“ - oh, so not fast at all,” Iomedae says, disappointed. “Does Tar-Baphon rule the world?”

"No - are you both dressed yet? I’d rather explain looking you in the eye rather than facing a wall -"

Nefreti can furnish Alfirin too with robes of many garments. She’s not deliberately being obnoxious, she doesn’t actually have any nonmagical outfits here.

"Okay, let me try to explain everything - well, the most important things. You - Iomedae - called Arazni, joined and took over leadership of the crusade against Tar-Baphon, defeated him, and sealed him away in Gallowspire. Then you went for the starstone and became a god. Eight hundred years later, Aroden tried to come back for the Age of Glory and died instead. Asmodeus' church took over Cheliax. It's about a hundred years since then and we're still trying to fix it. There are some other problems too but that's the big one. And then today You - that is to say, the goddess Iomedae - told me that I could resurrect Her mortal self, and Nefreti here is the high priestess of Nethys and always has the right spells prepared when something really weird happens so I asked her. I assume that's not enough of an explanation, just tell me where you want more detail."

Iomedae mostly got stuck on the part where Aroden died, actually, and is now staring at the man sort of frozen in horror. All of the other bad things he mentioned you can probably fix with guns, but that one she’s not sure you can. 

“Well,” she says in a very small voice when she manages to talk at all, “that is - not what we were expecting. But I think we can still fix it. Possibly not Aroden being dead, I don’t know how to fix that. But Asmodeus’s church taking over Cheliax sounds like you could fix it with a lot of really cheap weapons which don’t take much skill to fire and which are very deadly? And with a lot of money?”

"Devils are immune to fire," he says, half-automatically. "...but yes, that would help a lot. I'm sorry about Aroden. I don't know if there's any way to fix it but maybe we can resurrect his teenage self now and he can go for the starstone again when he's ready? Since that's apparently a thing that works."

"It really isn't," says Nefreti. 

"We didn't die in this world," says Iomedae. "Five years ago Alfirin and I were transported somehow to another world, called Earth, that has - lots of wonders of Azlant, without any magic at all. And we were enslaved - it's kind of a long story - but eventually we realized that if we memorized everything about how Earth made all its weapons and all its wonders, and then killed ourselves, then Aroden could tell His church to call us home and we'd know enough to make the whole world rich, and kill Tar-Baphon besides. So we did that. I don't know why we're - here - instead of being home. But I don't think you could get Aroden the way you got us, because he wasn't…with us? …we did try to check if there were any others but we never found any."

"And probably Iomedae - other Iomedae - would have said if we should resurrect Aroden too -" He remembers what Nefreti said, earlier. "- That wasn't your third resurrection of the day, was it?"

"Believe it or not, sometimes things happen that are unrelated to you! Less often than you'd think, actually. But in this case it just happened a powerful wizard in Absalom was going to explode himself."

...That phrasing doesn't rule out that she's talking about Aroden, so he's not sure whether that's meant to be an answer or an evasive nonanswer. Either way he should probably drop it.

"I don't even know where is Cheliax," Alfirin says, "But I'm not sure that fixing me not knowing things is the most important?"

Iomedae squeezes her hand. "Cheliax is Taldor, the part - west of the rock mountains if Taldor was America -"

"Ah. That's - I don't actually know if Taldor is the size of America or the size of, like, Texas. Is this world a ball?"

Iomedae doesn't know the answer to that! She will listen expectantly to the fancy knight.

"A ball? Yes, the world is a sphere - a wizard went to the moon a long time ago and made round maps, there's one in Vigil - that's in Lastwall, which is the country Iomedae founded after the crusade. We can go back there whenever you want."

"Is there the place to be to make the world rich and end smallpox and the plague and fight Asmodeus with guns?" 

"Yes. Especially the last one, you might want the church of Abadar for making the world rich and they're - a lot of them are here in Osirion but they have representatives everywhere."

Iomedae looks to Alfirin. Her own instincts are to go where the fancy knight says but she has picked up enough common sense off Alfirin to note that there is an argument against doing that, which is that they don't actually know anything at all about the fancy knight except that he says his god, who is Iomedae, told him to resurrect them.

That's Alfirin's concern too. She can ask. "Who are you and why should we believe what you say?"

"Oh! I'm sorry. Alexeara Cansellarion, paladin of Iomedae."

Well if he's a paladin he isn't lying. But he could be lying about being a paladin. "Are you a priest of Iomedae?" Iomedae asks Nefreti.

"Me? No, not at all, though we have some surprising things in common!"

"Such as?" Alfirin asks. She's not sure she likes surprising things.

Nefreti makes a face. "I can't explain that…nor that …not that either…that one's not even true around here…there's a sense in which we both …exist." She looks very smug to have arrived at this.