Livebloog 6: I continue to be grudgingly surprised by bits.

As before, from here: https://glowfic.com/posts/7028?view=flat

So, before I jump into it, I’d like to bring up some things I’d like to see, now that we’ve got something approximating evidence that this is someone from at least a Golarion-shaped dimension with weird mideval-Europe characteristics.

The more I read, the less I am liking this version of Iomedae. Iomedae is supposed to be on a grand crusade to fight an evil that can decimate entire nations; there is no reason for her to stop for a month dealing with random itinerant illegal immigrant farmers, and even less reason for her, given how little she respects U.S. law, to stay with Evelyn. She has a job to do; Evelyn does not need that job where she is, so Iomedae should go to where the smiting needs to happen. The awkward Spanish that gets thrown in is just that, but I am signing up for dumb-ass linguistic stuff as part for this fic, so I’m putting up with it. But the thing I am continually aggravaded about is that at no point does Iomedae actually name-drop anything with a name from her world, ever, because that would give the jig up. She does not actually listen to what people telling her about Jesus are saying, and while I’m not an expert on the specific Mexican flavor of Catholicism I’d expect her to be exposed to, and even given that she’s willing to consider the wrong names for things, at no point does she say “Wait, Aroden never died, that’s what Living God means, clearly you are praying wrong and deeply mistaken about this Jesus person and I need to fix this.”

Iomedae is not from a monotheistic world, or even a monotheistic society. She is also not from a world in which you need to have faith in the existence of gods, or their powers. She should not slot smoothly into anything dealing with Christianity for anything past a cursory conversation.

This would work so much better if she did have a magic translator that was hinky on account of being a first-level adventurer’s magic item, and she’d been here for like, a week at most.

So, more talk about Iomedae’s attacker. Again, this is just dumb vague bullshit. I do not believe that the author has thought for five contiguous seconds about what justice and policing looked like in Iomedae’s version of Taldor, or what Iomedae’s actual perspective is coming from a world where, if we are taking our cues from medieval England, summary execution of outlaws was the assumption. We also have not actually gotten Iomedae to ask herself “Am I in Taldor, or in the benighted lands yet to be brought under the empire’s rule?”

We should have a clear opinion on what Iomedae thinks should happen to the criminal (which, again, in either Golarion or faux-Golarion, should be death or banishment as soon as his guilt can be reasonably established), and what she expects to happen based on what she’s seen so far. Everything is vague and muddy.

More dumb crap about how friends and families of prisoner had to pay money and bring them food, which was vaguely historical for specific prisoners in specific cases, and was not done by the victims of criminals basically ever. Again, I in no way believe that Iomedae has ever actually dealt with any kind of criminal justice system in her world, or that the author had thought about it beyond vague bellyaching about medieval England.

And then we get a kind-of interesting pivot; Iomedae goes from being gratified that the prisoner will be fed to wanting to know why he’s being fed and the random illegal immigrant kids aren’t.

Evelyn actually manages to gesture at a correct answer; food is available and cheap, and there are numerous charities that literally give it away without question and absolutely would do so to a hungry family with children; the problem is political. She can’t bring herself to say “Yes, those parents are in my professional fucking opinion neglecting their children and if our organization was worth a damn we’d be up in their shit.”

And, again, Iomedae is acting like the crazy person the story is telling me she’s not. She should be deeply and fundamentally curious about this world she’s in, and the places where things happen that are just alien to her should raise questions, which should immediately reveal not that she’s naive, but that she has an entirely different set of assumptions.

Like, to go back to the tractors, in Golarion, if you have an item that moves on its own, grows hot to the touch, and emits noxious odors, it’s probably an Animated Object that possessed and is dangerous. I can buy, vaguely and with much scowling, that a Ring of Fire European peasant can be convinced that a car is just a complicated mechanical engine and nothing to be superstitious about, because they don’t have actual demonic objects as reference.

So, Evelyn resolves to take Iomedae (and probably Lily) to tour the local churches and food banks, which does genuinely sound like a fun and enriching activity. And we also finally get a bit about where Iomedae had her own religious instruction.

Iomedae: “My father-brother is a holy warrior of God. He fight in, I don’t have the words. The holy fight with Tar-Baphon. He die. He fight in Heaven now. When he alive, he visit, and he tell me all about holy warrior of God and all the rules.”

To be specific: “A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class features except proficiencies if she ever willingly commits an evil act.

Additionally, a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority, act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, and so forth), help those in need (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those who harm or threaten innocents.”

And…I’m going to quote the response, because it’s the thing that makes me find this story so tedious.

UM??????

Evelyn…is too tired for this conversation, mostly, as usual she’s up with Lily since 6 am. She’s trying to keep what is now a pretty big pile of future lot notes in her head, and a pretty big pile of emotions somewhere she won’t be unfairly making them Iomedae’s problem.

Maybe “Tarbafon” is the word for Satan in her language, and her brother was – traveling as a missionary? Right, isn’t there a thing where in some insular religious sects, the boys leave as young adults to travel and proselytize (and the girls, presumably, are kept at home and ignorant and shunted into arranged marriages, and good for Iomedae for avoiding that fate). She’s not sure how someone manages to die on a proselytizing mission, maybe he went to South America and got a tropical disease. …Evelyn should stop speculating about things she can’t verify yet and that aren’t the point, the point is the teenage girl sitting in front of her, who is lost and confused in a system that makes no sense to her and whose brother is dead. Evelyn feels kind of squicky about the part where her affect seems to be that it’s okay for him to have fucking died on a mission, because now he’s continuing to do God’s work in Heaven, but it’s not her place to question Iomedae’s faith and it does seem to be bringing her some kind of closure and peace.

“That makes sense. I’m sorry to hear your brother died. It sounds like he was a very good role model,” would she know that word? ugh how would you say ‘role model’ in Spanish? “- dador de consejos, for you, when you were younger?”

*Giver of advice

Fuck you, fic. Evelyn, as you note, is not a teenage girl. She’s an adult with an adult son, and giving her this wack-ass internal monologue with ‘kind of squicky’ and badly misunderstanding the difference between the insular Mormon split-off groups and the ones that do send people on missions. Then again, I’m also kind of getting that this is deliberate; that by making everyone around Iomedae have such hate and fear for Christianity, and shy away from everything she says that is even vaguely religious, we can put off the “Wait, where the hell am I?” conversation.

And again the Hell thing. Why’d you put your attacker in jail, Iomedae? Why’d you put him in a place where (you assumed) he’d be starved and confined and had to deal with the depredations of the other prisoners? Why don’t you save him, Iomedae?

Again, fuck this warmed-over strawman-Christian bullshit that manages to answer its own question as to the Problem of Hell. Fuck this weak-ass milquetoast hybridization of Californian liberal guilt complexes and imagined European peasant values. Fuck you for pretending that the fact that evil people go to hell when you, Iomedae, nascent Goddess of Stabbing Motherfuckers In The Face, I Am Only Barely Exaggerating About This Being One Of Her Legitimate Divine Domains, stab them in the fucking face, bothers you more than what those evil people would do to the innocents of the world if you did not.

Evelyn, as is in character, praises Iomedae’s squicky uncle and immediately says that he’d want her to go to school, which Iomedae rightfully doubts. She points out that she’s a paladin, not a wizard like her patron god, and that she doesn’t want to multiclass wizard.

…Fuck, I’m just skimming. Evelyn approves of Iomedae’s sideways understanding of Aroden, because it pattern-matches to a sideways-ass understanding of Christianity. And of course Iomedae thinks that learning at a school will help teach her how to find hungry kids, because of course it would.

Iomedae, we remember, is either in a world where signs and portents are real, and you can make them happen with a moderate spell slot expenditure, and again there is no basis either for statistical demographic analysis of a population, and even less that a random farm girl would think they could exist. Man, hearing this story go on about starving kids when I am sure that I share barely the smallest reference with the author in what the actual causes of starvation are, in either Golarion or Earth, is getting very, very old.

Iomedae actually does want to continue paladin lessons. The fact that no priest she’s met is actually a cleric hasn’t stopped her yet, but then again, she is from a world where a mid-level cleric can do literally every material miracle attributed to Jesus in the Bible (obviously excepting the saving mankind from sin bits), and she’s heard that this is the kind of things that the people she’s been around expect from holy magic, so this is kind of explicable confusion.

There’s a bit of a confusion about paladin orders and holy orders, and damn if I don’t want to just sit Iomedae down in front of a computer with text-to-speech, let her browse Wikipedia, and then have her come back with the clarification that “Holy warrior of god” matches most closely to “Crusader”. (Again, she’s literally a goddess of the crusade back in her world.)

