"Well, you're welcome to try, but I'd be surprised if I could do anything more with that than I can do with, say, a ley line."

"What's a ley line and what can you do with them?" She holds out a hand for the experiment.

"Places with naturally occurring magical energy. You can learn to use it to cast your spells like you're a more powerful wizard, but you can't just scoop it up and then cast more spells." He holds out his hand as well.

"Woah, we do not have those. Mals would slurp them immediately. There are artifacts that can store mana you put in them but the really good ones that don't leak are made by professionals and none of us are professionals. Franklin's best at it." She boops him on the hand and attempts to pass him a dribble of mana, enough for a freshman to set a tripwire alarm with. 

"If there are any of those around here, we'd love to take a look at one. What sort of controls on their access are there?"

Trying to pass mana to him works as well as trying to pass it to a doorknob. 

"There aren't really access controls on ley lines, beyond 'no trespassing', and some of them go through land the command or the Church could get you access to."

"It would be great to check one out eventually. Though it turns out I can't give you mana at all, so who knows if the stuff in the ley lines bears any resemblance to what we're used to."

"Can you tell me more about the government and, uh, the church, in general?" She doesn't know much about Earth churches beyond what the more religious students do in the library on Sundays.

"Yeah, of course. Lastwall was founded almost nine hundred years ago at the end of the Shining Crusade, a decades long war between an unfathomably powerful necromancer called Tar-Baphon and the people who didn't want him to enslave the whole planet. The crusade succeeded at trapping him, but there was no way to destroy him, so they left Lastwall with the responsibility of watching over his prison so he can never threaten the world again.  - when the Worldwound opened up we took that on, too, because someone had to.

The great heroes of the Shining Crusade set up rules for Lastwall, so that we'd remain a Lawful Good state, and not be steered by whoever was in charge into whatever wars empowered them personally, and not lose sight of our duties. And the greatest of the heroes of the Shining Crusade, Iomedae, ascended, as the Lawful Good god of just war and prioritization and triage, and Her church is kind of the big one, locally, though we don't take issues with any other worship so long as it's not Evil."

. . . She's on an alien planet and has no idea whether any of that is true.

Necromancer sounds from the morphology like it might be the local magic's equivalent of a maleficer, except even more dangerous, and she sees no reason to disbelieve that part. Same with the part where he ended up immortal but sealed away though she doesn't think that ever happened with an Earth maleficer.

'Our country was founded by a god to be better than the other countries', on the other hand, sounds like total baloney. Not even real baloney. Scholomance cafeteria imitation baloney. Marit sure seems to believe it, though. 'We have freedom of religion except for the evil religions' is, well, the Scholomance often chose to provide its charges with spells in the form of history classes. On the other hand maybe this planet has maleficer cults or some shit.

She settles on, "A lot of people on Earth believe in one or another god but there's none that everyone agrees definitely exists." That'll be a useful statement to gauge his reaction to.

" - there's disagreement about whether your gods exist? Can't you, uh - actually, wait, let me think what I'd do if I were trying to verify that the gods existed. 

So obviously something picks priests and paladins, but I guess they could all be, like, getting their powers from some unknown and unknowable force of the universe, since that is a thing that happens sometimes. Hellknights can smite. Obviously powerful priests say they commune with the gods but I guess all the powerful priests could be conspiring together, or just talking to some entity that isn't the one they thought they were talking to. Angels and archons and so on, if you summon them, will confirm they know the same gods we know....I guess they could be lying?

You could truth spell the angels, and the priests powerful enough for Communes, and adventurers powerful enough to have had cause to go to the realms of the gods, but all of those entities are the kind who can beat a truth spell sometimes. I assume you do not find the objection compelling that angels wouldn't be Lawful if they were engaged in a giant conspiracy to hide that the gods don't actually exist, because devils are still Lawful somehow. Iomedae Herself would've had to not have guessed about this conspiracy, presumably, because She wouldn't have ascended if this just caused you to stop existing, and She was a paladin of Aroden, but I guess technically paladins wouldn't necessarily have to be in on it, they don't get Commune...

I'm sure this has an answer, to be clear, but I'm now kind of embarrassed that I don't actually know it. I'll ask someone when we get back to the fort."

". . . That is at least very much not the sort of answer someone from Earth would give if I asked them how to verify the existence of their god. Priests don't have magic powers unless they're also wizards, some people believe in angels and devils but nobody goes 'oh let's just summon one and ask them questions' . . . I'm not sure what paladins or hellknights are and it sounds like you're using Lawful as a technical term in a way I'm not familiar with. Also 'archons' is translating as a kind of civic government official from ancient Greece so we might be having translation glitches again."

"So, some people have innate magical ability. We call them sorcerers and I'm back to thinking that's what you are, just an alien kind. Some people learn how to manipulate magic with specialized tools through study despite having no innate magic, and that's what we call wizards.

Some people are given the ability to do a different kind of magic, divine magic, by powerful extraplanar entities. The most common form of that is that a person devoted to a particular god, and often already formally committed to that god's church, gets powers. Healing and strengthening their allies and specialized spells for destroying demons and so on. They receive their spells every day through prayer to their god, they cast them using a holy symbol of their god, and they get picked for being the kind of person that god approves of. Their god can stop sponsoring them if they stop doing things their god approves of.

