He's already finished his first mug of ale.

"Another!"

He needs to avoid getting so drunk he can't keep spinning his past smoothly, but he can handle a few drinks no problem.

He fills up Mateo's cup again. "Got any more good stories?"

He could tell him about the time they made a Chosen foreswear himself before dying so he would go to the Abyss.  ...no, Good people don't go for torture.

He hadn't actually gotten to go any of the actual (very rare) teleport raids.

Back when he was a bandit a group of travelers they robbed had a woman with just a hint of tiefling features that looked exotically attractive and he No, don't even think of that story ever.  Actually, he should slow down on the alcohol, he really doesn't want to let that sort of things slip.

He puts a smile on his face and hums to fill the pause as he mulls the question over.

"I've got plenty of stories of fighting Asmodeans, but, well, they often end in an excessive amount of torture of the Asmodeans, probably more than actually served the goal of fighting Asmodeus."

He hopes that answer strikes the right balance of interesting but not too torture-y while also not actually being too merciful or sympathetic to the Asmodeans.  If the barkeep is still interested he can tell one of the better 'foreswearing a Chosen' story with a bit of watering down (and maybe some extra embellishment on how awful the Chosen was).  In the future he will have all his stories carefully retold to himself in advance with just the right level of watering down.  He'll try to gauge the right level now, since he's already committed.

Solemn nod. "You don't need to talk about it if you'd rather put that sort of thing behind you." Split-second pause while he assesses the man— "But if you're up for it, I'd love to hear about any particularly dastardly Asmodean plots you were able to foil." Smile. 

Was 'put that sort of thing behind you'... a threat to reveal what Mateo is really like?  A reminder that he knows what Mateo is really like?  Or maybe being genuinely friendly?

It's not like he can really keep his guard up around a man that can conjure alcohol from nothing, so he might as well enjoy himself and if it all turns out to be a trap for heretics or whatever he's dead either way.

"Well, when I got reassigned to the central organization, with the 6th circle wizard in charge, I mostly didn't get to know about what was going on.  But before that, when I was with a smaller group, we pulled some clever schemes.  No big dastardly Asmodean plots, just the typical grinding turn of the hierarchy and bureaucracy that we jammed up when we could.  Like this one little village, it had previously had a rotating priest, you know, on a circuit, and they were planning on expanding with a regular permanent priest and a little village temple.  We couldn't risk revealing ourselves, or even make them think to look for humans, so we came up with elaborate ideas to convince the Asmodeans that the area had an undead problem.  The wizard pulled some clever tricks to sell them on the idea.  Like he had some clever spell uses to make it look like a corpse had tried to claw it's way up out of the earth, and he faked ghostly residue with egg whites and a prestidigitation, a few other tricks like that."

He will elide the tricks that were more like desecrating dead bodies to try to get some actual undead to arise.  There's enjoying himself talking and then there is being an idiot.

"I was mostly just dumb muscle, helped kill the first group of weak adventurers that was sent to investigate.  We ditched the area after that, we figured they would waste a lot of effort trying to put down undead that weren't there." 

Because their corpse desecration didn't actually result in any real undead.

"We might have only killed a few of them and wasted some anti-undead adventurers' time and delayed the new temple by a few months, but still I figure a few months without some Chosen lording it over the people are a few months that were better, right?"

Mateo smiles amicably at that concluding thought.  He thinks he's figured how to reframe things as 'Good' pretty well.

"That's the spirit! I bet the people in that village were real happy not to have Hell's dogs breathing down their neck, even if it was only for a few months."

"Back before the war ours got it into his head that Longnight was heretical somehow. Bastard kept telling everyone that if they wanted to celebrate it they needed to spend it in prayer and vigil to Asmodeus."

 "Ours had my little sister beaten for skipping an execution 'cause she had the plague. And my littlest sister beaten for showing up sick."

"Ours used to make people grovel just to have the 'privilege' of taking her water." Glance at Valerio. "Shows what she knew, I'd rather have Cayden's brews any day of the week."

Maybe he should go for the "tortured and mentally broke a priest into foreswearing themselves" story?  He'll test the waters a bit first, borrowing a piece of a line he heard from Justice and remixing it a bit.

"I figure the only reason not to torture them until they're begging to recant is that it does Asmodeus's work for him!"

There's scattered laughter, but people seem notably less enthusiastic about that than about his earlier stories.

"Honestly, if someone had paid ours back in the same coin, I wouldn't have complained," says the guy who mentioned his sisters.

