She jolts forward, as though awaking from a bad dream, except for all the ways that this is nothing like that. 

She's...pretty sure that if you die in one of the afterlives* you're just gone. She should be just gone. But she--has limbs again; hands, legs, fingers--she raises them into her field of vision and flexes them just to be sure--

Maybe she was...not killed, somehow. Removed from the jaws of the presumably-a-demon that had her before the life, such as it was, could be snuffed out of her--that someone had made a mistake in sending her to the Abyss in the first place and snatched her out of it to re-sort properly. 

Her surroundings...aren't, as far as she can tell. The space around her goes on indefinitely, with no visible horizon, no ability to distinguish between firmament and fundament. It's...white, sort of, but not the white of things that are white, more like an opposite of the blackness of impenetrable darkness, except you would expect that to be blinding and this isn't.

There is one other person in this space with her.

"You're not Pharasma."

*as a petitioner. Plane Shifts don't count.

"I'm not," the woman says sympathetically. 

Not only is Seshka's companion not the Lady of Graves, she doesn't appear to even be any psychopomp; in point of fact, she appears to be an angel.

"--Did you rescue me from the Abyss?" 

Wince. "I'm afraid not. You see, the ineffable Will of the Multiverse selects people who have just died--truly, completely died, not the ordinary kind of dying you're used to where you get shuffled off to an afterlife--to reincarnate in other worlds under certain conditions." 

"...Is the Will of the Multiverse Pharasma," Seshka asks suspiciously. 

Headshake. "No. I'm afraid we're outside of Pharasma's Creation as you know it." 

"--Are we in the Dark Tapestry!?"

Firmly: "No. The Dark Tapestry, as you know it, is, if not part of Pharasma's Creation exactly, attached to it in a way that this place is not. This place is both farther from anything you've known than you previously believed possible, and more comprehensible than you ever would have guessed something so far away could be." 

"I guess that demon did get me. Or whatever it was."

"I'm afraid so. I'm sorry." 

Deep breaths. 

"You said, reincarnated into other worlds. In circumstances. What does that mean?"

"Basically, we're going to make up a fictional narrative, and then instantiate you into a new universe, designed from the ground up based on that narrative."

"Wh...why???"

"The Will of the Multiverse," the angel says, "is ineffable." 

She doesn't say it as though imparting some great wisdom or even expositing some fact of reality. She says it through narrow, pressed-together lips, while looking off to the side as though some person she despised and also were personally unimpressed with were three meters to her right. 

Oh no. 

"How fucked am I?"

"...Not that fucked, in the grand scheme of things. Certainly less fucked than you would have been if we hadn't scooped you up. The 'Will of the Multiverse' has a certain predilection for, shall we say, finding narratives more immersive with real people in them, but they aren't, as far as I'm aware, especially into narratives where things are completely hopeless. You have a certain amount of control over the circumstances you'll find yourself in, and I have a lot of experience guiding people through the process in ways that get them as much of what they want as they can." 

"...Are there any options that will let me go home, to my mother." 

"So there are actually a couple of things we can do there--the first and most obvious is that we can set your new world on a time-delay, so that it doesn't start until certain conditions are met, and we can wait until your mother also dies permanently enough that we can scoop her up, and then instantiate her as your mother again in your new universe. The other thing..." The angel looks slightly to her left, and pokes at something invisible in the air with her finger. "...Normally, I could set you up with a magic system that would let you travel back to your home universe fairly easily once the designated 'plot' of the narrative was over, but unfortunately Pharasma's Creation has...barriers to entry, so to speak. I can set you up with a magic system that will do dimensional travel, I can apply to make it possible for you to go home, but actually making that possible will be up to the External Relations department and whoever they send to negotiate with Pharasma. I can advise you on things that will make it more likely for them to succeed, but even if you ruthlessly optimize for it I can't absolutely guarantee that it will be possible." 

...Seshka frowns, twiddling her fingers thoughtfully. 

The thing is, she really doesn't expect her mother to perma-die anytime soon. She'll be incredibly upset that Seshka is gone, of course, but--frankly she expects that to result in horrible things happening to witch hunters, not to Mom. Even if she is killed, if she happens to get unlucky in a different way from Seshka, she could be turned into an outsider and forget herself and live for eons and eons more. 

