"Oh don't worry about that. We'd never dream of it.

Karumzek, when you're ready?"

"You have started a Game, little mortal, between Gods, and now your own Lord requests you play it.
He has entered into an alliance, as much as Gods like Him ever can, with Our Father Blackfingers.
On Their behalf, I deliver you this message.
It is possible for you to bring ruin upon Cheliax.
Within 1 year, if you are diligent.
To achieve this you must be strategic, cunning, quiet.
If the Lord of Hell or any His servants learns of your business here, or of your Masters intervention, you will not live to see it through.
Our Grey Master may aid you, if it suits Him, but no such oath be made, if you would fail to warrant it."

Norgorber's actual instructions here, to be clear, were much shorter. He's paraphrasing as far as seems beneficial.

The Karumzek is not Lawful. It has no obligation to follow instructions exactly, if it might imagine itself benefitting from doing otherwise.

"Wow. That's. More than I was expecting. You're supposed to be able to defeat Cheliax?
And you're dead if anyone who knows breathes a word of it, which currently is just me?
Definitely gonna blackmail my way into this. How can I help?"

Robaldo is pausing to think.

"What of the means, can you-"

He looks back up. The Karumzek is already gone.

He considers his god might not, in fact, be involved in this at all.
From what he's heard, Norgorber's not insane. He's selfish. Reliably selfish.
If Robaldo starts down this path, he won't find out if it's wrong unless he spends a commune he doesn't have, or notices a change in alignment that would be covered up by his aura as a Cleric, or tries an Early Judgement, or more likely is Forsaken by his god.

When he does, if he does, he might already have done great Evil.
Not wanting that, Tet's best play would be to forsake him right now, so he can get on with trying to redeem himself.
This profits Norgorber only the value of him ceasing to be a Cleric, surely less than the value of just killing him, which he has made the point he can easily do.

It's only selfishly worth it to Norgorber if helping isn't just going to immediately cost Robaldo his divine spells, which is only true if Tet approves.
And knowing that, Tet of course wouldn't bother wasting intervention on additional evidence. Wouldn't be inclined to cleric the kind of person who would need it.
It's still going to be terrifying when he does it.

Even given that, it's a shockingly short message.
Not, "Here's How", or "Their Weakness is", or even "Bf6."
Only "It is possible".

"That's all I get, is it?"

"Rude! You get me to help!

Don't worry, my kind are great at secrets.

If anyone hear's a word of it from me, I'll go to Abaddon instead of Axis, nothing could be worth that."

Well, I guess if Tet thinks this is a Winning move, He was right about the chess game, He's probably right now, too.

"Hi, I'm Robaldo. Pleasure to meet you. Won't the cloak and mask be a bit of a giveaway?"

"Oh absolutely. This is just for business meetings and formal occassions.

We'll need to come up with a backstory first, and then I'll get an outfit that matches that.

And I'll want to look at local girls' name frequencies, for newborns as of 24 years ago, and roll some dice to pick."

Suppose God told you

Suppose God paid a serial killer to summon a talking magic spider assassin into your bedroom, to tell you a message, and the message was, "Fun fact, you could totally defeat Hell if you really tried. Don't tell anyone though! There's a soft deadline of 1 year!"

Suppose the talking magic spider assassin's friend knows, and is sticking around.

It's not abnormal, that the new Mystic Theurge is engaged in weird experiments that he doesn't explain to anyone.
All magic users are like that. It'd be weirder if he wasn't.

Robaldo is trying to solve reality like it's noughts-and-crosses.
He is trying to explicitly calculate, with numbers attached, what the current equilibria is and what forces are keeping it there.
He is reading every book he can get, every spell he can find, to see if it contradicts the implied prices of victory, that his equilibria math insists on.

It doesn't feel like trying to match wits with a god.
Tet probably matches wits with gods all the time, and Wins anyway.
Robaldo couldn't be expected to do that ever.

If feels like trying to match wits with a thousand intelligent men, spread over dozens of countries and hundreds of years of military history, who all tried with all they had to crush eachother, and the current status quo is the best they could come up with.

And Robaldo's supposed to prove he's not just smarter than all of them individually, but all of them combined, too.

The individual whose religious upbringing is opposed on principle to having "names" that aren't disposable pseudonyms, has rolled "Consia" for her time here in Almas.