 "I don't know, ours recanted when she saw the way the wind was blowing. Last I heard she had helped repair my aunt's house for free. I'm not saying I'm always happy about it, but I'd rather meet her in Nirvana than Hell, you know?"

"Dunno if anyone would've let ours live but we gave him a clean death, at least. Not that I think he appreciated it much, it's not like he's having a nice time in Hell."

Valerio has started polishing a mug.

"One of my cousins got picked up for the church about half a decade before the war," he says. "It's not like we'd ever really gotten along, he was always so serious, and it's not like I can blame anyone for killing him given the sort of thing he got up to after seminary, but — well, someday Hell'll be free."

"I think Galt should've given us some of those sword things they've got that trap the souls. Solves the problem, no torture required."

 "Sure, drag one of those around to every village in the country, no problems there."

Okay looks like feeling things before telling his torture stories was the right call.  He will awkwardly sip at his drink for a bit and let the conversation move on before speaking up again.

“What sort of drinking songs do you all have around here?”

Valerio grins and starts singing a song about a man from the River Kingdoms, who leaves his home kingdom after some political upheaval, hears that Andoran is rebelling against Cheliax and that Andorens hate slavery, and comes west to help fight in the revolution. After a moment, the rest of the bar joins in.

She gets why people here sing it as "Sarenrae take the nobility" rather than "the devil take the nobility" but it just doesn't sound quite right.

When they reach the end of the song, another customer immediately picks up with another song. Songs that the customers at the Lucky Fox apparently like include:

• The song the Eagle Knights taught him earlier, about the pirates trying to evacuate the sinking ship. The ship's wizard has just enough time on his Fly spell for the strongest crew member to carry almost all of them off the ship, but the captain refuses to leave until all his men are safe, and ultimately sacrifices himself so that a deckhand can escape. The final verse is about him sailing all the planes on Besmara's pirate ship.
• A man from Augustana dies and goes to Elysium. In Elysium, he sleeps with Desna, Milani, Calistria, and Cayden Cailean, but finds all of them lacking in some way. In the final verse, he meets a dead woman from Augustana, sleeps with her, and concludes that Augustana women are the prettiest and best at sex in the world, even better than the gods. (The scansion on the lines about Augustana is slightly weird, as if the song were originally about some other city.)
• A song that is also popular in Cheliax, about a man trying to find a tavern that sells good ale who keeps being stiffed by the tavernkeepers, who attempt to charge him increasingly absurd prices — the first demands all the money the man is carrying, the second the man's horse, and so on until eventually the final bartender demands the man's house.

Rebellions against Cheliax, good!  Further confirmation that he won't be a heretic for saying a prayer to Besmara every now and then, good!  Confirmation that Andoran isn't all prudes, good!  Shared bar song with Cheliax, good!

He sings along with the ones he knows and tries to learn the words to the other ones.  By the end he's got a comfortable buzz going and he is really enjoying himself.

After a while he turns to Independence.  "Were we meeting up with them again today?" 

He feels relaxed enough that he won't even try to get under the wizard's skin, maybe he'll even try being friendly, like for real, if he sees the chance.

Nod. "By the unicorn fountain in Fleet." If they beat the casters to it the three of them can track down an appraiser.

"It was great to meet you! Hope to see you soon!"

When the Church of Iomedae is deciding how to allocate its resources, it generally does not prefer to spend large sums on magnificent cathedrals. The Cathedral de Sancta Iomedaea in Vigil is scarcely more impressive than Vigil's temple to Sarenrae, and less so than its temple to Shelyn. If it were entirely up to the Church, decisions about how much to spend on its temples' architecture or artwork would be driven entirely by considerations like 'if we want to be capable of influencing Opparan politics whatsoever, we need to conform to Oppara's standards for respectable churches' or 'if the building is completely miserable, no one who isn't already a devout Iomedaean will want to attend services there,' to be weighed against other strategic considerations for how to spend their money.

Nonetheless, it sometimes happens that someone of great wealth, who fears for the ultimate destination of their soul or wants to be seen very publicly supporting the Good churches, decides it's embarrassing for Iomedae's temples to be inferior to those of a foreign barbarian's goddess and insists on funding renovations. The Church always attempts to explain why it would really be better to simply donate to the Church's efforts in general rather than insisting that the money be put towards a particular purpose, but the sort of person who's aiming primarily to be seen giving money to Good causes doesn't necessarily care, and the Church as a matter of policy does not refuse their donations. So it was that not a month after Andoran's independence, the son of the late Duke of Missa, along with a dozen others not nearly as wealthy as he, sold off all his silks and magic items and donated the proceeds to the fledgling Church of Iomedae in Augustana, insisting that the money be spent on a grand cathedral.

