'Decide what kind of life to lead and what group of people to lead it among' is not at all the kind of problem Marcy is used to solving. It feels entirely too similar to having gone too deep into the library stacks, except for how instead of being surrounded by books and wishing she wasn't she isn't surrounded by books and wishes she was.

"We'll take a look at our options and figure out what's honorable--Lawful--and will put us in a good position to help with the demon problem. Or one of the other problems, but fighting demons is something I know we're good at. I doubt we'll need more than a handful of days to decide unless a major complication comes up."

"Travel times are a lot longer than that, if you're going anywhere other than Crusaders'. But by all means don't try to decide today, you just got here. You could as easily have landed on Cheliax's side of the Wound."

Oh right, places that aren't in walking range of each other exist. (The last time any of them got somewhere other than by walking or the induction spell, they were ten. After that excursions outside the enclave would have been needlessly risky.) And they should make sure to put some effort into verifying the truth of everything Marit is saying, since if there are Good and Evil countries you'd expect people from either to claim to be from the Good one if they could get away with it. But saying you're going to put effort into verifying what someone is saying is rarely the best course of action so she doesn't. 

"Cheliax has a side of the Wound? . . . Are they fighting against the demons or with them? Is the Abyss the demons are from related to Hell?"

"Nope, the Abyss and Hell hate each other. They're both Evil but the Abyss is monsters running around killing anyone they can beat in a fight and Hell is the monsters in power planning the tortures of the monsters of lesser rank. Cheliax fights to defend the world from the Wound, because they don't want it overrun by demons either. There's a treaty; we can't bother their forces here, and they can't bother ours."

"That sounds a lot better than all the evil factions working together effectively. Is the god who runs Cheliax Lawful as well as Evil and that's why you can have a treaty with them even though I assume you hate each other, am I understanding this system correctly?"

"Yep, you've got it. Hell is the Lawful Evil afterlife. You shouldn't try to make contracts with them, they'll try to screw you over with a loophole and they're very very good at it, but for something as important as the Worldwound you have Lawful beings from the Outer Planes draft a treaty that's airtight enough even Hell is limited in how far they can push it.

...and I don't hate the people of Cheliax. I feel bad for them, because they're all going to get eternally tortured. The government, sure, but the soldiers are just people who got unlucky where they were born and believe that being a terrible person is their only real option."

"Yeah, I wouldn't really expect the people would have a lot of choice in the matter. The god sounds pretty hateable, though."

"I still don't feel like I understand the gods and what they can do and what kind of constraints they're operating under."

"Gods mostly act by empowering people who care about the things the god cares about. They can also send visions, or send their servants to convey messages or directly fight in wars, or do big miraculous interventions, but they usually don't. Powerful priests can cast Commune, which lets you ask them yes/no questions, and it's also possible to just travel to Heaven though I think you're only supposed to do that for a good reason.

I don't know any of the details really but I think there are a bunch of agreements among the gods, so that they don't usually have godwars, because when they do it's really really bad. So obviously Iomedae wants Asmodeus dead and He probably wants Her dead too but they don't actually spend all their time fighting." 

Sort of a twentieth century Cold War situation, then. Complete with proxy wars between empowered humans which then reach their own Korea-style awkward stalemates. "That all makes sense."

The fort is made of stone, squat and seamless. There's a gate. It doesn't open for them. Marit yells something in a different language at people up on the walls. They yell back. 

"Someone's going to come out to speak to you. They want to know if they should bring anything out, too."

Quick exchange of glances. "Could they bring us some water?" They could have brought their canteens with them, if they'd known they weren't going home, but, well.

"Of course. Should be just a minute."

It is, as promised, just a minute; the gate opens and an older woman with a permanent scowl strides out, holding four waterskins.

She speaks briefly to Marit in Taldane. "Proceed with the guards to Edel South."

       That's in the dungeons. This is not exactly surprising but it does - feel like possibly making a mistake Iomedae was telling them not to make. "Inquisitor. - I think it's very important we try not to scare them off, there's - a lot to lose if they're on the level. They aren't used to, uh, governments."

"They're not going with you. You proceed with the guards to Edel South."

       Which makes much more sense. If this is a demonic plot he has probably been mind controlled, and he's not going to be scared off the cause of fixing the world by spending the next day in Edel South having very tedious conversations over and over again, nor is there a Law-shaped case that in arresting him the command is being something different from what he thought it was. He tries not to look too annoyed. "Yes, sir."

And she turns to the four alien sorcerers from another planet or demons who thought it was funny to pretend to be that, and offers them the water. "I am Inquisitor Tanatius, head of security for Fort Traves. I will confess, all this is very surprising to us. Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves?"

