Blink. :I am not sure if you mean that the decision I made is the - thing that leads to very bad mistakes, or if you mean a different thing we could have done instead.:

:The thing you did was very reasonable! The dangerous thing is - deciding that you'll kill the Star-Eyed if She attacks you, so that She'll see She shouldn't. For example. Aroden can do that but I wouldn't myself.:

:It is a mistake I might be more tempted to make if we had anything like the capabilities we would need to retaliate after the fact! Most of why it matters to me to avoid any vulnerabilities, right now, is that we incredibly cannot afford any more serious losses.:

:That makes sense. 

For what it's worth, a lot of my worries about the blood-magic and compulsions are not about what will come of it in your time, but what will come of it after your time.:

Nod. :I think I want to better understand the experience and intuitions that make that concern obvious to you, but not as a priority right now.:

He’s relieved that Iomedae doesn’t think he was being obviously stupid, in what he negotiated for Predain. He…wishes that were more deeply convincing to his emotions that he actually hasn’t been making a terrible mistake that will be embarrassingly obvious in hindsight at some later point.

:I think the next major decisions were around negotiating with the temple orders, and - the only one that was really high risk, where I was putting sone thing at stake such that a betrayal would be cost more that we could recover from, was bringing you. I had a very confusing conversation with Kariasha about it. …It turned out well, obviously, I am very glad I took that gamble, but - I am still not sure if I was tracking the right considerations. It is a type of decision where I have very few existing heuristics.:

:It would've been very bad if the nameless god also wanted to eat me: she agrees. :The upside was - my being competent before we return to Golarion?:

:And knowing that we have an ally among the gods here. It - I was putting weight on it, that we had such a firm piece of evidence that Bestet the god, and not just Her temple, is, well, at least more on our side than on the side of Vkandis. ...I am not sure if that was actually an important consideration, it felt important at the time but I may just have - wanted to feel safer.: Shrug. :I do think having you functional sooner is a major upside. It might take months for Urtho to reach your world, though I am hoping for weeks, and - there are a large number of problems you are well equipped to solve or head off.: 

He closes his eyes, trying to remember. :I talked to Her priestess, Thaliss. About the request that their temple set up a priest order with permission to use compulsions, but - trying to get a read on her - not sure if I would normally have found it useful but the headband is very helpful for trusting my sense of someone's character. I concluded that she is someone who cares very much about - things being good - and she careful, not exactly in the way I am, but - careful about tracking things which hurt people, or which have indirect effects that might cause more people to be hurt later. I was very scared, I am not used to trusting people based on trusting their - motivation to do the right thing, as opposed to their incentives.: 

It feels very hard to talk about, for some reason, he's grasping for concepts that he doesn't have words for. Maybe he had them before with the headband.

:...I remember thinking that in my position you would not be scared, and - that would not mean you would fail to be careful enough or miss warning signs, it would actually just mean that you could make a better assessment of the evidence you had, you would not be exaggerating the risk in your head because it felt scary, or only paying attention to the upsides and not the risk of betrayal... I think I thought about your decision to trust me, and how that - meant something good could happen that could not have happened otherwise.: 

...Honestly right now he is very badly wishing that Iomedae was a Thoughtsenser, and he could just shove it at her. 

:You will, in fact, get betrayed sometimes, when you trust people. But - it's worth it, I think. For - yes, for the chance to notice if an enemy general is someone brilliant and careful who you want on your side, the chance to do the kinds of things that can't be done alone.:

He leans on her shoulder. :That...is basically what I was thinking, to the extent I can recall it accurately.: 

And then he explained the situation to High Priestess Thaliss and she offered him a HUG and he hadn't realized how badly he needed it, hadn't really thought of it as the sort of thing that could help at all. He...sort of wants to talk to Iomedae about that, too, but he isn't sure what he's confused about and it sounds like a different conversation. 

:I decided it was worth it to ask her about the Mindhealer. She must have been aware of how worried I was - she was willing to let us bring guards, with weapons, even though that is normally against the rules at their holy sites. - I ended up deciding against that, it is really not the sort of thing that would help if the Nameless God had decided to eat you, and would mostly just result in a lot of other people dying. Anyway. I agreed to speak to her later, and came back and we talked. I am not sure if you remember much of it, you were still fairly impaired.: 

(It's the same conversation where he said...something, he can't remember exactly which of the things it was...and she had the baffling response about thinking it was sweet and not being sure it was okay to say it when it was clearly irresponsible for them to have a romantic relationship. He - sort of has questions about that too, actually, but he's not sure if this is a good time for it, yet.) 

