... The Ministry of Justice wishes to explain to the Emperor that, uh, when it tried to scry the fugitives to apprehend them, an alien Adept used a terrifyingly powerful alien compulsion to overrule the first successful scryer's other compulsions and make him Gate out, then write and speak an explanation that the any "archmage" like her could cast compulsions on anyone who caught her in their Scry-area including a compulsion to Final Strike, and also to insult and threaten them if they ever try to scry on her again.

So, probably this Alfirin person Iomedae warned them about is already here.

(The Ministry of Barbarians has been sharing information, which it doesn't do often, but, crisis.)

Well! That explains the having been suddenly and abruptly Gated out to a secure compound! Is the threat under control now? If the mage is now secured somewhere, do they they have any avenue to study the spell and figure out how it works and whether it can be blocked or unraveled?

He...can probably just work from here for the rest of the day. It's annoying, and probably doesn't even offer much protection in the case where this archmage 'Alfirin' actually wants to sabotage or take over the Empire or something, but it will make his guards less stressed. 

The threat appears to be as over as any threat can be over when a terrifyingly powerful mage with unknown capabilities is rampaging around the Empire.

Quick analysis took place but there was deemed to be no simple way to block the spell or remove it safely as it overruled all other compulsions, so the spell was cut. Cutting it was simple for a mage, produced significant backlash on the victim, and the scrier is presently in intensive medical care. He is not expected to recover.

...Reasonable of them. Hopefully if they don't keep trying to scry the archmage then she'll - leave them alone - 

(He would be terrified but his emotions continue to be put away to deal with later.) 

If they had a sufficiently powerful dispel on hand they probably would have done that sooner, which means they probably killed the scryer. Pity, that.

The Ministry of Barbarians reports on what the paladins are saying!

They boast of their sterling moral character, and say that they can only be chosen by the gods that respect law and justice, and that if paladins ever betray these their gods stop giving powers. But gods can give lots of different people lots of different powers, and the only constant rule among all these types is that they need to stay loyal to their gods. Iomedae boasts that she has lots of way scarier people and she just sent these because they'd be nonthreatening; so far they haven't demonstrated any magical powers yet, though they claim to be Healers and immune to fear. She says she has huge armies loyal to her and that they all have magical powers like-her-but-weaker.

They're pretty sure Iomedae is perfect in every possible respect as a general and a leader and a hero and completely unbeatable and they, fundamentally, worship her. They think she's partway through turning herself into a god, that almost all the other gods back her, that she just took a city with impossible miracles. They say that Aroden, the god who was once a man who Iomedae serves, invented a way for humans to transform themselves into gods, and that Iomedae will use it once she's built an invincible kingdom allied with all the other countries she hasn't conquered and fix everything wrong with the world.

They claim there are very large numbers of different sentient species with widely varying psychologies and lifespans.

They claim that people not born mages can learn magic (!) if they're sufficiently clever and know the right tricks, and that this learned magic, which they call "wizardry," is more versatile and can be more powerful than the magic of an ordinary mage, which they call a sorcerer; they may or may not count all Mind-Gifts as sorcery, as many barbarians outside the Empire do - as far as they're concerned, sorcerer powers are very wide in category, often involve song, and are very hard to precisely categorize. (This is fairly common, among barbarians, who sometimes do channel mind-gifts through song.)

This is, of course, a summary, and they have transcripts, but it's the important bit.

(Kastil is, of course, trying to figure out how to drop an assassination squad on Alfirin if she ever shows her face directly anywhere in the empire.)

....The Ministry of Progress should immediately start looking into this 'wizardry' that can apparently be learned by anyone, even those without Gifts. 

Iomedae is - very good at this. That part isn't news, exactly, she was halfway to building a church that worshipped her in Oris. 

He'll read the full transcript too, of course, but it's - fundamentally the problem is that he has no idea how to think about it, when he can't verify anything save that the "paladins" currently being questioned believe everything they're saying. 

It's a nice story. He would be tempted to believe in Iomedae too, in their place. 

He waits for further updates. 

The Ministry of Progress will of course obey; does this overrule the previous top-priority order to try to find ways to get to Golarion themselves? And if they're both top-priority orders, can it have a higher budget?

They can go on the list of departments that cannot tolerate a budget cut right now. Actually increasing it would imply a source of funds that they do not, in fact, have. 

- scrying Iomedae's world sounds like it might...go badly...if they do it before they have a better understanding of its magical capabilities. They should keep the current research team on it though. 

The Ministry of Barbarians will quietly attempt to pump them for everything they know about Alfirin, wizardry and how it works, dimensional travel and all the nonsense their world's magic enables.

