He'll repeat it more slowly, this time happening to throw in various extra tidbits of information, like that Asmodeus (Lawful Good), Calistria (Chaotic Neutral), Dahak (Chaotic Evil), and Gozreh (True Neutral) are four examples of gods who fought Rovagug alongside Pharasma.  These tidbits also happen to include the fact that gods usually negotiate their disagreements rather than directly battling over them; the Rovagug situation was very rare and represented a breakdown of divine order.

(They have no idea what to do about Merrin being alarmed about spatially-localized persistent disagreements among mortals.  They can't even understand the mental concepts that flash through her mind in Baseline when she thinks about why that's alarming, they're clearly referring to math that wizards don't know.)

It would be acceptable, though a bit less convenient compared to a scheduled in-person block of conversational time, to have messages passed back and forth around inside the palace system.  Iker Egobar is on duty in the palace and reachable.  To be clear, if this works for Merrin she should do that.

Hopefully she can manage to ask all her urgent questions now, and wait for a later time when it would make sense to do another scheduled block if that works better for him.

(The problem for Merrin, right now, is that the math behind why it makes absolutely no sense for there to be spatially-localized persistent disagreements, and thus their continued existence is pointing at something deeply and seriously wrong, is...not among the concepts that live close to the surface of her mind or that she's regularly thought through explicitly since she was fourteen. There are areas of Exception Handling that would involve more of that, but not the ones she's actually had time to train in so far.) 

It would theoretically be reassuring that literal godfighting is rare and usually they do the obviously reasonable thing instead, but Merrin is firmly starting from a position where the fact that it happened once is deeply alarming. 

(Also, it was not specified what happened to Pharasma's previous universe - plausibly because no one in this one has any information on the matter - but Merrin has one very very unpleasant wild guess.) 

She writes all of this down, and copies the names and alignments of the newly-mentioned gods to her sheet of paper currently in use for Active Questions. 

"Is Rovagug...also approximately a god? Did they - it - come into existence at the time or shortly after when Pharasma brought this current universe into existence? If Rovagug is the same kind of entity as other gods then...what...is its domain...? And alignment?" 

Maybe Rovagug is instead an entity more like the 'Seal' that Pharasma used. Not that Merrin actually knows what that would mean, in any very concrete sense. 

One version of the story holds that when Pharasma first stepped off the Seal that had transported Her to the new universe, She felt unease at leaving Its protection, and this unease became Rovagug.  Iker does not endorse this version of the story.  It sounds fake to him.

Another version of the story has that there was a Chaotic Evil realm that was later transformed into the Abyss, the Chaotic Evil afterlife, but before it was the Abyss it was something else, inhabited by beings who predated Pharasma's arrival, and the most powerful of those was Rovagug.

Iker doesn't necessarily endorse this story either.

Rovagug is conventionally labeled Chaotic Evil and sometimes clerics Chaotic Evil people from inside Its seal.  It is worth emphasizing that most humans classified as Chaotic Evil are not trying to destroy the multiverse.  If Rovagug is in fact older than the alignment system, that system may not properly apply to It.  If Rovagug has a domain, it's 'destroying the multiverse'.

Merrin has CONCERNS. 

Merrin had really hoped! That when Egobar said Rovagug was now sealed! That he meant actually sealed, cut off from any causal influence over the rest of reality! If he's still able to hire employees (metaphorically, she knows that 'cleric' doesn't mean exactly that) from inside his ""seal"" then he is NOT SEALED and Merrin is VERY WORRIED. And should probably...also...be making some updates about the general safety of this place and its future, like, on a multiverse-scale. There have been active godconflicts that failed to be resolved by negotiations even though gods are superintelligent and that could happen again and also it sounds like the best that the entire alliance of gods in favor of the continued existence of the multiverse could do was block Rovagug from– from what, actually, if most gods only intervene in practice by choosing clerics, and Rovagug can still do that? 

...She supposes that the multiverse has not in fact been destroyed, which is BETTER THAN NOT THAT. 

