"A sensible set of precautions," she says as they file through the gates. "Our truth magic is sufficiently difficult to use effectively that I want to think more about what questions to ask, but we'll want to take you up on that eventually. As for questions, can you tell us more about how paladins work, both magically and the details of the obligations that come with it?"

"So I wouldn't think of it as 'obligations that come with it'. Most paladins take vows, but you haven't, and shouldn't, at least not any time soon, while you're new to this entire world and all the surrounding context. You have no obligations as a consequence of being a paladin. Iomedae ensures that it is true of all of her paladins that they act honorably, that they do not do evil except where every alternative was even worse, that they can be trusted when they give their word and do not give it casually. But that's still not a promise you've made; you wouldn't have done anything wrong, necessarily, if you did something that made her decide to withdraw the endorsement.

Magically, paladins get powers that are extremely useful for fighting evils and protecting the innocent. They get both the ability to detect evil and the ability to smite evil, pick a particular target and fight it with particular clarity and strength and fervor. Paladins also possess unusual resistance to hostile magic. As they grow more powerful, they also get healing magic, become incapable of experiencing fear, and can cast spells granted to them by their god. They can form what we call a celestial bond with either a horse or their weapon, which lets them grant those powers as well. Like sorcerers, paladins benefit from enhancements affecting their force of will and determination for their spellcasting and their healing abilities."

"I agree that we're not oriented enough to take any kind of vows yet, though it might help to get some examples of the sort of vows other paladins have taken. Mostly what I'm trying to understand is--Iomedae, if that's who it was, must have had some reason for empowering us, and I want to understand what that is and either cooperate with it, in the sense of doing things that won't make her regret it, or--and this is less likely--deliberately decide that it's not something I want to commit to and give the powers back. Maybe what I really need is more information on who Iomedae is as a person, or force of nature, or whatever the gods of this world are best understood as. I'm working from a model that's based a lot more on legends from another planet than on facts from this one and probably making all kinds of mistakes."

"That is very reasonable of you. And the kind of thought process that would strongly predict someone becoming a paladin. 

Iomedae was a person, when she was alive, and left us a lot of notes on what kind of person, what she cared about, how she thought about the world, how she understood honor, the vows she decided to make personally and decided to require of her order. We have history books here with all of that. She also arranged for the church of another god to be able to convey verification, that she had turned into the god she intended when human. The god She wanted to be was one of allocating the resources of Good as well as possible across the worlds towards the cause of ending the Evil afterlives and the other great horrors of Creation. 

The gods are - not quite like people, though it's probably easier to imagine them as people than to imagine them as anything else. The gods are unfathomably intelligent, but their attention is usually fragmented across thousands of worlds and millions of sources of information. You might want to imagine a - very busy person, who can magically make temporary less intelligent specialized copies of themselves, and receive reports from the same, and who is commanding an army made entirely up of those."

Marcy follows the Inquisitor silently for a minute, thinking.

What a fascinating sort of god to try to become. When she imagines the sort of person who would do that . . . she remembers the first three years in the Scholomance, focusing completely on keeping her squad alive. She remembers Annisa talking about how you can only want one thing, and her thought that the two ways to get around that were to have a lot of resources and to have someone else looking out for you symmetrically to you looking out for them. She remembers the announcement that the graduation hall was empty, and the debates on what to do about it that gradually expanded their scope from "what's best for the seniors" to "what's best for everyone in the Scholomance" to "what's best for all the wise-gifted children of the world". Was Iomedae, then, someone ambitious enough and possessed of enough resources (or expecting that becoming a god would get her enough resources) to extend the scope of her plans to the entire universe? In the years before Orion and El, anyone who tried to go through the Scholomance with the goal of making sure as many people got out as possible would have just died, or else ended up doing basically the same things as someone focused only on their own survival, because the road to survival was that narrow. Last year, the road got wide enough for it to matter--and part of what made it wide enough was that everyone noticed the opportunity and got on board and made it happen. So the question is: is Iomedae's plan one that Boston should get on board with, and not one that will just get them killed? At first glance it sure looks like it--she ascended to godhood and recruited an army--but it feels like the right direction to probe in.

"How well has it been working? Allocating all the resources of Good to solve all the emergencies, I mean. Also how long has Iomedae been a god? I can't imagine the kind of problems I've heard about would be solvable quickly."

It's not hard to follow Marcy's logic; it's the same logic the whole student body worked through, more or less thoughtfully, after that first suggestion to send the mals to school.

It is not very confusing why Iomedae picked these people. "- it is hard, from one planet among thousands, to get a sense of how everything is going," she says, after a moment. "Iomedae can't tell us all of Her plans - the agreements among the gods limit how much they can tell us, so we only ask strategically relevant things - but on this planet, things are going badly. Iomedae, when She lived, was a paladin of Aroden, another former human god with many of the same concerns, and the plan was that a hundred years ago He'd return to Golarion for unspecified vast triumphs over Evil. Instead, there was a war among the gods, He died, the planet was devastated, hundreds of millions of people starved, the Worldwound opened, and Cheliax fell to Hell. 

We don't know what went wrong, exactly. Presumably Aroden took a bet that was worth taking, from what He knew, and did not work out. But things here are worse than they have been in a long time, maybe since Iomedae's time."

Gods can die? Well, shit. He gets points for not trying to sugarcoat it, at least.

"So then I guess the question is--is whatever Iomedae wants us to do something that will leave us and the planet better for our having tried. Where I guess the answer isn't necessarily no even if we die doing it, given afterlives." (Annisa would be so jealous if she knew. Marcy hopes she's alright, back with her family or somewhere better.)