Iomedae does casually drop that she expects to get that Immunity to Disease at level 3, which immediately panics Evelyn (since she hasn’t had the vaccine conversation). She does manage to deflect and hope to just get Iomedae speaking better English; Iomedae likes the idea of working at a church-run food bank to both do good, practice her holy bits, and learn better English all at once.

Evelyn suggests that maybe Iomedae volunteers instead of getting a job (which makes perfect sense given her age and inclination), and that there are lots of rules around employers and who they can pay.

Iomedae: She looks concerned about that, actually! “It is illegal pay people who don’t have papers?”

Because of course the paladin is now suddenly concerned that she might have been doing something very illegal previously?

Man, I’d love to hear a tearful, remorseful Iomedae attempting to turn herself in at the police station and also attempt to request a W2.

And man, I’d love if the author could actually manage another perspective. Why is Evelyn divorced? Why not have an aggressively no-nonsense husband around who is used to laying down the law on foster kids, and who can both make formal pronouncements of “You are going to school. This is how it’s going to be. Neither I nor the United States of America care whether or not you think that you need it.”, and to provide a contrast to Evelyn.

But…where do we actually go from here?

And…fuck, I gave this fic too little credit. Iomedae actually is deeply concerned that she was working illegally, and immediately offers to give her illegal earnings back, and says that she’s spent about half of them, pulling a few hundred dollars out of her shirt.

Evelyn is impressed. I mean, I’m honestly impressed, but mostly once again rolling my eyes at beating the drum on hungry kids. If Iomedae is doing fruit-picking, that’s usually paid per-item. I am absolutely willing to buy that in addition to being in the best physical shape of everyone there despite her sex, Iomedae is also cheerfully willing to work until she’s down to her last few hitpoints of nonlethal damage. And, even if we assume that she is twice as productive as the next best farmer…let’s say that she’s got $350 there as a conservative definition of “several hundred.” And let’s say she’s been working for two months, so double and half cancels out. So, that’s $40 a week. You can absolutely feed kids rice and beans on that, and you can save up for the minimum appliances to make cooking it easy, and that’s before you just ask to take home the reject fruit that’s perfectly edible but doesn’t meet American supermarket standards. It will not be an exciting meal, but it will be food to fill empty bellies.

Evelyn tries to console her about this, but Evelyn is adamant that she can and will make amends; if she was the kind of person that broke laws on-purpose, her god would not have her as a paladin, and even though she did it accidentally, every paladin that fails to uphold their standards even on accident damages the trust in paladins everywhere. It’s a surprisingly sophisticated statement for an abused cult kid, and Evelyn does finally manage to get a hit in; she points out that the easiest way to learn all the myriad laws of America is to go to school, and Iomedae agrees, as long as it’s free since she has no money now.

I will confess, I was not expecting the Iomedae of this story to take on faith that if the law of America places restrictions on who can work and under what conditions, that this should be followed because America was not a tyrannical hellscape and thus should be assumed to be legitimate authority. I assume we are going to get an unprincipled exception to this when we get into whether or not her illegal immigrant friends should be in the country at all, but I’m enjoying what bits of paladin-like behavior that I’m seeing.

I’m also looking forward to Iomedae witnessing some bullying, responding according to her mieter, and getting immediately expelled.

Livebloog 5: The Bit With the Bit I Actually Like

As always, we are here: https://glowfic.com/posts/7028?view=flat

Evelyn: “I’m sorry. We can’t go feed them right now. But – you know them – how about this. I can try to find a phone number for a charity that helps workers like them, who, uh, don’t have papers to be living in the US. I’m sure that’s a thing. I think it can be hard to help the children there, because they’re – scared of getting in trouble for being in the US without having papers. But if you think they would trust you, then you can tell them it’s safe, and then the grownups who are already trying to help people like that will know who needs helping.”

Iomedae: She relents slightly. “If it’s safe I can tell them it’s safe.
I don’t have papers.”

Fuck this mealy-mouthed euphemistic bullshit. Iomedae herself I’m happy to give a pass on; the U.S. code of law absolutely has no provisions for interplanar travel, and I’m not going to fault her for breaking immigration law when she was transported against her will, and presumably aggressively lied to by the illegal aliens she was bunking (well, tenting) with. The issue is not that the people present just misplaced their papers, it is that they have no legal right to be in the U.S. to begin with, and cannot seek help from the law for the same reason that criminals also generally cannot seek aid.

Is the U.S.’s system of immigration perfect? Absolutely not! Would it be improved with actual paladins and magic to be able to root out the actual refugees from the economic migrants from the drug mules to the criminals fleeing their just prosecution? Amazingly so! And the reason that we have so many miles of bureaucratic slog (other than the general inflation of the bureaucratic state and cost disease and so on) is so we can make an attempt to find people like the sex criminal that Iomedae had to take care of, and not let them into the country willy-nilly.

The correct answer for a paladin to “Why don’t they have papers?” is “Why not send everyone back to the Immigration office to start the process for getting green cards, and then follow said process?” Or, if the U.S. is such a tyranny that such a process is impossible, then why not escort them back to wherever they migrated to?

Evelyn does clarify that actually-born-to-Americans-without-papers are treated legally differently than illegal-immigrants, and…hot damn. We actually do get Iomedae to swap her wording a bit. I may need to change the working title I gave this entry.

Iomedae: “The people who pay for the food because I am a kid, if they know I am a holy warrior of God, they want me eat the food? Or give it to someone who cannot work for their own food?”

Iomedae is still concerned about being the recipient of general charity. I again wonder if Iomedae has heard of taxes and public spending, because one of the follow-up questions I had for her was how much of her savings as a migrant worker she was earmarking for taxes, and if she had asked that question of anyone. Because, again, paladin, Lawful, etc. Really, the more this goes on, the more I feel that this whole story is just a troll and Iomedae actually is a crazy woman, and neither from Golarion or the actual historic Iomedae from same.

By now, however, it is finally getting through to Evelyn that she’s fostering Joan of Arc and not a traumatized ex-Mormon, and she does, speaking graciously for every American taxpayer, assure her that the people paying for the foster care system do want her to eat the food, even though she’s not a destitute cripple. Oh, man, I look forward to the leaps in logic we’re going to get when she tries to explain how democracy is a good thing to someone from Golarion.

We’re still on the charity thing, and so Iomedae decides to pray and wait for a bit before accepting the charity, to make sure she’s deciding based on what is right and not on what is in front of her. Honestly, if this is going to be a thing, what feels like the best idea to me would be to just shrug, go with what the child wants, and come up with a list of chores and responsibility and an allowance-wage, and let Iomedae buy flour and veggies (and make use of the oven and appliances).

I’m also really wondering where Iomedae’s starting allowance of gold is. Paladin start with the clothes on their backs (check) and 5d6*10 gp worth of equipment, including her 15 gp longsword and apparently nothing else. If we assume Iomedae was in the lowest .01% of starting wealth paladins, that is still 35 gp of gold Iomedae is carrying around, or about $15,000.

And…huh. We get a little more nuance, interestingly. Iomedae fasting concerns Evelyn, and she gently pries into her home life. Before, apparently, Iomedae’s farm was quite sufficient, but since she had to share her take from her migrant farmer gig with the kids in her camp, she went hungry a bit when getting to America. Farming in actual medival conditions without tractors or mass-produced nitrogen fertilizer is a hell of a lot of work, and can fail despite that work due to entirely external conditions even without wandering monsters. Modern American farming is strictly better, unless Iomedae had a 5th-level druid as a neighbor that was casually multiplying their crop yields. And again, this is America, food is cheap, and there are food banks and the like. Why would the kids of migrant farmers not be able to take enough food home to feed their kids?

That sounds like solid evidence that there was a lot more shady things going on than Iomedae didn’t herself recognize. I also continue to be aggravated that I’m not getting an actual story written by an actual D&D player, because I’d love to see Iomedae show up with $50 worth of flour and a little camp stove, give a little lesson on preparing and baking hard-tack flatbread, tell people that they were now longer hungry, and then get progressively more confused, and then upset, as she realized that no one was actually at risk of starving and they were abusing the same charity she was getting so upset about.

In America, Apollyon is dead and buried. People do not die of calorie deficit unless someone is keeping them imprisoned (possibly themself, if they have an eating disorder). People functional enough to work under-the-table jobs can feed themselves enough to sustain life, basically without exception, and even the people who cannot do so are given sufficient charity that they don’t die in the streets like actual famine victims. Prosperity may not be shared equally, but people do not starve in America, and if there were hungry kids in Iomedae’s group before she was helping them, then there will surely be after.

Damn it, now I want a vengeful Iomedae to dig into this, and respond “Fuck it. I am the Evelyn Steel now!” and just be her own personal CPS for all of the kids in the camp.

