She still hates how many of the soldiers under her command aren't going to be there willingly. She'll just have to pay and equip them as well as possible to make it up to them and win battles as effectively as possible so they can survive and go home.

"So it sounds like a lot of factions can help us, and the more the better, but no single one is likely to actively harm us except by ceasing to help?" 

"Not openly, at least. Demons are not exactly popular with most governments and interfering with the worldwound defense is a quick way to get a lot of very powerful people who would ordinarily not work together mad at you specifically. I'm sure we'll get some anyway, but outside of demon cultists it should mostly take the form of people interfering with their rivals' efforts to help us when they have enough plausible deniability."

Some people care way too much about politics and not enough about everyone on Golarion not being eaten by demons, but this is not a surprise per se; she has lived among humans for years.

"Alright. Quick review of the things I need to do so far: meet with Nurah about how not to imply things I shouldn't, meet with the quartermaster about armor, meet with Rathimus about bank accounts, do the scrying experiment--I can probably get my friend Nenio for that so none of you need to spend the time--read the books the Baroness recommended and write to the war college." And talk to Alpina and Ember and Seelah and Wenduag, all separately from each other. "Is there anything else that should be on that list, and do any of those things need to happen before the official crusade announcement? . . . Am I going to need to make a speech?" (She keeps the nervousness almost entirely out of her voice on that last bit, but some of the people in this room probably have excellent Sense Motive.)

"That should be everything. You can make a speech if you want, but the queen will be there and she's very good at that so you could also skip it and just be visibly there."

"I don't think it makes sense for me to do one if it isn't necessary." Her Friends In Places powers are pretty laser focused on making friends with specific individuals and she doesn't actually have anything she wants to convey in a speech anyway. "If we have extra time, it would be nice to know a bit about who you all are and where you're from."

"Very well. I hail from Osirion; my parents were caravaneers, but I was never much for the desert so I enlisted in the infantry and served for some years. Osirion doesn't fight many wars, and despite my duty to my country I came to feel my time there was being wasted. Instead of renewing my contract for a third time, I took my leave and traveled to Mendev and joined the fourth crusade. I've spent the last twenty years fighting demons in service to her majesty."

"I suppose I'm next, then. I'm an aasimar, as you might have noticed; I'm descended from an archon on my mother's side. My family's lands are on the southern end of Mendev, but we know our duty. I joined the fourth crusade when I came of age, and didn't stop serving when we had to end the offensives and regroup. As an officer my talents lie more towards command than personal combat, but I have some skill as a sorcerer and am a passable melee combatant. I have something of a reputation for daring victories, but it's honestly rather overblown; I mostly just avoid committing to fights when I don't have a way to win."

"My story isn't nearly so impressive as theirs, so this is a bit of a hard act to follow. I'm from a humble family in Kenabres, but I taught myself how to read and write, so once I'd served my term as a shieldbearer I moved on to other jobs. I spent some time in the stonemason's guild, but eventually I changed careers to become a shipwright and then eventually a merchant, where I spent a few years on the trade routes sailing to and from Iobara. There was good money in it, but it felt wrong to be out there getting rich when people back home were dying for the sake of keeping people like me alive, so I made my way back to Mendev and rejoined the army. Almost joined the infantry again as a sergeant, but someone in logistics caught wind about it and they needed more people with my skills. They poached me as a quartermaster before I finalized my decision, and I've spent the last few years getting experience there."

He shrugs, lightly.

"There's not much more to it. Once we finish this crusade I've been considering retiring, maybe starting a family."

"And that just leaves me!"

Nurah smiles brightly at Brenda. 

"I'm from Isger, a patch of land with the dubious honor of being one of Cheliax's client states. They're big on the idea of freedom, but only when they're talking about their own freedom from Cheliax, which they're sure they'll achieve any day now - never mind the fact that it hasn't once been independant in all the centuries since its founding. I've always found the talk laughable. Isger has a large population of Halflings, and much like those in Cheliax itself, nearly all of us are slaves. I was relatively fortunate - I was able to demonstrate my intelligence from a young age, so they sent me to school to learn to be a secretary instead of relegating me to farm labor. I was sold to lord Axilar Trezbot, who decided he wanted a historian of his very own so as to better chronicle his achievements. He's the one I left Isger with, and with any luck to never return.

"Lord Trezbot set about organizing a little crusade of his own; he felt that the reason that Mendev's efforts had stalled out was the inherent weakness of the followers of good gods, and that proper Asmodean discipline would let his people succeed where they failed. He saw some success, but even someone like him couldn't stand against the demons alone; his last act was to cover my retreat after we were caught in an demonic ambush so I could tell the world his story. I made may way back to Mendev, and once there I don't mean to brag, but - actually, yes I do. My books chronicling his adventure were very successful, and for a time I was pretty famous.That's what brought me to the queen's attention, and she recruited me in the hopes that I would put my knowledge and skill with words to work wrangling people rather than just stories."

"I didn't know that, about halflings--I'm glad you got out. I hope things get better there someday." Maybe someday the Worldwound will be closed, and--don't worry about that. Focus on the crusade. Everything else can and must wait.

