“Yes, now would be a good time to speak further. - Iomedae said that I should.”

He nods to the other paladins and priests as they’re introduced.

He nods. 

"There's - one thing I definitely want to say, though I worry it's very rude, because - it seems like a hard thing to get right without experience in Golarion, and dangerous to get wrong. I am...worried about the Asmodean associate of yours."

Leareth sighs. 

“- That seems like a reasonable concern to have just on priors. I am curious if you could unpack some more detail on what specifically you think could go wrong?”

"Asmodean Cheliax teaches people to be - very good at lying, even to themselves, and very good at defeating mechanisms for detecting lies. Its people are - obviously very much worthy of our sympathy, but they are very dangerous, and they are not easily persuaded to see things differently. And it's very hard to tell the difference between those who are sincerely reconsidering their beliefs and those who have decided it'd be strategic to pretend to, either with explicit instructions from their superiors or just with the knowledge that their superiors will welcome their betrayal of Good later. It's not all of them. But I would never run an operation that an Asmodean could choose to betray, because with any one of them I can't be sure enough. And - with all due respect - you are not used to dealing with anyone that good at lying, because it takes an entire society engineered to inculcate it, and I notice that - what's her name -"

“Carissa Sevar,” Leareth offers. He’s not at all sure how to respond to any of the rest of that.

"I notice that Carissa Sevar has in a very short time achieved a position of - closeness and trust and intimacy - which I do not think it serves our war effort to extend to her. I want her to be all right. I want everyone in the world to be all right. But when we're planning a fight against Hell, I want every Asmodean far out of our way."

…Leareth feels like he really should have some kind of planned response to that, and he just - doesn’t.

“She - is capable of updating? She is very - oriented toward her own survival - but right now, that is best achieved by sticking close to me. Which is not ideal but I will accept it, the alternative was letting her superiors take her back to Cheliax. …For what it is worth, her staying here was my— well, Nayoki’s idea initially. She had been reading Carissa’s mind and realized she was afraid of being tortured to death for her failures, and informed me that I needed to demand to keep her instead.”

"In a war, which side it's advantageous to be on can change very quickly."

“- Yes, fair enough. …But - I mean, you must know that I read Evil as well? Are you - in fact less concerned, about having me closely involved here?”

"We've been talking with your staff about your mission here. I very much hope we have common goals, at least when it comes to Cheliax. And if we don't, then I suppose I'll have to try to stop you." This isn't a threat. It is also lacking all concern that if they picked a fight with Leareth's people here they would certainly lose. It's like he's charting out paths they might take from here to the nearest mountain pass, noticing their advantages and disadvantages. "My stance on Asmodeans is not my stance on everyone who reads Evil. In our world -- and, I think, in yours -- people can read Evil for lots of reasons, many of them sympathetic, some of them reflecting very little on their potential to change the world for Good. Being an Asmodean is a lot more than that."

“I have definitely noticed that her worldview is bizarre and concerning? But - Iomedae seems to approve of us interacting?”

He looks very taken aback by that. "She - expressed an opinion on it? ...well, I would still prefer that we take steps to ensure she can't communicate with Cheliax, or learn the details of the invasion plans, but if Iomedae thinks you should be...

actually, no, sorry...She thinks you should be sleeping with the Asmodean prisoner who is obviously trying to seduce you for some combination of protection and strategic opportunity to make sure everyone goes to Hell? That's just really surprising and I am not sure something is being conveyed correctly."

“- I should what?”

"...I think you should not! I think it's a terrible idea!"

“I do not even want to do that! But it - did seem that Iomedae thought I should…”

And he trails off, because in fact he still isn’t sure what Iomedae thought that he “should.”

"I really don't think Iomedae thinks you should."

Maybe he should at some point just ask Iomedae what She’s hoping to achieve by advising him to ask Carissa for a hug or to sleep in her bed… 

However, right now it mostly feels like they’re getting incredibly off topic, in an exceptionally confusing direction.

“Anyway. Iomedae…also said that I should ask to read one of your minds? Because She thinks it is important that I understand better what Good means.”

"Yes. You can do that, if you'd like; when we selected people to send here we selected ones without important Church secrets." 

“- Then I would appreciate that. Thank you.”

