"...what is a 'plane'?" Presumably this isn't referring to the geometric concept.

"...well, those ones in particular are afterlives? And the elementals are from their corresponding elemental planes... and my spellbook hangs out on the Ethereal... it's all the stuff you can't get to by traveling in a direction long enough."

"You're right, I forgot about the elemental planes." Oops. Tanya looks suitably chastened. "So there are more planes besides the four elemental ones, and people from one of them conquered Cheliax. And they're... afterlives?" This possibly answers one question about the translation of 'Hell' and raises several others. Is this like the people who say some political enemy of theirs is the Antichrist?

"Yeah, there's nine afterlives. Hell's the Lawful Evil one."

That doesn't mean anything to Tanya but she isn't actually interested in local religious beliefs and it sounds like Belmarniss isn't either. 

Transit between planes being easy enough to bring over an army and conquer a country is probably an important fact about this world, but not one Tanya can properly understand yet beyond making a mental note that the political as well as the literal map is not limited to what she saw in the atlas.

Something about 'planes' tugs at her memory. Something Belmarniss had said?... no, she can't recall whatever it was. 

"I suppose we'll see for ourselves."

"Uh, you can go to Cheliax if you want but I don't want to, on account of the ruled by Hell thing, seems bad."

"I didn't mean I wanted to go there, just that we might find out more once we're on the surface. There's no particular reason to go to Cheliax." The Commonwealth's national church says the Ildoan one is ruled by the Antichrist in the service of Hell and this is presumably something similar.

"Yeah, news takes a while to filter downstairs and it's spotty."

Then they can proceed on their way! While being wary of kobolds and anyone or anything else that might waylay them.

Some critters, nothing else organized or sapient, for the next while. Tanya may or may not be fazed by a zombie halfling but it's not very difficult to put down since it's already got a broken leg somehow and is really bad at compensating for that.

It's definitely not a person anymore, right? It's a body being animated by a fungus long-duration magic for... no observable reason on part of the caster? Was it just abandoned because its leg broke? Animating dead bodies sounds very useful but then you have decomposing, stinking and presumably infectious bodies, a walking health hazard. Maybe you can set them to working in the fields far from living people?

Are they even allowed to destroy it, it might be someone's property if Belmarniss thinks it's dangerous to other people even if not to themselves then fine, they'll destroy it.

The most disturbing part of that is that the long-lasting magic isn't detectable, but if it's no more capable than a living body then that's not a huge tactical problem, although you can presumably do various tricks by fitting zombies (or parts of them) into places where humans don't fit, or use the fact they don't need to breathe and can stay hidden forever.

"Oh, it might not've been made on purpose, zombies sometimes just pop up naturally. Zombies are the mindless kind of undead, nobody's home in there."

That raises more questions than it answers! "How can someone - or something - be dead but still... in there? And why do zombies sometimes - do they just come into existence out of nowhere or do you mean dead bodies become zombies? Is there a known cause for this?"

"I mean dead bodies, they don't spontaneously generate. Happens more often if you don't handle the body, obviously, that halfling probably died in a way that made it inconvenient to get to or so nobody noticed or someone would've eaten it and used the bones for something and then if it left anything undead it'd be a ghost. Liches and vampires and stuff are undead but still have their souls present and operational."

...so it just happens sometimes, the locals don't know why, and the only defense is destroying the body beforehand? Well, cremation is better than burial anyway, it's not so much a concerning fact about Golarion as it is a weird one.

Cannibalism feels instinctively wrong and Tanya needs to train herself out of thinking that; not only is it culture-specific, here they have completely unrelated sapient species including some carnivores which presumably see nothing wrong with eating a dead halfling. The fact that he was probably a slave in life, and then died with no-one noticing or caring, is the actually problematic part. 

"I don't think liches were in the bestiary, is that because they're not local or very rare or some other reason? Vampires are, mm, powerful humanoids with various abilities but they're not immune to fire and are actually extra vulnerable to sunlight. What does their being undead mean, in practical terms? And the entry on ghosts said they're intangible and can only be hurt with spells and magic weapons, so I should pessimistically assume I can't do anything to them" which is frankly terrifying, "can you?"