So, Iomedae prays, from a first-person perspective for the first time, and…you know what? I don’t hate it!  I’m just going to quote the whole thing, since this is the first thing that made me actually want to read more of this fic so far.

She has no particular intuition that one should pray in private, and praying in that vast rich room that is supposedly hers seems harder than praying in Evelyn’s kitchen. She smiles, and closes her eyes and prays.

–

Prayer is not about the hope that your god will send a vision on the spot to answer you; gods work across uncounted worlds, on great and important things, and cannot answer you all the time. Prayer can call your god’s attention to something, if it’s very important; Iomedae has spent lots of time fervently pleading with Aroden to fix the Evil afterlives, just in case he can and just didn’t realize he was supposed to. But mostly prayer is to give your mind over to your god and see if things are clear that way which aren’t clear otherwise.

Would Aroden take food from a program meant to feed the poor? Probably, if he were hungry and needed it, because he was the only survivor of Azlant and had reason to suppose he could help more people if he was strong. Iomedae is not the only survivor of Azlant. Iomedae is a better swordsman than her brothers and never gets sick but there are ten hundreds of people like her, maybe more than that. She will be able to help more people in the future if she eats, but so would anyone she takes the food from, and she isn’t special. If anything she can endure hardship better, because she is a paladin; it is much less likely to cost her paradise and less likely even to weaken her to the point of illness. She won’t steal in desperation and she won’t lose the ability to support herself. 

–

Evelyn says that the people who give the food would still want her to eat it if they knew she was a paladin. She isn’t sure she believes Evelyn. She isn’t sure Evelyn really understands that she is a paladin. The travelling workers did understand – well, it took her a while to get enough vocabulary, but once she had the words for ‘the god who was human once’ and so on, then she explained and everyone thought that it made perfect sense of her, of how hard she worked and how she shared her food and how she told stories and sang songs and children loved her, and they’d call her over for help when they were injured or sick, though she won’t have healing powers until she is stronger. They acted like people who know enough about Goodness to trust it and be inspired to it when they see it. When she explained that Aroden would give her miraculous healing when she got stronger, they told stories of the miraculous healings He’d done through holy people they knew. (She thinks priests here don’t channel like priests at home; no one ever proposed going to stand around a church until all their minor wounds were healed. But they knew that Aroden could heal people.)

Evelyn is rich. That is not incompatible with understanding that Iomedae is a paladin. Most paladins are rich, really, because you need armor and a sword, and only rich people have those, and you need to let a strong healthy child go off to spend their life in Aroden’s service, and desperate families can’t do without a strong healthy child. But Evelyn seems to have instincts that – don’t have exceptions for miracles and holy people in them, maybe because she has never needed either. 

This isn’t prayer, this is just thinking. Thinking is important, but the thing she wants right now isn’t actually to try scrabbling around with her own inadequate tools. It’s to give her mind over to Aroden and see if it’s clear then.

–

What does Aroden see, here?

–

–

Aroden sees a country that is farther up the slope that it is humanity’s birthright to climb. The richest country in the world, Evelyn said, and she was only a little bit boasting. Aroden sees the big houses and the magical beasts and the flat flat flat roads as far as the eye can see and the indoor water and how even the poor children are clothed and Aroden sees humanity marching towards its destiny. Aroden does not see a world that has no need of holy warriors. There are still poor people, and frightened ones, and people who have wealth but forget that they can’t take it with them to Axis. But Aroden rejoices in this place. It is good soil to grow in.

Its people are good and generous. Evelyn is a very confusing person, but she seems to have taken in Iomedae as an act of charity, and while Iomedae mostly feels resentful and frustrated because she does not need to be the recipient of an act of charity and it is baffling to pick her as the target of such rather than any of the many people who do need it – Aroden, she thinks, is impressed. Aroden is glad that the world is so rich that it can afford this. And from the perspective of a god, Iomedae is small and weak and ignorant and confused. Not because she’s a child, but because even adults are on only the first step of their journey which they are entitled to end in godhood. Aroden is proud of Evelyn, and above petty irritation because her choice of people to help is silly; all of Iomedae’s decisions probably look just as silly when you are a god. After all, she was just feeding the children in front of her, and didn’t even think to ask if there was somewhere where children were even hungrier –

–
This is still not prayer, but it’s getting closer.

–

Aroden, Who knows the strength of civilization, show us the habits that build it; Aroden, who knows us in glory, hold our memories of greatness close to our hearts, so that we will know when it is in our reach, and know how to reach for it. Aroden, who gave me the strength to be a holy warrior, give me also the wisdom to choose my fights wisely, and spend my life well in your service, and help as many people as I can, and help me grow strong enough to save everyone, literally everyone, and do not let my strength come coupled with contempt for weakness, or my wisdom with contempt for foolishness, and withhold Your grace for me, should my conduct ever be unbefitting of a paladin, and if it’s unbefitting to eat meat pies from the charity of this country help me grow in understanding and explain why to Evelyn. And help the lawmen to stop the man who assailed me from hurting anyone ever again, but help him also to not be damned for it, and look after my family and give them the strength to build paradise in this world and find it in the next one, and look after everyone else too, all the families and everyone without a family, in the Empire and in this strange country and in all the worlds You travelled to and any worlds You didn’t.

And make Hell cease. 

(She always ends prayers that way.)

 

And…like I said, I don’t hate it. It’s the first actual acknowledgement that Iomedae is actually from a version of Golarion yet, and I am amused to see that my prediction of Aroden’s title of the Living God did get him confused for Jesus. I also note that there are a lot of specific cleric spells like Water Walk, Sticks to Snakes, Create Food and Water, Raise Dead, Cure Disease, and Banish that are, uh, topical.

I feel like there should be a hell of a lot more questions as to why the local clerics of maybe-Aroden don’t channel energy to heal injuries, since that’s one of the big and hard-to-fake tells of actually being a goodly cleric and not an imposter that worships an evil god. I also think that Iomedae’s belief that Aroden wants everyone to be a god is outright heretical, but in a completely plausible way given that she was raised on a farm and only has the doctrine revealed to her via divine revelation. Aroden clearly wants some people (including, amusingly, Iomedae) to be gods, but the Starstone he raised doesn’t elevate just anyone to godhood. It is not true that every human soul is uniquely precious and special in Golarion; again, this seems like Iomedae’s personal heresy.

I do like this, but the fact that I like it makes the bits of it that are clearly Bay Area Rationalism stick out the most. As I’ve said before, bandits have weapons and armor and they are not rich. They may not have the giant steel tower-shields and custom-armored full plate mail that paladins can kick around with, but swords are cheap, quite logically; if you can’t get a simple sword where you are, you definitely can’t get a scythe blade, and it’s even more labor-intensive to farm without hardened steel tools.

I could do a whole bit on “And make Hell cease.” I’ll do the cliff notes. One: Hell is specifically the Lawful Evil afterlife. It is absolutely not metonymy for “The collective planes aspected with Evil where Evil-aligned souls go when they die, barring powerful interfering magics.” We’re in Iomedae’s monologue, so we have no language-based excuses here; this is just wrong and reflects a Christian, monotheistic lens of the author poorly slapped over a very factually-different world. Second; making it cease. What does that mean? Just storming Hell and freeing all the damned souls? I mean, the celestials try that all the time, just as fiends frequently make forays into the celestial planes to abduct the righteous. By god standards, Aroden was quite powerful in his heyday, but gods in Golarion are absolutely not “I create the heavens and the Earth.” powerful. Aroden, again, outlived his own patron gods as a mortal; to know his story is to know that gods are not all-powerful, and not foundational to what they represent and embody. But the bit that does set my teeth on edge is that we are again forcibly trapped into the BAR view. What would happen if the fiendish planes ceased? What would that mean? Would that actually improve things, if you just slew all the fiends of every description? Sure, for a time. But new fiends would arise from the damned souls that still populated the planes, and would continue to do so even if you scoured the planes bare. Is Iomedae asking that the utter oblivion that the daemons call forth to extend to all of the evil planes? For all evil to be destroyed forever? I mean, that’s a hell of a prayer, but there’s no weight to it. Iomedae doesn’t seem to actually believe in evil as a moral agency. She seems to think that Hell is where a single monotheistic god sends the bad people to as judgement, when He could unmake and remake them instead. That is not how gods or souls or afterlives work, and there is nothing in Iomedae’s world that would make her think that it would be. Some bits of her heresy make sense; this does not. Of course, we have a bigger problem here. It is a truth, obvious and absolute in Golarion, that the outer planes are made of what goes where, or, to be more specific, who goes there. Hell is not cruel because Aroden mandates punishment for the wicked, it is cruel because it is a place of Law and Evil, and Lawful Evil souls and powers migrate there. And if we want to get all Planescape up in this biznatch (and when do we ever not want to Planescape a biznatch up?), then we know that point where Hell ceases to be a place of Law and Evil is when it ceases to be Hell, and vice versa. There is a truth that is built into the metaphysics of Golarion that this author dares not utter, that the character of a place is made up of its people, and that if you did manage to mass-export a bunch of Lawful Evil petitioners from Hell and put them in Golarion’s heaven, it would not make them good, or if it did, it would only do so by undoing who they were in the first place and making them anew. And if you brought so many of those petitioners to Heaven that they spiritually outweighed the current inhabitants, then they would make Heaven no longer Heaven. The implications of this world-view as applied to illegal immigrants entering a prosperous nation are left to the reader. — Man, you know what else would be interesting? Level 1 Iomedae is boring and underdefined. Let’s have Level 20 Iomedae have to undergo one last test before the Starstone accepts her and elevates her to godhood, and drop Uberpaladin 20 Iomedae into the same situation. She’d be older, more mature, and have a lifetime of experience to guide her, and I bet she’d spend maybe two weeks before declaring herself the Eighth Expeditionary Army and annexing Mexico as a colonial holding of the Taldoran Empire, doubtless creating a fascinating new syncretic Catholic schism in the process.