Also, they want to know what they know about the rebellion in Oris; from their perspective Iomedae invaded their territory out of the blue, so they're kind of confused about this 'she is a good person who respects the laws of the land' thing.

(At some point they will move the delegates from the Knights of Ozem to a different location wayyy further away from things they might sabotage and people they might assassinate, but still on a major Gate-canal line, and get them rooms that are exceptionally bugged but are not prison cells.)

The paladins will happily answer these questions too! Strategic decisions about how much the Empire should know were presumably made by Iomedae before she selected them; their job is just to explain everything they know so that hopefully there can be peace or at least the Empire can avoid annoying, and being enslaved by, Tar-Baphon. They know wizards use spellbooks which have inks with special magic-relevant characteristics. Wizards can either learn spellforms from other wizards or derive them from first principles though the latter is difficult. They know dimensional transit is a high-circle wizard and sorcerer and cleric magic. 

They know that an apprentice can in a few years have a grasp of weak magics, and that an ambitious and lucky wizard with other wizards to learn from and lots of hard fighting, say because they're in the crusade, can reach fifth circle from first circle in a decade or two if they don't die for good along the way, and seventh circle from fifth in another decade or two, but probably not ninth even with the rest of their (magically extended) life, though of course occasionally some manage it, and occasionally it goes faster, like if Arazni, who was herself a ninth circle wizard before she became a demigod, is there to learn from. 

They know that Alfirin is ludicrously powerful. They've seen her do Tsunamis and they know she carries one of the crusade's diamonds so she can do a Wish in a pinch. They don't know all that much about her as a person? She's not the kind of person who comes to eat with the soldiers and talk at length about all of her nonsecret strategic decisionmaking, like Iomedae is, or to give grand speeches. She and Iomedae fight together, and she's obviously a very strategically important ally, but Alfirin's not in Iomedae's chain of command. Ninth circle wizards don't generally take orders from anyone. 

Iomedae didn't explain the situation in Oris in that much depth. She said that - the Empire runs on mind control, and that no one in it is free enough to consider whether the existence of the Empire itself serves its people or the other people of the world - like, not that they're selfish, that they are mind controlled to not be allowed to weigh the tradeoff, not to be allowed to stop even if it's not worth it to keep going.  She said that Oris had been fighting for its independence, and she'd backed them, and she thinks that an independent Oris would be in the interests of almost everyone involved, but then she got killed, directly by the Empire but indirectly by local-god-interference. 

She said the Empire bans all the gods though this was understandable of the Empire since the local gods seem pretty unhelpful and the way that people relate to gods in general quite troubling to the Empire for philosophical reasons she's actually inclined to grant them. She said that Aroden could vastly improve things on that front, and block the interference of the other gods, but that He was going to have a hard time getting a foothold without Iomedae, and of course right now she can't be spared from Urgir. 

...Lawful doesn't mean she respects the laws whatever they are. That's a decent approximation to use if you are inexperienced at Law, a guardrail of sorts, but it's not what Law is. It doesn't mean if you land on a revolution you always side with the people who conquered the country a year ago. Law is - well, Iomedae would've sent terms as soon as she decided to fight in the war, and tried to arrange talks, and conducted them in good faith. If they'd arrived at terms she'd have abided by them. She wouldn't have lied in any communications at any point, or been strategically bad at thinking about anything in order to convey a biased impression, or selected a person to write terms who she thought would get things wrong in her favor. That's Law.

The results of the questioning reach Bastran at intervals, in neat summarized reports with attached full transcripts if he wants to take the time to read those as well. 

It's not a huge amount to go on, for the magic. Bastran...does not really expect the Ministry of Progress researchers to get very far in whatever time is granted to them. It's worth trying anyway, of course, and he's not sure he trusts that sense of pessimism, his internal predictions have a tendency to be unduly pessimistic when he's tired, or sad about something, and right now he's both, even if he's not dwelling on either because it wouldn't help. 

He's still very confused about the relationship between Alfirin and Iomedae. Alfirin - isn't in her chain of command, and theoretically doesn't take her orders, but does her favors anyway, despite being powerful enough that she would hardly need Iomedae's goodwill? ...Think about it later. 

The relayed explanation of Iomedae's attitude toward Oris is...unsurprising...and doesn't really tell him anything new. Of course she would claim that a free Oris with a church of Aroden in it is in everyone's interests, somehow even in the Empire's interests. Of course she would claim that Aroden isn't like the other gods that the Empire has encountered. Not that this means her claims are false, but - it's not really new evidence that they're true, either. 

Generous of her (he thinks, a little sarcastically) to concede, after the fact and past the point when it could matter, that maybe she misjudged the local gods and the Empire was right all along about Their unhelpfulness and Their opposition to the cause of civilization and progress. Took her long enough to notice. 

