"I want to think more about what you said. I don't want to dismiss it. And I'd like to hear your life's story, if you want to tell it."

That's - probably as much as she should have hoped for.

"I don't have any dark secrets to tell. Some matters of privacy, but I - judge it's more important to share them at this point, even if you were going to spread them around recklessly, which I don't expect you will."

"I usually tell new recruits that my career as a paladin is quite - atypical, and while there's nothing to be ashamed of, they should not emulate it either. I suppose that's another reason I should tell you about it: I am a rather unusual paladin."

"My parents were adventurers. They retired after the Third Crusade, settled down in a little village a few miles east of Kenabres."

"Adventurers often talk about 'buying the farm', but I find that they rarely do. They get used to the excitement, the power, the sense of accomplishment, or perhaps they get addicted, and so they keep adventuring until they die. My parents had more sense than that." She smiles briefly.

"My mother was human; my father an orc. He never seemed any different to me, growing up, but children accept their parents as they are. In the village life, where everyone is long used to everyone else, personality matters more than background."

"Whenever he talked to strangers, at the market, people going by on the road, they liked him. They praised him - to his face, sometimes, or in his hearing - as a model man, incredibly kind and patient. They called him a saint of patience, only half in joke."

"I didn't think to question, growing up, and I have always wondered since, if this bothered him. Whether he pretended not to care, for my sake, for our shared tranquility. If it was pretense, he never once dropped it. He really was a very patient man." She smiles again.

"I was an only child, and my parents adored me. I grew up with their stories of adventures, of the wider world. There was never a point when I decided I'd follow in their footsteps, it just seemed - natural. They taught me to fight, the armor and the sword and shield, and when I was eighteen they gave me their blessing."

"I could have gone to Kenabres. There's always work for fighters, as soldiers, mercenaries, guards. But I was raised Iomedaean, and I had higher aspirations. The Third Crusade had dissolved in infighting and disgrace, until the very idea of crusading seemed discredited. I went to Lastwall instead. Lastwall is the Goddess' own country. Iomedae is the Goddess of defeating Evil efficiently, everyone placed where they will serve best. Lastwall would know how to use me, better than I could myself. And they would train me, to do better than the Mendevians."

"But Lastwall is a country that has been fighting the same two wars, nonstop, for its entire existence. A country for which the Worldwound is a terrible distraction from its founding mission, to contain Tar-Baphon, and its eternal defensive war against the orcs of Belkzen Hold. They have fought them for eight hundred years without a day's respite."

"In Lastwall, the average man has as much fondness for orcs as he does for the undead. When they see a half-orc, they pity her, assuming without question that her mother must have been raped. When they find that she is not ashamed of her heritage, that she does not regard it as a curse, they are baffled - and indignant. As if it were a slight, that any peace however small could be established with an orc, when the paragons of Lawful Good had tried and failed to end that fruitless war for eight hundred years, when even mortal Iomedae before her ascension seemed to write it off as hopeless."

"I was refused entry to the War College in Vigil. This was within their rights; they have discretion in admitting recruits, beyond the objective examinations of ability. They thought my race would be an impediment to unit cohesion, that it would always work against me. They did not know me, and so they did not trust me to be as moral or as patient or as wise as a human. They were wrong about me, but they were not wrong as a rule. When one does not know a person, one must resort to averages. And they knew my fellow soldiers would reason the same way."

"I refused to go home. I kept looking for a way in, talking to anyone who'd give me the time of day, studying in the public libraries, trying to prove myself in competitions, for most of a year, until my money finally ran out and I had to leave. I prayed to Her every night. Not for aid, because I didn't know better than Her whether her aid was best spent on me. But for guidance."

"On the last night before I was due to leave, She chose me as a paladin."

"I was overjoyed, of course. I never expected to be a paladin, but it is a great honor and responsibility, and She knows best."

"Vigil is the best place in the world to become a paladin. Anyone can tell you what to do, where to go. There is training, study, the standard oaths that all paladins take, the reasons for them. I was given board and lodgings so I didn't have to worry about money."

"After the initial training, paladins join an order of their choice. We don't have to, of course, we don't have to do anything that we haven't promised to do, but it's what everyone does. The received wisdom - written by Iomedae Herself, when She was mortal, so I'm sure it's right - is that paladins outside of orders Fall much more often. Paladins keep each other from straying, but more than that, we help each other, to not be tempted or faced with some terrible choice, and to choose wisely. And we know each others' needs best, because we have sworn the same oaths - each order has its own - and we are working together, for a common goal."