Liveblog 4: In Search of Plot

As before. Maybe something will happen this update!

https://glowfic.com/posts/7028?view=flat

Lily needs a few more bedtime rituals, and Evelyn is not actually eager to have Iomedae tell more stories about Hell, so she jumps in and asks for another story.

*Deep sigh*

Iomedae: “Once a rich man think, I a good man. He go to the streets and say to all, I a good man! He ask a priest, I a good man? The priest afraid. The priest know not safe to say, no, you a bad man. The rich man will kill him. The priest say, in your land who is hungry? The man say, only those who do not work. The priest say, in your land who is afraid. The man say, only those who disobey! The priest say, if another grow richer than you, you happy or you sad! The man say, none shall ever grow richer than I! The priest say, then your land is not Heaven. For in Heaven no one is hungry and no one is afraid, and many will grow. The rich man angry. The rich man say, who are you, to say my land not Heaven! You dare! The priest say, I dare, because your land is not as good as Heaven and so all you can do to me is send me there. And the rich man kill him but the priest won.”

Fuck off, story. Just fuck off entirely.

First: Iomedae is from Pathfinder. On Earth, there are hard limits to what human scaling is possible. There may be no number of random schlubs that can replicate the work of Ramanujan, but there is also no individual that can fight a dozen people at once, or a hundred. In our world, money is valuable because it’s a universal currency; rich people have something that everyone wants, and getting a bunch of people to do something you want them to do is basically the win button on Earth.

On Golarion, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a million or billion or trillion peasants paying you taxes, that does not by itself let you do high-level magic or perform high-level combat feats. What it gives you is attack surface, because anyone with intrinsic power can take your money and co-opt the infrastructure that you used to get it.

Then again, I’m wondering how much of Iomedae’s vocabulary is just wrong, and if she accidentally stumbled into some Communists and is mistranslating ‘rich’ for ‘tyrant’, and that she will politely go back and both write a series of apology letters and cut down a few university departments once she realizes how badly she’s been lied to.

Heaven, I should point out, is also not a generic place only defined by Italian bible fanfic in Golarion. It’s the new-and-fresh name for the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia. It’s a mountain because being Lawful Good represents struggle and achievement over both your baser impulses and the world around you, and the magic physics reflect the metaphysics. Hunger is a moot point because everyone’s a spirit and people don’t fear the government because the government is definitionally good and just.

This feels like someone poorly adapted some lame-ass Facebook copypasta. It makes no sense for Iomedae as a character, for the world she’s from, or for something she’d think would be helpful to say in the house of, as far as we know, the richest women Iomedae has met in her life.

So, I’m just going to skip Lily’s dialogue. I’m sure there’s something intended by the author, but I have zero investment in Lily as a character and I can only deal with one fucking twee accent at a time.

And…fucking finally, Iomedae sings something in a foreign language to calm Lily down and get her to sleep. Hurrah…ah, hey, I know that one! Looks like Vixy and Tony’s Uplift. A solid hymnal choice for a god of humanity and human civilization. I mean, thematically. Golarion is actually quite fucky on standard human development and timelines, and the story is about pure technological development, and refers to milestones that I can’t imagine were things that Azlant knew or really cared about, but you know, I’m not going to demand that a fanfic author writes new lyrics in a made-up language for a single comment. But damn, writing a revised version of Uplift for Aroden starting with the destruction of Azlant and ending with the literal uplifting of the Starstone would be fucking baller, and I’m mentally substituting that fictional hymn for this.

Iomedae has commentary on the song, and…fuck, this is getting repetitive.

Iomedae: “The song is about people. I don’t – have all the words. About how we start with nothing, and if we work hard we will have everything. Water in houses, if we work hard every house will have water in it. And light at night, and no one will go to Hell – that’s not in the song but I think it.”

The author, I feel, is not only not qualified to write about Iomedae, or Golarion in general, I do not think she is qualified to write about paladins. I am getting the sinking feeling that none of the characters who hate all that religion stands for and substitute secular idols and material comfort in its place will come to grips with what it means that Iomedae is a paladin, and Iomedae is here.

In our world, Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War (and sometimes Conquest) are reifications of the terrible things that happen when humans go to war. In our world, we have conquered our environment so thoroughly that we do not fear the dark even when we have temporarily misplaced our means to banish it, because we have murdered the fuck out of every animal that flew, crawled, or swam that dared to threaten us, so thoroughly that only those who avoided humanity left descendants.

In the world of Golarion, there are dire animals that definitionally do not and cannot do that. In Golarion, Death, Famine, Pestilence, and War are the domains of Charon, Trelmarixian, Apollyon, and Szuriel. They are as real and present as Aroden, and they cannot be fought with peace or understanding or prosperity, but only with sword and faith, and a willingness to give all on the hope that others might hopefully live in peace.

In Golarion, advancement of human society is done in the force of a titanic head-wind of the many forces and factions that do not want humans to reach the level of dominance over the world that we have on Earth, and realistically, humans in Golarion will never reach that point, even if Aroden had managed his Golden Age trick. And the author does not appear to believe in evil as something separate from want or mere misplaced pride, and whether or not that might be true in whatever weird-ass place glowfic-Earth is, it is not how Golarion is, and no one with a passing familiarity with the setting should think so.

Anyway, Evelyn finally digs a bit deeper, and finally notes that it’s odd that Iomedae (and her God) are 100% on the side of technological progress and running water in houses and all of that. She also thinks to have Iomedae use Spanish if she’s more fluent, which Iomedae is fine with if Evelyn has someone on hand who can translate, and then Evelyn tries and fails to explain Google Translate.

She does not take a break and pull out a cell phone to demonstrate it, of course, because that would be interesting. Instead she offers Iomedae some late dinner, which Iomedae shies off because it sounds expensive and has meat. Now, we know how expensive a live cow is in Golarion; 10 gold, or quite a lot. That’s 1000 copper, and 1 copper can get you a pound of uncooked, unprocessed wheat. Of course, there are like 400 to 450 pounds of meat on the average cow. Let’s go leaner since they don’t have BGH and most farms probably aren’t doing our clever agricultural tricks, and that most cows are raised for milk and only butchered at end of life, so call it 350 lbs. Let’s say that we double the price for effective butchery and storage, so 20 gp gets you 350 lbs of beef, or 17.5 lbs per gp. So, just under 5 times the price of wheat. Expensive, but not pouch-breaking.

If we want to know what Iomedae’s financial expectations are like, let’s assume that she’s doing mostly-untrained farm work. She’s pulling in about a silver a day in expected value; if she had a single rank in Profession(Farmer) and an average Wisdom, she’d be getting on average 14 gold per week (or 2 gold per day; quite a lot more).

We’ve also got real-world measures for those coins; a Pathfinder gold coin weighs 1/50th of a pound. So, if Iomedae had actually taken one rank in Profession (Farmer) and worked for a week before she went on her quest, she’d really not need to worry about beef prices.

And man, there’s another aggravating fucking twitch which I want to put down to Iomedae’s whacked vocabulary, but I am done giving this fic any kind of benefit of the doubt. Evelyn reminds Iomedae that she’s her ward and living in her house and that she doesn’t have to pay, and her reply is:

Iomedae: “I am not a kid. You should give the money to the hungry. I pay.”