And even if she knew for sure that Mom was going to die eventually, she would still be condemning her to her grief until the end of her arbitrarily prolonged lifespan, when she could instead fix it--perhaps not immediately, but still--by coming back. 

Or at least try to. 

"Is there any way to...try that, and then, if it doesn't work, whenever she dies you scoop her up and put her in this new world not as my mother...?"

"That should be possible, yes. There have been cases where clients of mine set up their new universes to automatically scoop up everyone who permanently died in their old one, but I can guarantee you that if you did that, you wouldn't be able to connect back to Pharasma's domain. But a conditional where a specific scoop happens only if that's already not happening is the sort of relatively if/then situation I can set up easily." 

Hell exists; "people who are permanently dead" isn't even the most critical class of people who need rescue, really. And, like, Geb exists; it has to be theoretically possible to retrieve even people who were killed in afterlives. So not worth cutting off the possibility of getting back. 

"If I picked the other option, where I asked to wait until Mom died, would that also cut me off?"

"No. A state of ongoingly receiving the dead would be an obstruction; raising the finite number of dead collected for the initial deployment of the world from one isn't nearly as big of an issue." 

"...Does that mean I can ask for people not my mother? Without fucking anything up?"

"Yep." 

"I am...guessing but not assuming that I can't get Arazni." 

"Not without a time delay, no, you can't just grab the version of her who initially died and ignore the lich-queen of Geb." 

"I figured as much but you have to understand that the lich-queen of Geb does kind of complicate the question of cessation of existence." 

The angel winces. "Ah...yes, but...on the other hand, Geb had a fairly intact corpse to work with. Most people who are as dead as that don't leave such a, well, repairable, set of remnants behind."

"I assume I didn't." 

Wince. "You did not." There was any salvageable remains behind, but...even if someone were to try to reconstruct her from that, and had wild, amazing success, there would be...gaps. Substantial ones. But mortals often don't like to see the remains of a predator's lunch even when lunch isn't themself, so if Seshka doesn't ask her to elaborate she's definitely not going to. 

"Can I get..." she mulls this over. "Can I get some people who tried for the Starstone and failed?"

"You could, although that's a substantial pool to draw from and I'd need more details about what you'd want done with them--details that would be easier to arrange after I've explained the scope of the choices you're going to be making." 

"I was more trying to sound the space of potential resurrectees than actually specifically request people but yes, that sounds important." 

"So, there are some basic ground rules that I can't alter," the angel explains. "The title of the fictional narrative is Roses of Villarosa, and you're actually supposed to take on the role of the villainess of the piece." 

"Not...going to lie, I don't love that?"

"It's not a factor designed with your well-being in mind, but it's not that hard to work around--to put it a certain way, while you're assuming the role of the 'villain' of the original narrative, you're the 'protagonist' of the story the Will wants to see play out, with one of your challenges to subvert your narrative role." 

"That sounds...sort of weirdly specific?" 

"Oh, it's an entire sub-genre on some planets." 

"That's weird but okay." 

"Fortunately, 'Roses of Villarosa' is a romance story; your fictional counterpart's 'villainy' doesn't strictly have to exceed the standards of 'romantic rival' although by default it will be a rather nasty romantic rival, at least socially. --To be clear, your fictional counterpart doesn't have to be meaningfully you in any way, although there are options later that would force you to behave more like her."

"Why would I take those options...? I suppose if they made it more likely that I could link up to Pharasma's Creation..." she muses dubiously.

"No, but they have other positive effects; I'll get more into the weeds of those particular specifics later after I've explained more of the basic premise, if that's alright." 

"Sure, go ahead."

"Roses of Villarosa is a story-template with some facts about it set in stone, and some in the form of discrete mechanical choices that you get to choose between, and then the two of us get to put our heads together to fill in the details not covered by mechanical choices. Some but not all of the mechanical choices are places where I'm going to give you advice that's different from the advice I would give you if you were just trying to get the best world you could instead of trying to pass Pharasma's scrutiny." 

"...Could I, possibly, set up one--set of choices, world design--to present to Pharasma, and then a different, conditional one, to deploy if I can't ever go home anyway?"

"Theeeeoretically, yes, but I should warn you that the external relations team is liable to do a worse job if they like your backup plan better than the Pharasma-compatible one." 

"Tch." 

