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Iomedae in the Eastern Empire!
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- she hates these people. She hates them for the miserable campaign so far, obviously, and also on some level she hates them for losing. There's something - she can't quite complete the thought, but something - in rebelling if you can win. When you can't, it's just evil and horrible and stupid. 

 

Could he be telling the truth? Probably not. And will they kill her, if she learns some terrible secret, no. If they could afford to kill her then the person who was here in her place in the first place would be someone who wanted to be here.

"I need the compulsions adjusted," she says aloud. "Make him listen to me."

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(Her commander does not report that he is supposed to be any sort of secret agent.)

Compulsions adjusted -

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He now has to think about her!

What he's thinking, right now, is that this is in fact something the Emperor has to hear, and by keeping him here instead of sending him to Jacona, they are screwing up tremendously, it will suck to be her.

(He, uh, has to think about what she will ask him, not quite what she did ask him.)

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The prospect of wasting the Emperor's time by escalating-as-urgent some nonsense by a captured rebel is at least as intimidating as the prospect of being wrong, here, though. She grits her teeth and pushes on. 

:Aroden sent no miracles in the battle. Your forces were crushed.:

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Yes, he was there, he did see that, this is a minor irrelevant detail - 

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:Did you have any of His priests. Were you expecting any miracles.:

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Whose priests??? What miracles??? He thinks she's misunderstanding something very basic -

(no, is accessible as a fact if she is good at what she is doing)

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She's good at it. She doesn't like it, but incompetence just makes it take longer.

 

:You know whose priests. The winged woman with the glowing sword. How did you convince her to assist you in your war? Or did she convince you to fight one?:

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Oh, Aroden's priests. The Emperor convinced them oh shit he thought it -

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It's a remarkably persuasive set of half-instinctively-suppressed thoughts, enough so that her stomach lurches, before she reorients.

If the Emperor for some reason authorized a rebellion in Oris - maybe to smoke out the Arodenites? - then he now wants the rebellion crushed all the same, or he would have sent his army with different orders. It's not as if 'give the enemy general straight to the Emperor's personal interrogator' is an order that couldn't have been given, or that would have even raised particular concern.

 

 

 

And if she learns something she isn't supposed to know, and they kill her, then she'd stop having this job, so - pluses and minuses, really.

 

 

She dutifully passes this claim along and then gets back to digging into his head, not at this point with any particular subtlety. 

 

:You're clever, and this has gone far too far for that to get you anywhere. How did you meet the priests of Aroden. When did you learn of the priesthood of Aroden.:

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It's like pulling teeth, and Samien makes them dig, with immense care and immense difficulty, for every bit of information.

But in the end, they get it.

He's not Marshal Orestan. He's an actor. He doesn't even know the name of the real Orestan, just that he's some kind of genius.

Iomedae approached them, not the other way around. She was the only priest until she started training more.

The real Orestan was chair-bound, almost bedridden, from burns; Samien doesn't know where he got them.

Everything they know about Aroden, they got from her.

And what they know about Aroden -

"The stars in the sky are suns like your sun, with worlds like your world about them, and Golarion is one of them, and it is where I operated until three weeks ago, as the Knight-Commander of the Knights of Ozem and of the Shining Crusade..."

"We have a god of tyranny and slavery and torment at home and Aroden and I mean to kill Him..."

"There are no very important resources I possess or know of here other than myself and Aroden, who I think operates here only at great expense..."

"Aroden has a very strong claim on my immortal soul, values it highly, and I believe quite confidently will grab it, if I die here. Then He'll likely tell His Church at home to resurrect me."

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Altarrin, receiving the summarized report on the interrogation, has so many questions

 

He was really hoping that hearing back on this would answer some of his questions. It's obviously normal and not unexpected for any source of new information to result in some additional questions, just, ideally it should be a ratio that results in having fewer questions rather than more. 

Does this answer any of his pressing questions? Well. It...locates the opaque mystery box of unanswered questions in a different place? Because apparently Iomedae, the occasionally-winged priestess - and her god, Aroden - are from another planet. This makes the impossible magical artifacts less surprising, in some sense, but doesn't give him better predictions about how they work...

 

Take a mental step back. It does give him some new information. Starting with the fact that Aroden, being a god native to ANOTHER PLANET, can only operate here at great expense, and thus - probably - won't keep intervening in Velgarth now that Iomedae, His only priestess in Velgarth, is dead.

(Though apparently Aroden was going to grab her soul and...and his church, on the other planet, has the power to resurrect the dead - set that aside it's not the most relevant part here and it's disproportionately upsetting to think about.)  