What a fucking first-world response. In Golarion, food prices are not really a big issue; either supply lines are open and food is relatively cheap relative to a day’s wages even if all you can do is unskilled, untrusted manual labor, or something’s fucked up with the farmers or the supply lines or there are dire rats in your granaries, and there is not food to be had at any price. Plus, you know, there is also the fact that clerics of even moderate level can crank out food magically, and if you’ve got someone able to make magical items and 2500 gold, you can get a magic item of Sustenance, and literally never need to eat again in your life. Then you’ve got druids who can cast Goodberry from the word go, and feed 2d4 people per spell slot (two or three, probably) people per day, for free, with nothing but their inherent magic and a handful of freshly-picked berries, and also heal them a tiny bit.

And we finally get some principle from Iomedae, as she pushes back against the go-to-school-until-you’re-18 default paradigm.

Iomedae: “I know writing and math. I can study and work. No one can study every hour there is light.

But if there is money for kids with no parents, for the poor, it would be evil, me taking it. I am not a kid. I am not poor. It would be – God would not have me as a holy warrior, if I took money for the poor.”

Ironically, hearing Iomedae name-check Mammon, archdevil of greed here, might knock aside some questions that should have been raised from the “Hey, that hymn didn’t sound like it had any Latin roots in it.” bit earlier, but that would involve knowing either something about Christianity or Golarion, so, fuck it, not expecting that kind of cleverness at this point.

Again, the words are all wrong. Iomedae isn’t poor or not poor, what she is is hale and hearty and physically able to do enough labor to be a productive member of a community. The paradigm, in either medieval Europe or fake-Golarion, should not be “I do not have enough money in my belt-pouch to eat right now.” but “I am equipped to add value (and live in a world where value is granular enough that I can start adding it on a moment’s notice), and people who can’t add value live on charity and then starve and die.” And the word for those people is not poor, and this bullshit fake-vocab equivocation is continuing to piss me off.

And, also neatly, Evelyn actually does fire back with Facts and Logic; we also get some solid facts. She insists that yes, in fact, Iomedae is poor, and she throws out some facts; Evelyn earns a bit more than half of the median income in the U.S. (about $70,000), apparently lives in an affordable-but-not-destitute part of Nevada, and has paid off her house (which is worth about $250,000.) We don’t know when this is actually taking place our time, but even if this was in the Before Pandemic Times, those are still not ridiculous numbers. And they add some much-needed context.

Actually, was Iomedae being paid in dollars under the table for her farm work? It looks like average reported salaries range from $10 an hour to upwards of $25 an hour in the most in-demand areas and times, but of course the work itself is very seasonal and limited. So, Evelyn earns about three and a half times as much as Iomedae does, assuming that Iomedae could find steady farm work.

And, once again, fuck you, story.

Iomedae: “….the kids I worked with are hungry. And not eighteen. And the country is rich, and can feed them. We should go feed them.”

By all fucking means! I mean, it’s not like it would be easy to get deeply-under-retail-price food working on a fucking farm, would it? Not like any farmer wouldn’t be happy to send you home with whatever produce didn’t make the top-grade cut and would just be food waste anyway. And even if it weren’t, and even if those prices were per day, not per hour, you can get enough calories to feed yourself on an active lifestyle with two pounds of dry flour, some water, and a heat source; toss in some beans for protein, veggies for fiber and general nutrients, and maybe spring for some turnip or mustard greens to add bulk and roughage and stretch things out, and you can be full and healthy on a few dollars a day.

Food insecurity is absolutely not a paladin problem, and in the cases where it is, you know what the best way to solve it is, in Iomedae’s paradigm? Get more people working farms!

Evelyn tries to push this off until Iomedae knows a bit more English, and Iomedae is…man, fuck this.

Iomedae: “No, we should go now. They are hungry now. You have this house, and they sleep in a tent, or in a car, with lots of other people, and they are scared and they are hungry and we can feed them. They also a future to thinking about.”

Why are you asking permission? Spend those damn skill points! Use the retraining rules and level up in Actuary, if that’s what you want to do! Give the whole effective altruism thing a try! You’re a fucking paladin, if you think that people need to be fed, get your money, go get some food, and give it to them! You are not the Avatar of Liberal Guilt, and you should not be fucking speaking like her! Solve the fucking problem if you think it’s a problem to solve!

You know, I want to read on until I get to something that is going to make me end on a slightly hopeful note, but I was…warned on this fic’s interpretation of how a Lawful Paladin of a Lawful god of a Lawful nation would consider illegal aliens.

But I will end on a little bit I like, because it’s actually trying to show a character’s thought process in this wack-ass format, and at least hints of something interesting to come:

Evelyn: Wow. They are absolutely not going to drive out at almost 9 pm on a Friday night to…feed…random illegal immigrants??? Evelyn is pretty hard to shock, at this point, but this is in fact the first time she’s ever had a child refuse to eat dinner because she hadn’t personally fixed systemic poverty yet.

…it’s probably terrifying, to truly believe that if you don’t fulfill God’s will then you’ll go to Hell. Put like that, it makes perfect sense how anxious she is about this, and also poor girl.

I don’t know if this is just the author being brain-broken, or Evelyn, but I’m going to hope that it is deliberate, and that Evelyn is just so genuinely hateful of religion that she cannot comprehend that what drives Iomedae to go help people who need it is not fear of Hell, but a genuine desire to help people in need, which is the exact rason that Evelyn herself has volunteered to foster special-needs children. If I were writing this story, then this is the exact point I’d have Evelyn start with that point, and really have it driven home that Iomedae didn’t seem terrified of Hell (or of anything, in fact), and have her hover fleetingly towards that it was Iomedae’s weird cultlike beliefs that were driving her to do good with great zeal, and maybe even have a few sparks from that Aura of Good get struck off of the steel in Evelyn’s own soul.

Man, you know what I really want? I really want an antagonist. I want a devil to show up and try to offer his own opinion on the world, to say instead that the engine that drives the miraculous prosperity of Earth is greased in blood and unholiness, and to be allowed to argue persuasively for that point. To argue that letting in unlimited economic migrants would kill the goose that is laying the golden egg, and to point to other nations and how well they are doing when they fail to control their borders, and to claim smugly that aversity is so rare here that most people fall into evil not because of grand temptation, but because they are never truly called upon to do otherwise. Have the devil whisper that Iomedae is the adult and everyone around her are the children, and that they repeat the pious lies of their godless society, and he is the only one who will tell her the truth.

And then, have him slip up and let Evelyn see him, have her recoil at the imp in front of her, living proof that either she is utterly mad or her secular worldview is a lie, and then have the imp sneer at her as not worth the effort to tempt into falling to evil, and tell her that she has already damned herself by forsaking her most holy oath and that no amount of running after other people’s children will make it otherwise, and then dig into what Evelyn herself will do, when she does genuinely fear hell.

But ultimately, either this story is about a mentally-ill woman who is pretending to be from fake-Golarion, which is boring but fits what I’ve been given extremely well, or it’s about a world in which the fundie cults are objectively and provably right about the direction of their beliefs, if not their specifics.

Livebloog 3: I will die on the hill of PF minituia.

Same thing here, folks. Link is just below if you think I’m making this shit up.

https://glowfic.com/posts/7028?view=flat

Well, Lily (the girl our foster ma Evelyn was bathing) is super-excited to meet her new big sister and runs out as soon as the cars shows up, which is charming if a bit worrying. We cut immediately to Iomedae’s PoV, noting the size and quality of the house. Again, this is a really big weakness of the RP posty format of this fic; we only get the very occasional detailed paragraph digging into people’s thought processes. And while I’m assuming that this is meant to be the author again projecting dark-age medieval Europe bullshit values, I’m actually thinking of the extremely fancy construction you see in Golarion, with actual magic to move, shape, and just outright conjure stone. On the other hand, I’m also going with the idea that Iomedae has lived literally her entire life on a farm and not actually seen a city, and thus doesn’t know what a mansion actually looks like in our world or hers.

What, I wonder, is Iomedae doing here? (I mean, in her mind. Obviously she has been dropped here by a much more capricious god than Aroden to serve as an awkward author mouthpiece.) Is she on a generic knight-errant quest? (Again, I’m looking forward to her watching a news report on the cartels to the south, watching a little lightbulb go off in her mind, and seeing her head south to smite Evil.) Is she still looking for the Whispering Tyrant, or someone of equivalent stature here? Presumably, she considers this just a rest stop while she manages to learn enough English to explain to whatever weird elf-blooded people live in this part of the world that no, she is of age by normal human standards.

Now that I’m thinking about it, Iomedae has asked oddly few questions throughout this entire process. Why hasn’t she asked how one becomes an adult?

Well, as they do, the hyperactive six-year-old pre-empts the discussion and jumps into excitedly babbling at her new big sis, who seems quite capable of handling the situation (as one would expect, given her background). This, of course, is Sus to the social worker.