"I...guess that makes as much sense as anything else? That Rovagug predates this universe and therefore the usual categories don't really fit." By which she means it does not make any sense to her yet but maybe it will once she stares at it for longer and tries to see past the surface and infer the parts she can't see but that make all the rest hold together coherently. "I'm - curious what Pharasma's official alignment is, then? And whether it also doesn't really fit. ...Also on further thought I would appreciate knowing if you don't share Albe's concern about explaining the alignment axes to me in a way that won't result in dangerous misunderstandings, because I think that's a very important piece that I'm going to need to understand any of this." 

Pharasma is classified True Neutral, and it does seem to fit?  Certainly, as the most powerful goddess, Pharasma has not seemed to intervene in favor of either Good or Evil, Law or Chaos, as She certainly could, did She wish.  Then She is probably indeed Neutral between them.

Albe's concern makes some sense to Iker!  It is difficult for him to imagine what it is like to not already know about alignments.  Albe suggested that facts about alignments just be mentioned as they come up.  Maybe the accumulation of those facts will do better by Merrin than simply dumping on her the sort of standard statements that are meant for people who, in fact, already know what alignments are, and really argue somebody's particular thesis about them.

(Or actually:  Let Cheliax figure out which lies to tell, incrementally, and in the context where those lies are needed, rather than trying to make those up all at once.)

That...makes sense, and might be closer to the way that humans in Golarion originally figured out what alignments were, unless a god told them directly? Merrin wants to know lots of those facts, though, it...might end up being time-sensitive for her to be less confused. 

Starting with - right, so she has a handful of examples of existing powerful-old gods, now: Asmodeus (Lawful Good), Calistria (Chaotic Neutral), Dahak and also maybe Rovagug (Chaotic Evil), and Gozreh as well as Pharasma (True Neutral),  She's still missing any examples for Neutral and Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, and Neutral Evil. Are there any equally old or powerful gods in those categories, or if not, who are the most powerful current gods? And then she would like a one-line summary of their 'domains', like the one he already gave for Asmodeus. 

Lawful Neutral:  Erecura, goddess of secrets, subtlety, prediction.  Despite being Lawful Neutral, She dwells in the center of a vast interdimensional trading center in Heaven -

Oh, wait, he should be naming ancient gods.  Erecura is less ancient.

Lawful Neutral:  A goddess whose name is secret, governing preservation and catastrophe-avoidance.
Neutral Good:  Urgathoa, goddess of healing, honesty, and the Sun.
Chaotic Good:  Desna, goddess of dreams and travelers and starlight.
Neutral Evil:  Sarenrae, goddess of gluttony and unnatural prolongation of life.

He actually doesn't think he's named anyone Lawful Evil either?  Zon-Kuthon is the ancient Lawful Evil god of pain, worshipped by sadists and masochists.

...the plan here being that, if counter to expectation it turns out it's possible for Merrin to pray effectively to gods, the only god whose name and symbol Merrin should be given accurately, as lies within one alignment-step of herself, should be Erecura, who dwells within Dis and hopefully won't make a fuss about keeping some things secret.  Cheliax can at least get a message to Erecura.  It's already on its way, in fact!  Sending messages to Hell is cheap; getting information back is the expensive part.

Oh neat, they have a literal god of avoiding catastrophes. That...kind of explains some things about how this universe still exists and, like, contains a Civilization that's even functional enough to have the concept of trade, and a country with Governance sufficiently on top of things to immediately bring an otherworldly visitor somewhere secure and then bring high-ranked trusted people to answer her questions. 

(Merrin thinks this with some level of sarcasm, and has no intention of saying it out loud.) 

Gods...can apparently also 'dwell', whatever that...means...for gods - Merrin isn't sure whether to interpret it as mainly an area-of-influence thing or that they have quasi-physical bodies there - areas outside of the afterlife that their alignment would otherwise predict. Weird? She would not have seen that one coming? In her notes that one gets a special shorthand symbol meaning that there are almost certainly further-reaching updates to propagate related to it. 

...They have a literal god of sadists and masochists. That probably ALSO explains some things about recent experiences Merrin has had. Maybe if she talks to Albe again at some point she will ask if Albe worships that god. Though Albe's afterlife-sourced ancestry was Chaotic Evil - but the options for gods there are Rovagug, which, just, no, and Dahak, who she knows nothing about except alignment - and that he helped trap (but not truly seal) Rovagug despite having the same alignment. 

