"Certainly, I can get you paper and ink." 

Hopefully she knows how to use a quill pen!  

Merrin knows how to make improvised writing supplies in the wilderness! This isn't exactly the same setup but she has a much easier time figuring it out. It only takes her about a minute. 

She writes down some notes, in Baseline and also personal shorthand (it's not a cipher designed to be private but it's very shorthand and likely to be opaque even if someone uses translation magic on it.) 

A number of different mental notes are now DUMPED and she can THINK again. Great. Merrin takes a couple of deep breaths. 

"I'm confused about 'gods', but I think mostly in a way where they don't map to anything that exists in dath ilan or any -" what this language doesn't have a word for 'trope' what kind of language is this even, "- any fictional worldbuilding convention, I guess, that I recognize from dath ilan. So I might be less confused once I have more examples to work with and more - descriptions of what their goals and capabilities and properties are and what they actually do over time and things. I - suspect I'm more fundamentally confused about the 'Law' versus 'Chaos' and 'Good' versus 'Evil' part - especially the first pair, but the fact that they're part of the categorization system and the first dichotomy doesn't make any sense is making me suspicious about the translation of the second pair too. Can you try to explain 'Law' and 'Chaos' to me like you would to a four-year-old child who hadn't encountered any of the math around Coordination at all yet or any other basic principles of physics and didn't already know the words?" 

Élie desperately wants to know what sort of math the aliens use to coordinate and what sort of civilization gets by without the concepts of Law and Chaos and the best way to teach physics to four-year-old children. Not the time. 

"There's a great deal of disagreement here in Golarion about what Law and Chaos are, besides fundamental organizing principles of the universe. But if I had to reduce it to the things everyone agrees on – Law is order, consistency, structure. It's the reason why I can expect this room will still be here tomorrow, and the river Sellen will still flow into the Inner Sea, and my left hand won't be made out of apricot preserves. Mortal societies are more Lawful when they have explicit, unambiguous rules for their citizens to follow; individual mortals are more Lawful when they obey them. 

Chaos is – fluidity, unexpectedness, variation. The plane we call the maelstrom is the Chaotic Neutral afterlife, but many cosmologists think it's also the primordial soup all the other planes are floating in. Nothing in it is the same from one moment to the next – if it even makes sense to think about time there, which is an open question – and anything that does manage to settle and solidify will eventually become its own plane, separated out from the essence of chaos. Mortal societies are chaotic when they're more open to change, or allow their citizens more mobility, or adapt themselves to a greater variety of ways of being. 

As far as I know, there's really no such thing as pure Law or pure Chaos. Even the Maelstrom has structures in it, and Axis – that's the Lawful Neutral plane –  presumably isn't just a perfectly uniform stationary arrangement of matter. They say it has neighborhoods. I don't really understand how the balance of Law and Chaos in the outer planes is supposed to work and nobody's ever given me an adequate explanation, but I wanted to flag it as a gap in my understanding. Ditto how this interacts with Gods. I could tell you obvious things, like that Lawful gods tend to be more predictable and easier to bind to specific agreements, but I bet there's some deeper metaphysical truth there, just one that's beyond me and maybe beyond mortals period." 

Merrin is jotting down shorthand notes so fast! 

The concept that at a deep level, physical reality is made out of certain math (maybe different math, here?) which can be distilled down into more easily-summarized principles: sure, seems reasonable.

.....Wait what does that have to do with societies making people follow rules? That's not– okay, fine, she can see the analogy and she did ask him to explain it to her like she was four. And on a sufficiently deep and fundamental level there's probably a lot of the same math. Merrin isn't sure, she's terrible at math. 

Oddly, the explanation of 'Chaos' is less confusing. At least on a narrative level. The concept that - whatever a 'plane' is and whatever an 'afterlife' is - everything else is embedded in the 'Chaotic' 'Neutral' afterlife plane - anyway, that does not obviously click for Merrin. It sort of kind of reminds her a little of some physics lessons she half-remembers, or more likely some debates she's overheard between other people with more developed physics knowledge and opinions. Remarking on this does not leave her any less confused. 

- this is a fantasy setting why is it making her dredge up ancient half-forgotten memories of physics classes - 

No such thing as pure– yeah of course that would be like saying 'you can have either pure mass or pure gravity'. ....Actually Merrin's not sure it would be like that at all. Maybe she should just stop trying to map over everything he says that sounds like it could be vaguely referring to her past math or physics lessons. This is a bizarre fantasy setting where even basic economics doesn't hold together. Maybe it's not even made of math–

Yeah she's going to stop thinking about that now too. 

".....I think it's possible I'm doing a really bad job of listening as though I were a four-year-old child and I'm trying to map over a lot of preconceptions that don't actually fit with how anything works here? I - sorry - I'm not actually sure what would help on your end. Maybe it'll make more sense once I ask more questions. Can you tell me about the 'afterlives' here, I know there are nine of them according to that whole categorization schema and you mentioned a couple of things about what different ones are like, but I could maybe use a more thorough overview here or something." 