"Several orders were willing to take me. A newly chosen paladin would never be turned away from all the orders, that would be unthinkable. They know that She knows best, as well as anyone does."

"But I still wanted to go to the War College. They have the best military training, and they have arrangements for paladins who are also members of an order based in the city."

"They said they'd take me. I asked what had changed. Obviously a paladin is trusted no matter her race, but would the ordinary soldiers accept me as one of their own now?"

"They said they hoped so. I pressed them, asking what they expected to happen. They admitted that many soldiers would still distrust and dislike me. Instinct and lifetime habit are hard to overcome by rational knowledge."

"I asked them why they were willing to accept me, knowing this. They said it was their duty, and that Iomedae knew best. I found that answer - unsatisfying."

"I went back to the order I was lodging with, one of those willing to accept my oaths. I asked them whether they thought I'd be a good fit, despite my race. They were cautious but optimistic. My weeks spent with them, in basic paladin training, had shown them I was as wise, and more patient than many humans, and they saw no reason to refuse me."

"I went back to my rooms, and I thought - I agonized over it, for several days. I meditated, prayed for guidance, went to the priests for council. I tried to understand why, if Iomedae had wanted to make me a paladin, she would do it the day before I left the city, and not the day after I arrived. What She wanted, expected from me, that She could not simply say, because it is so expensive for gods to talk to mortals. What the reason could be, to make a half-orc woman a paladin, when there were many equally strong and Good and Lawful fighters in the city, better trusted and so better suited to accomplishing Her aims."

"I decided not to join any paladin order, and I left Lastwall."

"I spent several years on my own, fighting Evil and injustice as best I could, eventually making my way to the River Kingdoms. Sometimes I had to take payment for doing work I dearly wanted to do anyway. Often I did not know which way was best, how to achieve my goals without anyone to help me, how to treat allies who were not Lawful Good, how to talk to people who weren't used to paladins and explain to them what we are and what we are for and why it matters."

"This is the point where I usually have to explain, to anyone else who hears the story, why in the world I would do the exact opposite of what every other paladin does and what Iomedae Herself did as a mortal. You probably have less of a sense of - how important this is. Paladins always work together, always join orders, fight under paladin leaders, alongside allies who at least understand them. The very hardest missions, for a paladin, are joining a band of adventurers with no clear leader or rules, or going undercover into Cheliax. Not because they are risky, or the likelihood of failing the mission. Because of being alone. Alone, unsworn to the oaths of an order, without a clear sense of purpose, we are much more likely to err, and to Fall."

"And while Falling is a tradeoff like any other - to lose your paladin powers for some worthy goal - to do so unintentionally is the gravest sort of mistake. It is the ultimate failure, betraying everyone's confidence, making them right to trust paladins a little less, and betraying Her confidence, wasting the powers she granted you and did not grant someone else instead. Paladins - Iomedaeans - do not take actions predicted to end in failure."

"I don't know if I was right to do it. It ended well, but that is barely an argument. I thought - that if Iomedae had chosen me, an unusual paladin, it must be for an unusual sort of mission. That if She wanted predictable success in a standard career, She would have chosen someone else. I considered what I had been intending to do with my life, before She chose me. I had hoped for a life like my parents'. They left the world better than they found it, and everyone in it who they met, and what more could one aspire to? Why should paladins be more - narrow, in the things they aspired to do with their lives?"

"I'm not sure I chose it for the right reasons. But I think I did choose well."

"If the Third Crusade ended when you were young, is the one going on now the Fourth Crusade?" she asks. "Why did you end up coming back to fight in that one when the Third Crusade had soured you on the idea?"

"There's no crusade going on right now; the Fourth ended a year and a half ago. There's always fighting to hold the borders, but it's much less intense."

"The Third Crusade was an attempt to retake the territory lost in the Second a generation before. Mendev called it, and many people answered from all over the world, some of whom were more - suited than others. There was no effective leadership or organization, and cultist infiltration suddenly turned out to be a much bigger problem than anyone thought. Everyone started suspecting and accusing each other. Mendev called the whole thing off three years later, without having accomplishing anything. The crusaders ended up killing more mortals than demons, and not all of them justly. It was a terrible disgrace, and it made everyone hate the Mendevian Inquisition, and often justifiably so."