"Is there...a known explanation for why 'honesty' and 'the Sun', or 'starlight' and 'travelers', are apparently obviously related to gods, in the same way that civic-order and promise-keeping are obviously related? ...Also is there a definition for 'unnatural prolongation of life' because I have no idea if modern medicine would count. And, domains for Calistria and Dahak and Gozreh?"  

...because starlight travels from far away?  But by and large the answer is that the domains of gods are - maybe-vaguely-plausible-soundingly-connected to mortals, but really gods' domains tend to be god-concepts.

Unnatural prolongation of life: past when a person would otherwise have died of old age, and resurrection spells stop working on them.

Calistria:  Goddess of lust and trickery.
Dahak:  God of Evil-aligned dragons, where dragons are giant winged creatures who can grow to be very old and powerful.
Gozreh:  God of non-human-modified-environments, weather, and the sea.

That is in fact what Merrin would have expected (that gods think and function using god-concepts, which don't necessarily map to human concepts. Though she slightly wonders if Baseline would have better words for talking about it, just because the difference in thinkoomph between the highest-ranked Keepers and Golarion gods is at least a bit less than the difference from the smartest humans here.) 

...She is now even more confused about the whole healing magic and resurrection thing, because 'when a person would otherwise die of old age' is not an ontologically basic fact, that doesn't even take especially advanced or heroic medical treatments - do blood pressure medications count as "unnatural" because for the relevant population that delays the negative health effects of aging by years. Egobar isn't a medical expert, though, so she'll put that down for later. 

Is it just her or is 'Evil-aligned giant winged creatures' way more specific than any of the others described? It...would fit better, at least in a vague and mostly narrative-based way, if Dahak were one of the younger and less powerful or far-reaching gods, but Dahak was described as being around in the very beginning of this universe and allying to stop Rovagug, so...she's still confused. Plausibly it's just because god-concepts are non-obvious, though, so she notes it down but doesn't actually ask. 

"What sort of interactions do the gods have with each other, excluding the very rare instances of fights like the one with Rovagug? Do they have trade - if so what do they trade in - do two gods in the same afterlife cooperate on work there? Which ties into my question about how and why Erecura ended up having a city in Heaven instead of - um, whatever the Lawful Neutral one is actually called - and whether things like that are at all common. ...I actually have quite a lot of questions about the afterlives in general but I'm not sure if you're the best person to ask since it's not all about gods." 

Lawful Neutral is Axis.

Erecura, well, the term usually used is 'married', but that may not be entirely an accurate term, a godlike entity named Dispater who manages one of the layers of Heaven and is managed by Asmodeus.  The giant trading city is Dispater's.

Gods - communicate and trade and negotiate and bargain with each other all the time, to a much greater degree than mortals, in fact?  It's pretty rare to see one god doing something and another god opposing it; they would instead negotiate to the same predictable resolution and save themselves the energy costs of intervention and counterintervention.  This, however, tends overwhelmingly to cancel out and lead to gods mostly doing nothing, because action is expensive, easier to oppose than to initiate, and there's a lot of gods with opposed interests.  Their common interest tends towards matters like Rovagug staying sealed, and this, in fact, they have been pretty good at doing.

Asmodeus is a god who desires that mortals be wealthier, more civilized, more educated, more knowledgeable.  He has done something very rare among gods and sent forth resources out of Heaven for Cheliax, something that must have been incredibly costly to him within godagreements; Asmodeus has been able to do very little in the way of direct intervention in Cheliax since then, and indeed is probably less able to intervene in whole other planes, for having focused on Cheliax.  Cheliax owes Asmodeus a great debt that must somehow be repaid.

Asmodeus is opposed in such matters by Chaotic gods who feel that humans should be left to themselves and their 'free will', uh, ontologically-simple-decisionmaking-capacity?  If nobody opposed that sort of thing, it would have already happened ages ago.

Oh. Interesting. That...says a lot more about what 'Chaotic' actually means, here, than when the translation magic kept wanting to translate it as a preference for higher entropy. Also calls for a lot more thinking and processing before she decides on how to interpret it. Gets a priority-symbol next to the note and an underline. 

