Which makes murdering them go faster, at least, and makes it easier to definitely not accidentally shoot any bound souls, not that he's at all sure that'd hurt them.

"Mind," says Mahdi, once the daemons are dead and they can jump in closer to get a good look, "I do not actually have the slightest idea how to help these people."

"What would actually happen if we just - let them go? Here, or I suppose in a different afterlife plane..." 

"Mahdi can check alignments in the morning, if they happen to be innocent people I think we can release 'em here safely enough." he says, leaning in very carefully towards a glass orb with a soul twisting frantically inside it. "If they're actually evil, though... and they probably all are...that sends them back to Abaddon."

"Maybe not if we did it in a different afterlife plane. Which we'd need Fazil for, but we can probably hold onto them safely until then?" He doesn't look thrilled at the risk. "I could take them back to Sothis and leave them in storage there, I guess, shouldn't stand out if I'm gone for ten seconds."

He's thinking, angrily, that if Aroden made the daemons in this area more active just to train up his army to invade Cheliax then that's impressively fucked up. Though these souls wouldn't have been better off otherwise, exactly.

:Is Abbadon bad enough that people might prefer permanent destruction over being there indefinitely?: Leareth asks him. 

:I think mostly the thing that happens to you in Abaddon is that you get hunted down and eaten. But Pharasma disapproves, thinks it's wasteful, so she lets people choose Hell or the Abyss instead if they'd rather, so probably if you care a lot about continuing to exist even if it sucks you go to Hell. Where they make use of every soul even if it is just 'being tortured by someone who finds your screams entertaining'. The whole system is -: He doesn't have a word for it but he doesn't really need one, does he. 

Mahdi scoops the souls up carefully, teleports them home, comes back ten seconds later. "We'd better not need to flee the country today," he says quietly when he gets back. "But this way I don't have to worry they break before we can figure something out."

Sigh.

:I mean, if we need to flee urgently enough I can Gate us out:  If they're all done cleaning up here, they can probably go back to camp. The slow way, unless Mahdi wants Leareth to re-power his spent teleports and risk being very tired as a result. 

Nah, they can trudge on back normally, which will also result in them being tired but only normal amounts of it. Soak in the baths. Complain about the food. 

:Are we going to try to approach the adventurers with geases tonight -:

Leareth frowns. :I think I would prefer we not be tired for it. And for you to have your teleports, in case something goes awry. I can imagine myself giving orders - or even a geas - for those who know the secret to capture or kill anyone who seems about to discover it when they should not. I think we can talk our way through it but I would prefer to do so from a position of strength: 

They can instead think about what to say, in order to minimize how hostile they seem. 

:Kinda tricky because, like, even if they know about Cheliax they probably don't know about Aroden, right?:

:Probably not, no. We could consider not even revealing that we know it is Cheliax, just that we think there is an additional layer of recruitment here, for a project we expect we would wish to help with. I am not sure how plausible that would seem, though; 

:And it might not be enough for them to see any reason to hurry. - might make more sense to just say, 'hey, I'm from another world. I want to talk to the person in charge here, because I might have enough resources to destroy the House of Oblivion altogether, if we coordinate -':

:Oh. Yes, that is a good idea. If they are his highest-level operators then I trust them with my own secret - they will understand the tactical value of keeping it from being widely known - and it looks much less as though we know an alarming number of their secrets: 

:Yeah. And, like, at this point I am leaning that we want to work with this guy whether or not he is Aroden and whether or not he is you - though admittedly it looks likely - so may as well not have everything rest on the most bizarre and hard-to-prove part of the whole thing.:

Leareth smiles a little. :Just because he seems to be running things competently? If we are wrong and it is neither Aroden nor another me, I think the chance that it is secretly a plan to conquer Cheliax is also far less likely, since we were inferring that mainly from it being what I would do and a plausible goal for Aroden: 

:And also from Rahadoum having lost a northern province to Cheliax a couple centuries back, the south tip of the Arch of Aroden, which they'd obviously want back. I figured Rahadoum might be preparing for a war with Cheliax before we ever met you. A smaller scale one, but - one less province is one less province.:

:That is fair enough: 

They can go to bed and try to intercept one of the geased parties in the morning.

If you wake up well before dawn, just as the horizon starts to lighten, you can get a lot of work done before it gets hot; this is one of the few advantages of not having a cleric in the party.

He wakes up, rubs his eyes, makes a magic light by which he'll be able to read his spellbook. Leareth and Hagan, who don't need an hour of prep work to start the day, are still sleeping. 

In which case he will be the only one awake when everyone in their tent is suddenly UNABLE TO MOVE. 

Leareth snaps awake about a third of a second later, at the touch of unknown magic. He doesn't recognize it but it's very conspicuous. It's vaguely acting like a compulsion if not shaped like one, but unlike his work, refined to take little power, it's overpowered to (what seems to him like) a ridiculous and unnecessary degree.

- it also seems like it might be more brittle, though, compulsions can't be broken from the inside unless laid badly, but this maybe can - he scrabbles against it, looking for any chink, even as he tries to wake Hagan with a sharp Mindtouch–

- well hopefully this means that Aroden has found them and not that something else has found them because - fuck - 

- they also got Fy, he just has time to notice before -

Some other force is grasping for Leareth - as though searching him - and he isn't sure what it is but probably he'd prefer if it didn't succeed, he stops trying to resist the paralysis-spell and instead tries to shield his mind and magic from it–

- and it doesn't work, and suddenly he's somewhere else. He can't feel his Gifts at all, it's exactly like in the star-filled demiplane where Nefreti first dropped him, but he's still paralyzed - which has some implications that he'll mull over as soon as he deals with that...

- it snaps after a few more seconds of effort and he finds himself sprawled on an opulent rug, the lighting around him is warm and soft - there are shelves of books, burnished leather spines. A library. Where his magic doesn't work, but someone else's certainly does. 

(Oh, this is so completely the kind of thing he would build, if he knew how, if his world's magic made it possible–)