"What- are you hoping for, here -"

"I said I'd answer relevant questions and I'm doing so, and at my own discretion I'm answering irrelevant ones if I think they'll make you less tedious. If I have further purposes I've made no promises I'd share those, or that you and your order would like them." She watches Freedom's perplexed face for a moment. The girl had legitimately assumed that because Lilia gave the advice 'you should have a theory of what I want from this conversation', Lilia would tell the girl what she wanted from this conversation if asked. There is no chance she grew up in Cheliax. 

"It's possible to try to answer a question to your own satisfaction through methods other than just asking the other person and seeing what they say. You ought to try to have a guess about what I want, and I have no reason at all to help you come up with one, except to mislead you."

"That sounds like -" a system that doesn't make planes fly, or take you to the Moon. Iomedae doesn't say that. "- like you worked quite hard to get very good at a skill that no one outside Cheliax is ever going to appreciate, and like I'm also trying to wreck the ways Cheliax appreciates it."

"I think I'd do all right for myself in most places," Lilia says. "It's Lastwall that is the outlier, in how far you can get by being very naive."

"For now," says Iomedae.

Ah, so there are plans for world conquest at work here. Fascinating. It seems increasingly plausible to Lilia that there's much more to Freedom than meets the eye - that she is the genius archmage that built the radios, except she knows that the only reason Cheliax decided Lastwall had an archmage who built the radios was the Dominate Monster, for which a different explanation exists -

Well. All she has to do is keep the girl talking, which is very easy, and maybe she'll leave here with an understanding of how this project was conceived, who is in charge of it, and how the radio show fits into the rest of it. "I suppose with guns you could take more than just Cheliax."

-a  flicker of doubt, poorly concealed. "Do you - does Cheliax expect Lastwall to do that? Go conquer everyone?"

"Cheliax's understanding of what motivates Lastwall and how they function flew out the window when we realized Freedom Radio ran out of Vigil and that they'd been secretly building guns. We thought they were slavishly devoted to holding onto Iomedae's territory and playing by Iomedae's rules, competent in the execution of that, and too weak and distracted to pose any real threat. We were wrong about them. An obvious direction to conclude that we were wrong in is - they in fact want to take for Iomedae every place she could reasonably have a claim to. Reconstitute the Empire, go pick up Ustalav and Belkzen - She would have, if She could have -"

"How much do you know about the faith of Iomedae?" asks Iomedae.

"I know how it works. We try to keep the idiots ignorant, but I can't do my job if I don't know what a spy sent to join a Lastwall paladin order needs to know and needs to say."

"They claim that it isn't in the nature of their goddess to use a person against their purposes, for conquests they wouldn't have agreed to enable."

Freedom believes that for Lastwall to go on some conquests she hasn't authorized would be employing her against her purposes. The radio show isn't sufficient for that to be a real constraint on Lastwall. The guns are. Lilia is finding this conversation very informative. "You wouldn't agree to enable the conquests?" she says. "But Lastwall is well governed, and at internal peace. There are few bandits on its roads. Its leaders never abuse their power. Has anyone told you the horrors to which the people of ordinary kingdoms are subject, by the caprice of ordinary kings? Maybe once they do, you'll tell Lastwall to go right ahead."

Iomedae is pretty sure she can't be persuaded that Lastwall should conquer Avistan. Because she doesn't know enough, because letting Lastwall conquer Avistan is a characteristic sort of mistake to make, because if Lastwall thought they could use her to do that then it recharacterizes everything else - because they told her they wouldn't -

"I really do dislike that they're a military dictatorship," she says, since she can't say any of that. 

Awww. Freedom wasn't just pretending, she's actually a bit of a Chaotic Good idealist who has just thrown in her hat with the paladins - no, that doesn't fit with actually joining an order - Freedom is a teenage girl with messy internally contradictory political opinions and enough Splendour to convince herself of any of them at any time. To a god this probably just looks like the human condition and isn't prohibitive for paladining.

It's a better answer than the one she expected, anyway, which was 'b-b-b-but that's Evil!'

"I suppose you are unlikely to be appointed the Lord-Watcher of Avistan yourself and are quite likely to win it in a fair vote," she says. 

Iomedae looks startled. "That's - not why."

"Sure it is - look, this is again the thing where you are not competent with the level of analysis that everyone else is engaged on. You think that places should be a democracy and you are very well positioned to win their elections and whether or not that's among your conscious motivations people'd be very foolish to discard it from their understanding of you."

"I'm too young and don't know anything about - several things I'd need to know about."

"Well, there's no elections to win this soon, anyway. But you're telling me that if some guns and diplomacy get employed to reconstitute Iomedae's Empire you wouldn't run to be its elected Emperor?"

"I'm not sure your elected officials can be titled Emperor. And - I don't know. I'd do that if it seemed likely to be the best way to build paradise in this world. And not otherwise."

"You know, among historians not in Lastwall, this is one of the great debates about the mortal Iomedae, whether she was an exceptionally virtuous and idealistic person or whether she was an exceptional propagandist who did approximately what any intelligent sufficiently ambitious person in her position would have done - become rich, accumulate a power base, win a war, declare independence, shore up the power base and ascend to godhood. And if a person is fully explained by their motivations, then virtue is hardly necessary to ascribe to them. We don't have to resort to virtue to explain why most men don't commit stabbings in cities in broad daylight."

"Historians in Lastwall don't debate this because - She's their god?"

"Well, that's probably part of it. But mostly because they are all people motivated by virtue, and so 'this person was not motivated by virtue' seems like the exceptional claim to them, and 'this person was motivated by virtue' the ordinary one."

"You're - very smart," Iomedae says, after a pause, "and very knowledgeable, and very - interested in learning what's really going on. How does a person like that end up working for Asmodeus?

"I'm not answering that. Next?"

"Is there something someone could've said to you on the radio, that would have made you defect sooner?"