"Sometimes people willingly take names that sound negative to make themselves appear threatening, or to indicate that they wish to claim power over those that tried to use it against them. Our ship is called the Stopping By Crashing Into Stone. As in, a ship, traveling at great speed, with people on it, crashes into things killing everyone onboard. It is a tradition in our culture to name ships after problems you want them not to have, allegedly it goes back to some idea about it reducing bad luck, but really it is just a funny tradition at this point."

"Okay. I don't have much personal evidence about Apollyon either, then, by that standard. Other than that he's definitely allies with Szuriel and Charon."

"Asmodeus has told us that a person he knows perfectly well does not want to belong to him is his property. He made repeated jabs at my friend for being an escaped slave, and talked about how it is rather rarer that people whom he enslaves escape. And also his … mechanism for talking to us in a provably-secure way … involved horribly killing one of his servants, I am pretty sure. That's almost certainly not required for security, he probably just prefers methods like that."

"That… is not worse than some of the particularly bad humans in history have done, but… granted, that person should not be in power."

Arithnu is now quite tense, hand on his sword, but is remaining quiet.

Boyd just looks grim, and nods, eyes still mostly on Arithnu.

"Szuriel. So, I mentioned an incident where the deity who wants to either kill everyone or do something worse spent a lot of resources on making sure a person with valuable information was very, very destroyed. The deity who I described then was Charon, and he and Szuriel are allies. The person who was destroyed was Kenchlo. That's not tactically important, I'm just quite upset about his destruction and want to circulate accurate information about him."

"Anyway. Szuriel has a kind of particularly powerful servant called an 'Obcisidaemon'. These are broadly referred to as 'genocide daemons', and it is commonly believed that they are constructed by fusing the deaths of genocide victims with the deaths of the perpetrators. The entity that killed and subsequently destroyed Kenchlo was an Obcisidaemon. I was present at the time of Kenchlo's death, and the appearance of the entity that killed him matches records of Obcisidaemons."

"After this incident, the deities had a meeting, because various details of the incident were, in my opinion and my friends' and allies' opinions, suggestive of suspicious behavior on Charon's part. During this hearing, we asked why such a powerful servant had been sent to where Kenchlo ended up being. Szuriel asked us if we knew what an Obcisidaemon is. We described it the way I described it to you, and Szuriel agreed with the description."

"That… that would be… more than…"

"Yadue." Arithnu says through his teeth.

"Sounds like a mercurial name. Who are they?"

"'Were they'. Past tense. And it is no longer a mercurial name. Yadue had many superstitions, many horrifying. I do not fully understand Griffith's description, but I know on multiple occasions Yadue would order a general to kill all in a village and consume the victims."

He looks at Boyd.

"To hide such things would be greater dishonor."

Boyd sighs. "I hope you don't take it the wrong way if I don't reciprocate. Orders from above. You know some of ours though."

Leonarda swallows "I… am still not fully sure what all of that actually means. 'Fusing deaths'… is not on any list of war crimes I have ever seen."

"This gets into complicated stuff about souls. It's a form of taking advantage of people dying. How about I talk about the more concrete stuff first? Uh. Szuriel … where to start."

"Here's a concrete thing. She taunted us about Kenchlo's death at her servant's hand, saying 'Tell me how much you care about this victim. Enough to lie to try to start a war in the outer planes, or not that much?'. …I said this was an unfair question, my friend said that she would prefer to somehow turn Szuriel to the side of good rather than destroy her. Szuriel then went on, saying 'To stop me from doing it again or whatever, because I will. Did you think war was limited to killing combatants?' Those are direct quotes of her, by the way."

"During the incident where her servant killed Kenchlo, some other daemons, 'bibliodaemons', were also present, and tried to destroy our memories and some books we had. Charon said these were Szuriel's servants, and asked her to explain their presence. She said 'I have found it always a good idea to make sure that those committing genocide get enough of their target's books and records. It reduces how much people try to stop them in the future, among other benefits.' We asked if they were for destroying evidence of genocides. She responded 'Not the evidence. The victim’s more sympathetic writings, typically.'. Those are also direct quotes."

Griffie looks increasingly agitated, but pauses to breathe.

"…Arithnu?"

"…yes Captain?"

"Your people have a lot of traditions around checking for truth and intervening in atrocities and avoiding the common pitfalls, do they not?"

"We do, Captain."

"…I would like you to arrange for beginning however it is you do that, and if this isn't the most impressive and audacious propaganda I've heard of, I will personally join in on the inevitable mercurial demand for support from us humans. We humans may be slower than you to put our lives on the line and dive into battle, but… wherever I put that line, this crosses it."

"…thank you Captain. That means more than you know." Arithnu says, beginning to tap on his tablet with tears running down his face.

"I'm still concerned about the tech issues, but… if this is true, and we can actually make a difference… well… you know I love those movies of yours, and as reasons to live one go… I can't say an actual goddess of war and war crimes had crossed my mind before."

"And she called Kencho 'daemon-bait'! She taunted us, saying 'To be clear, the only one who could confirm or deny your claims in a way not easily faked is the bard who was left trapped in a circle as daemonbait?'! He was an artist and historian, and he had been helpful to us at a point where he could have hurt us quite a lot, and we had him in a comfortable containment area because he was also still kind of in the service of someone who wanted to invade my world, and we were treating him well, and we had him guarded by people who were told to use nonlethal containment methods if he tried something, and we were going to have him talk to the deities who want to help people about Charon's plans, and I was going to try to take him to parties and find him people who wanted to hire him to paint things for them, and Szuriel said Kenchlo was daemonbait. Because she and Charon have made up this story where we try to capture lots of daemons and use their soul-damage-manipulation abilities to heal people instead of hurt them. I wanted Kenchlo to live! I wasn't in any way expecting to be ambushed by incredibly powerful daemons that we only managed to mostly defeat due to incredible luck! I was expecting to bring Kenchlo home with me and show him the world!"

Griffie is out of breath and crying.

"Captain, how long are we planning to keep Griffith in quarantine?"

"I probably can't breathe your 'air' anyway, so how much benefit is there to having me outside of quarantine, beyond getting useful information?"

"Many acts of comfort and camaraderie are rendered easier by the absence of such measures."

"You do have a point. Thank you."