"...Huh. I - guess that's maybe what you would expect if you have very intelligent entities that can negotiate on action but can't - negotiate directly and come to a shared agreement about their alignment? I'm not sure why alignment is more fixed than that but it sounded like it is, and gods of differing alignments collaborating is mostly - finding shared ground despite the differences? So it'd be - easier to agree on things like 'Rovagug should not be allowed to destroy the multiverse' and harder to agree on 'mortals should be wealthier'. Also it sort of addresses my other question, about whether there are gods other than Asmodeus who - arranged to indirectly run countries through their clerics? I'm now going to guess not that much, because it's the kind of intervention where there isn't much common ground with gods of the opposing alignment and so it's expensive to negotiate for. Are there any others, though?" 

Some countries end up with the Churches of gods holding a lot of political power.  Even that describes Cheliax much better than describing Cheliax as a country run by Heaven or Asmodeus.  Cheliax is mostly governed by the Queen, a Chief-Executive-like entity named Abrogail Thrune Version Two, and heavily influenced by the Church of Asmodeus, which is mostly acting on its prior idea of what Asmodeus wants and only very very rarely is allowed any additional input from Asmodeus or even from Heaven.  Other countries have their own Churches; Osirion, for example, is heavily dominated by the Church of Gorum, god of banking.

Their Chief Executive is version two. What. What happened to the version one???? ...Egobar is the person to ask about gods and not about non-god-related Governance matters. Merrin's notes are starting to again reach the point where paper is a very unwieldy user interface, but she takes ten seconds to find the right one and make a note so she doesn't forget to ask the expert on Governance in Cheliax about the version thing. 

"...Right. That makes sense. So the main difference is that Asmodeus is - sending resources directly from Heaven? What kind of resources - it sounds like information is hard to obtain even though I would naively have expected that to be the cheapest, it's certainly cheaper in dath ilan to move information long distances than physical goods. - Also, god of banking, huh, what alignment?" 

Gorum is Lawful Neutral!

Information is insanely expensive in terms of agreements between gods, that call for mostly leaving the mortal world alone.  All interventions are measured by impact more than by bulk weight.  Heaven has sent, for example, many copies of books about magic, for education, full of diagrams that are hard for Cheliax to print - but only knowledge within those books that was already in Cheliax.

"Wow. That's...kind of counterintuitive but it does fit with the differences I already know about. I think. Heaven has better printing tech than Cheliax does?" 

If afterlives in general - or even just some of them, the ones where the gods value wealth and knowledge and Civilization - have a significantly higher tech level, then that ALSO has implications which Merrin was not previously taking into account. 

...Heaven makes the books somehow.  How, if they have better printing tech, would be information.

Huh. Okay, Golarion is kind of competent at information security. At least when it comes to keeping information from leaking out of entire other planes that are mostly under the control of gods. 

"Off-topic, but I might know some things about how to print books with complicated diagrams better and more cheaply. That– does that mean that there are communication restrictions on people who died here and are now in an afterlife, even if the magic would otherwise exist for them to talk to their families and such?" 

Yep.  People liable to be resurrected go to holding areas where they don't learn secrets.

"Right. Um, do you actually know much at all about - what the day to day lives - not-lives, I guess - of people there look like, in general? Is someone who was a wizard or cleric while alive going to continue doing that - do people in other trades or specializations continue with that - oh, right, can children be born there or is that not a thing -" 

...they know what life is like in the holding areas?  It's generally understood that things get more interesting outside the holding areas.  Mortals of Golarion do have some general ideas such as, for example, Elysium, the Chaotic Good afterlife, being an infinite wilderness that is really pretty, and it gets prettier and more complicated outside the holding areas.

Wizards need to retrain, or so one hears.  Clerics have finished out their term of employment and may enjoy whatever rewards are now due them for their mortal service.

Children cannot be conceived by the dead.

...Wait does that mean actually infinite or is it the thing where people here tend to be really sloppy in their spoken reasoning, even when speaking Baseline which is a perfectly reasonable language for this, but maybe Taldane doesn't...actually have good vernacular words that distinguish infinities from 'just very very big'? 

