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.
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