:I don't remember it. Do you have it in your notes?:

It should be in the timeline notes he gave her, but heavily summarized, it wasn't really one of the major decisions Iomedae made and so he didn't focus on it. He does have more on it in his own notes - he was taking a lot more personal recordkeeping notes when he had the headband, it made it so easy - and he has those on him, and with that prompt can pull more of his recollection of it.

He gave her an update on the recent peace treaty negotiations. She seemed pleased with his progress, said it was better than she had expected. He said it helped that she believed he could do it, they didn't talk about that further. He explained that he might have a plan to get better healing for her; she said Aroden would be annoyed if she needed rescuing from an evil god trying to destroy her mind a second time. Ma'ar explained that he was very confident they could trust the temple order of the Nameless god, and - less confident, but still positive, that they could trust the god as well. He said it seemed like Velgarth's gods often need to act through mortals, and so it felt somewhat reassuring that he was fairly sure none of the mortals involved in the church would be okay with horribly betraying them. 

He said he had asked Marlana to pray to Bestet for guidance, and why he was inclined to believe that Bestet was on their side. Iomedae thought about it, to the best of her ability, and agreed with that assessment. She brought up that a particular healing spell from her world would probably do it, if Aroden had a church here and could grant it. Ma'ar wasn't sure what Aroden would need to do that; he explained that he planned to ask Urtho for help on researching interworld Gates, but was worried about how long this would take. Iomedae said she was probably too impaired to be thinking about good uses of Urtho's terrifying talents, and also expressed that it wasn't an emergency and she would be able to put herself together eventually.

Ma'ar agreed that it wasn't an emergency and that he'd had enough past advice from her to follow it and probably avoid very stupid mistakes. She said it hadn't been very long. He said it had been very high quality advice and that, at least with the headband, he could get by for now by imagining what she would have said. She said it that was sweet of him to say that, and also that she wasn't sure if it was a good idea for her to tell him that. He tried to reassure her that it was fine and she shouldn't worry about things being a bad idea to say, because he was aware she was impaired and would account for it. 

She reads through it, nodding thoughtfully like everything she said makes perfect sense to her (which it does). 

(Ma'ar is still confused about the whole 'romantic feelings' part of the conversation, but that's a separate conversation and doesn't seem as high-priority.) 

After that he went back to for further peace talks. Followup with the temple of Vkandis confirmed that the other mages involved in the superweapon attack had been tracked down. They had been in the Ceej Empire, which does use compulsions for capturing mages, and used them when they were helping capture said mages. The temple of Vkandis, Urtho speaking for Tantara, and Ma'ar speaking for Predain, all agreed that not removing said compulsions was reasonable as an interim solution. 

The temple of the Nameless God offered to take custody of Ravenwing, the surviving shaman of the Star-Eyed, who is apparently extremely distressed after recent events; they thought they could maybe help her come to terms with what happened. They weren't comfortable (yet) about their ability to hold potentially dangerous prisoners, so Ma'ar and Urtho figured out an interim agreement on having one of his mages put compulsions on her, so that she wouldn't be dangerous to the priests of the Nameless God. 

:I really think you handled all of this very well. And I'm glad there are alternatives to just killing people.:

Ma'ar leans on her for a moment. 

:After that I went to interview Kariasha, to - see if I could get any more information on whether it was a good idea to bring you to her.: 

He's going to lean pretty heavily on his notes, for this, because for some reason he still doesn't want to think about that conversation in too much depth. With his notes, though, he can recount it almost word for word. 

It was brave of you to come, when you are so afraid of me, and of Them. I kind of hate that I could make people trust me, if I wanted. That is not what trust is for, but it still makes it feel hostile to ask for it, that I could.

I am certain I can ease her suffering. I am not sure if I can heal her. The Eternal Flame has come to me a few times, but it is really not at the times when you would think the stakes were highest. I think it would help her either way, to come to the holy sanctuary. Knowing what I do of her, I think she would choose the risk, if it were her choice, but she would not be afraid. You are, and she entrusted the choice to you. I am not going to ask you to go against your conscience.

Are there questions I can answer that would help? I could - I am not very good at this, usually people come here because they already follow and trust the Eternal Flame, and I should know why but it is hard to convey in words.

He - it's not quite right to say that he liked her, at that point, but he had an overall positive impression, even if mostly he was very confused. His question for her was: why did she trust her god? 

And she told him the very baffling story of how, apparently, the Nameless God gave her miraculous Mindhealing powers. 