This time she's going to explain things in a reasonable, comprehensible order.

"On our planet, magic is kept secret by those who have it because anyone who knows about it is at risk from the local monster population, known as mals. The mals' favourite prey is teenage magic-users--we only have one kind and they're closest to what you call sorcerers--so until this morning there was a school in something like a demiplane, made as secure against mals as possible which was far from perfect, where as many magical children as possible are sent at the age of fourteen with no adults. They stayed there until age eighteen, getting stronger with age and education, after which they had to graduate: fight their way out past the horde of mals living near the exit. Usually about a quarter of the people who went in got out; outside it was one in twenty. Last year, two unusually powerful sorcerers were able to repair the machinery that was supposed to burn the graduation horde, and this year everyone remaining in the school, especially those two, took advantage of this to do something different. We lured a substantial fraction of the whole planet's mals into the school while escaping ourselves, then one of the two powerful people was set to cut the school off from the planet and send it and all the mals off into the Void and come out last. We think it all worked, except at least for us the exit gate that was supposed to teleport us home instead sent us to a couple miles that way.

The four of us were the oldest year group of students from Boston, one of the hidden magic cities called enclaves. This gave us some advantages inside, both in the form of physical resources and in the form of having some people we knew and trusted going in. Boston's culture emphasized what this planet calls Lawfulness--honesty, trustworthiness, fairness, consistency.  There wasn't a government inside, just reputation and the knowledge that resources spent fighting each other were resources you couldn't spend defending yourself from mals. Marit said your magic reads as Lawful Good. Probably the Lawful comes from that history and the Good comes from helping with the escape plan; we didn't do anything impressive before then except survive."

"Are there people you want to try to get in contact with? Do you have spells that work across planes, with which Boston could be contacted?"

"We don't have any communication spells we'd expect to be able to reach our planet from here, but if you have any it would be really great to be able to tell our parents we're alive."

"How is the teleportation spell that was supposed to send you home meant to work?"

"The spell for getting into the school was called induction. It pulled students into their dorm rooms from locations all over the world. It's not technically a movement spell: the school is made of space borrowed from the real world into the void and at induction it borrows the space you're occupying and takes a certain maximum weight of you-plus-possessions along with it. At graduation you go out the gates and it puts that amount of space back where it came from, which you experience as appearing at the same place you disappeared from four years earlier. I'm not sure how it handles people getting taller, but people are generally carrying a lot less stuff going out than coming in and it probably has something to make up the difference. Franklin?"

"A proper explanation would involve general relativity but basically it borrows more with the next freshmen to make up for it. I know one or two of the relevant equations but for real understanding you'd need Julian."

"Do you have any idea how it would've sent you to the wrong world? Do students go missing from it frequently?"

"So, every previous graduation about half the people who started the run didn't make it to the gates and it was basically impossible to track what was going on, everyone just contacted each other afterward to say they made it. But it was also usually groups who came in from different locations going out together, and if only part of a group had vanished that would be really obvious. So if this has happened before either it started last year and we hadn't heard about it yet, or it was based on us all having gone out at the same time rather than all being headed for the same place. My best guess is that it has something to do with having already started the process for breaking the school off into the Void, in which case a lot of the oldest year could have gotten misdirected--we went out youngest first because even with the spell to distract the mals we knew it was gonna get dicey at the end, we were about seven eighths of the way through the order."

"I think I understand. Or as much as I'm going to, I'm not a planar transit specialist. And then once you arrived here, you ran into one of the border patrols?"

"Yes. They were worried we were demons impersonating humans; we're not but we don't have a good way to prove it on hand. If there's anything we can do to help untangle that that wouldn't be made pointless by telling us about it we're happy to cooperate." 

"We're hoping we can think of a way to do that," she says. "Unfortunately, demons do sometimes try things like claiming that they're lost soldiers. We have some spells that might help with determining whether you are demons, and if it's all right with you, I'll have some people cast them; I don't want to tell you precisely what they do in advance, because a demon who wanted to imitate the effect probably could. 

I got a report that someone or something may have given you paladin powers on your way up here?"

"That's our best guess for what happened; Abigail and I both had a very weird but pleasant mental experience and acquired a new sense that we haven't had a chance to check yet but might be demon detection, and I and possibly her also got the ability to do something that made my shots hit harder. I don't think I mentioned the shots hitting harder thing to Marit so if our stories don't match that's why. You can go ahead and cast whatever verification spells you're planning on and I'll let you know if I notice any of them." Conveniently she doesn't currently know any secrets that are relevant to anyone in this fort, so if one of them is detailed mindreading it's not going to get anything more sensitive than her opinions on which of her classmates were unreasonably pretty.