"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?

Song sorcery (or bardic, if you're one of the people who doesn't agree that it is a kind of sorcery) is a splendor based form of spontaneous arcane magic with its own unique set of available spells and some song-based extra magical abilities. The case for it being a kind of sorcery is that that also describes almost every other kind of sorcery, down to the idiosyncratic set of castable spells, and that being able to inspire people who hear you sing isn't really any weirder than being able to take on traits of a dragon or being able to control plants like a druid. The case against it is that it's significantly more common than any other kind of sorcery except maybe draconic taken altogether, appears to either require or benefit from training more than is usual for sorcerers, and that there are few to no credible cases of bards with more than 6 caster circles. One common argument to dismiss these points is to claim that the commonality and spell circles share a common answer in it being a very widespread but diluted bloodline, or (on rather shakier ground) the natural form of human sorcery, but even many proponents don't seem completely happy with these.

Sage sorcery is a particularly rare form of sorcery that pops up sometimes in families with lots of wizards, but that casts from cunning instead of splendor. Some classify it as a middle ground between sorcery and wizardry, or even a particularly unusual form of the arcanist wizarding discipline, while others say that the broader number of shared traits means it is best considered a more ordinary variation on sorcery.

What are... splendor and cunning?

Splendor and cunning, along with wisdom, are what golarion considers the three fundemental parts of cognition and are each useful for their own type of spellcasting. Splendor covers force of personality and persuasiveness and ability to model other people and self confidence and acting. Cunning meanwhile is significantly closer to more usual ideas of intelligence; having more cunning means you are better at problem solving, abstract thinking, mathematics, learning skills, and memory. Wisdom rounds out the trio and covers self reflection, keeping calm in a crisis, common sense, overcoming fear, and noticing details, as well as resisting some kinds of hostile spells.

Huh! Interesting. Why do they think of them this way so consistently?

Most of the books seem to think this is too self evident to bother explaining, though she will also find mention of a matching trio of physical characteristics in constitution, strength, and dexterity. If she’s willing to check out some of the more practical magic related books, though, it turns out that Golarion has a set of spells and items that enhance each of the three kinds of cognition independently. There are, admittedly, also ways to only enhance individual pieces of wisdom or splendor or cunning that make you better at that one specific area - like glibness making you better at lying - but if there’s a way to get the benefits to spellcasting without doing it holistically it has yet to be discovered. Because of this, they tend to be considered something of a set of natural categories.

How interesting. Does Heroism which she has tried affect any of these?

Heroism is slightly orthogonal to this, because it’s one of the most general spells around. It covers resistance to the same hostile spells as wisdom, but also a bunch of spells wisdom doesn’t cover and you need dexterity or constitution for. It makes you better at any kind of skill intensive task, including lying and being persuasive and noticing small details and mathematics and also acrobatics or swimming or combat, but doesn’t seem to help with learning skills or casting spells or whatever is being gestured at by common sense.

Wow. What a curiously well-rounded spell.

She has been at this researching a long time now and will go try to scare up dinner for herself and Iskander.

By this point most of the public meal lines are occupied by crusaders, but it's by no means exclusive to them and nobody seems to even suggest that she or Iskander present any kind of identification. While waiting in line, most of the discussion seems to be split between ordinary interpersonal gossip ("Did you hear what happened with James?"), bragging and optimistic declarations related to how "it only took a day to clear this city of demons, we'll sure show those demons what for," and rampant speculation about what kind of a speech the queen will be giving a bit over an hour from now after they finish the last buildings at the north end. The normal festival plaza is a bit unsuitable for a speech thanks to the enormous chasm running through one side of it, but apparently she's cleared out another location in the market square with room for thousands and thousands to listen in and most people talking about it are absolutely planning to attend.

Oh yay.

Dinner, another rehearsal of her speech, reading up a little more - is there a Galfrey biography or anything, which would give her an idea of what she'll be like to work for -