Iomedae hugs her again. "I'm glad. If that's what you want, of course. You don't owe it to me. It's probably going to be pretty frustrating."

"I'd rather be there with you than out here worrying about you and about being kidnapped. Assuming I'll have space to work, there. Probably even if not."

 Iomedae will go find Cansellarion at the end of the hour.

"You're coming to talk to the defector, then?"

"Yes. I'm only willing to follow Clepati's instructions if they make sense once I've talked to them but maybe they will. And Alfirin will come with me to Osirion."

They Teleport.

Lilia has been meticulously selling out all of Cheliax's agents everywhere else. They don't have many in Lastwall but they have enough, accomplishing enough, that she got a few suppressed distress-reactions out of the paladin interrogating her. When the door opens again she is not surprised to see Cansellarion and quite surprised to see him followed by -

"I'm not particularly interested in appearing on the radio," she says. 

"- it'd have to wait anyway, I assume your being here has military implications and we keep those matters off the radio. Nice to meet you - how did you identify me -"

"Extravagantly splendour-wearing teenage girl working for Cansellarion but out of uniform. What do you want, if it's not to ask me to make propaganda for you?"

"Oh, I did want to ask for that. I'm just guessing, all the time, what will be compelling to people. The people who can guess best are the people who, themselves, left."

"I do not think that most people decide whether to be loyal to Cheliax or not for my reasons."

"Sure, but you'll have a better guess than I do of what their reasons are."

"...the big one you're missing is that they are evil. They're bad people. They want to keep slaves. They want to be feared. They want to see people flinch when they enter the room. They want to see annoying preachy paladin children suffer. They see you extending them kindness that'd never be reciprocated and they see a - merchant who can be talked into selling at any price by any sob story because he's stupid. And setting their character aside - they want to pick the winning side. The most compelling argument you can make to them is that money, and power, and respect, and safety, are on your side, and that the government can no longer offer those things. People will not rebel out of the goodness of their hearts, but they can track a shifting tide."

"People do rebel out of the goodness of their hearts," Iomedae says. "We get reports - I mostly can't publicize them, for secrecy reasons -"

"Sure, some people do. Those ones I imagine you've got already. The ones you don't have, and could get, are the ones who want to hear that there's power and advancement and opportunity on your side. That their past is an asset, that they're clever for getting out now."

"Thank you. I think I understand. …you listen to the show, then."

"Everyone listens to the show. Even at its worst it's a less predictable sermon than you'll get in any church, and sometimes it's better than that. - is it, at this point, really necessary that I be shackled," she says to the guard, with the smooth professional impatience that at least in Cheliax sometimes causes people to do what you said instead of go check with their superiors. 

Back in his Worldwound days, Vildug once stood guard for twelve hours over half a dozen succubus prisoners. They were still prisoners at the end. It's what qualified him, in the eyes of his superiors, for jobs like this one.

"Yes, unless you wish to leave."

She goes back to ignoring his existence. "We believe you to have fairly little penetration in the interior of the country. But the port cities were a problem."

"Because the boats need radios," says Iomedae, nodding. "I was hoping it'd work out like that. I was hoping for more in the interior, too, but it didn't end up making sense to move that slowly."

So she takes part in strategic decisions, too, instead of just being the voice on the radio. Lilia wishes that the effort to kidnap and interrogate the girl had succeeded; it would have been interesting. "I will admit," she says, "I would have imagined that if a plan required letting an inexperienced if charming child go on the radio and talk about whatever she wanted Lastwall's leadership would've chosen their alternative plan which did not require that."

Iomedae is going to have to be very careful to have this interaction not be wildly more informative to the defector than it is to her. "I can see why you would have imagined that. I obviously cannot comment on whether Lastwall's leadership had any say in my plans at all."

(It's much too late to not have this interaction be wildly more informative to Lilia than to Iomedae. It was too late for that the second it started.)

"You're a paladin of Iomedae, in Cansellarion's order, based out of Vigil. Don't be clever, you're not good at it."

She would have left Vigil if they'd objected to the radio show without sufficiently good reason. She does not say that. "I'm not clear on whether you're summarizing the state of Chelish intelligence's speculation."

"Chelish intelligence knows that you worked out of Vigil. We got persistent tracking on Marusek so we could find you when she was in the room with you. I did not confidently know you're a paladin until I saw you, though once we realized you worked out of Vigil and that the passionate opinions on democracy were a distraction it was a likely guess. They figure you're lying about being from Cheliax, which would imply you're not a paladin; if they were satisfied on that point they'd be pretty sure you are one."

"And you concluded that when you saw me because -"