"That's about the size of it, yeah. I'm sorry for being part of an obnoxious bureaucracy." 

"...Do you meaningfully have a choice...?"

"Not...really, no." 

"Then don't apologize, you're being very helpful and I really do appreciate it." 

"Thanks. Anyway, Roses of Villarosa takes place with in the Kingdom of Villarosa--has to be a Kingdom, has to be named Villarosa; you have a non-zero amount of wiggle room for things like giving the monarch titles other than 'king' and translating 'Villarosa' into other languages but that wiggle room trades off against other exploits you could try in terms of the patience of relevant other parties in the bureaucracy and the wiggle room here is particularly expensive so I would advise skipping it. 

Yeah that sounds sort of Taldane but she wouldn't rather something that sounded more Hallit at the expense of things that actually matter.

"The choices that have strictly to do with your world, as opposed to your character or the other 'characters' in the story, are your world's magic level and technology level. To be clear, these are factors that vary greatly within Pharasma's creation; the parts of Golarion you're most familiar with stand right on the precipice between 'Idealized Antiquity'* and 'Dawn of Reason',** and its magic level stands right on the cusp between Medium and High. ...Technology levels have a much greater level of gradation than magic levels; magic levels only have None, Low, Medium and High."

*Faux Medieval
**Early Modern

"None? That seems...dire. Deeply, deeply dire."

"Yes, I generally recommend people not choose that; it gets you an extra 'perk' option later on but it is not, not worth it. Some worlds really do just not have any magic, though."

"I'm not sure I understand how that would even work but I'm also...not sure it matters." 

"It's not tremendously important, no. If you were trying to design one, then yes, but," she shrugs. 

"I mean, leaving aside what a bad idea it would be for other reasons, I suspect it would make it a lot harder for me to go home."

"It sure would." You can actually get dimensional travel in a no-magic world with one of the higher technology settings, but based on the notes available to her that would be much less likely for Pharasma to allow anywhere near Golarion. 

"The other tech levels, besides the ones I already mentioned, are 'Awfully Archaic,'* 'Industrial,' 'Marvelous,' 'Steampunk,' 'Space Age,'** 'Cyberpunk,' and 'Space Opera.' Do you want me to go into detail about all of those, or only the ones most likely to not piss off Pharasma."

*Actual Pre-Modern
**Contemporary

"Mmmmight want a brief description of some of the more confusing ones even if they do piss off Pharasma, but by all means start with the ones she's less likely to object to."

"'Awfully Archaic' requires a magic level of Low or None, and I don't recommend it even though Low is a lot better than None, but it's very unlikely to provoke Pharasma so it bears mentioning. It's...well, this isn't a perfect comparison, but it's about where a lot of places on Golarion were at during the late Age of Anguish or early Age of Destiny." 

Yeah that doesn't sound great no.

"'Industrial' is something that's still a few centuries out, at least, from where your planet currently is, but not totally beyond what I expect to be able to explain--Industry is, in essence, the practice of developing tools to perform tasks--such as making other tools--automatically, at scale. Giant looms that are to the looms you know as a spinning wheel is to a distaff, lines of unskilled workers each performing a single step of a craftsman's art over and over again on a thousand different pieces of raw material, furnaces burning tons of coal and filling the skies with smoke..."

"...Is that really centuries away? It sounds pretty Arodenite, and the Age of Glory is scheduled to happen really soon." 

The angel consults her notes. "That's a good point, actually, I'm not sure. It would be centuries away based on normal projected development, but I don't actually have access to the information 'what is Aroden going to do in the Age of Glory.' Not along the specifics of cultural uplift, I mean; obviously he's going to rescue Arazni and kick out Irrisen and Nidal and so forth." 

"Fair enough. I hope whatever he does is good enough for my mom that she'll be okay-ish by the time I get back."

"I wish her luck," the angel says honestly. "Now, 'Marvelous' and 'Steampunk' are both sort of edge cases; I think they can be handled in a way that Pharasma won't particularly object to, but there are also things you could do with them that definitely, definitely would. They're both divergences from the traditional technological progression, insofar as such a thing exists, at about where Golarion is, developmentally speaking, although not exactly. They...hm, they diverge earlier in prerequisite scientific understanding than they do in large-scale social consequences, does that make sense?" 

"I think so." 