:This really does continue to sound like probably Sarenrae. The ancient gods are more baffling because they're - paying attention on weird levels, to weird features of situations.:

:It was very baffling! I, just... It did feel like evidence that the Nameless God was - at least not the sort of god who would use Their people to betray and kill someone who was trying to act in good faith.:

:Yes.:

:Anyway, I thought about the various ways it could go. I did not actually expect a miracle to be very likely, since apparently they are expensive, but the worst scenario - where They also tried to break you, which I think Kariasha would have needed to willingly facilitate. And - even then, I thought that Aroden would probably intervene and - at the very least be able to grab you if you died and find a way to fix it. Which would still be very bad! But not…bad on a level where it destroyed all of our options to fix things, forever. Probably. And the upside seemed - worth reaching for.:

: - even bigger upsides than you probably imagined, actually, because I have some - ambitious plans I need to be really really sure of myself to go ahead with, and that probably must be laid before we contact Golarion. I'm glad you did it.:

He nods, slowly. :...I admit I am curious what plans. I am not going to - press you to tell me, if you are worried about operational security - or about how I will react to it showing up more clearly in Foresight than you do alone, which might be a reasonable concern, it seems like our gods cannot see you as well as usual and this is much of why they were so alarmed. But it seems likely it would be - something where I want to help.: 

So she tells him about Hell. 

She hates telling people about Hell. It's necessary, even in Golarion, because most people don't really think about it, don't really want to think about it, if you put up an illusion in the town square they scurry away, it's not good for them to know. She feels like Pharasma's instrument, when she lectures people on how they need to stop being Evil so they aren't horrendously tortured; it's impossible not to feel like Hell's beneficiary, when people moved to terror for their immortal souls give her money for her crusade.

But it's true, and they will make less stupid decisions, if they know.

:One of Urtho's superweapons - it's a self-sustaining magical chain reaction, it eats magic and spreads from there. It's partially disassembled, only Urtho can fix it, but I expect he will, if I ask him to, which I haven't because - because this is in fact the kind of plan where the downside is almost without bounds -

- I think prophecy will be messy at home, too, if people from your world show up, the same way it was messy here when I arrived. I think that Asmodeus won't be able to see what I've done until I've done it. And what I want to do is send someone to Dis with it and trigger it. Avernus is too sparsely populated, but we could get nearly all of Dis, I expect, and if local mages can Gate there from here they'll have difficulty seeing us coming. 

It is the kind of spectacularly horrifying suicide mission where I don't know what would happen to the soul of the person doing it and they might in fact end up in Hell. 

- to be clear, what will probably happen is that Aroden will tell Asmodeus this and bargain for the release of some enormous number of souls, or some other thing as good as that, and we won't in fact use a contagious magic superweapon to eat a plane of Hell. But if Aroden doesn't call it off at the last second I do uncomplicatedly intend to do it.:

Ma'ar listens calmly. It's not productive, to be upset about horrible things when you're still in the middle of hearing about them and don't yet know how far to update, how much worse the world is than you previously realized. 

(And he's not personally afraid. One, because he can't be afraid right now, and two, because even if it turns out that this affects the people of Velgarth - which he suspects not - or will affect the people of Velgarth in future once there's contact between the worlds, it's not going to be applicable to him.) 

He's impressed. It is, in fact, a blindingly ambitious plan. He's not sure he would have thought to propose it. 

:That - makes sense. Is there any way the person's soul could be retrieved from Hell - by Aroden, or by your world's magic, or if I develop a new kind of Gate? ...I suppose it would be difficult to be sure, and so that is still an enormous thing to ask: 

(It's possible one or more of his immortality contingencies would survive that. But it's also possible none of them would, and - the one that seems most likely to work even if he's in another plane entirely is also the one he hates.) 

:I think I would want us to study the weapon directly, I - am not sure I trust Urtho to have thought through all of the potential side effects, especially those involving setting it off in other planes, it seems - not entirely guaranteed to me that it would only affect the plane of Hell. But I suppose that might be apparent to Aroden in Foresight. And if He negotiates an agreement then it will not need to be set off at all.: 

:We should not assume Aroden can see anything; if He can, Asmodeus probably can too, and we're deliberately trying to benefit from the fact that this interworld travel has apparently been hard for the gods to account for. We're going to have to figure out all of the expected side effects ourselves. And while the most likely outcome is that we won't have to set it off, we should make all our plans on the assumption that we will have to set it off. You never want to be in a position where Aroden doesn't call it off and you realize you weren't actually expecting to have to do it. 

Obviously I'll arrange an attempted resurrection for the person who carries the attack out, but I don't want to count on it working - and no, it absolutely should not be you. If I ask this of my Knights I will have hundreds of volunteers.: