"Irabeth recommended you as another pair of ears to check over my speech for a forthcoming announcement."

"Certainly. What do you want me to listen for, fact checking?"

"Absolutely, if you find any errors, but mostly for - tone, mood, cultural resonance - I'm very very foreign."

"Normally this is where I'd say so am I, but honestly it's less bad than it could be; plenty of people here still speak Taldane, even if they have an accent. What's the kind of message that you want to send, and who do you want to send it to? Are you prioritizing the Mendevians listening live? The churches of the gods? Foreign adventurers in Absalom? The governments of Taldor and Galt?"

"Oh, good question. How about I read you the draft and you tell me if it's drastically off for any of those?"

"Certainly. Obviously it won't be equally compelling to everyone, but I can see about identifying what tradeoffs it's making."

So she clears her throat and reads the speech.

"Hmm. So other people probably have a better finger on the pulse of how the locals will react; I assume from your comment that you've spoken with someone about it, and they seemed positive, so I'll focus on everyone else. I think this probably plays quite well in Andoran and Galt - not to the point that either government seriously steps in, but it's a step towards it for Andoran and I think you probably wouldn't get that from Cyprian unless you promised to subordinate yourself to Galt and establish a sister republic in the liberated territories. Cheliax and the church of Asmodeus are unlikely to be impressed, but you aren't burning bridges with them and anything that would impress them would be burning bridges elsewhere since they aren't terribly popular with anyone else. I expect it mostly doesn't get you anywhere in Absalom; if you want to motivate adventurers, you want to promise riches, opportunities to get stronger, or a good cause, and if they wanted the last one they'd go through Lastwall. That's nothing you can't fix with advertisements or sufficient wages, obviously, but I wouldn't expect this speech to contribute. The church of Iomedae in Lastwall will appreciate it and probably send you exactly as many forces as they were planning to anyway according to what is strategically indicated.

"In terms of other powers, in Taldor you're likely to get some praise for your noble intentions and maybe some token support. If you wanted to change that, you should spend more time talking up it as a glorious endeavor of civilization, thoroughly praise Iomedae since we consider her a national hero, and ideally have someone in their court connecting you with a faction that could use your words for some internal benefit and would scratch you on the back in exchange. To appeal to the church of Sarenrae, you would want to emphasize your goals of defeating evil and defending the innocent more. Osirion doesn't get involved in foreign wars, Ustulav lacks the capability to even hold their own section of the border without Lastwall, and the river kingdoms are currently occupied with Galt and too disorganized to offer much besides mercenaries anyway.

"Obviously some of these will come at a cost to how flattering and inspiring Mendevian crusaders find it, but whether they're worth it or not depends on what you want to get out of it."

"I'm given to understand that I very much do want adventurer attention and support. I can at least name-check Iomedae and defeating evil."

"That's always the trouble in wars, yes. There's no beating armies when it comes to combat, but when you need versatility or miraculous victories or rapid response forces and so forth it's hard to do without groups of elites. Especially high circle casters, and most of those aren't hanging around in armies. I wouldn't put too high expectations on the outcomes there, even the perfect speech isn't going to accomplish miracles and expecting it to is just setting yourself up for disappointment at a good performance, but at least on the margins I think that'll help."

"Margins matter. Thank you very much for your help." She expands the paper between a few lines to have room to scratch in notes.

"It's the least I can do."

Klaem will return to his men to help them finish up the check, and prepare for their next sweep.

Ky helps a bit and then swings back to the library to read.

The lines have pushed up much of the way to her library at this point, so it's not a particularly long hike, and any remaining cultists are wisely keeping their heads down while every demon that can't hide or flee dies. Nobody is willing to accost her on her way there, and she'll be free to read uninterrupted until a team arrives to sweep the building.

She'll let them in for a double-check; some of them have powers she doesn't for checking nooks and crannies.

A sweep of the building doesn't reveal anything with detect evil, though they do spend a while looking at the statues suspiciously.  Eventually they declare the building cleared and get out of Kybele's way.

Do they have a guess about the statues? She's new here and cannot vouch for the innocence of the statues.

Well, they aren't evil and do seem to genuinely be stone, which is definitely a positive sign. But the labels on them are illegible from damage, and while they were able to identify Zacharias the Martyr after some work they don't know who or what the gryphon statue is supposed to represent, which makes it kind of inherently suspicious.

Okay. She appreciates all their hard work.

Who was Zacharias the Martyr and what's up with gryphons, that seems like as good a next research topic as any.

Zacharias the Martyr was a powerful sorcerer famous for his work in the first crusade, where he worked tirelessly to help defend the citizens of Sarkoris-That-Was from demonic incursion. After the crusade completed, he remained in northern Avistan to train students, contributing greatly to the otherwise barren Mendevian arcane traditions. He perished in his old age fighting off the demons; after the fall of Drezen, many crusaders were forced to retreat across hundreds of miles of hostile terrain to reach safety in Mendev. When the Desnan shrine he and his group were sheltering at on their journey came under attack by demons, Zacharias stayed behind to hold them off while his fellows and students made it to safety. Many of those saved chose to resettle in Kenabres, and despite never setting foot in the city he's considered something of a local hero; he even has an exhibit at the museum in the Tower of Estrod.

Gryphons, or Griffins or Griffons depending on which book she reads (there does not seem to be any consistent standardized spelling even if they all magically translate to the same word) are large, typically feline-bodied creatures with the wings and upper bodies of birds. The most common variants in Avistan are a combination of lions and eagles, but many other types exist, including the more local combination of snowy owls and lynxes. They're highly mobile and dangerous predators that like to make their homes in hills and the lower reaches of mountains, but are also highly intelligent animals. Many cultures revere them as symbols of freedom or hunting prowess, and some adventurers and nobles have been known to try and domesticate them for use as mounts; to this end, there is mention of a thriving (albeit dangerous) trade in gryphon eggs. Allegedly, they were originally associated with the chaotic good god Curchanus, but after his death in aeons past this connection has declined.

Cool. Next she is going to read about local deities! How many of the fucking things are there?!

Lots! There are about two dozen ones with notable amounts of worship in Avistan, from Old Deadeye Erastil to Cayden Cailean the lucky drunk to the Archfiend Asmodeus, but if she's willing to go looking for them she can find easily three times that number mentioned at least offhand and no evidence that that's an exhaustive count. Most lists she can find will categorize the gods into two three step axes between good and evil and lawful and chaos, plus neutral on each category, but beyond that any classification system is harder to be sure on. Probably the most agreed upon system divides the gods into the ancient inhuman gods like Pharasma and Desna, the ascended mortals like Iomedae and Nethys, and the relatively more minor 'demigods' who are generally agreed to be weaker than both, though where to draw the line is not always clear. Some scholars suggest that a demigod refers to deities that manifest a specific body that is them rather than distributing their attention, but taken fully generally this would cause odd results like classifying the ancient god Achaekek as a mere demigod. The main dividing line between gods and non gods seems to be their ability to pick clerics as mortals, but even this can get fuzzy with how some kinds of powerful outsiders might be better classified as clerics of themselves, or some deities might simply choose not to select any and be misclassified.

Huh. And she's gotten the sense that there are a lot of kinds of magic! What are those?

Well, the ones that everyone knows about are Clerics, who get their powers from a god and have access to powerful healing, wizards, who get their powers from study and are considered the most versatile, sorcerers, who draw their power from their bloodline and can do anything wizards do but not everything wizards can do, druids, who get their power from 'probably nature itself' and act like more plant focused clerics, and paladins, who are exclusively lawful good individuals who swear an oath of their order and get powers from their god as long as they follow the oath and do no evil.

If she's willing to go for subjects that might only have a handful of books about them none of which are necessarily any good, she can also learn about witches, who get their powers from deals with demons and are similar to wizards, shamans, who work with spirits and are somewhere between witches and clerics, oracles, who apparently just spontaneously manifest divine spellcasting, and inquisitors, who are like clerics but trade some spellcasting for abilities relating to combat and rooting out enemies. She might also find some debate about how natural these categories are, like claims that some particularly skilled hunters can get similar powers to druids or how song sorcery and sage sorcery really ought to be considered their own thing rather than just another kind of sorcerer or discussion of whether the classification of warpriests refers to anything real or just some clerics that spend particularly long training to fight.

What're song- and sage-sorcery?