Should she - ask - the way he's saying it makes it sounds like an afterthought and not something with enormous implications, which inclines her to think that it's a translation error or he's being sloppy. Also clerics apparently do not actually need to know a lot of math and if Merrin tries to ask he might just be confused. In which case she will inevitably end up confusing herself because those math classes were a decade ago; it's not exactly one of the branches of math that comes up regularly in her line of Exception Handling, and certainly not in more ordinary EMT work. She makes a note to herself to ask one of the wizard students later, if she doesn't get an opportunity before then to talk to a more highly trained wizard. 

"So - that makes it sound like economicmagic works there but differently. ...What happens if very young children die." This happens even in dath ilan, sometimes, which tries incredibly hard to avoid it; Golarion is clearly trying much less hard and also has a fraction of the total resources to point at it. "What about - if someone dies while pregnant, is the child born there? What if they're not the same alignment as the parent?" 

Fetuses older than twelve weeks have souls and sort as True Neutral.

If a soul dies that young, it can't get out of the Boneyard - the True Neutral afterlife - until they've, well, done at least a few things that give them an alignment?  They can leave right after that, but their alignment doesn't always match that of their parents, and... there isn't, often, a way to know which child's soul is which, they're not exactly labeled...

Obviously one tries to reduce child mortality of children too young to remember who their parents are, or which afterlife they should be trying to head for.  This isn't however the sort of place where you can throw effort blindly; the main thing that kills children, young and old, is not enough food and medical interventions without agricultural interventions probably just result in more starvation.  Also helpful might be some sort of solution for women having fewer babies than currently, if more of them are surviving all the way to adulthood.  Even in Cheliax that's not... really the sort of thing where you can just ask and be obeyed about it, people like having sex.

This is getting into matters of state, but even Iker has some idea of the chaos and disaster that would result inside Cheliax if suddenly more children were surviving all the way to adulthood, and farming yields were the same.  Everywhere else in Golarion it would be much worse.  The obvious order in which to improve things - he thinks, he's not a logistics-expert - is farming first, if Merrin knows anything about farming at all.

(Merrin is temporarily distracted by the vivid mental image of - not disembodied exactly, but dis-wombed fetuses - how does that work? What should she even be picturing here? A twelve-week human fetus...is still at the point where it looks as much like a weird translucent fish-alien as a person; it's not obvious to her why this is the point at which the fetus acquires a soul, she really does not think that 12-week fetuses are sentient. But, whatever, clearly the conceptualmagic here thinks it's an important cutoff for something. Does the Boneyard have artificial womb tech? Not that it would help if they do, given the intense information security precautions. Or do they not need it because 'dead' fetuses don't need continued blood oxygenation. Come to think of it do the afterlives have air and water - probably, they have cities, which at least implies they have matter that behaves according to similar physical laws... ) 

That's...really sad. She had already made herself sad thinking about more children dying in accidents, and - apparently she was somewhat misjudging the tech level, if they're at the point where insufficient food production is the main cause of death for children. She...doesn't actually know that much about how to judge what farming-tech would go along with a particular level of nice textiles and beds and such in the Governance headquarters. 

She is not going to do anything stupid that results in more children starving! She's read that novel! With aliens, not humans from a different Civilization, but same principle applies, it's - a pretty obvious unintended-consequence of trying to help without sufficient understanding of the situation to reason through all the possible consequences. She's faintly glad that they're being conscientious about making sure she doesn't do that, and also faintly frustrated that they thought she might? 

"That - makes sense. I know some things about farming, hopefully enough will generalize even if you have completely different staple crop plants. I...know some things about micronutrients and childhood nutrition that might be helpful independently of just increasing the total calories being produced by farms. I plausibly know more things about contraception, it's medical-related. Can you - do you know the average number of children per woman, and a breakdown of how many survive to various ages, including the ones that die before they're actually born? Also crop yields but I'll be less sure what to do with that, I do not have average agricultural productivity per acre or per worker memorized for various tech levels." 

Pause. 

"- Sorry, that's getting more into matters of state, if you don't know I'll write that down to come back to later."