And - after a long moment of hesitation - Leareth extends his Thoughtsensing.

Ignasi is still thinking about Carissa, though he's vaguely intending to stop that; the man is clearly more than a little defensive about it, and unprepared to discuss it, and nothing will be achieved by pushing anyway. His impression of her is from the previous day, where she and Leareth were practically clinging to each other, and then she declared aloud that Leareth needed rest and had been talking to Iomedae, and helped him out. She'd been disheveled and underdressed and bright-eyed and innocent-looking and no Asmodean ever looked like that except very deliberately. 

- other topics. 

"What is Good" isn't actually something he imagined would be confusing, in the absence of gods aligned with it. Most people probably wouldn't think of it, because the scope of it is very ambitious, because the pieces of it don't fit together easily when you're first confronting them, but he thinks if you did ask them they'd sort of know. If you ask young children without a theological education what Good is they name bits of the right thing already. Helping people. Curing the sick. Fighting for justice. 

Ignasi does not, himself, remember an age before he had a theological education. He grew up in Lastwall, descended from Chelish refugees. There are a lot of them in Lastwall. Good was the force that fought Evil, and the set of all the weapons that Evil cannot wield - generosity, mercy, compassion, forgiveness, love, the abiding self-respect that comes from knowing that you are leaving the world stronger for your presence in it. The joy of teaching a student and seeing them grow more capable and more sure of their abilities - Good. There's some of it even in Cheliax. You can't actually stamp all the Good out of people. 

The complexity is all in the implementation details, and there's endless complexity there, and their adversaries are very clever, but he's never been particularly confused about the core. It's hard to know, really, what parts of that to point to, without an understanding of what confuses Leareth about Good.

A dozen fragments of last night's conversation with Vanyel are drifting back and forth in Leareth's mind. 

"...I do not feel confused about wanting to help people," he says finally. "And - I have tried to leave the world stronger, by existing in it. I think it is a different thing that I am -" 'confused about' isn't even the right phrasing here, "- that I - do not know how to do. Or that existing in this world, as a person with goals, has incentivized me against doing. It...seems that one of the asymmetrical strengths of Good, maybe, is - coordination, trust, groups working together?" 

There's a story about four ancient Osirian pharaohs - all Evil - who bound their lives together in a magical pact, to prevent them from trying to kill each other. They reigned for hundreds of years, and then one got cancer, and they all four died. 

Good people can just work together without a magically binding pact that'll kill them all if any one of them dies. And - well, all right, that's an extreme example, but - if he's met an Asmodean - 

- Good people share values. This is much less true of Evil people. There are, in some senses, a million things you can value as an Evil person and only one you can value as a Good person, no matter how many tactical disagreements there are. And that means that Good people have the basis for coordination, across countries but also across worlds, across contexts - they'll find people on their team wherever they go. That's an asymmetric strength of Good. 

Also, the sorts of people who want to fix the world are generally more pleasant to work with than the sorts who want to do a lot of murder and torture and slavery, and make for better allies.

...This continues to feel very confusing. 

"I had been under the impression that - being able to make agreements with others and maintain - them was about Law, not Good, in your world's ontology?  ...Also Carissa does not at all want to murder or torture or enslave people, she - cares about wealth and progress in the same ways that I do -?" 

Making agreements is one way to coordinate, and Evil can do it - though there are downsides to trying to enforce everything through contractual agreements rather than just through shared values. There's even, if you're a god, a more complicated thing, where gods can have Law-arrangements they didn't negotiate in advance but that they'll predictably pay for, like the church of Iomedae paying for intelligence even if they didn't specify intent to do so in advance, but applied more broadly.

But that's not - it's not that there's a contractual arrangement, or even a potential contractual arrangement, between the church of Iomedae and whoever runs the nearest abolitionist organization or social benefit program. It's just that they care about the same things and so they'll take up each others' goals if they can - not as a carefully negotiated reciprocal value-preserving arrangement of the kind human institutions can sometimes cleanly make and individual humans mostly can't. Just because they both want Hell destroyed and slaves freed and society benefitted.

It seems possible that the Asmodean is not sharing her murder, torture and slavery related values with someone who disapproves of them. It'd be pretty surprising if she didn't own slaves, if she's a wizard; well-off Chelaxians almost invariably do.