 

Malduoni is in a hurry. He burns another Dimension Door to reach his office rather than walk in. 

Carissa, now in the form of a paunchy middle-aged Garundi man, runs, stuffing her magic items in her bag as she does. 

This is stupid. The powerful wizard might have more important priorities than her at the moment, but as soon as he wants her he can scry her and Teleport to her and take her prisoner again. Without Mhalir, without the spaceship, she doesn't stand a chance. 

She could try to contact the bigger ship in orbit. But she's not sure she trusts the Yeerks other than Mhalir either. They'll stick one in her head, obviously - briefly allowing her to work without one was obviously Mhalir's personal call, and everyone's going to be concluding he wasn't paranoid enough - also the powerful wizard might easily be able to reach the spaceship too. Gate could probably do it, once he can mindread Mhalir for all the details he needs. 

She could - what? 

It might be there is nothing she can do and she should in fact return to the palace and surrender. She - does not want to do that until she has at least given all of her options real consideration. 

She has a scroll of Teleport. But he, too, can Teleport, at a range of more than twice hers, and 900 miles from Azir on the far western coast of Rahadoum doesn't get you many places. It gets you - Cheliax, she could teleport anywhere in Cheliax. Or anywhere in the desert of northern Garund. Or Nidal. 

She doesn't want to go back to Cheliax. In one sense it is insane to prefer being taken into custody again by the mysterious powerful wizard to returning to her own people with a verifiable story about how she was kidnapped and then kidnapped again and then escaped and returned to them. On the other hand - no one has tortured her, since she left. People keep not killing people they have no reason to leave alive. Of course, it keeps not working out very well for them, but -

- Good might be as stupid and confusing as she thought but it seems to be more complicated than just a selfish system for getting a nice afterlife. And she...wants a nice afterlife. Probably eventually it'll be eaten by Asmodeus but - the universe is, apparently, very big, and it seems a bit less inevitable than it did. 

It's just too bad that whether she'll ever see any of it is now entirely in the hands of -

- no. 

She doesn't want to go back to Cheliax and turn herself in. But Cheliax has thriving rich cities full of wizards, just like other places, and she knows how it works, she can navigate it safely, and she can buy another scroll of Teleport there. 

She fixes Egorian in her mind, the glorious capital city of House Thrune, the seat of Hell's power on Golarion.

She pulls out her headband, and her scroll, and reads from it.

She Teleports. 

It is worse than she remembered it. Which is a weird way to feel. It's not like the cities she's seen since are richer - they're mostly poorer - they're mostly dirtier - lots of them have beggars in the streets -

- you don't need 25 intelligence to figure out why Cheliax doesn't have beggars in the streets. 

She slouches into a magic shop. "Scroll of Teleport?"

          "Down the street."

That one, then. "Scroll of Teleport?"

          He narrows his eyes at her. Mid-level adventurer. Lawful evil. Garundi-looking. There'd be more questions if she was Chelish and wanted it. Can't have people smuggling themselves out. "Fifteen hundred."

That's twice what it is in Absalom. She tells him so. Pays it. 

She walks out of the store and fixes Vigil in her mind, instead. Mhalir got her pictures of everywhere. The whole world. Because why not. She reads off the scroll right there in the street, because she doesn't want to delay. 

And there it is, a city with layers of walls on a mountain, reminiscent somehow of something she's never seen before. The knights at the gate detect evil, presumably, and step in synchrony into her path. "Who're you here to see?"

"Uh," Carissa says. "I'm - here to ask about an atonement and request sanctuary and - I'm a weapons enchanter but I want to do ones you use for - the Worldwound, not for whatever you do in Cheliax - is that okay?"

Malduoni retrieves his scrolls, plus a scroll of Plane Shift because it was in the drawer over and he might need that spell slot later, based on how today is going.

He asks Mhalir, his voice very calm and courteous, to leave his host. 

Mhalir wakes to hearing an order and finding himself doing it. He probably would have anyway. His host isn't that functional right now and he's in the hands of a ninth circle wizard and - do they have Carissa - he didn't see... 