"There aren't any really good reference points in your experience to use to explain them, but the best analogy I can find on short notice would be that Marvelous is what happens if people like your mother drive technological progress for an extended period of time, and Steampunk is what happens if gnomes do." 

"...Exciting!"

"Yes, rather. You can see why there are extrapolations of those ideas that Pharasma wouldn't be thrilled about giving access to Rovagug's Cage." 

"...Mm. So it's not just about what Pharasma likes in general, huh?"

"I won't lie, it would probably be easier to convince Pharasma to let us hook this new universe up to Her creation if it weren't for the fact that you're predictably going to go around doing things on your home planet in particular."

Seshka chews on this for a bit. 

"Is there any way to, like, try to make up for that? Like, Pharasma likes...there not being undead, and babies not dying, right? If the Villarosa world has those traits, will that improve anything?" 

The angel makes some notes on her invisible interface. "Yep. I mean, I can't guarantee anything for certain, I can't read Pharasma's essence like another god could and it's always possible the guy who gets handed the negotiation could flub it, but yeah, in expectation you can get away with a little more contamination if some of the contamination stops babies from dying." 

It did not escape Seshka, when she was first determining that the place she was in probably wasn't the Boneyard, that it didn't have dead babies draped over every available surface. Seshka is also pretty opposed to babies being dead! Dead babies are no good. She is firmly aligned with Pharasma on this fact. 

"Maybe I can come up with a way to resurrect babies at scale..."

"That is deeply cool and I will put a pin in it but I think you should probably have a better idea of what kind of magic system and/or tech level you're going with before trying to figure out how to use them to save babies."

Seshka nods, drums her fingers against her leg, and sucks on her teeth. 

"Would you say," she says slowly, "that there's a lot of overlap between the parts of Steampunk and Marvelous that would make it easier to save babies, and the parts that Pharasma won't particularly object to." 

"--I think so, yes. More centrally Marvellous than Steampunk, but either will do." 

Seshka doesn't have anything against gnomes but she prefers her mom to them. "Marvelous, then. And...you said Golarion as-is is right between Medium and High; do you think it'd be fair to say that in the Age of Glory it's going to be High?" 

"Oh, almost certainly. Azlant would have had a magic level of High, for instance." 

"Okay. Marvelous and High, that works. What's next?"

"Next are your character's narrative-independent traits--you don't have to be her, in personality, but you'll have her body and so on, so it should be one you want to live in." 

"Okay." It seems a little odd that this is something with mechanical choices and not just free-formed, but maybe that will make more sense after she's had them explained to her. 

"The choices in this category are hair color, haircut, and race."

"Race makes sense as a category...I think..."

"The short version is that the Villarosa reincarnation choice-set is a commonly reused one, and the fictional tropes and so on that it draws from come from a set of worlds including ones with a lot more visual media than you're used to. Think of it like books with illustrations--you can't really draw in everyone's face as it is, not every time, especially not if you have as many pages of illustrations as some of them do, so each character has to have some easy-to-depict visual cues so the audience knows who's who." 

"--Okay that's actually significantly less stupid than I was anticipating!" 

"It's still pretty stupid," the angel shrugs, "But..." 

"But this whole thing is reasonably stupid, yeah."

"Right. Now, the hair choices have consequences beyond the aesthetic that are not strictly necessary, in the sense of my bosses having made decisions and also choices and not in the sense that they are, here and now, optional. The style options are Drill Hair--hair that naturally forms ringlets," she changes her own hair to demonstrate, "that normally wouldn't form without significant work. You can fiddle with this a bit to create other forms of curly hair but it takes up wiggle budget. It gives the perk 'Ohohoho!' Then, Hime Cut; bangs, long hair in the back, and a couple of locks of intermediate length," she changes her hair again. "That one gives the perk 'Silk Hiding Steel.' And the last one is 'Elaborate,' which is the most naturally free-form; any kind of hairstyle that looks like an enormous pain to maintain. It gives a free Maid minion. I'm guessing I should explain minions and perks now." 

"Please." 