"I'm starting to think it might be more useful if you could explain some of those preconceptions to me, but I'll do my best. I wouldn't worry too much if it doesn't make sense – scratch that, I'd worry very much because it's all of tremendous metaphysical importance and impacts the continuity of our immortal souls and so on and so forth, but it's not like anyone in Golarion is doing much better. I think we're all just doing our best to come up with rough analogies that don't contradict our observations too blatantly. 

Anyway. Afterlives! Lawful Good is Heaven, that's where they lead the assault on the evil afterlives. It's the one I know the least about, since the information that exists in Cheliax is obvious blatant lies. Probably it involves fighting demons. Maybe farming? The god of agriculture is Lawful Good for some reason. It's probably a fine place to spend eternity if you're exceptionally selfless and don't have a sense of humor. 

Axis, Lawful Neutral, I already mentioned it – they say it's a perfectly orderly golden city with countless millions of districts for every species and civilization on the material plane. The followers of Lawful Neutral gods claim that it's the afterlife that's the most like living. It sound really lovely, except for the thing where it's full of Lawful people. 

....Lawful Evil's Hell. Petitioners there are tortured forever. The Church claims some of them eventually get to rise through the ranks until they're allowed to torture other people, but they're probably lying about how common it is and how long it takes and how much of yourself you get to keep at the end of it. 

The Neutral Good afterlife is called Nirvana. It is a place of rest and healing and recovery from the trials of mortal life. And also of being turned into animals. I don't know why, none of the other afterlife planes do that. 

True Neutral is the Boneyard. That's where the goddess Pharasma sits and decides where mortal soul should go. They say she hates it when people end up there, so it's mostly just children who died too young to be judged. 

The Neutral Evil afterlife is Abaddon. The outsiders that live there eat souls – if your soul gets eaten, you're just destroyed, goodbye forever. Pharasma doesn't approve of that either, so petitioners assigned to Abaddon can choose to go to Hell or the Abyss instead. – the Abyss is Chaotic Evil and it's not very interesting, just demons fighting each other in an endless war of all against all. 

I already told you about the Maelstrom. That leaves Elysium, the Chaotic Good afterlife. It's supposed to be a beautiful unspoiled wilderness with no signs of civilization, but I think that's stupid, since I have to imagine lots of Chaotic people want to live in cities and who's going to stop them? At least the floating jeweled islands and singing waterfalls sound neat." 

Okay. Focus. She can do this.  Forget what the things sound like, she knows the translation-magic is doing something weird - set that information aside for the moment, she can't actually do that, but she can attempt the mental motion - and focus on the descriptions. 

She takes very rapid notes. 

Lawful
- 'Assaulting' one of the afterlives with an Evil alignment. 
- Agriculture. Which is probably a precursor to Civilization, so that fits, although now she has questions about afterlife ecosystems - clearly they have plants, do the plants come from plants in this plane that died??? 
- Cities. Organization in general? There does seem to be something Coordination-flavored there. 
- ...Whatever 'ranks' are. It's probably not the same thing as the different ranks of Keeper. Given the torture. 

Chaotic 
- Wilderness, the opposite of cities
- Landscapes as surreal art installations. 
- Reality not obeying legible consistent physical laws. 
- If certain cosmologists are right then Chaos existed before anything else did? 
- People fighting other people for no reason? Which is pretty 'the opposite of Coordination', so. 

Good
- Focused on being 'selfless' which probably means altruism but she's not taking for granted that it doesn't mean 'literally does not have conscious experiences' or something, this world is weird. 
- Not having a sense of humor. (Or is that associated with the Lawful part of Lawful Good?) 
- Rest and healing and recovery 
- Turning into animals??? But the other Good afterlives don't do that so maybe it's a one-off. 
- People...getting to do the things they want to do and not other things? Hinted at by Élie's description of 'Elysium' but maybe that's just Chaos actually. 

Evil
- Being tortured forever 
- Having 'torturing people' as a life goal for some reason, or at least that seemed like the implication? 
- True Death
- The 'demons fighting each other forever for no reason' might factor out with Evil and not Chaos, actually. 

She's...made progress? Maybe? Something there sort of hangs together, not yet in a way where she could give an explicit verbal description let alone math - which means she does not, in fact, understand what's going on at all - but she feels like she has something to go on when it comes to interpreting what the words mean. 

(Also she hates this place! It's kind of absurd to be upset about being here when the alternative she had expected was permanently ceasing to exist, this is not in fact worse than PERMANENTLY CEASING TO EXIST, but this does not mean that she's happy about it!) 

"I need a couple of minutes to think," she tells Élie, speaking very calmly because she does have the basics of Dignity down even in a situation as outside of her skillset and comfort zone as this one. Dath ilan doesn't teach people to crumple in the face of baffling and upsetting situations. That's not even Exception Handling, those lessons start when you're six. 

So she is not going to freak out. 

"- Right. I am not entirely un-confused but I'm less confused, I think? I - sorry, I'm not sure if this is a question that you're going to find easy to answer, but it would be helpful if you could point out some of the things about Cheliax and its Governance that are specifically Lawful, and ones that are specifically Evil. If there are other, um," what was the word for it, it wasn't cities, "- countries, that also have an alignment but a different one, I think it would be helpful if you could go through some of the different combinations, point out how Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil would be different from Lawful Evil?"