...The explanation of what 'Lawful' means, separate from 'obeying laws', feels like - the kind of thing Altarrin would talk about, and that he might actually follow if Altarrin were the one trying to explain. He doesn't really follow the version of it explained by the delegates. 

But it does seem like some kind of information, positive rather than negative, that Iomedae sent diplomats at all, and apparently ordered them to be cooperative and helpful. It's not like she couldn't have done it as a trick, to get the Empire's guard down, but...she didn't have to do it at all. 

He is of course on edge, given the strong implication in Iomedae's letter that Alfirin would at some point act against the Empire. It keeps feeling like the other shoe should drop at any moment. 

It should, by this point, be late into the night in the Empire. She puts Altarrin into a mindscape, (a quiet parlour) explains the way to wake up (walk through the door), and that she'll give him an hour after Bastran shows up before she does anything else. (There's a clock, and unlike in a normal dream, it even tells time.)

Discern location. Spell Resistance. Greater Teleport. (500 feet up) Limited Wish.

And then she can invisibly, undetectably descend into the emperor's bedroom as easily as if he were sleeping in an open field. Physical barriers are for other people.

The Emperor sleeps in a room shielded against scrying. The door is guarded, and there are wards to detect dozens of kinds of magic - as well as any unexpected magical signature above a certain total power output - but nothing to sense an invisible and undetectable Alfirin as she approaches, even as she passes through the shields. 

The Emperor is asleep. 

It's usually quite hard to completely hide Golarion magic; There are some spells that can mask the auras of other active spells, but hiding a spell so it has no signature at all even in the moment of casting - it can be done, but only with two talented spellcasters well-practiced in working together, one casting the spell of concealment at the same time that the other casts the spell to be concealed. It's outright impossible for a single caster to do it - the two spells have to be truly simultaneous.

Every ninth-circle archmage can do at least two things everyone else thinks are impossible. Alfirin can hang cleric spells and cast a quickened mask dweomer in the middle of another working. The alarms don't sound. The Emperor is still asleep, but now he's having a very different dream.

Bastran was in the middle of a confused and stressful dream where he was at his desk, working on some very important treaty, except that his secretary kept sending people in to request that he sign documents, which kept having the wrong number of pages, and the wax wasn't melting right for the seal and for some reason he only had ink in weird colors like 'bright green', and he couldn't even stand up to get better ink or wax because he had forgotten to put on trousers that morning. 

- and now he's stepping into a quiet parlor. Somehow, even though it doesn't make sense, he doesn't feel confused or surprised. There's a quiet calm behind everything.

Altarrin is waiting for him, sitting in an armchair. He doesn't speak at first, just looks at Bastran with an expression far less guarded than anything he's shown before. There's - grief, and regret, and apology, and frustration, and deep, deep tiredness. 

For some reason this isn't surprising either. 

He takes a step forward. "Altarrin. ...This isn't real, I'm dreaming of you. I wish -" 

Altarrin shakes his head, slightly. "Dreaming, yes, but we are both really here. It is a spell from Iomedae's world, that Alfirin cast for me. I - am sorry, I realize that is an escalation, but - less of one than kidnapping you, and I needed to speak with you in private." 

What? 

...He walks to the other armchair and sits down, because that at least sounds less awkward than standing here stupidly and staring at Altarrin with his jaw hanging open. 

"I...got your letter," he manages eventually. "Well. Not - exactly what you wrote - one of the Office of Inquiry scholars did a rewrite. In case it was a mind control letter." 

Sigh. "An understandable precaution, though - I assume it means the message you received is not exactly the one I sent. ...It does not really matter. Most of what I wished to say to you, I did not want to put in writing where the Office of Inquiry would read it." 

He ducks his head. "...Are you all right? I know - it cannot have been easy, these last few days." 

For a few moments, all Bastran can manage to do is stare blankly. 

"Am I all right?" he squeeze out finally, faintly. "I'm not the one who got kidnapped to another world! ...Or, I mean, I know that's not what you're claiming happened and you - presumably believe what you wrote - but it doesn't exactly sound better from your point of view." 

Of course that's the first direction Bastran would go. It would almost makes him smile, if not for the fifty other reasons why the situation is not one to smile about. 

"I - was not very all right, no. I am much more all right now, and the reasons why are part of what I wanted to speak about here. But there is - some history to explain first." 

He closes his eyes. "I understand that once I tell you of it, the secret is out of my hands. But - you are the first person in this world I have ever told. I hope you will take that as an indication of trust." 

Great. Okay. Where is this going. Altarrin is being incredibly ominous and he hates it.