"They're rare and it's possible the author was one. The generalities of being undead are that they heal with negative energy and are hurt by positive, which isn't really relevant to us because feeding one a healing potion is not a practical combat action, and that they don't do being alive type stuff like breathing or aging. I wouldn't be sure your spells wouldn't work on a ghost, you have concepts of them ceasing to count as spells at a distance in a way that is not square with what I know so it could go either way, but I know force effects do work fine, I'd try a magic missile first if one cornered me."

"If I push something around with my flight spell, like I do the rod for your hammock, I'm applying physical force which is created by the spell. I don't know what it would mean to apply force in a way that is more magical than that. An explosion or a bullet apply the same kind of force; as far as I know force is just a single concept... I suppose I could try pushing one away if nothing else works, although I'm pessimistic that that would work either." Enemies immune to physics are such an unfair and ridiculous concept.

"...I also have my weak healing spell so I suppose I could try that but I don't even know how I'd target something insubstantial with it. I don't know how to translate the terms positive and negative energy, we may not even have discovered them on Earth or they might be referring to some exotic physics I'm unfamiliar with."

"Force effects that are more magical are like the floating disk, you saw that? Though the floating disk is not a combat spell so that in specific would not harm a ghost. Not all healing spells are positive energy based and yours probably isn't. Positive and negative are both elemental planes, if that helps, spells that use those energies are drawing from the planes."

"We - that is to say, Earth doesn't know about any other planes. Or not as far as my admittedly limited knowledge of physics serves. I thought the disk was similar to my shield, which also stops physical objects from going through it and does so by applying the appropriate counter-force to stop them, but the underlying principles might be different. It would be interesting to know if my shield can stop your magic missile, if we could test that safely; it's a globe so you can aim at its boundary parallel to my body without risking hitting me."

More interestingly though - "you said that dead people whose body is destroyed sometimes leave ghosts. Are the ghosts still those same people?" Except now intangible and unaging and not needing to eat or breathe, which is a strict improvement for someone who was a slave in life and possibly for everyone who'd otherwise die of old age! Tanya hadn't seriously considered the implications of some of the bestiary entries, because... well, because she wasn't considering them seriously yet, and insofar as she was she focused on the combat aspects, and this was in retrospect an error.

"Next time we settle down to camp and I've got spells left we can test a missile versus the shield. Ghosts are - hm, I've never really met a ghost, do you in fact want my, like, cultural impression."

"Unless you want to disclaim that it's likely wrong, yes, of course."

"My impression is that a ghost is the dead person but under extremely warping and impairing conditions and stressors that make them bad to have around almost all of the time even for their historical friends and allies in the long run, and that by and large one would rather not be a ghost unless one is expecting a bad afterlife and maybe not even then. This is also my approximate impression of vampirism and lichdom."

"Huh. Because - having one's soul attached to a dead and decaying body, or no body at all in the case of a ghost, is unpleasant in ways people aren't designed and can't train in advance to handle?" Tanya guesses.

Vampirism seems self-limiting since vampires need the drink the blood of the living - Tanya isn't clear if animal blood works but in any case there's much less blood in a cow than there is meat - and she doesn't know how liches work, but if being a ghost was a generally acceptable state then there would probably be many more of them around.

"Or there's something inherently trippy and bad about running on negative energy and it's like trying to function while high on a bad batch all the time, or because the body's usually doing more - support for being a functional person? - than the soul can pick up all the slack for, yeah, something along those lines."

"That makes a lot of sense; body and mind aren't really separate." It sounds like the ghosts mostly don't want to stop being ghosts and go to an afterlife. Tanya can get behind this; until she met Being X she hadn't believed in afterlives and becoming a ghost probably would not have changed her mind. "And it's not known why this happens sometimes, or how to predict whether it will?"