Priests no longer being sponsored is pretty rare. For paladins it happens more often because paladins are - they have very strict vows, they cannot knowingly do Evil, and if they ever betray their oaths, intentionally or even under mind control, they lose their powers. Though it's easy to get them back when not mind controlled, if it was mind control. Because the paladin rules are so strict, if you meet a paladin you can be pretty sure of them. 

Lawful is - well, it is a feature of the world you can use magic to detect, whether a person is aligned with the great impersonal force of Law, but in practice it mostly means, are you the kind of person who wants people to be able to rely on your word and whose word is actually reliable, even to your enemies. ...all four of you are Lawful Good so I suspect you know what I mean even if we're having translation issues, people who haven't heard of Law in any form usually aren't doing it."

"That all sounds a lot more likely if gods exist than if they don't." Though she wants to see a priest do some priest magic with her own eyes (or better yet, with Abigail's magic-seeing potion) before she's really sure. "Lawful sounds like it's at least a similar thing to being honorable--keeping your word, dealing fairly, making decisions based on being the sort of person you want to be who makes the kind of decisions you want to make instead of chasing momentary advantages. If you have magic that detects that I expect it's really useful." It would let people build reputations in a society of more than a few hundred people without two hundred years of tradition vouching for them.

"I admit I cannot personally prove it to you but I am really pretty convinced about the gods existing. Whether we can trust them is a more complicated question, especially for the ones who aren't Iomedae and didn't leave us her entire life history, including the terrible mistakes and stuff, and all her intentions and plans for godhood. But for them to not exist it would really have to be an incredibly well organized conspiracy by people who don't get along and don't obviously gain anything by it.

Being honorable translates right. With our magic you can see who is honorable, and it is one of the requirements for most roles in the command and in the Church."

"What a great thing for magic to be able to do. We have some mindreading spells back home, but they're like trying to read a book when you can only see every third word and if the person isn't trying to show you the specific thing you're looking for it's more like only being able to see the vowels. Can you tell me more about what gods there are? It sounds like there are a bunch."

"There are, yeah. Uh, Pharasma, Neutral, the creator of the universe, goddess of birth and death and judgment - Nethys, also Neutral, god of magic - Erastil, Lawful Good god of farming and family, Abadar, Lawful Neutral, trade and commerce, Desna, Chaotic Good, travel and exploration, Gorum, Chaotic Neutral, war, Sarenrae, Neutral Good, healing and redemption, Shelyn, Neutral Good, love, Cayden Cailean, Chaotic Good, ascended human god of revelry and drink, that's most of the big non-Evil ones in this part of the world. I know they have a completely different set in Tian Xia and some of them are ours by different names and some aren't. There are also plenty of minor gods and I can get you a book with a list but I don't know them all offhand."

That seems like a reasonable set of gods for a planet with gods to have, and if they're local to this part of the world and other countries or continents or something have different ones it's no surprise that Earth doesn't have any of them. "And then is Good-Neutral-Evil another magically detectable thing? Whose definition of Good and Evil does it use, the person doing the detecting?"

"Uh, some people say it all goes off Pharasma's judgment which is fundamentally arbitrary and just happens to halfway resemble human values, some say that Pharasma's kind of aggregating the values and priorities of mortals, some say it's even more ancient than She is. Either way Good is doing things for the benefit of others, and Evil is hurting others. If you're not wronging anyone and not helping them either, or if you're going around wronging and helping in sort of equal measure, that's Neutral."

"Huh. That also sounds really useful. Do most people pray to all the non-Evil gods or just pick one or two favorites?" If she's going to be expected to be religious, the god of magic and the goddess of prioritization and just war (which presumably includes fighting demon incursions) seem like good picks at a first glance.

"Most people will pray to Desna if they're travelling or to Erastil for a good harvest or to Pharasma for the soul of a dead kid, you know, as it comes up. Some people get more into the service of a particular god or a few than that."

So not too far off from polytheistic Earth religions except for the probably being true part. "We should probably read some more about the gods at some point--wait, the translation magic is on you not us. I should learn your language and then read up on gods. And learn the common kinds of demon and what they're strong and weak against."

"I can give the translation spell to you sometimes but it's at third circle and so competes with other things the fort needs very badly. There's a rarer spell that shares the language directly into your brain. Someone can prepare it tomorrow, give you a head start on learning the language the slow way. 

Demons are generally immune to electricity and to poisons, and vulnerable to cold iron weaponry and to weaponry aligned with Good. Aligning weapons with the fundamental forces of Good, Law, Chaos, and Evil can be done with spells we have, or the weapons of sufficiently powerful paladins and so on will just count as Good. We can teach you to recognize everything that shows up a lot. There are a ridiculous number of kinds of demons but most demons you see will be the same dozen kinds." They have started winding up the narrow, exposed approach to the fort. The wizard is a bit out of breath but it'd be rude to get back on his horse and make the guests walk. "I should get you some other books, too. The Worldwound's, uh, a big problem, but it's not the only big problem, you'll want to at least know what else you could be working on."

Marcy misses the first part of the tactics explanation because she heard the words "shares the language directly into your brain" and was immediately overwhelmed with greed, or possibly lust.

But that's okay, because the other three were still paying attention.

Abigail notices Marit being out of breath and slows down a bit so the others do too. "A list of this world's problems would be good. The Worldwound sounds very like the sort of thing we've been training our whole lives to handle, but there might be something else we'd be even better at."