"The Fourth was different. The balor lord Khorramzadeh gathered up a huge horde of demons, and he personally led an assault on Kenabres. The city nearly fell, and if it had, the kingdom would have followed. It was a terrible crisis, and I rushed home to help when I heard about it."

"I'm confused."

"You're saying that a paladin, even more than other Lawful Good Iomedaeans, is a kind of person who always works together with their own kind. And that following tradition is very important for you, and one of your traditions is to bind yourself by Law. And you didn't do that, and don't regret it, but you still - think everyone else is right in following the tradition? You did something unusual, that everyone else thought would go badly, and succeeded - I assume you accomplished something worthwhile, in your years adventuring - and yet you think it shouldn't be tried again?"

Oh good, it looks like he does understand why it was a bad idea to do what she did!

"We think of the rules as - the best known way to do achieve our goals. Obviously you do what is best, what everyone thinks is best. To do otherwise, you need an argument for why everyone is wrong and should change, or why you're different from everyone else and the rules don't apply to you. But it's very, very hard to do better than the collected wisdom of centuries of paladins in Lastwall alone, with the guidance of the Goddess and Her allies."

"It's fair to call it tradition. Tradition is what people do because they always have, and that's how it works in practice. Mortals can't think through a complex argument each time we make a decision, we can only remember the conclusion and follow it, and it takes something - obvious, something big, to make us stop and re-evaluate."

"It's obvious that I'm unusual for a paladin, because I'm half-orc. I'm also unusual in being a woman, but that's much more common and well within the scope of - tradition. Still, the paladins in Vigil didn't tell me to run off on my own because I was a half-orc, and they're both individually and collectively much wiser than me. I had trouble being accepted in Lastwall, but there are many paladin orders in Mendev and other countries that I could have joined, where being a half-orc is not so remarkable. So why did I even consider doing something else?"

"As I said, I'm not sure I did so for the right reasons, or that I would make the same choice again, not knowing where it might lead. But here's what I was thinking, at the time."

"One way to make trade-offs is to decide how much you're willing to risk. The traditional way, the safe way, is very likely to succeed but it's not very likely to accomplish much more than it usually does. There are many paladins in Vigil and they are to a large degree - interchangeable. Their leaders can think of them in numbers, not only as individuals. And that is a good trait to have, for an organization and an army. It's also the reason I was a poor fit for joining them, even if I had wanted to follow tradition."

"The only reason to ever take a greater risk, a path unlikely to succeed, is the promise of greater payoff. It's not something you should do often, or risk too much on, because one large failure may matter more than even many large successes. You can't accept your loss and go on to fight another day, if you're dead. Empowering one paladin, though, is an acceptable gamble for a Goddess."

"I tried my best to understand why Iomedae had chosen me. There are ways of interpreting Her actions, when you're not important enough to ask Her in a Commune, and few people are that important. You ask yourself - how is the world different, because She chose me and not another? What would I have done differently, if She had chosen me when I arrived in Vigil, or before I ever journeyed to Lastwall, or after I had gone home? What outcome in the world is She trying to achieve, by doing the exact thing She has done? What did She intend for me to understand about Her choices?"

"If I had been chosen at home, I would still have gone to Lastwall to train. It would have been a waste of time, to have me an empowered paladin for months on the road."

"If I had been chosen when I arrived, before I had months to experience how people see half-orcs in Lastwall, I would have probably joined a paladin order in Vigil. It's expected and encouraged, and I would have taken Iomedae's blessing on my arrival as validation, that I had come to the right place for me in Her service."

"If I had gone home, and been chosen only then, I would have gone to Kenabres, and spent my life fighting demons. Perhaps it would have been good, to have another paladin in the city on the day Khorramzadeh attacked, but the attack was not foreseen. It would have been another safe path, and my year in Lastwall would have been a waste of time, not a great loss in the grand scheme of things, but a loss nonetheless."

"I decided that, by choosing me when She did, she was telling me to leave Lastwall, and not go home, and try to do the best thing I could that other paladins were not already doing."

"And so I went to Ustalav, Numeria, the River Kingdoms, everywhere there were not nearly as many paladins as in Lastwall and Mendev, everywhere people were suffering, preyed on by bandits and monsters, without good governance or safety, and I tried to help them as best I could."

Gord is trying his best to understand, but her logic and motivations are so alien.

