Huh. 

He nods, respectfully. "Thank you." 

What else do they need to know? Well. Probably it would help if he could try to unpack his actual reasons for coming here, try to separate that from the rationalizations. ...He's not sure he can do that, yet, it sounds - too hard - like it requires having his head in a much clearer order than it is right now. But he can at least - say things he thinks are true - and maybe that will help? 

"I think the Empire I wanted to build is - I read some of Aroden's holy book, that you sent - I think I wanted...the same things Aroden wanted. Based on what was written, which I did not and still do not entirely trust, but - I trust it more after, " vague handwave, "after this." 

Shrug. "I - think that is most of the actual reason I Gated here. They were about to recall me to the capital and - I am not sure what would have happened if I had gone - I had written a proposal that included suggesting we pull back on the war in Oris - I suspect it made my superiors suspicious, and they were already very worried that Aroden might be able to mind-control people through the artifacts. But - either way it would not have accomplished - working toward an actual alliance - if I had tried to go there and follow the usual channels. I think." 

"....the claim made by the Orisan rebel leadership was that there was no one in Jacona, not even the Emperor, who could decide to - be less paranoid, less ruthless - without losing to someone who was moreso - and no one could quit the game, either, because of the loyalty compulsions -"

That...hurts, but in a way that isn't surprising, and if he's flinching away from it, it's only habit and - the usual human reasons - not literal barriers in his mind. 

He lets out his breath.

"I very badly wish I had managed to create an Empire that was less - like that - but even in hindsight I am not actually sure what I should have done differently. 

- I was still under the compulsions until your people cut them. I - I am honestly not entirely sure how I - did that - but I suppose I have more practice than most." 

She snaps the book closed, plucks one of the smallest diamonds, and casts a stoneskin.

...Oh thank the gods.

"They're good."

Iomedae's instinct, when she has spent sleepless nights desperately trying to find a way to take a city without a massacre and then a solution far better than anything she could possibly have dreamed of falls into her lap not at all through her strength, is in fact to pray, to Aroden and to Sarenrae and Shelyn and Desna and Erastil and Shizuru who probably isn't doing literally nothing up there and to every minor demigod of fortune she's heard of, to try to brush every power that might care with thankyouthankyouthankyou, I will use it well, I will stretch everything you can bring me as far as I can reach, whatever you paid for this I will make it worth it -

This would, obviously, be enormously disrespectful to the distinctly nonreligious man before her who acquired these diamonds with his personal resources and evidently at fairly extraordinary personal cost because she said her world needed them. She is not going to do it. The only sign of the instinct is that her eyes close, and then she deliberately opens them again. 

And she says very carefully, "These are - the right kind of diamond. I am more grateful than you can imagine. I - could save hundreds of thousands of lives with this, plausibly more. ...and before I accept this gift I need to give you an accurate sense of how much it would be valued at - in our world - if you took it to our wealthiest cities and sought a fair exchange and weren't impatient to sell and didn't get robbed along the way. If I don't do that I would be taking advantage of you.

You would, with half of this, be richer than any man who's not a King, and most who are." 

Altarrin honestly has no idea how to respond to that except by - pointing out some resource-availability differences? That Iomedae probably wants to know? 

"....I purchased these for three pounds of gold, in Velgarth. I could have gotten a better deal on it if I had been less hurried. ...I cannot give a good estimate of how far that exchange rate would go, I bought out the entire inventory of the biggest port city market on the continent, but - further than this, there are other cities and diamond mines that could increase production if they had a reason. Probably the main cost to getting more for you is the Gate back and forth, I assume you have enough gold to trade for it, but Gates are still very tiring until I have a month to figure out a more elegant search-routing solution, and also I am not sure of the risk per each Gate of Tar-Baphon detecting it." 

" - yes. I'm aware. It's an advantage we were in fact already ourselves contemplating how to exploit. I just - 

- it is important to me that as far as it's possible, no one who tries to bring me aid will have a moment later when they realize I misled them to make the aid easier for them to part with."

