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
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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?

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