"I guess I should tell my own story too, though there isn't much of it. I grew up on a planet with almost no magic. About a week ago I got the opportunity to get some magic and leave the planet, and took it. I've been getting used to my new abilities and helping out around Kenabres most of the time since."

"Wait, are you saying you got this strong in a week?"

It flatly doesn't make sense. Nobody levels that quickly on their own, and even if she somehow was such a once in history prodigy that wouldn't explain the gear. Which, well, maybe some god for baffling god reasons pumped her to ninth circle and opened their vault to her, but then her gear isn't good enough to fit the explanation. If it's a lie, it's one she doesn't understand; it obviously wouldn't fool anyone. Which means it's a joke, to yank the rug out from under her feet and then give her the real answer, but she's pretty good at reading faces and Brenda looks serious.

"Yes--but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep getting stronger at the same rate. Sorry if I got your hopes up."

This still feels like the kind of thing that can't possibly be true, but if it is hiding something it's probably not something her commander is willing to share? 

...She supposes if Brenda had just said 'sorry that's private' she would have accepted it, so she shouldn't accept an obvious misdirection less? Maybe?

Captain Harmattan's opinion is impossible to guess, his face doesn't move.

Ugh, she should either not have told them anything or told them a lot more detail. But she doesn't want to talk about either Alpina or Areelu Vorlesh and everything she can think to say leads in one or the other of those directions. Better to just change the subject.

"I know it would be helpful to tell you more details, but there are things I want to keep secret even from trustworthy people. Oh, something I should have asked earlier: do we have a plan for setting up new fortifications when we gain enough territory to move the Wardstones in, or is that something we need to figure out between now and then?"

"Walls of stone, when we have them spare; palisades until we do. For some of them we can also ship stone over land but that's not always going to be practical. Ideally we would also get earth elementals to dig ditches and help make it harder to approach on foot, but that takes money and wizards. Some of the hellknight orders might have improvements on that, but there aren't a lot of people with experience building new forts to hold off demons as cheaply and quickly as possible."

She makes a mental note to get a scroll of Wall of Stone. It likely won't be a full solution on its own given how many walls they're going to need and how many things she'll be doing, but it'll be good to have the flexibility.

"Is the money to pay the earth elementals directly, or do they want to be paid in kind? I'd guess the latter, since they spend most of their time on a different plane from our economy, but that doesn't get me anywhere on knowing what they have a use for."

“There’s actually a fairly steady trade with the elemental plane of earth, so plenty of them will take money, but not all of them or at great rates, and if you’re summoning randomly you’ll want other options available.”

"That's really cool!" Brenda doesn't want to discuss either the feasibility or the strategic usefulness of her getting a scroll of arcane Plane Shift and doing a bunch of tourism on all four elemental planes, the Good afterlives, and Axis, so she steers the conversation elsewhere.

Pretty soon they've covered everything on their lists and everything the conversation thus far has added to them, and Brenda's new subordinates start trickling out. She has a few hours to herself before the Queen's speech this evening even if she wants to spend some time preparing.

If Baroness Gaunther has copies of any of the books she recommended easily available, she borrows them, but she doesn't start reading them immediately.

Hi Alpina! You'll never guess what happened unless you're really good at guessing things based on narrative logic, because that's the only logic under which it makes any sense. The Queen of Mendev is launching a crusade to push back the demons to make the Wardstone barrier shorter and stronger, which is totally reasonable, but also she has put me nominally in charge of it! I think I'm mostly supposed to look cool and let the adults on "my" staff run things, but if it's going to have my name on it I feel kind of responsible for it and anyway I want to help, so I'm going to do as much of the actual work as I can and try to use Anything You Can Do for a lot of it.

Oh, wow! That sounds like a lot of responsibility. But also a lot of opportunity to help people! I'm excited for you.

I'm glad you don't think I'm insane. The people I'm going to be working with seem like they really know what they're doing, and it's my best chance to close the Worldwound--both in terms of doing enough fighting to become an archmage and in terms of getting to the center of the rift to see how it works.

I don't think you're insane at all! You have important things to do and you're trying your best to do them. I think that makes perfect sense.

You're such a good friend. <3

There was something else I wanted to ask you about. Your ability to make copies of scrolls gets around one of the biggest limitations of this magic system, the limit on spells per day. Being able to cast the same spell over and over, and cast higher-circle spells than I've learned to prepare on my own, would let me do a lot of things for the crusade that would take a lot of work from a lot of people to do any other way. I'm talking about things like building protections for the Wardstones when we move them closer together, but also using a lot of magic in combat to make battles go better and lose fewer people. But I know you care a lot about not acting outside your covers, and I don't want to ask you to do anything you wouldn't feel good about doing. Giving me all those Sendings to talk to Arueshalae was awesome, but I don't want to assume that because you were okay with that you're okay with helping me fight. Would you mind thinking about what sorts of things you'd be comfortable making scrolls for? You don't need to have an answer right away.