Consia Servina, in the rare event someone asks for a last name. It just means "servant", there's tons of them and there's no guarantee they're related.

Consia works at a bakery and sandwich store just outside the university campus.
The guy who owns it is getting old, so she gets more responsibility then she probably should.

Few people in Golarion have read Norgorber's holy text, all 17 chapters.
The real one, of course, not any of the dozens of decoy holy books.

Robaldo is now one of them.

It's utterly remorseless, coldblooded, evil.
It's also, in a strictly game-theoretic sense, correct.

Robaldo's written adapted versions of several chapters to submit to the Tettian writing competition.

Consia vetoed his first draft, with corrections where it was too similar to the original and therefore a dead giveaway, passed his second draft to an unnamed associate, and eventually agreed to help submit it under a pseudonym based in a foreign country.

Consia's well liked in the community already. She attends a local Desnan congregation, and helps out with the little lost children there, when she's not working.

She's obviously not a local, her accents more Opparan and a local would have older friendships.
Probably she came on a boat or something. People in Andoran don't ask about that kind of thing. It's impolite.

Consia has a childhood friend who lives in another city.
He's doing well for himself, he sends her letters and coin, to help her out.
She talks about him to the mailman, who thinks they're in love even though she denies it.
If she ever skips town on short notice, it'll probably be because he's finally asked her to marry him.

Some of the kids with the congregation want more work than they can find.
She'll let them help out with bringing supplies to the bakery, for a few coppers.

No Andoran guardsman has ever thought it reasonable to pour wheat flour through sieve and comb, on some ridiculous theory that maybe there's contraband hidden in it, without any evidence at all. There's a kid carting it, he's just happy to have a job. Stop hassling them and find a real problem. This isn't Cheliax, where authorities engage in arbitrary abuse like that.

A few weeks ago Consia was really hurt. She was just out on the town and some idiot driver hit her and didn't even stop.
Some of the guards helped her to a temple and she got healed from it.
It only took one channel, that'll usually fix anyone who isn't some bigshot or adventurer, or on the very verge of death.
She wouldn't give them a proper description, didn't want anyone to get in trouble, thought it an accident.
Naive girl.
They told her it's irresponsible to go around alone like that, but she still does it.

Desnans, you can't talk sense into them.

Anyone who knows her knows she's good.
Well, not knows knows, she wouldn't show up to alignment detection. 
Detect the Faithful would tell you she's Desnan.

A magical reagant supplier across town closed a few days ago.
The owner disappeared with most of his stock.
Must have spent days planning it. People think he was in a lot of debt, and ran out.
He didn't show up on a divination, some think maybe he spent half his debts on an Amulet of Proof against Detection and Location.

Clever plan.

If Consia was any less suspicious, it'd wrap around back to more suspicious again.

Robaldo doesn't look stressed about anything.
Robaldo looking stressed is many times more likely in worlds where he's up to something.
Robaldo looks perfectly fine, learning his spells and doing his writing and his research.

He really wishes that Consia never had to kill anyone. He hates it.

Consia thinks that mercy is dumb, can prove that mercy is dumb. Can prove it with the same kind of math he knows his god needs him to use, expects him to use for his quest.

He still wishes mercy wasn't dumb, and that it was never strategically correct to kill people.

Maybe in some better world, soldiers use wooden swords and padded arrows, and just pretend to die, and accept the result of such battles as much as if they were really dead and could do nothing to oppose it.

Maybe in some better world, criminals wouldn't have to kill witnesses. They could just poke you with their wooden dagger, and say "tag!", and you'd lay down and play dead while they took your gold, and you wouldn't be allowed to tell anyone who did it.

The guard would have to be really Lawful, for that to work. Even Iomedaens would struggle, with how Lawful you'd need to be for that to work.

Robaldo isn't that Lawful, not really. He hopes to create that better world anyway, after he's defeated this one.

Sometimes Robaldo needs stuff he couldn't get normally. Consia helps with that.
He mostly goes to the library but there are some standard reference books on his shelf, and a few folders of his loose notes.
The covers on the books stay the same, look the same, but the content is whatever he's requested most recently.

It's not like Robaldo and Consia don't know each other.
She talks to him when he buys a sandwich.