"Minions are characters-in-the-story whose narrative roles are subservient to your own, often but not universally with explicit legal and/or social subservience in the actualized world as well. In addition to being named characters, they also have various skills and so on that their non-minion counterparts wouldn't have--you can have an arbitrary number of maids no matter what, for example, no matter what you pick, but they won't be the equal of a Maid minion. Also, we personality-select the people who are going to be inhabiting those roles to ensure they're actually loyal to you; an ordinary maid might choose to sell you out to one of your enemies, but a Maid minion won't. By default you get two picks off the minion menu--and you can take the same pick twice--but there are various options that give you extra picks, such as, yes, the Elaborate hair option."

"Okay..." She's never had a maid in her life and she doesn't feel especially compelled to start in the next one, but maybe some of the others will be more appealing. Having guaranteed friends does sound nice. Although-- "Wait, they're personality-selected to be compatible with me, not the original 'villainess' whose role I'm inhabiting?"

"Where possible they'll be compatible with both, although if it comes down to brass tacks they'll tend to prefer you to her." 

"Okay, good to know."

"Perks are, well, perks, that you can pick to enhance your life and narrative in that other world. One of them allows you to recover your memories younger; one of them creates an alternate version of the story where the villainess triumphs over the heroine. 'Ohohoho!' gives you the ability to perform a traditional villainess laugh, dispiriting your enemies and bolstering your allies. 'Silk Hiding Steel' will bolster your inner resolve, ensuring that you never freeze up in a bad situation or allow despair to overcome you." 

"...Some witches have an ability where they can cackle to prolong various hexes, is Ohohoho at all related to that." 

"Uh--" the angel's eyes flick to her invisible interface. "...Normally, no, but apparently someone thought it would be funny and so in your case yes." 

"And does Silk Hiding Steel work on magical fear effects?" 

"It will bolster your resistance to them but not make you immune." 

"I think I'm going to have to go with Drill Hair, then!" 

"Makes sense. The hair color options are Blonde, Redhead, Silver, Brunette, and Rainbow. Blonde is denoted as the 'rich girl' hair color, which, given your role in the narrative, makes it the default and has no particular effects." 

"So I'm going to be rich?" That's not terrible. Money can be used to buy spell components and scribing supplies and spellsilver and all sorts of other useful goodies. 

"Oh, for sure. In the kind of romance this is ostensibly based on, the villainess is always in a superior position to the heroine at the start of the story." 

"Okay, I guess that makes sense." Less so for a romance than for most forms of conflict, but whatever. 

"Red hair--by which I mean both shades of actual red and orange, which tend to get lumped together--is, in the tropesphere we're drawing on, considered more of a 'protagonist' hair color than a 'villain' hair color; you can have it anyway, but the effects will be to amplify your emotions, and to make you a little bit stronger and give you more potential as a warrior."

Why would protagonist-ness have to do with strength and physical fighting--wait, no, actually that might make perfect sense--protagonist is here being contrasted with villain, so it means hero, so these are likely paladin tropes that are being drawn on. Especially if--"Would 'amplified emotions' mean increased Splendor?" 

"It would have that effect, yes." 

Definitely something paladin-related, then. Seshka is pretty sure Iomedae isn't a redhead but the angel did say they're drawing on other worlds, here; presumably there's some deeply famous paladin or paladins somewhere with warm-toned hair that are inspiring this. Checks out. 

"The next hair color is silver, which..." she gestures. "Covers both actual metallic silver, and the white you already have, as well as whatever other variations are closer to white than to a different mechanical color choice. Silver hair will make you a bit weaker and a bit smarter, and boost your magical potential."

"--That one, I want that one obviously. ...I mean, I guess brunette or rainbow could have something even better, but--"

"They don't," the angel assures her. "Brunette--which refers to black hair as well as brown--makes you more relatable, which has various effects when dealing with people below your social stature and makes a redemption arc ever so slightly easier. Rainbow hair--well, mm, it--increases the influence of a certain tropeset, which...isn't particularly related to your world's gnomes but which you would probably associate with them anyway just because of how weird the tropes would be from your perspective. A little bit gnome, a healthy sprinkling of Tian Xia, and an obligatory hot springs episode." 

"...I don't have anything against Tian Xia," and she's just not going to unpack the hot springs episode bit, "but that does in fact sound less interesting than a boost to my magic." 

"I thought so." Silver hair isn't better than rainbow or brunette for everyone, but Seshka did seem like the type to pounce on the magic and intelligence boost. "Okay, so the race option is going to be different from what you're expecting, I think." 