Social Worker: See, she figured Iomedae would be good with younger kids. The problem might be making sure she isn’t too good with them. Fundie cults often have some severe parentification issues.

See, I was going to have this whole sarcastic bit about “Do you not know how families with siblings work?”, but, I mean, social worker. So, unironically no.

Evelyn has similar ideas, but she appears much more functional; she has as a policy not to criticize the old families of the children she fosters in front of them, even if she’s also assuming Iomedae’s holy quest from God was just an excuse to get herself out of a bad situation. Well, hopefully that means Iomedae will only be righteously smiting one heretic in the near future. She also immediately starts setting expectations about rules and policies while in her house, which seems like the perfect approach for an actual paladin. Let’s see if it works for Iomedae.

I’m also seeing that Lily isn’t just super-excited, she appears to have a genuine speech impediment, and is babbling barely-comprehensible pidgin. Apparently this is going to be a whole thing, then. Hmm. I wonder if we’re going to get Iomedae’s magical Comprehend Langauges to come in clutch here.

We also learn that Evelyn is divorced. No details as to why. Iomedae doesn’t comment on it. Hmm. I wonder what Evelyn does that she can afford the fancy house and foster multiple kids?

…Are we going to send Iomedae to public school? In Texas?

And…OK, this is getting genuinely annoying. Iomedae is shown around the house and her bathroom and is dutifully impressed by indoor plumbing, which of course continues to peg “Oh, the poor dear raised in poverty by Fundie cultists.” meter. She does not ask if the house uses a common Decanter of Endless Water or it’s a bespoke enchantment, or if there is a marid house-servant around she will need to be cautious of, or any other extremely sensible question someone from a world with magic would ask when they see potentially-dangerous magic and they don’t know how it works.

She also hasn’t asked if she can get a replacement weapon for her impounded sword, asked hesitantly if the first-floor windows might be too large and admit thieving goblins in the night, asked if the local ankhegs and bulettes left different ground-sign than she was used to, or severely demanding to draw the Sign of Aroden on the wall of Lily’s bedroom to keep night-hags out of her dreams. She also hasn’t asked where the outhouse was, so if there is a little gardening shed for lawn upkeep in this fancy house, there might be a hilarious misunderstanding in the next few days.

But this whole deal is feeling awkward and artificial. Iomedae is from a world where things we take for granted are fantastical. And also vice fucking versa. It feels…well, it feels exactly like what it is; someone is awkwardly hand-holding Iomedae through every conversation she’s had to stop her from saying anything that would, if actually interrogated, reveal that either she was bugfuck crazy, or everything the listener knew about the world and cosmos was wrong.

Iomedae again is acting extremely sanguine about being a governess for some unspecified time. If she has stumbled into a conclave of round-eared elves, she could be signing up for the duration of her natural life before she turns 80 and is considered a young adult at last. The story is being extremely unhelpful and cagey about what she knows and when she learned it, and it’s being even worse about thinking what Iomedae should know firmly that isn’t so in Earth.

Also, we do get confirmation that Lily is indeed special needs and nightly tantrums are the expected thing thing. Also, that Lily goes to school, and Iomedae will be going soon as well. Hmm. I wonder what Iomedae’s thoughts are on corporal punishment in response to misbehavior, if we are having her be a faux-medieval.

And…huh, we get confirmation that whatever Iomedae is using to get her weird-ass awkward and unnatural speech patterns, it isn’t magic, or at least isn’t Comprehend Languages. One thing I noted but didn’t bring up earlier was that Iomedae is not talking like a normal person even in her stilted speech; if she was learning a combination of English and Spanish, I’d expect her to drop into Spanish when she knows a word in one language but not another. I’d also expect her to drop into Common (or Taldoran) when startled or thinking, and hell, maybe she knows Celestial, since I have no idea where she did put her starting skill points. I was hoping the answer was “She is awkward because of magic.” but it appears she’s just awkward. And that, unless I miss my mark, is another hole in the stern of the U.S.S. This Story Having Anything To Do With Actual Fucking Golarion And Pathfinder.

Iomedae, as part of her Assumed Governess and general assumed normal duties for people in a household duties, tells (because she can’t read English yet) Lily a bedtime story.

Iomedae: “Once was a girl. Lived with sisters and brothers in a big house, so big. Wanted to save people. so she became a holy warrior of God. She left her home with a sword. A terrible evil was. She wanted to fight it. But she was too small. She could only fight small evils, but every one she fight, she stronger. One day, so strong, no evils will fight her! They will all run away! She will go into Hell and the devils will run from her! I am this girl, you are this girl. Everyone is this girl. Everyone can do this, only need to be strong and never stop.”

Iomedae, I have bad news for you about both your fighting of the big evil of Tar-Baphon, and your eventual track record for personally crusading against Hell in Wrath of the Righteous (hint; the module is not named after your wrath). But this is the closest we’ve got to Iomedae referencing that she is a heroic adventurer who levels up and gets stronger, and I am looking forward to that bit quite a lot.

I guess I’m livebloging – 2

I continue my liveblog of weird-ass Pathfinder isekai glowfic! If you recognize all of those words, my condolences!

https://glowfic.com/posts/7028?view=flat
—

Iomedae: Too many unfamiliar words. “Government, ma’am?”
OK. That’s…a thing.
So, let’s do a deeper dive into what we do know of Iomedae and her world. Per the wiki, she was born around 3800 AR (and, for the record, it was her god Aroden that did the miracle that people use as the calendar mark 3800 years ago). Historical Iomedae joined the Shining Crusade against a tyrannous lich-king in 3816, which I find amusing given my insistence that paladins be at least 16 years of age last episode, but there is that ‘about’ in there. Anyway, the point is that we’re given basically nothing in Iomedae since participating in the Shining Crusade was her first notable action.

However, we do know that she was Cheliaxian. In modern Golarion (well, pre-adventure paths), Cheliax is a nation riddled by devil-worship and the premier slave-trading hub on mainland Golarion, and your generic antagonist nation, but as of 3815 AR, it was still a part of the Taldoran Empire. And while the modern Taldoran Empire is sclerotic and degenerating, and the Taldoran Empire was falling from its heights, it was still the premeire force on the continent at the time; it was one of the main participating forces in the Shining Crusade, for example. Taldor is also fairly heavily England-themed, representing a decaying British empire; its other most significant bit of history is its Armies of Exploration, explicitly colonialist territory-grabs backed up by the might of a continent-wide empire, and which added enough territory and people that the empire ended up fracturing. And, to be clear, this was being done under the explicit sanction of Aroden, who was not (currently) a god-king but just a god, was still the single most-commonly worshipped god in the Inner Sea area at the time. Aroden is also Lawful Neutral, meaning that he is ambivalent on Good and Evil as values, and supports law, order…and government.

It has been suggested that this fic might be written under PF2E assumptions, and I am keeping an eye out for that. However, even in PF2E, and indeed in every edition of D&D, paladins are champions of both Law and Good. It’s usually suggested that paladins serve Good over Law when the two come into conflict, but Law is always supposed to be represented as a value.

“Government?” is not a question for any paladin of any era, much less the mortal precursur to a god of paladins who herself worships a god of human civilization and Law.

The glowfic RP medium is really awkward to read, as I’ve mentioned, but it does give me a handy title for speaking character, and we’re told from that that Iomedae is (or at least considers herself) a Paladin of Aroden. I doubt that, from this one sentence. Either she’s some woman with Napoleon Syndrome and a sword, or she’s from an AU so distant from Golarion proper that she has less in common with canon!Iomedae than her Coffeeshop AU counterpart.

Anyway, our social worker explains that the government protects and cares for children like Iomedae, and Iomedae, being a child, immediately insists that she’s not, she’s a holy warrior of God. That’s a tic that has come up a few times, and I’m grudgingly putting it down to a glitch in the Comprehend Languages spell or a very path-dependent translation error, because Aroden-ism is absolutely not a monotheistic religion. Hell, Aroden worshiped patron gods himself when he was a mortal; outliving his patron gods also while a mortal definitely gave him a unique perspective on being one.

We’re doing this song-and-dance because we can’t have Iomedae talk about her siblings being snatched by goblins or carried away by spider-eaters, and she can’t actually name her god or start using obviously-supernatural paladin abilities, because we are milking Chavez’s assumption that she’s an unusually heretical Mormon or something. And, you know, one of Aroden’s titles is “The Living God”, so I can (again, grudgingly) see a dialogue chain in which Iomedae tries to communicate important thing to someone, ends up poorly explaining due to limited vocabulary, and thinks that the Christian God (called ‘God’) is our name for Aroden.

