"I'm glad you have a better one and hate that we don't." 

Kevin does the actual casting; it involves a bunch of chanting in Latin which to someone with Tongues up is obviously a poetic description of the thing Marcy said it was going to do. It feels like being drunk at a party with your best friends, cheerful and relaxed and like nothing matters enough to be worth thinking clearly about, no reason not to just say whatever comes into your head because surely nothing bad can happen here.

Marcy makes her voice light and casual, just a friendly question: "Did you lie to us at all, earlier?"

"Nah. I didn't know if you had a way to tell, and I knew there'd be a review afterwards and they'd be on my case if I screwed up at explaining anything."

She hopes nobody will judge him for this. "What happens to people who screw up?"

"I mean, it depends, right? If you screw up at fighting the demons, they eat you." He giggles. "If it's a really stupid screwup you probably get demoted, or discharged. It's not really my job to talk to aliens, though! If I really screwed up at talking to aliens they'd just chew me out and make a note I shouldn't talk to aliens, probably. That would sure be a note to have in your records. And I'm a third circle wizard, so no matter how stupid I am they want me around to put up Phantom Steeds. Third circle wizards don't grow on trees! At least, not any trees I've heard of!"

"What are your organization's goals?" Not the most casual way to phrase the question, but she really does want the organization's goals and not Marit's personal hopes and dreams.

"You mean Lastwall's goals? Don't let the Whispering Tyrant out, hold the borders, hold the Worldwound. People who are more ambitious say 'close the Worldwound' but we don't know how to do that, and we do know how to hold it, so guess which one we're doing."

"Hold the borders against whom?"

"Belkzen. 's full of hordes of orcs. I guess we also want to hold the other borders, but no one's really fighting us for the other borders." He giggles. 

Getting an account of the start of this war and what the orcs' opinion on it is is best done from someone other than Fucked-Up Marit. Ditto for the demons' side, actually; if they're smart enough to impersonate humans the situation might me more complicated than "they're basically mals; kill them". She sticks a mental pin in it.

"What d'you think is the worst thing about Lastwall?" (They discussed a lot of variations before settling on this particular question; it's a good way to check for a broad spectrum of secret nefarious motives or internal factions without being as fraught as 'what do you most want us not to know'.)

"Huh. Man. Everything I hear about every other place makes it sound way worse. I guess it's that we're losing? We're too small to save the whole world."

Ow. 

(Everyone here has seemed so impressed by the magic calling them Lawful Good, and the Law is real but the Good is just luck, really. They spent three and a half years, or possibly over a decade, believing they were too small to save the whole world and using that as their reason not to try to save anyone other than themselves.)

Stop that. The interrogation spell has an ongoing mana cost. "What are Iomedae's priorities?"

"Fix the Evil afterlives. Stop the Evil gods. Stop everyone running torture-countries. All the other bad stuff that's worth stopping, after that, I guess."

"Do you agree with those priorities?" It feels like a blatantly stupid question, at this point, but dropping a question you planned to ask because it felt stupid is a bad policy.

"I mean, I'm probably not perfectly Lawful Good, like She is. I have priorities like 'become a super cool wizard' and 'impress girls with how I am a super cool wizard' too.

But, yeah, when it comes down to it, that's the important stuff."

(They got so close to getting all the way through without accidentally making it personal. Stupid garbage spell). 

"If you or your government was going to lie to us, why would they do it?"

"The inquisitor can lie to you about how her spells work and what she's looking for and how she'll interpret evidence. She can't lie to you about the law or about, like, things outside her inquisiting remit. Lastwall paladin oaths don't allow lying at all - well, even the paladins can lie to a third party - uh, say we're enemies, and I'm a paladin and I know you're spying on a conversation, I can say something false for your benefit, and clear it up at the first opportunity with the person I was actually talking to.

I think your question was kinda incorrect, theologically? But it's not a big deal."

That was the last of the planned questions; she gives Kevin the thumbs up and he drops the spell, and they give Marit a bit to get his thoughts in order.

"Thank you. As far as I can tell you're the ideal sort of people to work with on the kind of problems you're working on and I look forward to a productive collaboration. Sorry again for how unpleasant the spell is."

He blinks a couple of times, orienting. "Huh. It's not that bad, honestly. I guess if I hadn't known it was a spell I'd be all confused about myself as a person now or something. Anyway, I'm glad I could help."

Huh. Must be worse when you actually have something to hide. She smiles; she's a skilled fake smiler but this one's mostly not fake.

"You mentioned that my question about lying was theologically incorrect; I'm curious what was incorrect about it."

"Oh. Uh - if you're Lawful the way paladins are, you don't lie for reasons, you have contexts in which you are or aren't expected to be doing the thing where your words convey meaning. And the situations where your words are expected to convey meaning are - most of them, for paladins, and the exceptions are like 'I was talking to someone else and you were eavesdropping' which is a situation, not a reason. So I wouldn't say 'why would the government lie' so much as 'when would the government lie', because the answer won't reference their interests at all. But that's being insufferably pedantic and I wouldn't get into it most of the time."

"'When we're trying to get a solid grounding in theology quickly' is an excellent time to be pedantic about it." The distinction only matters if they are what they say they are, but now that she's sure enough of that to be getting on with it's important and she's glad to hear it articulated more clearly than she could have done. Being around people like this is going to be good for them.

"So I think the next order of business is either getting into more detail comparing forms of magic, or getting that language-sharing spell so we can start reading up on military regulations and paladin vows and things. Should we talk to the Inquisitor about who to talk to about those?"

"Probably, or to her boss, the fortress commander. I'm happy to stick around and compare details of magic unless someone tells me to do otherwise, and I can prepare a Share Languages though it'll take me a while, I have the opposite of a knack for divinations."

"That would be great. Can you talk and prepare the spell at the same time? I don't know how preparing spells works."

"It's pretty involved, I can maybe talk a bit but not that much. If you have magic detection, you can watch, see if it's the kind of thing you'll be able to pick up yourself or not. Some sorcerers can also learn to prepare spells in a kinda wizard way."

And he starts setting up the scaffold of magic on which he'll rest his spell, which is going to be a pain to hang because it's a divination and he's terrible at those. Oh well.

Abigail casts the best magic-seeing spell she has on Franklin so he can watch.