"Is it not just deciding whether I want to stay human, or be an elf or a dwarf or a gnome or whatever?"

"Not as such, no. That is, you can decide to be any of those things if you want to, but that isn't actually what this choice is about. You see, you don't have to be any of the species that exist on Golarion, or even in Pharasma's Creation at all. Being too absurd could make it less likely that you could go back, but something that could exist but just doesn't happen to yet should be just fine. The mechanical choice part is whether you want to be a 'normal' or 'enhanced' race--that is, assuming your destination setting has multiple sapient species like your world of origin, do you want to be one of the really interesting things, or something more normal." 

"...Huh." It's an interesting thought. "I assume there's a reason everybody doesn't just pick Enhanced..."

"You have to take an extra flaw." 

"And is there any particular reason not to just make sure everyone has cool stuff?"

"Well, a dimension where everyone is approximately an Elder Wyrm is a lot less likely to get connected to Pharasma's creation than one that just has a few." 

Seshka shrugs and shifts how she's sitting, crossing her ankles. "I've never really heard of a dragon really accomplishing much, in the long run. Like, of the great and ancient archmages I've heard of, none of them are dragons...actually, they're all human. Why are they all--there've got to be seriously powerful archmages who aren't human. It's probably not a coincidence that I, a human, have only heard of the ones who are--actually, I guess I don't even know for a fact that, like, Old Mage Jatembe or whoever, wasn't secretly a disguised dragon...I take back what I just said and please don't tell any dragons I said it." 

The angel's eyes have crinkled up but she is managing not to actually laugh. "I won't," she assures Seshka. 

"...I don't think I want to be a dragon. Dragons get stronger as they age, and they age slowly; I'm not saying I expect to be able to get home within a hundred years but a hundred-year-old dragon couldn't cast Plane Shift."

"And you might need something stronger than Plane Shift." 

"I'm not shocked by that but I'm not thrilled either." Sigh. 

"To be clear, the relative power and social standing of various races doesn't require something as impressive as a dragon to count as Enhanced; an aasimar surrounded by humans would count as an Enhanced race." 

"But if everyone is an aasimar, it doesn't?"

"Right." 

She breathes out slowly. "Plenty of books are mostly just about one race...I'm not trying to create Golarion Again: This One Doesn't Have Rovagug. It would make everything much simpler if there were just the one kind of person...well, excepting familiars and so on...I'm not opposed to archmages creating new races or whatever, but then it's their problem to design them, not mine. I just want to make something that Pharasma will allow to link up to her existing Creation and which won't be a horrible crime against everyone who lives there. Let's just do the one species and forgo the flaw. Is that okay?"

"That's completely okay," the angel assures her. "It will make your world look like a weird niche demiplane to anyone on Golarion who finds out about it, but that's not necessarily a problem." 

"That's fine. And--I'm not opposed to there being other kinds of people, I just..." she drums her fingers against her thigh again. "I don't want to get bogged down doing a lot of species design, and I don't want to condemn a lot of people to being--second class--because I didn't feel like personally making sure they weren't."

"We could default to one species, and then when everything else is pretty well wrapped up we could revisit the question, if you're not too impatient to leave." 

"...I guess that works. What is...leaving going to be like?"

"I haven't actually gone through it myself. I know what will happen to you next--you'll be reborn, in your new body in your new world, and you'll start to regain your memories as a teenager--but as to what the experience of the transition is like, well, I've never met the same person again after they've been through here, and even if I did, I'm sure infantile amnesia would have claimed that memory." 

...It seems sad, to never see the same person twice. Or, well, the angel has the other servants of the "Will of the Multiverse," but she's expressed enough contempt for that system that it still seems lonely. 

"Alright. What's next?"

"Next is the more directly plot-focused stuff; I already explained Minions and Perks, in the general albeit mostly not specific cases, and I've mentioned Flaws; those are basically reverse perks, bad things you can take on in order to get more goodies. Although of course 'bad' and 'good' are subjective, and some people prefer some flaws to some perks. But before we get seriously into those, it would be better to explore the more broad-strokes narrative pieces of your role, your rival, your fiancee, and your fictional counterpart's bad end." 

"My fiance?"

"The story of Roses of Villarosa begins with the villainess in an arranged betrothal with the male lead." 