She wanted to do Good, the most she could. She tried to join the army, but they refused. She kept trying, for a year, and everyone refused her. Seeing that, her goddess personally chose her - as clear a sign as one could ask for - and yet their paladins' response was cautious optimism? 

She tried so hard to figure out what Iomedae was telling her to do, and never for a moment considered what Iomedae was telling everyone else, namely, that they were idiots for not accepting her in the first place! Isn't that how Law is supposed to work? Set in their hidebound traditions, but - weren't they supposed to change them, when they got a literal sign? Politely ask Iomedae what she meant by that, at the very least? Not just - shrug and go on, like they hadn't just been told they were wrong about their precious rules!

Irabeth had just told him that Lawful Good wants everyone to help, but they rejected her help. They didn't make her better off for coming to them.

He has an obscure feeling of - disappointment, with the paladins. They were supposed to be better than that. And a rising anger, on behalf of this woman who dedicated her life and subjugated her free will to laws and organizations, because she earnestly believed it was the best way to do Good, and when they failed her thought only of how to follow the wishes of her goddess.

"Irabeth. They failed you. Wronged you."

"I can understand if you've forgiven them, or you've succeeded on your own and don't care anymore. But - you're telling it as if they were doing the right thing, the safe thing, their duty of not taking undue risks, and it was your decision that was questionable. They failed in their duty! You came to them offering help, and they didn't accept it to make Iomedae's cause stronger! They didn't make you better off for having come, it was a waste of your time! Your goddess herself sent them a sign, a big obvious sign saying they were wrong, because they had rejected a soldier so outstanding that she was made a paladin, and they grudgingly agreed to let you in but didn't consider changing their rules!"

"Doing something new and successful should be a reason for others to follow you, not a warning not to take the risks you took! When they think of you as 'the half-orc', they should be thinking 'and that's why more women should marry orcs'! How can you stand there and take it, as if - as if you're doing Good for everyone's sake but your own? Are you a woman or an axiomite?!" Gord is so, so deeply frustrated with Lawful Good being incompetent.

That's - kind of him, sweet really, and also makes her deeply grateful that her father taught her patience was a great virtue.

"I - thank you. You really don't need to be upset on my behalf. Not even on the behalf of me twenty-two years ago. I don't think they wronged me very much, or that I've been - wronging myself."

"I did consider whether Iomedae was signaling them as well as me. But I ultimately decided that wasn't Her main purpose, because She could have achieved that more cheaply in other ways. And the other paladins know everything I do, and ultimately it's their job to figure out what She was telling them, and they're better at it than me, so I focused on myself."

"We paladins do think of ourselves as - resources, to some extent. It's not that we do Good only for other people's sake, but we do put their lives ahead of our own. That's not a downside or a sacrifice, that's - the thing we want, the thing we're choosing to do. To make the world better for other people, and not just for ourselves. It's a choice I'm proud of, and I could have put it down any day of my life without blame - there are paladins who retire - but I've never wanted to. I'm happy with my life, I'm only ever unhappy about the rest of the world."

"And I think it's a very good impulse of yours, to be - easily upset on others' behalf, and it should be nurtured." 

"I - accept that it's your choice. You know best what's best for yourself, and I'm glad you're happy."

"I still feel that - if that had happened to someone else, it would have been wrong, and hurtful. An injustice. So I don't want not to be upset, just because you're fine with it. Maybe you can think of it as - doing Good for the other people in similar situations to yours, the other half-orc women who weren't as patient with finding the city of their dreams unwelcoming, who weren't chosen as paladins, who didn't succeed despite the odds. Be angry on their behalf, if not on your own. It wasn't all right, and it shouldn't be ignored." He looks at her pleadingly.

"It wasn't perfect, no. But the world is full of little hurts and injustices. I would rather focus on the big ones, and I hope the day comes when we can help - all the half-orc women who didn't become paladins."

He said more women should marry orcs, if the result was her. That's - maybe what people call romantic? But it's also deeply unwise advice for women. 

More women should marry her father, but that's a much harder goal to strive for.

"I think it's likely that day is pretty soon," Weeping Cherry opines. "It's ... not universally true that more resources make people more comfortable with people who look different. Fighting for equal treatment for all people is definitely still something that takes ongoing effort. And there are still pockets of people who have horrible stupid opinions about outsiders that they will happily apply to orcs. But when people don't need to fight, unless they want to, and can't be hurt more than they allow, and can talk to each other instantly across the vastness of space, it does make a difference. People learn to live with each other and accept each other in a way that they sometimes can't when they're more constrained."