Mhalir's other personnel aren't geased, but the obey the perfectly mundane request when woken for it. They don't have a lot of options. 

He casts Polymorph Any Object three times from the scrolls and turns the tiny gooey-looking slugs into humans. They look the same as their hosts, just for simplicity. 

Take care of them, he asks Parmida, meeting her eyes for a moment but not touching her, and then he places the three polymorphed Yeerks' hands together, and Plane Shifts them to join the wizard. 

He attempts Detect Thoughts on the wizard to gauge how upset he is about presumably still having a Yeerk in his head. 

He thinks that he would not have accepted this job if he knew that it was run by these incompetents! Smooth presentation and everything but fundamentally you have to not walk into traps constantly, come on. It does not exactly make sense to accuse a Yeerk of thinking with its dick what with how they don't have one but that is totally his interpretation of Mhalir's decisionmaking about Carissa, who is, to be fair, hot. 

He plans to plead that he has been involved with this operation for like one day. 

He's not upset about the Yeerk and the Yeerk is in fact letting him do what he wants, which is mostly pace having these opinions.

Malduoni is going to focus on Mhalir, then. 

Who's on his feet, having taken a couple of steps back and edged up against a bookshelf. His posture is deliberately relaxed, his expression neutral. 

"Why did you come back for her." 

Mhalir is thinking that he's sort of wondering that himself right now. He feels like he tried each step expecting to find some reason to abort, and then there wasn't, and then he - could sort of feel the stretching his mind was doing, his decision-making here wasn't neutral. 

He wants Carissa to be safe and he wants to be in her head again where their thoughts together are so gloriously clear and he wants to watch her keep growing, and probably being kidnapped again will just make her want to shrink to nothing again and he hates it... 

He wishes he knew what this deadly-calm old man wants from him. 

"She is my voluntary host and I wanted her back. You will notice that she agreed on this." 

"I have been told you are neither stupid, nor generally rash or impulsive, and yet I observe you keep making choices that do not match that." 

Mhalir has no idea what he's supposed to say to that! Now, in addition to scared, he feels dizzy and like the world is falling away under him again. And sad and confused and so so tired. 

"You seem to find some features of our world perplexing. What is it that is new information to you?" 

"I am not sure." Mhalir doesn't have any words for it, only feelings, vague and sliding away when he grasps for them. The bizarre local conceptions of Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, which would have seemed metaphysically incoherent to him before, but - here they're real, they bear weight, and he can't help but poke at the new framework for everything. The feeling that he could afford to explore here, maybe, in a place the Andalites knew nothing of and hadn't yet poisoned. 

Alloran, talking to Carissa and the cleric, impassioned, thinking new thoughts. Suddenly realizing that the reasoning behind keeping Alloran as a host no longer applied, and only then recognizing the sheer relief, how desperately he wants, suddenly needs, to be anywhere other than Alloran's head listening to his mental screams. 

The feeling that researching spells with Carissa is the dream he's been reaching toward all this time, the someday future once he has enough power to hold his own against the Andalites and demand they accept his terms, because otherwise his people's future will never ever ever be under their control... 

Carissa, thinking that his reasoning about the Andalites is naive and childish. 

The cleric of Sarenrae, who thinks Good is so simple. Just stop hurting each other. 

And, of course, it was impossible all along, he was deluding himself with hope that he could operate in a world not full of alien powers determined to destroy him. It hurts. He wants - not that. 

(Something else that he deliberately isn't thinking about.) 

"I am not determined to destroy you," Malduoni says quietly. "I realize you are a person too, and so are all of the others. I suspect you were wrong about the Andalites - at least about what is possible, if not about what you personally could achieve with them. I think there is hope for your people's future, if you stop enslaving people on my planet." 

He sounds so possessive. Presumably it isn't personally his planet, even ninth-circle wizards aren't gods, who can claim territory in that sort of way.

Still, Mhalir supposes he might choose the same phrase in defending his homeworld, if it ever came up. 

He says nothing, because the man's words add very little clarity, and don't give him much reason to believe anything different than he did before. 

Malduoni sighs. 