Eyeroll. Mom would never try to put Seshka in an arranged marriage. "Alright, hit me with my options."

"Your options for Role are the Royal Princess, the Duke's Daughter, and the Rich Heiress."

The Royal Princess is the daughter of the monarch of Villarosa, the highest ranking and most desired bachelorette in the nation. This confers all the obvious social dominance it implies, unless you really twist the worldbuilding around, and it doesn't provide infinite protection against the consequences of your actions."

The Duke's Daughter is the only daughter of the highest ranking noble in the nation, after the royal family; by default the 'Duke of Thorns,' though the title will change based on the cultural influences you pick for Villarosa. This is a lot like being a princess, but less so. The difference in status is made up for in that your engagement will be an important part of your relevant parent's political plans, so you can can call on their resources for aid in defending it, up to the point where it's more politically expedient to cut you loose instead."

The Rich Heiress is your sole non-noble option. She's the daughter of the wealthiest merchant-or-equivalent in the realm; not noble, but rich and prominent enough to freely move in those circles. You won't have the power of a noble title, but what you will have is money. All the money. And that's a power all of its own. But unless and until you marry the right boy, you're still technically a commoner, and your family money, like all the other nepotism powers, has a limited amount of power to protect you."

"Rich Heiress," Seshka says firmly. "I don't want to be responsible for administrating a kingdom or even a duchy or whatever, and I already shared my views on the value of money." 

"Checks out. Next is your fiancé, the male lead of the story's central romance. The three options are the Prince Charming, the Dark Rival, and the Noble Prodigy."

"Why aren't any of the male options non-noble?" 

"That is...a good question, that mostly boils down to the tropes involved. Partly because the male lead has to be politically valuable, I think, not just personally desirable." 

"Hmm. Alright." 

"True Love meaning the heroine, not me." 

"You can actually take a perk about that but basically yes." 

"None of them immediately stand out given that I'm not actually going to go through with marrying any of them..."

"We can come back to this, some of the options later might make the choice easier."

"Fine by me." 

"Next is the heroine. Now, going forward, the narrative roles you don't pick for yourself and your fiancé will still exist as narrative roles--there will still be a Royal Princess and a Duke's Daughter, and all three of the male roles no matter which one you pick. But by default there is only one heroine."

"By default?"

"You can take a flaw to add another one--the new one won't be vying for your fiancé's affections, she'll be an ally to your main heroine."

"Sounds like an easy flaw to pick. Alright, hit me with the heroines." 

"Despite being royalty, the Poor Princess is for some reason neglected and powerless. Common reasons include being the King's daughter with a previous, politically inconvenient Queen, or a legitimized bastard daughter, or a refugee from a destroyed kingdom. Regardless of the reason, she lacks most of the advantages of her station that the Royal Princess enjoys, and, while far from incompetent, is the least personally formidable of the potential heroines. What she does have is the a kind heart, a lovely face, and just enough social advantage from her royal blood to tie your hands somewhat; not that I expect you specifically to use the kind of tactics this precludes."

The Hero's Daughter's heroic parent died accomplishing some great deed - defeating a Demon Lord, sealing an evil god, etcetera. This won a posthumous elevation to the ranks of the nobility. This gives their daughter legitimate noble status, but none of the experience or social mores a noble young lady from a more established house would have. She will be quite talented, but will lack the extreme genius of the self-made Extraordinary Commoner. What she will have is fame, the inherited gratitude of the country, and connections with her parent's influential and dangerous surviving companions. Your fiancé's curiosity with her will soon turn to attraction, and the Hero's Daughter is not to be underestimated."

The Extraordinary Commoner is the 'default' option. Of humble background, without any social status, this accomplished young woman won admission into the exclusive Royal Academy on sheer merit. Given the stratified social structure of Villarosa, this is quite the achievement, but makes her the proverbial nail sticking out. That gives her an obvious weakness, but she is by far the most talented of the potential heroines. She will outshine her more pedigreed classmates and thereby attract the notice of your fiancé." 

"It's sort of weird that someone who can defeat a Demon Lord would have a less exceptional child than a random person...but then, maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part because my mother's a genius. I guess proooobably the Extraordinary Commoner? Since I don't want to be enemies." 

"I'll pencil that in, but you can change your mind later. About anything, actually, if you wanted to start over from scratch with Elaborate red hair you could do that, nothing is final until you've been sent on your way."

