And they can get fried.

She pulls out her gun and--oh, there's something other than mana she can put into firing it now. Her shots rip through the demons.

If he does the crushing force spell on one at a time, does that make them fall out of the sky? Let's find out.

It takes a lot of crushing force to knock them out of the sky but it is doable.

Marit's trying to estimate the approximate combat capabilities of these kids for his report and just coming up with 'a lot'. Which is either great news or terrible news, there's really no middle ground here.

"- cool, okay. Sorry about the demon situation around here."

"I'm sure if you'd landed on us at most times in the past we'd've been saying the same thing to you. So you were saying that you think Iomedae decided to give us these abilities because she thinks they'll turn out to be useful for whatever we end up doing here? Does that suggest that she's indicating that the most useful thing for us to do involves being able to detect demons, or is it more general than that?" The bit about some things being cheaper for gods explains why only half of them, and with her longer range and Abigail's perception affinity it's a sensible choice of which half.

"Paladins get some useful abilities for spotting and killing all Evil things, and the in-many-contexts-more-useful fact of being paladins, which means they're Lawful Good and not doing anything evil and not conducting negotiations under false pretenses and so on. I have no idea whether Iomedae thinks you're going to need the literal ability to smite demons or the fact-of-being-people-She'd-choose or both. ...or the added durability. Paladins are a lot tougher than sorcerers."

"Those all sound really useful! Does tougher mean harder to injure or faster healing or something else?"

"Both, I think. More powerful paladins get magic healing they can apply to themselves in the middle of fights, and also they're harder to injure and harder to affect with spells and so on." He does not sound jealous because powerful wizards are of course even cooler.

"That's so cool! Does the healing work on allies too?" She experimentally bites her own wrist to see if she can notice any difference.

There is a noticeable difference, actually.

If the wizard thinks Marcy is weird he conceals it. 

"Yep. You have to touch them to do it until you're more powerful. There will be a pamphlet back at the fort, all about paladin powers and how they work as far as we know, though of course a bunch of things are individual and also probably different if you're an alien sorcerer and also you aren't going to be able to read it."

"We all have practice learning new languages and the spell you mentioned should help a lot. Is the written form ideographic, syllabic, or alphabetical?"

"The latter. I think. I'm not an expert in languages, myself. Taldane, which is spoken in Lastwall, will make you understood for the most part in big enough cities anywhere on this continent, and the other languages I have encountered are written the same way."

"That shouldn't be a problem then. Are there also books on, hm, the history of the Worldwound, what's going on with it magically, things people who have tried to help with it and how those went, that sort of thing?"

"I don't know how great the selection is going to be here, this isn't a fort where a lot of researchers hang out, but I'm sure that someone can find you. The short version is that a hundred years ago the gods had a war, one of them died, it caused a bunch of catastrophes all over the world, and a very powerful witch took the opening to rip the rift open. The world was scrambling because of all of the other simultaneous catastrophes and by the time we got things under control most of Sarkoris was gone. People built the wardstones, which maintain the barrier, and now we just have to patrol it, but that's - spending more than we can really afford just to avoid losing ground, and sometimes some demon manages a coordinated assault on a wardstone and we lose one and then we're that much weaker, forever."

"I really want to study the local form of wizardry, and the barrier in particular.--My affinity is containers."

"Huh, cool. If you enlist and have relevant talents you can get wizard training paid for, generally - that's what I did - and obviously if we could make the wardstones better then everything would be much easier."

He's nervous about enlisting in an unfamiliar military; it sounds like promising to take orders from someone he's never met. On the other hand, learning an entire new form of magic. He looks at Marcy.

She gets it and his concerns are totally reasonable.

"Can you tell us more about what enlisting involves? Mundanes on Earth have militaries but there are a lot fewer wizards and we don't really have governments larger than one city."

"- there are also other ways to get wizard training, I just don't happen to know much about them. Uh, enlisting soldiers take a class on their obligations and rights under our laws, and swear to obey their commanding officers and the charter of Lastwall, so long as those orders are compatible with regulations. You can resign effective end of your deployment at any time but resign effective immediately only with the approval of your superiors. You're subject to our military law and our courts. I doubt this is a very compelling pitch, if you aren't used to militaries. It sucks but you get superpowers and may save the world."

"I'm sure it works well when it's what you're used to, but--uh, important context we might not have explained yet, we spent the last four years in a demiplane with several hundred people, none of them older than we are now, and no government other than 'if you're more of a menace than the constant stream of attacking mals someone will get together a big enough group to kill you'. It's going to take us a bit to get used to normal society."

"....you're Lawful Good," he says, a bit pointlessly.

"I'm not saying I definitely won't join the army. This seems like the sort of situation where it makes a lot of sense to have an army. I just don't want to rush into anything." Also he wants to clarify with the others whether their promise to each other expired when they went out the gate, or hasn't expired yet because they're not back in Boston, before he promises anything else, but that's an awkward subject to bring up in front of Marit so he's just kind of kicking the can down the road.

Abigail gives Franklin a quick reassuring hand-touch. They'll get some time in private sooner or later and they can figure out where they stand and what they need from each other then.

"Are paladins expected to join the army, will it cause problems if Abigail or I don't?" She's aware of the same difficulty as Franklin, but also has an additional difficulty where she's been given something valuable by a being she's never met and has only the most general idea of how she's expected to pay for it.

"No, absolutely not. You can do your own thing entirely, if you want, and there are non-Lastwall orders you can join if you prefer those. The powers are not a promise you've made anyone and no one's going to ask you to make one. ...paladins who try doing their own thing are more likely to fall, but most people aren't Lawful Good in a besieged demiplane with no government in the first place, so I expect you'll be fine, probably."