"I can, and will, demand by force that you stop it. I would rather you did not threats, though, and instead - saw that you have better paths, now, and can set aside all these horrifically costly tradeoffs that you were choosing to make - in full knowledge of how monstrous they are, I think - and build that more cooperative future you wanted to have someday, now, here." 

Mhalir blinks, that's - surprising, somehow, but not in a way that makes any of the whirling puzzle pieces slip together. 

"Are the Yeerks in command back home going to pursue you here, if you do not return or send messages?"  

Wow change of topic. "Eventually. I gave them coordinates but not the ship design, it will take them time to re-engineer it."

Which might have been a mistake or it might've been a mistake to send word home at all and his entire mind is locking up with the effort of not screaming about it. 

"Why." 

"...I wanted to have breathing space. There was a great deal of new information here to orient to." 

"And you thought you might change your mind about the correct strategies to pursue in your war?" 

"I - hoped so." 

"Can you believe me when I say that I also hope so." 

....Apparently not, no. 

Malduoni sighs. 

"I am not angry or planning to harm you. I do not have Carissa; she escaped. I will look for her but I am sure she can take care of herself for a little while." 

Mhalir winces, surprised at the sudden ache. He wants to be back in Carissa's head; it feels like the world will be a little more right and okay if he has that. 

"I am sure she will manage to find you again. She seems quite motivated to." 

...Really? It'd be stupid of her, it was one thing when he was winning and could give her wealth beyond imagining but he's been captured by a powerful enemy now and if she's smart, which she is, she'll want to be far far away, not get caught up in the collateral damage. Of course, the wizard can probably find her anyway, though it sounds like he's taking his time about it for some reason. 

Malduoni isn't angry but he is starting to get a bit frustrated. 

"Please have a seat and rest," he says distantly, pointing at some armchairs, "the restroom is there," and then he ducks through the divider into the study and seals the door with magic. 

And prays to Iomedae. 

She's there. She looks quite pleased with herself, for some reason.

"Something going well on your end?" Aroden says, wearily. "I am glad one of us is having a good day. I have Mhalir, somehow, his Chelish wizard escaped but I captured his shuttle in the process. After Nefreti hauled me off to Gate a large number of Andalites to the pharaoh's palace in Osirion, for some reason. I am having such a tiring day." 

Now he is sitting in her lap being held against her chest. Her size is sort of whatever size makes this cozy which is not precisely the size humans really are. "You poor thing. You did very well. I am still piecing together a lot of what you did but you did very well at it. There is a flock of axiomites in Sothis learning about computing and negotiating some kind of agreement with the Andalites. Abadar wants to mediate. Between them and the Yeerks. I guess He might be the right god for it."

"- Really. Excellent, I am very pleased to hear that. Abadar does have - a framework that they can both see and work within, I think." It's very cozy in Iomedae's lap. He relaxes into it.

"I wanted your advice with Mhalir, actually. I do not think I am figuring out the right way to reassure him, or to help him understand this world and - understand Good, and why it is in some sense a real and important force here, just like gravity. He is not currently able to see it that way and he feels very very confused and I cannot seem to bridge the gulf." 

"Carissa thought that maybe the cleric who she spoke to earlier should speak to him. I think that is a good idea though that specific cleric is regrettably occupied at this moment and will be for the next hour. I can get her to you then."

"I would appreciate that very much. I have him Polymorphed into a more convenient human form for the next eleven-and-some hours, so waiting is fine, I think he could use the time to settle down a bit." 

"I can send her over when she's done, though she can't teleport to the same place as last time because of your usual protections on it. I am not going to intervene again; frankly at this point the situation seems well in hand and does not justify it. Carissa scared me briefly by going to Cheliax but she just wanted to buy some things and flee immediately."

"She can Teleport to outside my office and I can meet her? Or if she has not been to Rahadoum, I suppose I can come to her." He hesitates. "Where - is Carissa? Mhalir is very worried about her and misses her, he was quite upset when I said I did not know where she was." 

"I feel like it would be disrespectful of her quite impressive effort at figuring out a way to hide from you despite the fact she is fourth circle and you are ninth, to just tell you like that. You can tell Mhalir that she is safe."