Chavez explains that even if she’s been told that’s she’s old enough to fight and marry and work all day, she is still young and requires care and guidance, which the government will provide to her whether she wants it or not, and we get a solid reply back.

Iomedae: “I do not want- …there are many hungry children. They need – services. I do not want to take services because you think I am a hungry children, when I am a holy warrior of God.”
(Sic; we’re apparently going to get a lot of wacky translation errors.)

And I like this. It is clearly a justification, but it’s an honest paladin-y justification, and by giving it, she’s invoking solid paladin principles of charity, and reminding us that she is a holy warrior of God, she is very clearly a child, and even if her paladin aura is stopping her from being terrified by the implications of her ride in a squad car to her current location, she desperately needs context and guidance for her world.

Anyway, Iomedae does accept, with hesitance, that she’s not getting her one belonging (her sword) back immediately, which I find odd as not being a sticking point, but I also hope that means we’re going to see her get into another fight and Smite Evil with a shiv she’s quietly pocketed, so I’m looking forward to that. And with that, our social worker calls one Evelyn Steele for placement.

I now have many questions. Iomedae is not in a place that looks anything like Taldor, or any place on Golarion. Furthermore, she’s from a world that has “Stumbled through a portal and am now in a different plane of existence.” as a thing which happens relatively frequently. An actual paladin, even a novice paladin, should have some context for what is going on, that Earth-folk should utterly lack.

But I’m getting none of that, and again, none of what I’d actually expect from someone who grew up in Taldor circa 3800 AR. So, the most-charitable reading is that Iomedae actually did grow up on in a rural heretical-fundamentalist stronghold, but in Golarion, and the problem was that she was being taught how to worship Aroden wrong and that is why she was called in a dream to be his holy warrior, and that’s why she doesn’t know any of Aroden’s actual doctrines or practices, just that he exists and wants something from her. And, I mean, one of Aroden’s hats is god of prophecy, so I could see him jumping the line and arranging things to give his destined inheritor exactly what she needed to go on her quest (and no more than that, because waste not, want not).

But man oh man is this Iomedae a really noncentral example of a paladin in Golarion to tell stories about, if she is a paladin at all. The other thing I’m wondering about is if Iomedae actually does recognize that she’s in another plane, and is just really, really bad at playing along and trying to figure out what is going on.

—
Anyway! Evelyn Steel is seeing to Lily in the bath when she gets a call, and hears that she’s needed for emergency placement of a teenage girl in a special situation. We get another bit about how much both women on the call hate fundamentalists (which I am sure isn’t totally resulting in one of the Raven Queen’s psychopomps’s clearing their ethereal throats and making some significant notation on their permanent records).

We get another questionable bit. Apparently, Iomedae knows scripture, not proper English, and that is given as the reason for her odd speaking. I’m assuming this is just something the social worker is making up (as social workers do), because the actual holy word of Aroden does not sound like any terrestrial religion, being as it was written by an actual living god who’d seen other gods rise and fall and was not having any of this syncretism bullshit happening to him. “Tell me about your God.” seems like an incredibly obvious question to both start building rapport with a teenage girl who thinks she’s Joan of Arc, and also get you a lot of good information about where she’s actually from. All the social worker has gotten is that Iomedae speaks broken English, broken Spanish, and (maybe) broken Hebrew.

Then we get this statement:
Diel: “We’re going to do some more interviews, I’m sure – she said five of her siblings are dead, which has got to be sufficient grounds for removal of the rest of them -”

Oh, man, I want to see her have that conversation with Little Miss Anarchist. You know what? Five dead kids is plenty of reason to start an investigation and ask some questions. I don’t think that all social workers are pure evil who rip apart families for the sheer joyful spite of it. But I am, you know, aware of how the social care system works, and the many cases for where it doesn’t, and how often the individual spite of the members, and the lack of meaningful ways to hold them to account, causes untold harm. And the fact that this social worker has latched onto a completely fictitious (if, I suppose, considerably more parsimonious than the actual truth) narrative and is ready to rip apart a family with no more evidence than that speaks fucking volumes about who she is and what she has done. Sometimes parents are fuckers and need to have their kids taken away. It might even plausibly look like it in this case. You do not fucking leap to that conclusion and assume it.

But I think the best part will be when she does try to talk around with with Iomedae and tell her, with kid gloves, that she intends to find her siblings, pull them away from her loving mother and father, ‘help’ them by sending them to others who do not know their language or their ways, and do this because she believes that Aroden is a lie and his Word is false and made-up, and the only reason anyone could think otherwise is if that lie were literally beaten into them, she would fucking spontaneously multiclass to Inquisitor of Heresy.

We also get a little more physical description of Iomedae (she’s apparently built like a 15-year-old boy), and that she’s been checked out at the hospital after showing up covered in blood from the stabbing incident, but apparently seems quite healthy. That’s interesting about that build detail, for reasons I’ll get into later.

So, the details are finalized, it is Agreed that Iomedae will be delivered over to Evelyn this very night. And then we get another seriously WTF bit. Iomedae wants to offer money so the attempted rapist will get healed faster.

Social Woker: “…they will get him good treatment, you don’t need to pay for it. They said he’s going to be fine.”
Iomedae: “- if he doesn’t get sick and die! Without getting fixed people get sick and die! The law can kill him but I did not mean to!”

Bitch what the fuck? You’re a paladin, he’s a violent criminal, of course you fucking meant to kill him! And sure, you can stop meaning to kill him when you stab him a little and he screams and falls over, but he’s going to the gallows or the gibbet for sure! How the shit do you call yourself a paladin and want to pawn this off on the law? You are the law!

Man, am I getting some specific neuroses about the author here. But again, Golarion is not mideval Europe, and disease works nothing like it does in our world over there. Then again, maybe what I’m actually supposed to be getting from this is that Iomedae secretly lived over a hidden desecrated shrine to Apollyon, and that’s why she’s so specifically different than the mean Pathfinder paladin (or the mean Pathfinder anyone) on this topic.

But, with the fact that there is apparently going to be no further statement to the police and a confirmation that Iomedae was definitely not the only victim of said attempted rapist (again, what the fuck?), and also some suggestion that apparently Iomedae lived at some kind of indigent camp where people got driven to job sites (which I’m going to call as her living in an illegal immigrant community, because, I mean, come on).

But hey, we end this section with Iomedae praying silently in the car ride over to her new foster mother, and the social worker noting that this appears to help calm and center her.

—

So, let’s talk about what who Iomedae is, and what she should be able to do. There isn’t a character sheet for Iomedae as far as I know, but we do have the Iconic Paladin Seelah, who is meant to be an example build of a basic Pathfinder character type to demonstrate to new players how characters should be put together. Seelah seems like a really good example build, actually; she is also a built-like-a-brick-shithouse swordlady, and also joined the paladins in her mid-teens.

First, the basic abilities. Level 1 paladins are actually not super-special in terms of weird class abilities. First, Iomedae has an Aura of Goodness, which doesn’t matter in this world because no one can cast Detect Good. Second, she can detect evil, which only will tell her something if she meets a non-Cleric non-Outsider Evil person of level 5 or higher, which is going to be hard to quantify. (I’m mentally assuming d20 Modern as a vague conversion, where most professional adults are level 2 to 3.) Again, with no outsiders or magic, this isn’t hugely relevant. And finally, she can smite evil, which is not super-dramatic at level 1, but will let her designate an Evil target and get notable combat bonuses to attack them and avoid their attacks.

We’re going to get to some interesting points in her build, like I promised. Let’s assume that she’s got the ability spread of Seelah: Str 16, Dex 10, Con 14, Int 10, Wis 13, Cha 15. The important one there is Str. Str 16 is perfectly reasonable for a melee combatant with multiple-attribute-dependencies. It also means that as a Pathfinder character, Iomedae can lift 230 lbs over her head, and lift and stagger around with 460 lbs.

If we assume that “Built like a teenage boy” means she’s 150 lbs (or 68 kilograms), then she is just under the Olympic world record for her weight class as a woman, with no bonuses from feats, background, specific training, or just generic level-up attribute bonuses. One of the things about Pathfinder characters is that they are only sexually dimorphic in appearance, height, build, and actual reproduction bits; teenage girl Iomedae is going to be stronger than nearly every other woman she meets in our world, and presumably if she was leveraging her background as a farm girl and doing indigent agricultural work, she would have been notable.

Of course, this is assuming that the God of Paladins started from the same position as a random iconic heroic character; Iomedae may have a much lower Str score and be compensating with higher Cha and relying on Smite for her damage. But regardless, humans on Earth are significantly sexually dimorphic in physical capacity, and humans from Golarion are not, and I’m curious if this is going to be played out straight.