"Oh, that I think we're more sure of. She wants Her church here to hold or figure out how to close the Wound, and keep Tar-Baphon imprisoned. And do something about the country ruled by the forces of Hell, though while that is a concern of Her church, it is not a concern of Lastwall's military, which has formal commitments of neutrality with respect to Cheliax and shared responsibilities with them at the Worldwound."

"Yeah. And that all sounds a lot more straightforwardly understandable by humans than the plan that got Aroden killed."

"I'd like to know more about the afterlives, please. So far all we know is that some of them are Evil and bad places to live--I mean exist--and the others are okay." 

"That sounds like slightly underselling the non-Evil ones. There are nine afterlives, corresponding to the nine possible combinations of Law and Chaos and Good and Evil. Lawful Good is Heaven; it conducts the war on Evil but it's also, you know, a place where you can spend eternity without material scarcity doing whatever interests you, just one where people are overwhelmingly the sort not to be content with that while everyone else doesn't have it. The Neutral Good afterlife is also reportedly a very pleasant place; a more major emphasis is on healing from the injuries to the person inflicted by living through very difficult conditions and under a lot of constraints, as nearly every living person has. Elysium is the Chaotic Good afterlife, and like most of the Chaotic afterlives somewhat defies description because it is infinite and different parts of it are very different. It also has no meaningful scarcity and people can do whatever's interesting or important to them. They throw unfathomably cool parties, reportedly." She says this like someone who has never in her life been to a party or wanted to.

"The Lawful Neutral afterlife is Axis. It is an enormous, very prosperous city whose disparate parts are connected by a million portals. The Neutral afterlife is the Boneyard. It's mostly petitioners who are too young to be sorted because they died as children. The Chaotic Neutral afterlife is the Maelstrom. It defies description even more than Elysium, not possessing persistent traits for more than a few minutes at a time, but its inhabitants report being happy, when they're possible to communicate with. They grow less so over time.

Hell is the Lawful Evil afterlife. It is ruled by Asmodeus, towards his interests of tyranny, slavery, and torment. Zon-Kuthon, the other torture god, has His own realm on the Shadow Plane. Petitioners in Hell are tormented over centuries to attempt to reduce them to building blocks from which devils can be made. Abaddon is the Neutral Evil afterlife. Its inhabitants mostly eat souls sorted there, and there is also a large population of humans in Abaddon which are forcibly bred, and raised in captivity so that daemons can eat their souls. The Abyss is the Chaotic Evil afterlife. It's full of demons and stranger things. They eat some people sent there, enslave and torment others, etcetera.

Most of the differences between the Neutral and Good afterlives are a product of differences in what kind of person they attract and what that kind of person builds. It's not as if you couldn't have a million person spontaneous art party in Heaven, Elysians just tend to want to do that more often; no one in the Maelstrom will stop you from trying to start an merchant venture insurance company, but if your heart's desire is to run one then you are more likely to end up in Axis. Over time, though, an afterlife tends to also make the people in it more like its fundamental nature, though in the Good and Neutral afterlives it's generally believed you can decline to be so altered if you want, at least to whatever extent the alteration is magical in nature rather than a product of the situation.

Most people think this is also basically true of the Evil afterlives. Their inhabitants are mostly the kind of people who'd enslave and torture or eat other people given the opportunity and who are given that and nothing else for the rest of time. I don't know about that. Hell seems worse than the kind of thing Lawful Evil people build on their own, though they do build some pretty terrible stuff on their own. Most Chaotic Evil people are not, in life, crazed torture-happy serial killers."

"Interesting. It sounds like it sort of drags everyone more towards the extremes of whatever they were in life." Which is bad for the evil afterlives but on a purely personal level is a satisfying way for an afterlife to be.

Marcy sounding satisfied about becoming more extremely herself is, well, extremely Marcy of her. Franklin's not complaining, though. Marcy being Marcy is great.

"Heaven and Nirvana and Axis all sound lovely."

Elysium sounds pretty cool to, at least to Kevin's ears, but if all the honorable people go to Heaven or Axis they're probably better.

"They tend to be the favorites around here," she confirms. They've reached a windowless conference room to which someone has brought stew and bread and potatoes.

They wait for Inquisitor Tanacius to take some food first,

Get food for themselves,

Examine it for mals or poison out of habit,

And then fall on it like underfed teenagers when it proves to be edible.

"We've been asking a lot of questions," she says once they've slowed down a bit. "Would you like to ask some of us?"

Military rations at Worldwound forts are not good. Add it to the long list of evidence that these people have had a time of it, along with the reaction to being temporarily blinded and the fourth or fifth circle equivalent spells before they're twenty and the fact they say they're from a demiplane where teenagers have to fight their way out past a horde of demons.

"I'm actually not sure I do. The immediately important strategic questions, from our perspective, are - what your magic makes possible, whether it's possible to contact your world, whether it's a good idea if it is possible, whether more people from your world are misplaced here, and what we can do to demonstrate to you that our aims align with yours, if they do. But the first three of those, I don't need to know, because this should be escalated, the fourth you don't know yourself, and the fifth seems likely to look more like you asking questions than my asking questions."

"That makes sense. Though a lot of those questions interact with each other." In particular the question of whether they can contact Earth, the question of what their magic makes possible, and the question of whether their goals are aligned. They still need to verify that Lastwall's goals are what they say they are, but if they are--she needs to talk to the others. She can predict what they'll say a lot of the time but this is too big and too unexpected. 

"If you don't want to dig into the first three questions right now, I think what we really need is some time for the four of us to talk in private, and then ideally to ask you some questions under a mind-altering spell that makes it hard to lie."

"Absolutely. Powerful magic of our world can make a place impossible to magically eavesdrop on, but we don't have that here. You are welcome to put up any precautions against eavesdropping you know. No one here will have orders to try to listen in, and I don't think they'd do it without."