She nods. "Yeah, it's a fake situation so people can make up whatever details they want. I think I see what you mean about how the gods disagree. Are Law and Chaos basically the thing you said about having specific duties versus doing the most good in the moment or is there more to it than that?"

aah more questions Seelah is a Paladin and can definitely explain what it means to be lawful good and probably once you have that explaining chaotic good is actually easy.

"Well for Paladins we swear a set of oaths, and we fall if break them or break our word do anything evil on purpose or stop being lawful or good. And the oaths include stuff like... not lying to people, not stealing, and not abandoning allies, because it's really important that being a Paladin means being someone you can trust. And not every lawful good person has to be a paladin but still more... along those lines of being someone you can work with when it's important  even if you disagree with them on almost everything else. Whereas a chaotic good person might swear up and down they never saw the runaway slave they have hidden in a back room?"

"That makes sense! It sounds like having some Lawful Good people and some Chaotic Good people around makes things better than if everyone was the same kind. Do you know what the ratios are? I guess it would be hard to get ratios for Good and Evil because a lot of Evil people think they're Good and some more would lie about it."

"I'm not sure you necessarily need people of all the good alignments around; like, Heaven is almost all lawful good and Elysium almost all chaotic good and I don't think there are any real problems from that? But I'd definitely rather work with someone chaotic good like Anevia than a lawful evil hellknight, and I think just about anyone else who follows Iomedae would say the same."

At Brenda's second question, she stops to think.

"I don't know if anyone knows that? Presumably the gods could figure it out, since they're way smarter than humans and Pharasma at least would know where she sorted everyone, but I'm not sure how we'd check. Most people aren't strong enough to detect as an alignment. I know babies and kids usually end up neutral so I guess maybe that's the most common alignment?"

Brenda is very curious about her own alignment but it would be pretty self-centered to say that. "I wouldn't expect Heaven and Elysium to have problems; not having Evil people around is probably more helpful than anything to do with Law and Chaos. What are hellknights, what's their deal?" (She has gotten the ten-second overview of Hell and has no idea why anyone would want to interact with it in any way. Except maybe via the business end of a B52.)

"They're knight orders from Cheliax, but frankly they're not much better than the demons. They're obsessed with making Golarion more like Hell, and they'll sometimes whip their own soldiers to death in the name of discipline. About the only good things I can say about them is that they're good at fighting demons and it's better that they're at the wound than anywhere else, though some of them don't even have that going for them."

"What the fuck."

"My thoughts exactly. If we didn't need Cheliax to hold a third of the border I'd want nothing to do with them, but as is I just hope to keep my meetings as far apart as I can."

Nod. "Are there a lot of them in Kenabres? I haven't really decided what I want to do with my next several decades other than 'become a wizard and solve problems' so I'll probably hang around doing those things in Kenabres for a while unless there's a reason to go somewhere else."

"None that stay there full time, though you'll occasionally get some traveling through the area. Mendev and Lastwall don't really get along with them, so we and they try to stick to our respective parts of the border so we fight the demons instead of each other. Becoming a wizard does sound pretty cool - Aroden himself was once a wizard, back in the day. But it's supposed to be really hard and there aren't a lot of wizards in Mendev to teach you so maybe it'll make sense for you to go to school in Absalom or Quantium or Andoran or... I don't actually remember of Lastwall has a wizarding school, or where any of the other ones that are safe to go to are, sorry."

Nod. "I'll see how far I can get with the books I have, and then if I haven't found a wizard who's interested in teaching I'll ask around."

The tunnels past the end of the maze seem a bit more complicated than Anevia made them out to be, but still not actually that complicated, and it's not too long before she can see a staircase leading up into what seems to be a stone-walled basement.

Gosh, are they going to come out in someone's house? Do they know they have an entire cave system attached to their basement? If so they're probably cultists. Well, there's an easy way to find out.

It does not appear to be a house! Instead, exiting the basement seems to lead into a larger building made of the same grey stone. There's the sounds of some fighting coming from up ahead.

Typical Dungeons and Dragons universe, can't go from breakfast to lunch without running into some kind of violence. Who's over there and what do they think they're doing.

A group of demons and humans, currently in the midst of trying and failing to hold off an attack by a more heavily armored force. The latter group is lead by a tall, muscular woman with golden armor and green skin who is currently facing off with the scariest demon of the lot.

She's hanging back and thus not the easiest to spot, but Anevia is also with the latter group, taking shots at demons whenever she gets a clear line of fire.

Demons on one side and Anevia on the other adds up to a good enough argument for the moment. She starts punching demon faces. 

It's a relatively powerful force, mostly schirs and babaus lead by a succubus, and almost all the cultists have combat experience or power granted by their demon lord. You need that kind of strength to not go down quickly against a prepared force of Paladins, defensive positioning or no.

This is, actually, wildly insufficient to inconvenience Brenda, but if she's not careful she's going to start picking up some annoying burning sensations on her hands from the acid coating the Babaus' skins.

When punching starts to suck she'll draw Lariel's sword again and switch to stabbing. If anyone has enough spare attention to consider the matter, she's clearly an inexperienced swordswoman. She's just making up for it with the strength to chop through bones and a keen sense for where the enemy doesn't expect the next strike to be coming from.

If anyone would ordinarily comment on the fact that she's fighting like a particularly strong barbarian handed an unfamiliar weapon in a rage, they're certainly not going to say anything about it to someone currently mid combat on their side. Less than a minute from when Brenda entered the fray, the last demon collapses from its wounds and the crusaders pause for a moment to catch their breath.

"Brenda! Seelah! Wenduag! Glad to see you all made it up here alright. You've got a good sense of timing."

"Ah, so you're the ones Anevia was telling me about. Thank you for the assistance, both here and making sure she got out safely."

"You're welcome; she helped me out a lot down there. How are things up here?" 

"Yesterday was a pretty bad day, but Terendelev got back early this morning so the worst should be over. The fires are under control and the streets are... mostly safe, at least near the city center, but there are a lot of demons running around still and lots of them are with the cultists rather than obligingly showing themselves in public for us to take down. It's going to be a major pain to ferret them all out in the coming months, and the exceptions are the ones that are most heavily defended so we can mostly only send large groups to clear them out safely. That's what we're working on now, actually; there's a lot of demons hanging around the wardstone here, and for some reason they aren't getting fried doing it."