A question he can help with.

"Yeah, according to the contingency planning, if the leader died there was only a few people that were supposed to go through his stuff, with the implication it was trapped and only they would know how to look through it safely."

Now, how to answer the Avenger's question and make clear he will be a Chaotic Good Cayden pirate.  (He is pretty sure that means only killing and looting from slavers, he needs to subtly check on how restrictive Andoran is on its pirates.)

"Andoran has lots of pirates, yes?  To help free slaves?  I'm good with a glaive and excellent at grappling, and as you can see I can take at least one good hit and stay on my feet."

He is eyeing the dead inquistor's glaive now.  He already has a silvered glaive, like hers, but hers has a bit nicer of a polish to it with a few less scratches and a bit less wear.  Also, maybe he could figure out how to wield two glaives at once?  He daydreams a moment with the thought of swinging two glaives around.

She smiles at Fernando. "That's helpful, thank you."

He wasn't able to leave unfilled spell slots at second or third circle under the circumstances, but he did save one at first. He starts preparing an Unseen Servant.

...Is that what she sounded like? Is this how Treason and Liberty and Joy and Eric felt when they met her?

He — could easily be the sort of person who really just wants an excuse to steal from anyone and doesn't care whether they're even slavers at all. But the first thing he did was help them fight off the cultists who were trying to kidnap the wizard for daring to disobey Baphomet, and presumably before that he was fighting Asmodeus, he's clearly got some sort of conscience somewhere. He — is probably really confused about some things, he's Chelish, but it's not like she wasn't confused about lots of things when she first got to Andoran.

Lawful types would probably say it's a bad idea to trust someone not to betray you if you know they betrayed the last group they worked for, but betraying the Baphomet cult was right, actually.

The Sarenrites she likes to argue with are going to be so smug that's not actually relevant. 

She's gotten into a lot of frustrating arguments with people who more-or-less agree with everything she's actually doing but think she feels the wrong way about it; if he's going to actually be a worse person because of how he feels, that's an issue, but she's not in charge of what's going on in his heart. 

"—Yes, Andoran's got pirates who free slaves." She's only a pirate on Stardays — that joke is only funny if you know her. "We can put you in touch with some people — they'll want to get to know you before taking you aboard, obviously, but it's always good to have more people fighting slavers and Asmodeans. Uh, and the glaive's yours if you want it for sure, none of us fight with a glaive."

Well now he’s got to learn to fight with two glaives!  Or maybe he could teach someone how to use a glaive and give them him his old glaive?

“I just figure all my skills are for fighting, you know?”

He glances at his fellow defector.

“It’s not like wizardry where you can learn a new spell and start making good money without any fighting…”

A thought occurs to him…

“Does Andoran also have travel passes?”

Yes, being a wizard is in fact great.  He made the right choice all those years ago not to pretend to be stupider like his mother said.  He would kind of like to know how she’s doing.  …actually he’s allowed to think that.  If he ever gets fourth-circle he’ll scry on her.

“I’m curious about Andoran also…”

They’ve been so busy planning in the immediate term, he only learned enough to decide Andoran is better than Cheliax or the Cult and he didn’t really get to asking for any details beyond that.

Headshake headshake. "Travel passes are Asmodean — like, the Asmodeans came up with them, even countries with lots of rules about where people can go mostly don't use them. But Andoran's a free country, you can travel basically anywhere. There's a few rules, but they're things like 'you've got to follow the laws for whatever part of the country you're in' or 'trespassing is a crime' or 'if there's a plague outbreak you need to follow the quarantine', nothing like what they've got in Cheliax."

"People are also allowed to leave the whole country."

"Yeah, that's true too, if you decide you'd rather live in... Absalom, or something... no one's going to stop you from getting on a boat. Uh, what else did you want to know?"

So it sounds like if the whole slave freeing Chaotic Good pirate thing doesn't work out, he could wander off to somewhere lawless and go back to the sort of banditry he was doing before becoming a follower of Baphomet.  He's not actually mentally flexible or self-deceiving enough to suppress this thought, he's just kind of hoping they won't actually check.