Next time, we get to meet our foster family in more detail! I mean, I’m also a little worried about what’s happening in Golarion with the Whispering Tyrant presumably cleaning up the Shining Crusade in Iomedae’s absence, but I’m sure she’s going to have some epic adventures and start clearing out the cartels, the foster system, or both real soon now, right?

Right?

Well, I guess I’m liveblogging now.

So, I’ve been challenged to liveblog this, uh, glowfic. I will say that I can’t actually define what a glowfic is, but the page or so I’ve read of it is not filling me with confidence in the medium.

So! What’s a glowfic, first of all? Well, when I got that most reliable of repositories of Internet Knowledge, TVTropes, I find…uh, they’re, microfiction in online roleplay format? Or maybe online roleplays that got turned into microfiction? Look, if you haven’t read enough online fora to parse them naturally as a second language, you should probably consider this a hard-stop, and if you’re not either hip-deep in the ratfic community, you should probably consider this your warning to exit.

Well, I got recommended a glowfic. The title is “in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die”, and it’s, from what I’ve been told, a reverse isekai (that is to say, a story about a character from a fictional world making their way into a modern world). It stars Iomedae, and apparently she did not fulfill her destiny in Golarion, but ended up on an Earth-a-like instead.

Story, for those who want to follow along themselves, is here: https://glowfic.com/posts/7028?view=flat

Now, I actually think that’s a really interesting premise, enough so to pick up the story and give it a try.

But first, I’d like to establish my own starting place. I have done a lot of shit in the Pathfinder system, and in Golarion in particular. I have no particular attachment to Iomedae. (I did absolutely run a absolutely horrifying mage named Tevingoth who had extremely strong opinions on Aroden, Iomedae’s predecessor, and because Iomedae worshipped Aroden before Aroden’s mysterious disappearance and her own ascension to godhood, I feel that may be a specific concern in what is to come.)

Well, nothing for it.
—-
The story starts from the perspective of Chavez, who’s with the police and/or social services in (I assume) Texas. She gets a call that a teenage girl is being held by the police because she stabbed someone with a sword and then dragged him to a church seeking aid; she claimed the man tried to sexually assault her and this appears extremely plausible to the police, and she’s not actually being held for that, she’s being held because she claims to be 15, hasn’t seen her parents in months, and to be a holy warrior on a mission from God to help people and fight evil. (with said sword.)

Now, I should note that I am going to be extremely autistic about this. I want my ratfic to be rational, and that means that it damn well better engage with the material as written, or else have a reason for the variance. Now, is this plausible? For the cops, I dunno, it sounds reasonable, and I assume that if some bastard with a record gets killed by an armed teenage girl, a supermajority of the cops would consider that a good thing. But she is specifically 15. Now, in PF, humans reach the age of adulthood at 15, and the shortest time that paladin training can take is one year. By definition according to the rules, Iomedae is wrong about her age, but if we assume that there were just imprecise records about exactly how she is counting time if it’s by winters instead of by a day or time, then it’s close enough to not be a big concern. You can, perfectly legitimately according to the rules, be a sanctioned-by-your-choice-of-god goodly warrior at 16, as a human.

Iomedae could also be a secret half-orc with the Pass for Human feat, which…is not in any of the lore I’ve heard of, but Iomedae makes some…interesting character choices when PCs are given the chance to interact with her directly in the Wrath of the Righteous modules, so…maybe?

We also get some interesting and possibly telling comments from Iomedae. She is speaking broken-but-comprehensible English, and says of her language skills “I – only speak a little. Understand all right – more.” Now, while first-level characters can’t start with magic items outside of very specific gear packages, we don’t know that she is level 1, or that she hasn’t done a bit of play before she entered the story. And a really cheap item, just at the level of first permanent magical item that a character can get in Pathfinder, would be a continual-use item of Comprehend Languages. (It’s also an item I’d expect someone who went directly from not adventuring to going on plane-trotting adventures to seek out.) Now, Comprehend Languages lets you understand and read languages, but not speak them, so it may be that Iomedae has one, and has been learning English by comprehending and memorizing words, or English may just be eerily close to Common. Either way, it’s something to think about.

—

Now, we get into things that set my teeth on edge. I could write a whole fucking essay on why I am generally suspicious of rationalist and rationalist-adjacent media that does not seek to communicate basedness in this day and age, but for now, let’s just say that the recommendation included a warning that we would not be rationally examining the shibboleths of our age, and how an actual paladin from Golarion would mangle their pronunciation. We also get several asides from Chavez about the horrors that happen in closed fundamentalist communities which are the people she assumes produced Iomedae. I find this ironic, given that we are now in a universe with defaulted D&D souls and Chavez will presumably come face to face with the Raven Queen or Kelvemor or someone similar, but hey, she’s got her priorities, and if she’s had specific encounters that make her particularly concerned and thus, wanting to take particular interest in Iomedae, then that’s fine with me.

But we get two things back-to-back that irk me. Iomedae says that she’s from a pre-modern-sized family (which, of course, Chavez interprets as a sign of her being from one of those patriarch-controlled communities), and she says that she has several siblings who died of disease in childhood. This leads to Chavez wanting to get Iomedae vaccinated. And here is where we hit one of several problems for me.

First, in default stock Pathfinder, absent the special rules from the Intrigue and Horror adventures, diseases are not really threatening unless they come from a specific magical creature. Filth Fever, the default stand-in for cholera and tetanus and all of those diseases, has a saving throw DC of 12 to resist it. It’s also an Injury disease. There are very few low-level Contact diseases, so unless some green slime residue got into the wheat and we have an ergot-the-firstborn-of-Egypt scenario, it’s not clear what happened to those kids specifically.

It’s also questionable how this happened, because it’s really easy to handle disease with magic in Golarion. Clerics of relatively low level can cure disease, and paladins like Iomedae herself become categorically immune to them at the same level. And diseases do not have unique symptoms or treatments; anyone trained in the Heal skill can grant a significant bonus to anyone suffering from any illness as long as they can meet the skill DC set by the disease, and a disease low-enough level to kill some but not all of a large family meets that criteria.

Disease is not the mass-killer that it was in mideval Europe. No common D&D campaign setting has much to do with the actual mechanics of Europe, because D&D worlds have magic and dragons and shit like that, and do not have several things that we in our world don’t have. It is at best suspicious that we had the deaths mentioned that we did. But immediately after all of that, Chavez (logically) checks that his poor cloistered off-grid ex-cultist kid has had her shots, and she does not know the meaning of the word ‘vaccine’. She explains it as “A doctor gives us a little bit of a sickness, and then our body learns the sickness and we cannot get sicker.”, and Iomedae replies “I did not know that! That is very good!”

No, that is not very good! That is how diseases work in our world, where we have immune systems and Memory T cells and a whole bunch of things like that! You can get bit by the same dire rat a thousand times in PF, and it will give you the same chance to be sick every time! In fact, the only place that core Pathfinder mentions the word ‘vaccine’ at all that I can find is the description of the drug (in the addictive sense) Gossamer Veil, which is given out by demon cultists and shysters in poor, squalid neighborhoods as a tool for control. Because, in Golarion, handling disease is something that is done quite well by divine magic, and if need be by divine magic one one trained healer providing mundane healing for many others, and you should be very suspicious of anyone not using commonly-available clerical magic for healing, and double-extra suspicious of anyone claiming facts not in evidence (to you in your world) about how diseases work, and extra-special suspicion of anyone who wants to inject you with something corruptive to make you stronger.

But, of course, this is $CURRENT_YEAR, and we cannot have anyone doubt the truth of the Sacrament of Fauci, even if this would be a great opportunity for her to grow wroth, squint at Chavez to confirm that she’s not evil, and for Iomedae to sternly lecture her on correct disease-handling procedure and get herself to the local church if she finds herself sick.

Also, as an aside, if this is a world with germ theory, then unless exchanges like this happen frequently (which, to be fair, if this EU includes actual-D&D and Forgotten Realms, they do), then Iomedae is both carrying around a load of harmless-to-her pathogens that Earth has never seen before, and vice versa, and that sounds like a big fucking problem to me.

Also, so far, I really do not like the chat/RP writing style. Iomedae’s voice comes across as inconsistent and awkward, and the lack of descriptive text as one consistent PoV character deeply observes another makes everything feel extremely shallow and ambiguous. This feels like an outline of a story, not a real story.

But I am told it gets better.

—

Next post will probably be an even-more-autistic dive into the game lore behind Iomedae and her patron god Aroden, and why the next few lines are a horrible harbinger of the dumb to come.

Chavez: “So then the government does not know you are here, and we will have to get proof you were born in this country so that you can access services.”

Iomedae: Too many unfamiliar words. “Government, ma’am?”