Focus. Take a deep breath. 

Vanyel switches to Mindspeech. Being visibly confused and upset in front of the prisoner they're interrogating does not seem like the world's best plan. 

:...That seems - hard to mix up? - I mean, it's not - it sounds like him, the - making a god...?:

:- I suppose I have to take your word for it. You're the one who knows him: 

Right. 

- Vanyel takes a deep breath.

Replays Carissa's words in his mind. 

He seems nice, I guess.

What. 

He's not anywhere near - narrow enough - to accomplish the things he says he wants to - he cares about too many things, he cares about all people -

....

- he wouldn't fight Iftel even to save himself from Hell because he was worried other people would go to Hell if we won...

Which isn't even all of it - and, in fact, the last part might be the most important part, it mentioned him... 

But. 

"- I. Um." 

Vanyel clears his throat. 

"...I - even if I thought Leareth was - was trying to do the right thing - I wouldn't at all describe him as 'nice'..." 

".......Does that word mean something different in Cheliax." 

"...probably? We're not going for Good. I mean, like, I bet he's not a rapist, I bet he doesn't torture people even when they deserve it, I - I mentioned the cows already, he tries to avoid eating animals because he thinks they don't like it -" She feels that it is plainly disqualifying for any kind of serious important problem to be the kind of person who has ever changed your behavior for the sake of animals.

Melody is trying very hard not to have any emotional responses, here, but apparently she's failing at it.... 

Vanyel takes a breath. Lets it out. 

"I...." 

"...what - I think we are still not sure what - 'Good' - versus 'Evil ' means, to...to your world...?" 

That's not a question but Carissa's being very cooperative and doesn't need a spell to make her answer. "Good and Evil are concepts the gods think in and the human versions of the concepts are oversimplifications but - Good is acting in the interests of others, Evil's acting in your own interests. Leareth said Valdemar is Lawful Good. Cheliax is Lawful Evil. The Lawful part's important, they won't want to go to war with you, - they're allied with Lawful Good churches and countries, where it's smart - but people don't care very much about being virtuous in Cheliax, and infanticide's legal if there's not a church nearby to drop the baby at, and we don't have, like, beggars hoping people will be nice and give them money, that kind of thing."

Melody’s mind keeps swinging wildly between a range of incredibly unhelpful responses, like ‘I thought we’d already been over how your country is horrible’, or ‘how do the courts decide whether the church was unreasonably far away’, or ‘you should hear Jisa go on about how cows have feelings’. 

She forces herself to take a step back from Carissa’s thoughts, and translates in a flat voice. 

Vanyel, for his part, badly wants to say - he’s not sure how to put it, but some kind of reassurance that Carissa will be safe here and they won’t ever let Cheliax get her back. 

This would almost certainly not reassure her at all. He steps on the impulse. 

“I’d say Leareth acts in his own interests plenty,” Savil says. “It must’ve come up that he’s planning to invade Valdemar?” 

Melody really feels like arguing about Leareth’s character is not the best use of the interrogation, but she doesn’t interrupt.

"Well, I don't think he is anymore, but he was planning to before the planar rift opened?" She's not sure what to think about that. A plan you've been planning for decades without doing it often isn't a plan that was ever going to actually happen. But he did arrange for them to not have many mages, which must have taken some doing. "There's a reason I said he'd get on with Iomedae, not that he'd get on with, I dunno, Erastil or Sarenrae or something. He's not completely incapable of actually doing stuff."

“He told me once that he’d been working on his plan for a thousand years,” Vanyel says, quietly thoughtful. 

“Huh. Which makes a lot more sense if the plan is ‘build a god’ than if it’s just invading Valdemar.”

This is getting rather off topic.

“Your commander was traveling back to Cheliax to make a report, right? What did he actually know about Leareth, when he left?”

"That he was thousands of years old and had hundreds of combat mages under his command. That he was an independent actor not affiliated with Valdemar. That he had impressive magic items better than any we'd seen on Iftel's combat units. ...I think probably they'll scry us, notice we're in Valdemar, and decide not to escalate since they won't want a war with Valdemar, but they could Wish us back, if they cared that much about it."

“Is there a way to shield against them scrying us? …Also how does that work - our scrying isn’t a search, it’s like Farsight, a way to view a place at a distance.”

Come to think of it, they should also be keeping the prisoners behind shields against Farsight, as well as magic. Leareth is in the shielded room at Healers’, it seemed wise, but those shields are aimed just at preventing delirious mages from setting the whole wing on fire. 

"There are ways to block scrying with Golarion magic; the one I can cast when I can do magic is Nondetection, but I'm not powerful enough for it to be sure to stop a motivated higher-circle caster. I don't know if there are ways with your magic. Golarion scrying spells can scry a specific person. The person can resist, but Leareth is unconscious and can't resist and I'm not going to be very good at resisting because of all of the mind control; being under a lot of mind control makes it harder to deliberately resist spells." She would resist if she could, since she belongs to the Star-Eyed Goddess who presumably wants her to. "I think blocking Farsight wouldn't block Golarion scrying, but an antimagic field would do it, if you have a way to do that."

“A - what - your magic can cause magic to just not work in a certain area?” That seems unfairly powerful. And also something Leareth would have loved to get his hands on…

"Yes. It's sixth-circle, abjuration, small radius centered on the caster, twenty minutes per caster circle, dismissable." Carissa got such good grades in school. "It doesn't work on gods."

Savil is tempted to ask if that's just because gods don't fit in a small radius, but that's not a relevant question. It keeps feeling like each of Carissa's answers gives her twenty more questions and it's not clear which of them matter the most for - what's going on here. 

"You seem confident Cheliax doesn't want a war. Do you expect they'll - contact us through diplomatic channels, instead?" 

"Presumably. It's possible Asmodeus will just directly negotiate something with the other gods and then expect them to pass on instructions to their followers but that's less likely since I think gods here aren't Lawful." (Grief; she liked belonging to a lawful god, it felt like an important kind of safety... and a fleeting thought about a plan but no, she shouldn't think about that right now)

Melody feels really bad about this, but...

"What plan shouldn't you think about now? Does it involve getting back to Asmodeus?" 

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh -

"So, I belong to the Star-Eyed Goddess now, but only her most loyal followers get an afterlife, and I don't know if I can be good enough, presumably everyone else is also trying and they've had a lot more time to know how to serve Her best, and - and the other option is to summon a devil and sell my soul, that might be a stronger claim? But I'm not fourth circle, and - and even considering it is definitely disqualifying as loyal enough to get an afterlife the way I'm supposed to, so I - I guess - I guess I don't have a choice now -"