"And ... I think Gord is right that it's important that you know that their rejection of you was a mistake. It may be the kind of mistake where they would have needed to be more wise or clever to actually pull off a better strategy, and they did the best they reasonably could have. I somewhat doubt that, just based on my experience with how people in my world judge others, but I don't know enough of the details to say for sure. Even if it was only the kind of mistake born of not being sufficiently competent, though, it still had to be pretty hard on you at the time."

Irabeth is surprised, and confused. Some of Cherry's words make little sense, perhaps due to her alien background, but - when two people out of three agree, the third is wise to listen. And her mission here, in this meeting, isn't just to explain herself, it is to learn. The straightest way to learning is to state one's confusion.

"I think you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I'll address the part that seems clearer to me, first."

"The war college wasn't wrong to reject me before I was a paladin, given what they knew at the time. The entrance exams were conducted by experienced professionals, and I never doubted their - factual claims, applied to an average half-orc woman of no special distinction. I believed in myself, I hoped and intended to be better than that, but belief in yourself can't be turned into a valid belief in you by someone else. The mediocre and the inferior often believe in themselves, too."

"In all honesty, I was probably wrong, when I didn't accept reality and kept trying to find a place for myself in Vigil until my money ran out. If I'd left Vigil earlier, with the same intentions, Iomedae would probably have made me a paladin then. Instead I wasted precious time. I don't think I was very wrong, since I also did not know I would become a paladin or a successful adventurer, but if we're assessing mistakes, that ought to be mentioned too."

"What you said about people being uncomfortable with those who look different - seems wrong, but that is probably because I misunderstood you somehow. There are races" - the word translates to Cherry as 'species' - "that look significantly more different from humans than orcs do, but are much more welcome in majority-human communities, and understandably so. People don't turn away a dwarf or a gnome because they look odd. Catfolk, kitsune and many other races that are rarer in these parts are if anything admired, for their - exoticism."

"People aren't uncomfortable with orcs or half-orcs because they look different. They're uncomfortable because most of them - of us really are different. Looking different just lets them know who we are. If orcs looked identical to humans, and lived mixed among them, we'd probably - just think there were many more Chaotic and Evil and often unwise people around."

"I know that people often distrust strangers who come from unfamiliar cultures and faiths. Perhaps more often in Lastwall, because Mendevians are used to seeing crusaders from all over the world. Sometimes it's because they don't know what the strangers might be like, and sometimes because they think they do know and are wrong. But the problem with orcs is that people are correct to distrust most of them. The War College didn't reject me because they were uncomfortable with me looking different from humans."

"People should treat others equally in their duties, and in their kindness. But admission to the War College was neither a duty I was owed, nor a kindness to be done for my sake. They were choosing the best candidates for their mission, and I didn't qualify."

"Okay. So if that is accurate, that is a very different thing than I thought was happening," Weeping Cherry replies.

"It's, uh, so you and Gord are clearly cross-fertile? You have the same number of chromosomes, and the same important genes at clear locations. There's some extra ... stuff ... going on in your cellular biology that I don't actually understand, but it is happening in both of you. And you talked about your father being an orc and your mother being a human, and you don't look like there's any reason for you to be sterile? So I assumed that you were members of the same species, and therefore thought that your situation was analogous to situations where members of my species have discriminated against each other because they thought there were large population-level differences in morality between people who looked different, even though that turned out not to be true."

"So I thought you were describing a situation where orcs and humans were two populations that looked different, and had had long-term conflicts, but that there wasn't any underlying difference in how likely they were to be good people. Which is a situation I have seen before that produces discrimination which is not actually correct."

"If, indeed, orcs are mentally different from humans in the way demons are but ... less so? Then their reaction makes more sense. It's still ... not the optimum outcome, though. It is possible that given their priors, there really was no way for them to do better."

"But. Clearly in your specific case, it seems quite likely after the fact that admitting you would have worked out fine, since you managed to be a paladin in more challenging circumstances. And so if you would have preferred that outcome, they wronged you. It may not have been an avoidable wrong -- people can't actually be perfect -- but it's still okay to acknowledge it and express sympathy for what could have been, if the world was better."

"If orcs really do have mental differences from humans, I have way less relevant institutional advice to provide about ameliorating discrimination, though."