He looks slightly sheepish, then smiles. "Fourth circle! That is new, good for her. Anyway, I will meet your cleric in an hour. Thank you. It - is good not to feel alone anymore." 

"It is a good thing I know about you! I have been changing some peoples' orders. In a very subtle way that even Asmodeus couldn't use to infer I think you're alive, don't worry."

"Thank you." His expression dims. "I was expecting to be ready to move in two to five years, but am now at the stage where I could trigger it within a week if I chose. I suppose you probably read that from my mind already." 

"Yes." She sounds very like him when he's being unapologetic about something most people would be apologetic about. "I think we may want to move sooner. I want to see how Asmodeus reacts to the news of the aliens, when he learns of it. It - might be important." Her eyes shine. "They have weapons that can destroy planets and on the one hand that is horrifying and on the other hand - I want to bring them to bear on Hell itself."

He twists to look into her eyes. "Oh. Yes. You make a good point. I think a great many things here may be important. Complicated and fraught, but - promising." 

And he wants to rest in her arms just a little longer, before he returns to his body in the study, and composes himself for a moment before going out and telling the three Yeerks he'll be leaving them here for a while and they're welcome to read the books. 

He Plane Shifts to his hallway, and goes to wait in his office, sitting at his desk with his chin resting in his hands, deep in thought. 

Eventually the same cleric as earlier comes by, with a wizard on hand. "- hello," she says. "I am not delighted about being in Rahadoum against the will of its people but I understand that we're just catching a ride elsewhere?"

“Yes, thank you. - Just to warn you, your magic will not work where I am taking you, but it is safe there.” And he offers her his hand.

She raises an eyebrow, but takes it.

He Plane Shifts both of them to the library demiplane.

Mhalir scrambles up from the armchair where he’s sitting, eyes fixed on both of them. He’s trying to guess who the woman is and what she’s doing here, he’s scared but more than that he’s confused. (He wishes Carissa were there...)

"Are you Mhalir?"

He glances back at the other two Polymorphed Yeerks, who are huddled in their armchairs, also scared but shrinking about it instead of reacting. "Yes." 

She looks at the old man. "May we have some privacy?"

"If you wish. You may knock if you require me." He gestures for the two Yeerk staff and the wizard to follow him into the other half of the demiplane, shutting the door, which immediately blocks off all sound as well. 

She sits down. "How long have you been here?"

He retakes his seat as well, looks uncertainly at her. "Here as in this library, or Golarion?" 

"The library. We can talk about Golarion in a bit, right now I want to make sure that everyone here is safe."

"An hour or two? I am not sure, there is no clock. Also no doors and the wizard's magic does not work here, so we cannot leave unless he -" handwave at the closed divider, "lets us. He has not harmed us though." His eyes narrow. "Who are you?" 

"My name is Lucia Ines. I am a priestess of the Inheritor - of Iomedae. Earlier today I was called to Heaven on urgent business, and on my way back I landed - I assume by the design of my goddess - here, where that man had been expecting me and asked me to do an Atonement for Carissa. Has he introduced himself to you."

"He has not. His wife told Carissa that he went by Alexeis when they met? I suspect that is not his real name." 

"He is Lawful, and not Evil." She sounds somewhat skeptical of him even so. "When I spoke to Carissa, she thought that perhaps I should talk to you."

"Oh. Why?" 

"We were talking about the nature of Good. She had some misconceptions about it but she thought your confusions about it were different in character from hers."

He blinks. The look he's giving her is distrustful and curious and hopeful and tired all at the same time. 

"Can you - say more about what you think Good is, then?" 

"Good is about fixing everything wrong with the universe. Hell, and hunger, and disease, and tyranny, and slavery, and suffering, but right now mostly Hell because everything else will be easier to fix if we fix that."

For a second his expression is one of clarity and relief and sense-of-recognition, and then he turns away slightly, his eyes shuttered. "I - agree that everything wrong with the universe needs to be fixed. It must be a great deal easier if you have a literal god on your side." 

"If you are trying to fix those things then you do have a god on your side."

He looks down. "Not where I come from." 