He is not going to curl up and cry - he's not even sure why he wants to do that in response to what Iomedae just said, which is an extremely reasonable thing to say - 

"I know. I - did not come here - because I wanted to be rich. I came here because - your world might actually have worse problems than ours - and I do not want us to have to be enemies...." 

:His standards are incredibly low and every time you are Lawful Good at him he almost has a crying fit. Obviously you're going to keep doing it but I thought you should know.:

Iomedae would make some rejoinder about what convincing evidence this is for her own side of the recurring Iomedae-Alfirin debate about how extrinsically valuable it is to be a good person but honestly this is so wildly out of context that it's hard to even fit into that lens. 

"Well," she says, "if you were just trying to buy as many problems-in-the-world fixed as possible for the diamonds, I am indeed widely considered the person to go to for that, and that is what I will use them for."

:OK I think that one was just gratuitous.:

:Me? Be gratuitously Lawful Good? That sounds like the kind of luxury I could hardly afford unless someone were going to drop a dozen Wish diamonds on my head about it.:

Which is the sort of assertion that under normal circumstances he would definitely want to check against independent sources but he doesn't have a spy-network here, does he, and also he hasn't tested the limits of it yet but he is presumably still under substantial mind control and it would be stupid for Iomedae to let him go question her enemies about her. Especially given how her main enemy is Tar-Baphon. 

...He doesn't really know where else to go with that line of thought. 

- what other information are they going to want to know? 

"- I would like to be allowed to scry Velgarth, if you are willing. I - suspect," now that he's able to think about it at all, "that my disappearance will be very disruptive, and I– it might not be possible at this point for me to call off the war effort in Oris, I have - they probably assume I am a traitor suborned by Aroden now - but I would like to know what is happening and I think it would be informative for your order as well." 

"What do you need for that - we often use mirrors, here, I assume yours is different?"

:I can probably let him do that without any other magic but I'm not sure, not having seen Velgarth magic done before, and if he gates far enough away the dominate might stop working. Unlikely, especially with the amount of cooperative he's being, I'd let him if you don't override me.:

:If he gates off to another planet I'm inclined to - consider ourselves very much on the whole to have gotten a good deal. Does he believe us that he should not get Tar-Baphon's attention, that's really the only big thing.: 

"I genuinely appreciate that you tried to get them to call off the war effort in Oris," she says. "And I'm sorry that I participated in raising the costs of that war, and of course wish I'd done otherwise. I'm fine with you scrying your home world - conceivably we should get you set up somewhere harder to spy on, first, lest our enemies notice something interesting is happening here."

"- That makes sense and you should do that. I - do not need anything in particular for scrying - if you have large unflawed quartz crystals," hand gesture, he means about half the size of a fist, "I...might be able to make an artifact that will make it significantly easier to cast repeatedly. We have standard artifacts for within-Velgarth scrying that I mostly could not use for the interplanar version. ...Mostly need to be somewhere secure, it will be very tiring and distracting." 

(It continues to be clear to anyone reading Altarrin's mind that, while his surface thoughts are coherent enough, he is still in a lot of emotional pain and just barely holding himself together against an emotional breakdown.) 

:He does appear to believe us about Tar-Baphon but if he gates off to another planet it's evidence that his mind is very slippery and we should be much less sure of anything we've learned here including that.:

"We've got some of those, yes. Do you want a spell to calm emotions."

Technically this place is almost as hard to spy on as a place can get, unless they're planning to stash him in Alfirin's demiplane (Has practical problems and she'd mildly prefer not) or Alfirin's foresight-resistant demiplane that she hasn't told anyone exists. (Not a lantern archon's chance in hell) It's also, however,  kind of in the middle of the camp road, which is reason enough to relocate.

(Iomedae would rather like Alfirin to take four hours out of her day to make a new temporary demiplane for holding the Archmage-General, but that's enough of Alfirin's time she isn't going to volunteer it.)

Does he want a spell to 'calm emotions' - he's not sure what that means - he is pretty sure they've already been running whatever mind-control they wanted on him and in the world where they're hostile (then he's already lost) and also it doesn't matter. (These are mostly reflexive thoughts, not particularly specific to Iomedae or this world and its magic.) 

