"The interesting question is whether she will."

"...Your theory is that she would want to hide the record of her existence? Or were you planning to give an account of her that is both unflattering enough that she'd want to remove it and sufficiently encouraging of imitation that we would?"

"I was planning to give a true and basically complete account on the grounds that there are - some, in my time, and more in the future we hoped to build - people who care about things like 'is this holy book actually complete and true to the best of the abilities of its creators even where it reflects poorly on them', and I wanted to get those. And that while we're doing some testing it's hard to guess in advance what'll have detrimental societal effects.

It is not shocking to me that some team of people found Alfirin's role - uncomfortable, in a way that you could gloss as being primarily about encouraging of imitation and that was probably partially that. But also just uncomfortable, right." She does not point out that he was himself uncomfortable, because she doesn't need to.

"So the theory is that it was true and mildly embarrassing, and maybe encouraging people in superficially similar and more obviously ill-advised decisions, and fell out of the published versions, and then Alfirin realized she could deny Lastwall knowledge of her existence, if she wanted to, and might want to for any number of reasons as an Evil archmage."

"I would do it, if I were an Evil archmage. I would do it if I were merely a Neutral archmage. There are a lot of grounds to want your origins forgotten, as an immortal archmage. It suggests where people should start looking for hints about how to destroy you.

- as a separate and probably unimportant note I don't think there was a good individual-level policy that would've caused you to not date Alfirin and thereby made things go better on the whole."

"I appreciate that and would have to dig up some notes from decades ago to decide if I in fact agree."

"Are you saying Iomedae was a Good influence on her or - there exist institutional policies which would prevent that relationship, you gave us some of them. It's possible, depending on where exactly she was in the command structure at the time, that you were not technically in violation of the letter of them."

"Iomedae's a ludicrously Good influence on her but the romance was a bad one. No, I mean - there are institutional policies, which all of us think are very important, and which we gave you from learning from various situations including this one, which - I'm not sure if they'd technically have barred this, they were in different units and reported to different people and were at comparable levels of formal seniority, but certainly if such institutional rules had existed, they would've produced a framework in which it was clear what supererogatory behavior in that framework was, and so it wouldn't've happened and that would've been better.

I mean that no such framework existed, so they dated for, as I recall, twelve days, after which Iomedae concluded that this was for various reasons injurious to their shared goals, and stopped it, and made the relevant institutional policies. And the only way to beat that, as I see it, is to have asked Aroden, and it wouldn't in fact have been a good use of His resources. ...I guess you could've asked Arazni."

"She was in favor."

His sense of professionalism wars with his curiosity.

...Well, in the end it is good to have friendly personal relations with allies. Heliu takes tea with Morgethai, occasionally. Khevos somehow manages to be the best of friends with half of Cyprians marshals.

"Fine. I'll bite. Why?"

"Do the holy books still have - there's a conversation we had the first time She took me to Axis."

"Yes. Not word-for-word, though I think that was you being conservative with detail and not a redaction. Did she know Alfirin at all or was it entirely about it being good for you to try having joy in your life?"

"She knew Alfirin. She liked Alfirin and thought we were both better when we were trying to impress each other. She said that she made me more - careful, and my vision of the Good more complete - and that I made her better.

But fundamentally it was about - she thought that I was too reluctant to make mistakes, to take chances, to be happy but also to do anything else that didn't obviously translate to a chapter of the book, and she thought I would, in fact, make catastrophic mistakes," bitter laugh, "in the three, four decades it was obviously going to take to do what I planned to do, and so she thought I should go ahead and make them and learn from them and stop having a self-concept that was mostly about not having made any terrible mistakes.

And none of us had - the rules I gave you. I obviously wish we had, and I think it's fundamentally fair to judge us for not having had them. Lastwall is meant to have grown into something better than the people who built it, that's the point of a country."

He snorts. Before today he wouldn't have been at all sure that they'd succeeded at that. It was never even something he'd thought of Lastwall as trying to do.

"Well, I'm glad you had someone to tell you to make your mistakes early. And thank you for passing it along. Now, I think we had been planning to discuss resource allocations before we got sidetracked talking about youthful indiscretions...?"

(That Lastwall didn't think of it as their mission is one of the obvious errors that happens when you assume Aroden has that fragment of human achievement covered.)

"We were! Marit has a more complete inventory, actually, I didn't want to carry a list in lest something go wrong."

Marit will call a Secret Chest back to the Material with details on the magic item and magic weapon possessions of the Shining Crusade.

Which includes kind of a weird amount of soul-trapping jewelry!

"...You've known about Cheliax for, what, a week? What were you stockpiling all this for?"

"After learning about Cheliax I recruited - well, Marit recruited - well, Marit arrested and I subsequently recruited - an eighth circle magic items crafter who has a technique for making them cheaply, and for them to trigger remotely and all at once if desired. A distasteful person, but presently working on shared interests. - the Shining Crusade has invented rules surrounding labor by prisoners and is in compliance with them with an external monitor appointed."

"...He did all these in a week? Or, no, he had made some already? Should we or anyone we're allied with be looking for remotely-triggered soul-trapping items secretly spread among our populations?"

"Is the state of Lastwall willing and able to commit to not using information about our activities in Golarion for inferences about our mechanism of interworld transit? We have formal obligations to keep that secret."

"We can commit to not actively trying to use that information for that purpose and to if we unintentionally make that inference making our best effort to not act on that information until we sincerely believe we would have come by it through other means. You should tell just me and I'll assign a team to jewelry-cleanup if that seems necessary with orders to keep their operation secret, of the people on the council with the authority to issue secret orders like that I'm the one least likely to immediately infer how you got here."

"There are thirty eight in the possession of various Mendevian nobility. We have a list of who. We have plans to handle it but it may be that you can do it more cheaply, or derive more advantage from doing so. They should not be possible to activate without the creator, who is, again, a prisoner on the other planet. - the monitor is also evaluating the jurisdictional issues and has approved our current course of action." Iomedae does not exactly regret having truthfully explained the Alfirin situation, but she is getting the sense she's going to need to be careful about reassuring them that their new allies are in fact fundamentally competent to do Lawful Good.

"...I would like to report that I believe myself to have inferred your means of transit. I still think I'm competent to not act on it."

Some part of him is amused to see Iomedae - Iomedae - acting out exactly the same pattern he's seen dozens of times in junior officers running afoul of the fraternization regs for the first (and usually only) time. Right down to the scrupulous emphasis on how well they are following all the other regs for a while afterwards.

"Shall we get it or do you want to?"

"I'd be better able to say if I knew how costly your plans for it would be, but my intuition is that you should. I'd probably just pass the information to Galfrey who would collect them all and in the process leverage a lot of favors out of her nobility. And she'd owe us but - we can't really call in favors with her without making the Mendevian nobility prickly about us meddling in their country, and publicly taking credit for the tip-off would make that worse, not better. Whereas the knight-commander - the other one - can publicly take credit and get more support for the Crusade."