 

- there's a god of tyranny and slavery and torment who Iomedae meant to kill, can you even kill gods, it sounds like she thought so - and thought Aroden would back her in it, which is even more surprising than the first half - 

 

There's an important question he's forgetting to ask but he's not sure he wants to know the answer

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...He should maybe be taking a mental step forward, actually, and figuring out which if any elements of this report are urgently decision-relevant on the timescale of candlemarks. 

 

The 'rebel general' they have in custody isn't the real leader. Presumably this information reached General Salan well before Altarrin learned of it, though, and Altarrin trusts him to update his plans accordingly. They should find out where the real 'Marshal Orestan' is, but probably General Salan is on top of this. 

 

It sounds - unlikely, at least - that Aroden will intervene in this war. Altarrin does very badly want to speak to one of the priests who Iomedae trained, which at least implies giving the army some different orders when they march on the capital. (The usual policies include being quite willing to kill priests who are actively resisting the invasion. Altarrin suspects that a priest of Aroden, even a barely-trained one in a world where Aroden apparently can't even operate, will...probably resist their city being conquered.) 

 

...What else...? 

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The stars in the sky are suns like your sun, with worlds like your world about them 

 

...That isn't a question. 

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Aroden has a very strong claim on my immortal soul, values it highly, and I believe quite confidently will grab it, if I die here.

 

Also not a question, but it's a more...pressing...not-question. 

 

- still not urgent on the timescale of candlemarks. 

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...It seems like plausibly most of this is either non-urgent, or else plausibly urgent but way too underspecified to make decisions based off. 

So. First priority is to get more information. Next step on that is - talking to the actor who played 'Marshal Orestan' in public, who probably does in fact know quite a lot about 'Marshal Orestan's work. 

 

This is more complicated than it is urgent, and so he writes a letter on Imperial letterhead to be (still pretty urgently) conveyed to the on-site team involved in the actor's interrogation, requesting that they prepare the usual security arrangements for him to come in person. It sounds like the actor is difficult in interrogations and Altarrin thinks he can learn more. 

(He really wishes it was verifiably safe to use the helmet that gives you short-range Thoughtsensing. It would be so useful.) 

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The actor is absurdly difficult in interrogations! He just appears, to all reasonable investigations, to be a spy planted by Emperor Bastran, living in some bizarre delusional universe in which various verifiable facts about him are not in fact true! It's really annoying!

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This sounds like exactly the kind of situation that Mage-Officer Arbas is shockingly (and somewhat concerningly) good at handling. Altarrin does have other very skilled interrogators, but the Gift-combination that Arbas has is, in fact, extremely rare, and - well - the combination of those Gifts and Arbas' personality is even rarer, which he is generally grateful for but this sort of seems like a scenario where you want Arbas, personality and all. 

 

He's not sure of that yet, though, so he'll send a comms-spell update to Emperor Bastran's staff warning him that he may want to borrow Arbas, and finish all the other loose ends on his current projects, and then arrange to Gate over to the facility where the actor is being held. 

 

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"Ah, good, Archmage-General Altarrin," he says, looking calmly up to where the general is. "It's good to see you." His thoughts are apparently about how Altarrin is his handler for the elaborate conspiracy his Thoughtsenser is not at all cleared for.

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His Thoughtsenser miserably passes this along to the Archmage-General, a much more important person than she'd prefer to ever be in the same room as.

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(Altarrin is not feeling paranoid enough about mysterious Arodenite godinfluence to impose any additional barriers to the flow of information, so he's approved receiving direct reports from the Thoughtsenser on-site, who he does sort of wish were less scared of him.) 

 

...He'll play along, for now. He can make a show of shooing everyone else out of the room, even, this won't matter for the Thoughtsenser since there's an adjacent vestibule that's inside the interrogation room's shielding.

"Report?" he says, trying to radiate quiet approval.

 

(He might be better at acting out this stupid pointless play if...well, if it felt less stupid and pointless.)

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"So I think the Aroden cult is working," he says. "We have actually made some real progress displacing the actual gods, and Oris is accepting Aroden as imperial-teachings-but-without-the-empire."

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Approving nod. "And what are the elements of those teachings that have been the hardest for people to accept?" 

 

(He is also holding his mind open to the Thoughtsenser a room over, he could really use some hints here for where to go next.) 

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The Thoughtsenser in the next room over is so confused???????? She'll get Altarrin whatever she can but, uh, the man's surface thoughts are just consistent with that.

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