"I am not sure it will help but if you think it might then I am willing to try it," Altarrin says, rather tonelessly. 

"We're asking because we are no longer in a hurry, and don't need to cause your mind to be in any particular states, and are treating you as a likely ally. We are going to keep using mind-control to stop you from attacking us, or trying to contact Tar-Baphon, or fleeing unexpectedly. We're not planning to use it any more than that. Probably if you wanted to be allowed to return home Iomedae would grant that and we'd stop controlling you at all."

"I thought you could use a calm emotions spell because - you're clearly very unsettled, right now. The spell smooths out extreme emotions, it doesn't last very long and we can safely end it early if you dislike it, but a lot of the time if the emotions in question aren't magically induced in the first place just mellowing them for half a minute can stop them - bouncing off each other - and make it easier to manage them afterwards. Or it's possible what you need is some time alone with nothing important and urgent so you can deal with your emotions yourself instead of trying to push past them. This isn't really my job and your assessment is going to be more useful than mine, I just thought to suggest it because - you seem to have had a mildly traumatic - " life. lives. " - day, having all your compulsions removed seems to be affecting you badly, and it's impairing your ability to think and you strike me as the sort of person who would rather that not be the case. If you'd rather some time alone we can give you that, if you'd rather press through it and keep doing important things I think you're being an idiot but I'm not going to stop you."

....Altarrin's appreciation and respect for Alfirin has risen substantially just now. 

He - would, all else being equal, prefer to be back in one of his records caches in Velgarth for a year or two to think. Unfortunately there are things which are important and urgent and they aren't going to stop happening if he declares that they aren't his problem and - he cannot, actually, declare that they aren't his problem. 

He had really hoped that he would be less impaired once he was no longer under compulsions - he's at this point pretty sure that's what he was angling for all along, when he decided to Gate here, whatever he might have been thinking about how his imaginary Iomedae model would predict that the gods would prevent him from achieving any of the things the Empire needed and also probably murder him - but he is apparently just differently impaired. 

(It's very reasonable for them to have measures in place to prevent him from attacking them or contacting Tar-Baphon or fleeing. He doesn't want to do any of those things anyway, so it's not as though it's costing him much. He also doesn't want to return to Velgarth right now - except maybe to get more diamonds, but it might actually be better if someone from their world could figure out a way to travel there, they have translation magic and won't be an obvious target for the Empire's scrying...)

He's still not entirely sure it will help rather than make things worse, a lot of things seem to keep making things worse when he hadn't expected that, but - he does believe Alfirin, that they can and will end the spell early if it's not helping. 

"- That makes sense. I would like to try it." 

"Most of our people who can cast it get it from a god but we have one sorcerer who can do it and I assume you'd prefer that?"

...Altarrin is genuinely surprised. He thought it was obvious, at the point he decided to risk Gating to Iomedae's message-exchange point, that he's decided - well, it's not that he fully trusts Aroden, but he - doesn't currently endorse distrusting Aroden more because He's a god, and - if he had read Aroden's holy book and been told it was by a mortal human, he would be substantially more inclined to trust that person than he would a stranger. He thinks that...should probably also carry over to Aroden the god.

(And it seems like...probably a misallocation of their resources...to get someone whose availability for casting is presumably a very limited resource to handle this just because it would bother Altarrin otherwise...)

"- I do not mind either way," he manages to say out loud. "....I would want to know who their god was, if it was not Aroden." 

"The crusade employs empowered followers of more than a dozen gods, but I haven't brought any of the crusade's empowered followers of gods other than Aroden in on matters concerning Velgarth or you, because contact with Velgarth seems likely to be delicate in god-politics as well as regular politics.

I did begin confidential negotiations with the Church of Abadar, the god of trade and commerce, to sell them access to Velgarth. I'll pause those now, of course. They do not in fact have sufficient information from me to reach Velgarth, or the means, and they are committed not to using the information already disclosed in negotiations in any way."

They have a god of what– ...not the top priority right now. 

"Understood. I - really do not mind having a follower of Aroden cast it. If I thought it was at all likely that Aroden - opposed my goals - I would not have Gated here."