Her cathedral in Augustana is a grand building with three wings; seen from above, the shape is vaguely reminiscent of a longsword. The entrance foyer doubles as a channeling chamber, three layers of balconies laid out carefully to ensure that no one will be missed, with balusters carved in the shape of Iomedae's longsword and a mosaic on the ground floor depicting Iomedae at the height of the Shining Crusade, raising her sword with the sun at her back to form the sword-and-sunburst. (The entire cathedral is warded by Teleport Trap; Andoran has many enemies, and the Church of Iomedae likewise.) The grand doors leading to the sanctuary have sculptures of iophanite angels on either side, gesturing insofar as their anatomy permits into the sanctuary.

At the entrance is a lay-priest of Iomedae, dressed in white robes with red trim, wearing Iomedae's holy symbol. "Welcome to Iomedae's cathedral! How may I help you today?"

They don't do torture.  He trusts the privacy and confidentiality of spiritual council... reasonably well.  Why is he so nervous?  Thinking on it carefully, half is simple mundane embarrassment (it feels silly putting it like that, like 'opps I sold a few people into indentured servitude and was planning to do it to a few more and also tortured some Chosen after that' but that's what it is) and half of it is worry that an organized lawful church that has researched the issue and is committed to honesty will tell him something that makes him much less optimistic about his eternal fate.  (He can sort of picture it: 'By our best estimate, based on your current history, clearing out of Evil into Chaotic Neutral will require living a life of abnegation and working tirelessly and diligently for 60 years.  Maybe 40 years  if you work really hard!  You're in your thirties now?  Guess you better get started now and hope you live a long life!')  

"I uh, recently escaped from Cheliax.  I am looking for spiritual council about, uh, a range of topics."  

Should he give more background than that?

"Uh, a Chaotic Good adventuring group I escaped with gave me a starting summary of Cheliax's lies and what Good is about and that sort of thing, and uh, before that I had an unusual but somewhat more informed perspective than many Chelish people, but I still have a lot of questions."  He's stammering pretty hard.  He thinks he can get it under control once he's somewhere private.

She nods and notes something down in a bound book. "Spiritual counseling is in the west wing, through that door and down the hallway to the right — since this is your first time, I can show you the way to the rooms. Everyone who does spiritual counseling here has sworn not to voluntarily reveal matters discussed with them during spiritual counseling without the permission of the person who received counseling, unless they separately become aware of them through some other channel. Everyone who's currently doing spiritual counseling has information posted outside of the room with some basic information about them, or you can also tell me if there's anything in specific you're looking for — local or foreign, cleric or paladin or lay-priest, man or woman, that sort of thing — you can let me know, though we only have so many people doing counseling so if you have a lot of hard requirements it might turn out that no one doing counseling today meets all of them. If it would make you feel more comfortable, the rooms are set up so that you can conceal your faces from each other, though of course that's optional."

"Thank you.  I don't have any hard requirements.  It would be most helpful to me if they could cite sources and research and specific examples.  Like if they knew the details of the Osirion scrying project or... " what's another example "records of interviews with Good outsiders.  And they could recommend books to read to follow-up."  

His stuttering is smoothing out.

"I don't have a strong preference for or against concealing my face.  I guess it would help me some."  It would actually be great not to have to look anyone in the eye while he explains how he manipulated a teenager that just gave birth into a loan-contract to pay for healing then later sold her into an indenture when she couldn't pay up.

"And if not seeing my face helps them not inadvertently reveal anything if they, like, encounter me on the street or something, that seems reasonable."  He doesn't think his sins are so impressive that a trained priest would recoil in disgust upon seeing him outside of counseling, but why take the chance?  (For both his sake and the priest's vows.) 

Nod nod. "Follow me right this way, then."

They don't have anyone from Osirion, Iomedae's faith has never been strong there, but Select Lelia Lepori is reasonably scholarly and keeps up foreign correspondence throughout the Inner Sea; she expects she'll be able to handle his questions reasonably well. The lay-priest leads him down the hallway to the room she's in, rings a small bell, removes a small tablet from the wall, and passes it through a tiny slit. A few moments later, the tablet is passed back, and she hangs it again in a different orientation.

"You can go in now."