He wants to know the rules on how Andoran pirates split up the loot.  He thought maybe Good people don't steal... except these adventurer's definitely just looted a dead body... maybe that is actually supposed to be Lawful people don't steal, except Asmodean priests definitely steal, they just throw around some complicated justification for it?  He'll wait for the other guy to ask questions first.

He could and probably should come up with a lot of theological questions, at least to get the official Andoran line of propaganda straight, but he'll start out with a few safer and more immediately useful questions.

"Does Cheliax really have more wizards than everyone else?  They said it was because everyone else was too poor to have schools."

His theory is that Cheliax shoves more kids into wizard schools, but also it washes a lot of them out, so maybe it doesn't have more real wizards.  Actually he should clarify his question.

"I mean, I assume Cheliax manage more laundry wizards with their cruel joke of a school system, but beyond that?"

He's pretty sure less wizards means wizards can charge more, which is great news for him... actually are ruinous prices Evil?  He can ask that next if he can think of a safe wording.

"It's — complicated. I think Absalom's technically got the most, right—"

He looks up from where he's preparing the Unseen Servant. "Absalom has by far the most per head, but Cheliax has more in total, even discounting laundry wizards."

"Right, that makes sense. And then I think Andoran and Galt have less than Cheliax but more than most other places, since — I mean, lots of people learned to be wizards before the revolution, even though they couldn't keep the schools open without Hell paying for all the books. Uh, I don't know about circles, though."

"A lot of wizards gained circles in the revolution, but a lot of them also died in the process. I don't know off the top of my head how that compares to what people manage at the Worldwound."

"The last attempt to make a direct comparison that I know of encountered issues due to the general untrustworthiness of claims made by the Chelish government."

"Galt's army is trying something, right?"

"—Right, yeah, there was something about it in the papers. I think they're... trying to find soldiers who'd make good wizards, and putting just them through wizard school, or something like that? But I might be misremembering some of the details."

"Andoran does offer scholarships to attend Almas University — that's how I was able to attend — but the government isn't doing anything anywhere near as comprehensive as Cheliax. I'm sure there are people with just as much innate aptitude for wizardry as me who never thought to apply."

"Does that answer your question?"

“Yes, thanks.”

Well that’s just sad… for them.  It also means he can probably sell spells for a good amount of money.  Also, the fact that they told him means they aren’t just feeding him optimistic propaganda.

He already knows he has no aptitude for wizardry, so it’s not like it matters the least bit to him.

“I was thinking about selling spells… is charging someone too much for something Evil?”

"—It depends who you ask — or, uh, presumably it doesn't really depend, but it's not something like slavery where basically everyone agrees. I think it depends what you're selling, and who you're selling to, like, I sell spells sometimes when I'm home, and I don't charge people for Remove Disease but one time this rich guy offered me a bunch of money so he could try out flying and I didn't turn him down. The Abadarans say there's not really any such thing as a fair price, and you're not doing anything wrong if you charge as much as people'll pay you, but they think it's fine to demand a widow's whole life savings to cure their sick child, or to charge people for water even though it only takes a moment to make, or to raise their prices even higher the more people need what they're selling. And then the Sarenrites and the Shelynites say, uh — that if you came across a dying traveler on the side of the road, and even though it'd be trivial for you to save his life you demanded he give you everything he has, that's Evil, and charging too much for things people'll die without isn't very different. And I asked a priest of Iomedae once what he thought and he said you could just charge people a lot of money and then donate it to the Church of Iomedae, but I don't know if most Iomedaeans think that or if it was just him, and then the other churches I've talked to don't necessarily agree with each other. ...Pretty much everyone I know who's not an Abadaran thinks people should charge fair prices, mostly they just disagree about what that means. —And third-circle wizards can definitely make enough money to live on no matter how careful you are about not charging people too much."