She decides to omit any mention of the fact that she also looks cross-fertile with both of them, because that is completely off-topic, embarrassing to admit to having checked, and so much weirder than ... two different species which can have children but not second-generation children? Which is her best guess for how this would work. Maybe Irabeth is just infertile for reasons that she hasn't been able to immediately spot. That probably makes more sense.

Irabeth gives up on looking calm and collected and lets her confusion show clearly on her face. To her enormous relief, Gord appears to be just as confused.

"I really don't understand how my - fertility is relevant? Or my ability to... bear children fathered by Gord. I don't have any children, but as far as I know I could bear, if I lay with a man."

"We are - clearly not the same race? He's human, I'm half-orc. ...I suppose if there was a world populated only by half-orcs, then all their children would be half-orcs, and maybe you'd call them a race? But they could still have children with full humans or with orcs, if they met any."

"Some races can have children together. Humans and orcs and elves all can, and their offspring can all have children with each other. Dwarves and gnomes can't have children with other races. There are tens of races on Golarion, I'm really not an expert on this, and hundreds or more on the Outer Planes and I assume the other planets too, and - some demons and devils and angels and azata can breed with humans, and for all I know with any mortal race? Dragons can breed with humans and most other races, and they're not even humanoid. I don't understand what chromosomes and genes are - the translation says they're to do with heritable traits? - the thing you inherit from dragons is magic, humans descended from dragons are sorcerers, does that mean they have a... magic gene?"

Now it's Weeping Cherry's turn to look confused.

"What?" she asks. "I ... am very confused. Hold on."

She pulls up a transcript of the conversation and quickly re-reads what Irabeth said.

"Okay. So it sounded to me like you made a couple of contradicting claims. Probably this means I didn't understand you or that you were mistaken, but I don't know which. You claimed that humans and orcs are different species*," she says. "But you also claimed that they are interfertile. Which is a contradiction. A 'species'** is a population of creatures that are interfertile. Although Mother Nature makes fools of us all and that is an oversimplification of the bizarre things that actually occur with real creatures. My best guess is ... your world doesn't have a theory of how traits are inherited from parents, and you are still distinguishing species*** by how they look, not by their underlying ability to share traits."

* A word which the truespeak spell chooses to translate as the Taldane word 'races' for Irabeth, and as the Hallit word 'races' for Gord.

** A word which the spell leaves untranslated, because of the use-mention distinction.

*** The poor tortured spell uses an obscure scholarly Taldane word meaning 'classifications' and the Hallit word 'kind of animal'.

"In populations where members of a given species intermix and interbreed freely, individual heritable traits propagate separately, which would make it unusual for a bundle of traits that causes non-green skin, different jaw structure, different muscle growth, and predisposition towards altruism to all travel together. It could happen that those traits all co-evolved* such that they were a package deal, but the more common thing would be for those traits to get selected** on separately."

* The spell gives up on this one and introduces it as an English loan word.

** The spell translates this literally, but modulates the emphasis to suggest a technical term.

"So if orcs and humans can interbreed freely, then either your populations are so separated that you never do in practice -- which seems unlikely given that half-orcs are common enough that the two random people from Golarion I met included one -- or the fact that whether a member of your species* is green is correlated with whether they're altruistic is weird."

* The much-abused spell gives up and goes back to 'race'.

She tries to asses whether this explanation has reduced her audience's confusion at all.

"Did that help at all? Honestly, the only thing it affects is my opinion of Lastwall's hiring practices. None of this changes my general impression of Irabeth's story. I can just err on the side of caution and send Lastwall an explanation of race-blind aptitude exams and when they would be a good policy choice once this is all over. And actually, like, take a look at the orcs and see whether they're just suffering from lead poisoning -- which makes people more prone to violence and have less impulse control -- or something like that. It's possible that this isn't genetic at all."

This explanation has reduced her audience's confusion in a way! Her audience is now much more certain that they're not understanding each other at all.

"Some of those words didn't translate, and some of the rest still doesn't make sense. I'm getting Taldane from the translation spell, how about you?" Irabeth looks at Gord.

"I'm getting Hallit, and probably missing even more words than you are. Hallit isn't used by wizards* much."

* The translation spell picks up enough of Gord's meaning to translate 'wizards' not as 'arcane mages' but as the word's literal English meaning, 'wise and learned people (derogatory)'.