"I certainly hope they don't. Are your gods ...less stringent?"

"Pharasma's the only one who decides. As best we can tell a bit more than a third of people end up neutral with respect to Good and Evil and bit less than a third end up at each extreme. The decisions themselves basically make sense. One could nitpick – and I do – but people generally sort evil because they do things like beat their wives or starve their peasants or have children in Cheliax when they know they'll almost certainly go to Hell." 

" - well, I don't think our mortals do any of those things. Probably some of them beat their wives?"

– Yeah, Élie's not sure why he expected the Quendi to be calibrated about this. 

"If I have time, I'd like to look into it." 

Of course, he'd also like to a get a sense of how the human subjects really live. Even a staged visit will be better than nothing. 

"Of course. I can have some people from the human military units brought here for interviews, if you'd like, or you can ride south to the villages; it's a few day's travel."

"I would like to visit the villages one day – " which he will be selecting, with no notice, when he no longer requires a Quendi interpreter – "but it doesn't seem like the most urgent priority just now. 

"As you like. I'll see who's nearest and if they can spare some human soldiers, and the villages can wait. We can make announcements that it's extremely important for everyone to not beat their wives? Separate the married couples? Is it specifically that or is that just a particularly characteristic sort of thing?"

It's not like Élie's never met anyone who's willing to stamp out essential freedoms to save their people from infinite suffering. Some of Élie's best friends are willing to stamp out essential freedoms to save their people from infinite suffering! Heck, Élie's been there himself. 

He doesn't think he's ever seen a person he could respect – someone who understands the stakes, someone driven by disgust and horror at everything Hell represents – offer to do it quite so casually. Bernat, the public prosecutor, took the job on the condition that when his time came he'd be granted the mercy of a final blade. Porras, the head of the censorship bureau, writes discourses on the liberty of the press, to be published when their Republic is secure. And Lucien – well, Lucien's the reason Galt won't have a constitution this year. But Élie knows that the evening after the vote, he wept. 

Of course, there are ultras. One of them had the rostrum when Élie stepped through a wall into Beleriand. Her speech was something about taking all the children of rebellious Iobére to be raised by good Republicans – or better yet, as wards of the state. The prospect seemed to excite her. Now that he thinks about it, hadn't he felt rather ill? Isn't that why he wanted to step outside? It's not the proposal itself he objects to so much as the ease with which she offered it. He's sure that woman did quite well for herself in Cheliax. 

Curufinwë doesn't seem like that, but he's been wrong before. 

"It's a characteristic example. I suspect you don't understand humans well enough to make useful determinations here. I'd like to know what your native concept of Evil is, and if it's at all similar to ours." 

" - well, there's - Melkor, right, enslaving and torturing people. But in Valinor, when we spoke of the evils Melkor had introduced into the world, we weren't talking about an epidemic of people enslaving and torturing each other. People who accused each other of evil meant - defying the gods. Desiring independence. Defending yourself. Having relationships the gods don't approve of. Making plans to leave Valinor. Demanding what was rightfully yours. Being willing to resort to violence even when your cause was just."

"None of those things are Evil as the people of Golarion understand it. Maybe resorting to violence? But that would depend on the case. If a starving orphan steals some candy from my pocket and I, I don't know, decapitate him, that's Evil; raising arms against a tyrant would be Good." 

" - right, well, that makes sense to me, but the Valar want everyone to believe raising arms against a tyrant is evil so that no one will overthrow them, or complain about them."

Élie is starting to put together a picture. The local gods are obviously, extremely Lawful Good. They've convinced themselves that any deviation from their own particular laws is Evil: that's a very Lawful Good mistake to make. The Quendi rebelled and now they think Evil means anything short of joining the Sacred Order of the Knights of Taranx whose members do nothing but bathe in ice-water, fight demons, and feed the widow and orphan on alternate week-ends. Delightful. 

"It seems like we have similar intuitions about what it really means for a person to be evil – which is interesting, since our words are so different." 

"I'm not sure we do! Or - I think we agree that gods of torturing people are very bad. But I suspect there are a lot of things that aren't - that - and it's not a popular topic, since the Valar went around twisting us all around their idea for so long."

" – Alright, here are some things that almost everyone on Golarion would agree are Evil: torture, murder, stealing from the poor, abortion, violence towards those in your power, raising armies of  undead, rape, bearing false witness. Most of these could be mitigated by circumstances. Reasonable people disagree about things like the line between beating your children and acceptable corporal punishment, or if there are any positive obligations it's Evil to deny. The general theme, I think, is cruelty. Evil is a lot of things, and if I had good definition I'd have told you already, but if I had to try – it's actions which stem from a refusal to see other beings as possessing their own autonomous rational will. Treating people as objects, if you like. 

Does this sound like a concept your culture has?"

" - not that doesn't also include in it 'disobedience to the gods' and 'war' and 'taking prisoners'."

"Making war and keeping prisoners aren't Evil, but people have a much harder time avoiding Evil when they do so. It's not unusual for Lawful Good entities on Golarion to decide that disobeying them is Evil and the rest of us tend to disagree pretty strenuously, but of course the empirical question is difficult to answer." 

"Then I suppose I know more or less what you mean, and don't see anything wrong with a little bit of Evil sometimes, once we've burned every Angband to the ground."

Élie wonders if this is what he'd be like if he'd been born in Lastwall instead of Cheliax. 

"I don't see any reason not to start on that immediately, then. I can speak to some of your human commanders tomorrow – incidentally, what is their language? – and in the meantime I'll prepare a curriculum. You should decide who can teach me your magic, and who ought to learn mine." 

"Thank you. I'll make those arrangements. They also speak Quenya, and we can arrange a translator if you need it."

That's very distinctly not answering his question. 

"Thank you. I hope that soon I won't need one." 

Then he'll round some people up for magic teaching and magic learning! And arrange for some nearby humans to come directly to his fortress to make friends with a human from an advanced human civilization! And then maybe he can ask some linguistics questions? He has a lot of linguistics questions.

Élie can answer them! He can answer them for Galtan and Chelish Taldane and speak at some length about how both languages grew out of ancient Azlanti! 

This is much more fun than trying to figure out how to teach a bunch of Quendi enough magic to be useful in the fight against their torture god without rapidly outliving his own usefulness. 

It is very apparently way more fun for him too. Lunch will be delivered eventually and other than that he'd do this all day.

Really. He isn't at any point going to make him do something more productive. 

....why?