He'll always be able to get a magic item loaned, if he needs to look at it's effects closely, compare it to this or that spell.
Probably Blackfingers told her something that noone's told him, for why she's doing this.
It wouldn't be a good reason.
Hopefully Tet's not expecting him to figure that out, too.

Robaldo knows why his original suggestion would never have worked now, nor any obvious variation of it.
He's found plenty of obscure ways to cause sudden substantial damage to a warship.
They're not small targets.

Mending isn't strong enough to effect a ship, but Make Whole (2nd circle, Wizard/Cleric) effects very large objects as if they were constructs, and the ships' wizards will have a few scrolls and be able to stabilise it 80% of the time, he estimates.

You'd have to destroy the ship completely before they can repair it, and before they can meaningfully attack back.

It's a start though. He'll add it to his equilibria prices, a few other things together might shift the numbers by enough.

Robaldo's still reasonably sure taking out the Chelish navy takes out Cheliax.

The people themselves aren't rich, they don't have the Good kind of divine magic that makes subsistence farming tolerable.

It'd lose it's more distant holdings fast. It'd lose Ravounel if it couldn't reasonably pretend it would march an army over the Menador mountains to stop it. There's only one good path across, the Menador Gap, and it wouldn't be a safe strategy and Cheliax's generals historically have picked safe strategies.

When Robaldo learnt the history of his country growing up, the Chelish army seemed a great dragon, that his people's anger at great price pushed back. Reading it again, with all he's learnt now, it seems a paper tiger that lost to disorganised rabble and could barely pretend to keep it's pride intact in the process.

Cheliax lives on its control of the seas, and on its wizards.

Finding a way to kill every wizard in Cheliax would also work, but the boat thing seems way more approachable.

He'll work on wizard-counters too, just in case.

The Sarglagon, called "Drowning Devils", can see in darkness, underwater, and through invisibility. They swim faster than they run, can fly, can control water, can teleport at will, can use telepathy, and can summon water directly into your lungs and watch you drown in it even though by all known laws of magic that's impossible.

They're from the swamps of Stygia. They work for Geryon. Cheliax doesn't have many of them, but it has some. There's probably at least one in every important port, but not one on every important ship. They'd be kept on a tight leash.

They're not on the normal summoning guides, Hell doesn't want just anyone to know about them.

Another thing he wouldn't even have known about without Consia.

He'll add them to his equilibria math.

Teleportation isn't as useful as you'd think.

There's no good way to target it, you can't know exactly where a ship at sea will be. If you could know exactly where a ship could be, that'd be most of a solution by itself.

Cheliax never knows where Cormoth is. His raiders flee from warships and only go after Galleys. If he knew where the Warships were they'd be useless against him.

People have invented the "paddle wheel", in that it's a bunch of paddles on a wheel you can turn to drive a ship.
It's not very often used.
It's not the most efficient design possible. The going into and out of the water wastes effort, you'd want something that pushes the water backwards by spinning in it at an angle.

Norgorber teaches a version of science that is individualistic and selfish.
You invent things and then don't tell anyone. It's the best strategy, it gives you an advantage nobody else has, that nobody knows you have and so can't plan for how to defend against.
Robaldo invents the propeller and doesn't tell anyone.

Robaldo's test give an estimate of 1% friction per weight, for a boat on water at low speed.

For example, an Unseen Servant, can lift 20 pounds straight up albeit very slowly. Because it's a magical construct, it can do it continuously. It can likewise turn a driveshaft to propel a vessel of 2000 pounds forward on flat water, or much less than that at a somewhat higher speed.

It has a very low range restriction, Robaldo's just using it in tests.
He'll substitute something else if it becomes part of a solution.

There are riots in Taldor.

Some Everbloom terrorists trying to attack slaver ships, not caring what other trade gets caught in the same fire.
If you're rich, or middle class and wish you were rich, some finer items imported overseas are costing much more than you wish they did.

If you're poor, you mostly buy grain. Grain's getting more expensive, too.

Everyone blames Andoran from it. They're harbouring pirates.

Some hero uncovered a small, highly local cult of Asmodeus. There was a big blowout. A dozen people were hanged, six of whom probably had something to do with it. The senate has made it very clear that that kind of thing isn't okay in Taldor.

But as long as Asmodeus is just being a small anonymous cult somewhere, and Milani is lighting boats on fire, people will hate Milani more.