"Humans on Golarion didn't start out with gods on our side; they ascended."

"Hmm. - Right, Iomedae was human. But not Sarenrae, right? I am not sure where the gods who are not ascended humans come from or how long they have existed." 

"Sarenrae was an angel, a kind of neutral good outsider. She has never been human and has a different outlook on Good that is related to that, I think. The First Gods - the ones who bound Rovagug - are somewhere between thirty thousand and three hundred thousand years old; their records are confusing, and ours don't go back that far at all."

"Your world's civilization is very old. I do not think any planets I know of have recorded histories a tenth that long." 

"Huh. And yet some of them already travel between the stars. Are we close, to learning how to do that?"

"I am not sure, your tech tree is very different from any of the ones I know, because of your magic. Your Plane Shifts might do something similar to our ship's hyperspace jumps, and could maybe be generalized to travel between stars?" 

She nods and does not say anything for a moment. 

He wants to get up and pace, but resists the urge, fidgets with the arm of the chair instead. 

"I knew someone once," he says slowly. "Who I thought - wanted to fix all of those things. He came to our world and he gave us electric lights and a way to feed ourselves and he gave us starships, and I thought... I remember thinking I had not even recognized what it was that I wanted until I met him and - saw what was possible. And I thought maybe we would win together, someday."

"That is a - rare, special thing."

He turns away from her. "I was very stupid." 

"- whatever went wrong, I doubt that would be my diagnosis of it."

"I wanted to make plans - to travel elsewhere, to find people we could help and work with, to bring the gifts he had brought us to them too. But..." He trails off. "Did Carissa tell you what my real body is like?" 

"She said you were called Yeerks."

"Yes. We are - little slugs, about this long." He shows her with his hands. "We lived in pools, on our home planet, and in our natural bodies we have very limited senses, and are defenceless. But - we communicate between ourselves with electrical signals, and at some point in our evolutionary history, we formed a symbiotic relationship with another species, the Gedds. We would slip in through their ears and interface with their brains, borrow their senses and bodies. They were not very intelligent, by themselves, and they benefited vastly from our presence, so they came back to the pools for us. It was - it was good, we were helping them, but the Andalites came and they were horrified at the concept of a slug that could enter someone's head and take over their body. We have so little without that, though, we have no eyes to see the stars with, no hands to build with..."

He shakes his head. "But when we spoke of going elsewhere to find hosts, they did not think any other species in the galaxy would voluntarily choose that. And -" a flicker of pain, regret, "and I will admit some of my fellows did - not really understand why the host's consent mattered, our culture lacked the concepts for it, we were so young and new. I - think I understood, even then, but evidently I failed to communicate that clearly enough. And so Seerow, who I thought was my friend, became alarmed. He had said he was concerned. We had debated it. I thought we were allies who could communicate our positions in words, and listen... Until he attacked us. And we fought back, because, what else were we supposed to do, give up and die?" 

"I told Carissa that it is almost never the Good thing to do, to give up and die, because then you will not be able to do any other things and there are a lot of other things to get done."

Mhalir's breath catches. He looks up into her eyes, startled, maybe relieved. "- Yes. That is what I thought." 

"Also because if all the people trying to do the right thing give up and die then the people who are not trying to do the right thing will end up in charge. And because people who are undecided about whether they should try to do the right thing will find the case for it pretty unpersuasive."

"That makes sense. I - I have tried many times to push our Council toward - plans that are less evil in the short run. And I think I have sometimes succeeded, on the margin, when it did not trade off much against other things, but...it was hard to make a case that those plans were otherwise equally good, when it seemed that the best-case scenario for us losing the war was being denied technology and confined to our home planet indefinitely, and the worst case was the annihilation of our entire species. I could not make a very persuasive case." He seems kind of upset about it, but mostly confused. 

"I am curious what you mean by 'less evil.'"

