"Well, then I'm definitely making myself a threat, right, if I offer them hostages and then immediately go and steal them all. And I don't think they'd appreciate it. I wouldn't appreciate it, if one of them had decided to get into a stupid fight."

"...okay. Can you... get shelter from another country without formally defecting to it, or is everyone at the Worldwound going to hand you over on account of this treaty."

"So my bet would be that someone just got anxious and told the magic item store not to buy me counterfeit while they hauled me in to posture at again and maybe collect a bribe, and since that failed they'll read my note and decide to just tell their superiors that I seem to have intent that serves Cheliax and the ideal time to assassinate me is once I'm done serving Cheliax or once they figure out how to summon apsels themselves on purpose. And so I predict that the people at the Worldwound won't have been told to hand me over and it'll just go fine. But maybe someone had already staked their credibility on me being a problem, which would be a stupid thing to do without me in hand but sometimes people are stupid, in which case they'll probably have assassins at the Worldwound? And I can just kill the assassins and write home being like "I knew that evil foreign agents were going to oppose Cheliax in the great work of closing the Worldwound! and then that person will get kiled and someone more sensible will be in charge.... they're probably not going to double down all the way up the chain of command on their soldier who is closing the Worldwound and hasn't any heretical opinions being a public enemy. At least that's how I was betting. But I guess I could get killed before it makes it all the way up the chain of command. Maybe I can spend some time in hiding, making magic stuff, before I go to the Worldwound. Think about this when I'm less stupid."

"Okay. You could, uh, hide in Absalom, or wherever, and I could go fix the Worldwound by myself? You'd be useful as a native guide but I can probably find someone else."

"I don't really think you could fix the Worldwound by yourself and also that sounds like it'd involve giving you very broad making-stuff rights without any ability to check if I like the results. Or way to, like, make you stop making things if you get mind-controlled by some of the demons at the Worldwound."

"...mind control! Yikes! Suppose you tell me about that."

"Enchantment is a school of magic. It lets you make people find you unnaturally compelling or trustworthy, or do what you say, or kneel in your presence, or just stop taking actions, or whatever. Most demons are not possessed with a lot of subtlety but scary ones've still got Dominate Monster, which just makes you do whatever they want, and if you manage to also make the enemy of devils, which you seem like you somehow might, they can do subtler stuff."

"Are there magic items about it."

"Yeah. I don't know how to make anything that'd make you persistently immune but I could learn, maybe, once I have an in with extremely powerful wizards."

"Can we buy something for it in Absalom. If I make you more stuff."

"We can buy things that'll help. Total immunity is - I haven't actually heard of an item with that effect, probably you'd want something off Mind Blank which is eighth-circle, and continuous, it'd be - few enough people in the world who can make it that I wouldn't expect to find one for sale in Absalom no matter how much we pay for it. We could commission it, I guess, and I could try to learn enough about how it ought to work that I could tell if the person who filled the commission left a backdoor..."

"Okay. Let's load me up on things that would help. You have left me several openings to kill you, the binding's working but it's not that great, and if someone got ahold of me just so I could destroy the planet."

"Asmodeus wants the planet around, I don't think you'd be permitted to destroy it. But we've lost continents before and that would be very very awful if it happened again."

"Yeah, I could do that too, though it would actually be slightly more labor-intensive, so if someone carelessly got ahold of me and wanted a continent gone..."

"The continents have different magical traditions and if you destroy one you might lose information we could use to get you good magic stuff," she says neutrally, as if 'reasons Cam shouldn't destroy continents' is the thing they were discussing and that's probably the one he'd find most compelling. 

"I don't want to destroy any continents, Carissa, you have just told me that mind control exists!"

"I am going to do my absolute best about the mind control but it seemed worth also making the case that the continents are useful, I don't know how obvious it seems!"

"I don't want to destroy continents, I assure you."

"Cool! Me neither! We'll just keep them all, maybe add a few new ones. Do you want to teach me how to make deals better so there are no openings through which you could be obliged to destroy a continent?"

"You haven't left me continent-destroying openings."

"Well, that's good I guess.

Was there other stuff you wanted to know? About Golarion?"

"...yeah, sure, suppose you were trying to explain Golarion to someone with a totally different, uh, cosmology and magic system."

"- I guess that follows. Uh, Golarion is a planet, it's one of thousands maybe millions of planets on the Material Plane. Accessible by magic from Golarion are the Inner Planes - so called because they're also adjacent to each other, and there's a sort of popular plane-configuration where they're sort of inside ours - of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and positive and negative energy, and the Outer Planes, of which there are nine, defined in god-terms but comprehensible to humans as representing every combination of the god-forces of Law and Evil. Law is the tendency to follow rules, to do things for reasons, to have hierarchy and obedience and goals and to sacrifice in the present for a better future. Chaos is the force of freedom and randomness and doing whatever you want. Evil is the tendency to - want to have results in the world, to try to do things, to be willing to make sacrifices towards a greater goal. Good wants everyone to live uneventful lives as farmers or gatherers, I think. So the nine afterlives are Lawful Evil, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Neutral, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Good.

The gods have domains in the afterlives and intervene sometimes in Golarion, mostly by naming the priests who can do miracles in their service. That's one kind of magic. Another kind is my kind, which just involves shaping magic to do your will; that's called being a wizard, or some people get an innate faculty for it and do it without study and are sorcerers. Alternatively you can make pacts with extraplanar entities less than gods for power. There are lots and lots of other kinds of magic users but I think most of them are basically some specialized version of one of those things."

"So, uh, your description of evil sounds totally unrelated to your abusive authoritarian theocracy situation, but if you'd asked me to guess, I would have suspected based on the word that those were closely related."

"I mean, it might be? You were upset about there being punishments for incompetence, that's the kind of thing that's Evil, and about people pursuing their own goals instead of dropping them to go rescue someone else, that's the kind of thing that's Evil."