"Offering alliance to planets rather than conquering them because we could and enslaving their people. We did this successfully with the Taxxons. They have an intense biological drive of constant hunger that they often cannot control, sometimes they eat each other, it was immensely limiting to their civilization and we can help. I - think it was demoralizing, for the Council, that the Andalites knew the Taxxons had chosen it voluntarily, and were not at all inclined to de-escalate the war as a result. I also pushed to talk to the Andalites rather than fighting. Repeatedly. On the Hork-Bajir world I was in charge of an operation and - I unilaterally decided to open communications with the Andalite forces there. Arguably I did not actually have authority to do that without advance permission from our Council. Alloran - my host who I left in Nirvana - used the comms instructions we shared to target attacks instead. And then - triggered a bioweapon and slaughtered all the Hork-Bajir remaining on the planet, rather than let them fall into our hands."

Mhalir's face clenches. "He gave us no warning. I - am not sure I would have backed down if he had, it is in a sense not a good strategy to do that, your enemies will know you can be coerced into surrender if they are willing to be more ruthless than you... But I might have. Anyway. We captured him. I - was facing the disapproval of the Council, for being too pro-Andalite, I was close to losing their trust entirely. I took him as my host as a political move to counter that. I know that was Evil, just..." Helpless shrug. "I felt very constrained." 

"Do you think that was a mistake?"

"I am not sure. I think it would have been a mistake if I had - lived in your world. Where there are gods on the side of Good. I...do not think our world is like that. I think we have no greater power trying to fix all the problems, or else things would look very different. But... I do feel very confused about it." 

"I am not sure the gods are the decisive thing. I think the strongest argument for Good - means, rather than Good ends - is the world being very strange, very confusing, containing lots of actors and factions whose aims you can't necessarily anticipate....and perhaps this is the same thing from another angle but being likely to make mistakes. People who have never fought a war before are likely to make mistakes related to how to fight wars. People who have never had contact with other civilizations before are likely to make mistakes related to contact with other civilizations. Good tactics are in general tactics that are robust about being wrong about what kind of world you're in. Not - infinitely wrong, no one has a tactic that will work just as well if it turns out that the exact opposite of everything they believed was true, but - 

- Golarion has gods. Maybe your universe does not have gods. But it has lots of peoples in it, right? Even if none of the ones you'd met so far were aligned with you, or powerful enough to defend you -"

...Nod. 

"I think I was wrong about the Andalites," he says after a very long pause. "I am not sure how wrong. Or - whether it was enough to actually produce different predictions of their actions, or whether there is any path I could have taken from where I was that would have de-escalated the war once it began. But - maybe." 

"People are - usually wrong about how their enemies think and feel. It is a known place where it takes extraordinary skill to be right."

He nods, slowly. "...I think I took Alloran's beliefs too much at face value. As an indicator of the Andalite political consensus on Yeerks, rather than - well, while one is being enslaved and tortured is not exactly the best time for them to express nuanced beliefs. And I did notice that, I tried to take it into account, but - probably that is something else where it takes extraordinary skill to be right. I was surprised, when Alloran spoke to Carissa and to the cleric of Sarenrae, and I should not have been, I had been in his head for fifteen years." 

"Did he - have the chance to speak to other people, during that time?"

"- I tried to suggest it, early on. He had no interest in talking to voluntary Taxxon Controllers, even when they were demonstrably Yeerk-free because he had just watched the Yeerk exit into the pool, and the adult Hork-Bajir all have an induced intellectual disability, the creators of their species made them that way. I...did not think to offer it again once there were humans in the picture. I suppose I had stopped trying by then." 

"It was confusing to Carissa that you did not kill him when you were done with him. It was one of the examples she thought of, of Good people doing unstrategic things in order to be Good."

"He would have gone to an Evil afterlife, here! I was not willing to subject him to that after decades of enslaving him. And...I promised myself, at the beginning, that I would free him someday, when we had won, and - maybe by then it would be too late for him to ever be all right but at least I could try."

He shakes his head. "I am not really sure either why I did it when I did, though, we had demonstrably not won yet and it was unstrategic. I - just - I noticed that the considerations for keeping him as a host no longer applied, wizards were just as smart and would be even more impressive to the Council, and - I told myself maybe the Good gods would try to fight me if I kept him but not if I freed him - and then suddenly it was intolerable to be in his head listening to him scream."