"I am definitely not going to do that but good to know." 

"Next is the fate your fictional counterpart suffers in the narrative. If you aren't careful, you'll suffer this fate too. The options are death, being sent off to a cloistered religious order, being forced into servitude to your rival, being stripped of everything you have and left to eke out a living on the streets, being exiled to a foreign political marriage, and simply being dumped and humiliated. The first one gets you an extra perk and the last one costs you an extra flaw."

She makes a Face. "Having now died twice, I can't say I like the thought of staring it down a third time. Maybe if there are enough really amazing perks. Can we pencil in 'dumped and humiliated' and I take the flaw that gives a bonus heroine?"

"Sure." She makes a note. "Minions next?"

"Sure." Hopefully there's something more appealing than Maid. 

"The minion options are Maid--exactly what it sounds like, plus any Maid minion will have some highly useful skill that an ordinary maid lacks, as well as being highly competent at normal maid tasks and deeply loyal to you personally. Classmates; actually two people who often act together, they're a pair of female classmates your age of slightly lower social status, whose families are formally or informally in service to yours, predisposing them to be your friends and follow your lead. The Classmates are one of the most independent and proactive minions, and therefore also a deniable asset if you need one of those--don't look at me like that, there are reasons that can be useful besides just picking on the heroine. They can be counted on to give you insight into the Academy gossip and help subtly manipulate it; both of which are tasks your exalted status can make difficult to accomplish yourself."

"My exalted status of being a rich commoner?" 

"You're not thinking rich enough. Richer than the Aspis Consortium." 

"Well, damn, fair enough." 

"The Admirer is a sort of male counterpart of the Classmates, though there's only one of him. He is a talented but not exceptional fellow student with an obvious crush on you. While he knows and accepts he has no chance with you, that doesn't mean a bat of your eyelashes doesn't twist him around your little finger. You may choose for him to be a rival or a friend of your fiance; either way he will prove a useful tool. You may optionally choose to spend an extra flaw to select one of the choices you have not already picked for Your Fiance to be your Admirer instead."

"--At which point, 'why do I care I'm not marrying him anyway' stops applying." 

"It can do, yes. That's a reasonably popular option for people who don't want to fight their heroines, is to dump the fiancé in favor of the Admirer."

Seshka laces her fingers and leans back and thinks. 

She's never been in love. It's always been something she thought it would be nice to have someday, but--even if it never happens, she'll be fine; she wants children eventually, but Mom did fine by herself. 

But...it would be nice to have. She loves her mother very much, but...the lifestyle the two of them lead has always been a bit lonely. She doesn't regret their research, but--this new life she's going to lead is an opportunity. 

"I'll take the Admirer. And upgrade him--I'll switch my literary ending to Servitude and use the extra heroine flaw for this instead." She might switch it back if there are other flaws she likes when they get there, but Servitude isn't death, and she doesn't plan to fall into her bad ending anyway. 

"Do you know which one you want for your admirer, yet?" 

"Not yet, no; I think I'm going to have to think more about how to resolve various combinations of fiancé and admirer."

"Oh, I forgot to ask, do you know which heroine you want for There's Two Of Them?"

"That being the extra-heroine flaw, I take it? I think I'll probably go with a bastard Poor Princess, since a Hero's Daughter would have to have lost a parent who probably would have loved her." 

"Fair enough. Next, the Animal Companion minion is some domesticated or tamed animal that you have bonded with and trained. In as magical a setting as yours, it will tend to have near human intelligence as a magical companion of some kind; in lower-magic settings it would simply be an implausibly well trained pet or steed. This can be anything from a pet cat to a pegasus mount. You can even have a dragon, but only a lesser sort, equivalent to a drake or tatzlwyrm or something like that."

"--I want my familiar back! Her name is Lulu, she's a cat--I think they got her when they got me--if she's okay somewhere I don't need her but--"

She checks. "Yes, we can get her for you. For completeness' sake, or if you pick the perk that gives you an extra minion, there's the Butler and the Construct. The Butler is not directly your servant, but is instead a much older person, usually employed by your father, who has taken a liking to you.Their actual job title could be Majordomo or Head Maid, or they might even just be an old friend and ally instead of holding a formal role. They are extremely skilled, but they are unlikely to ever intervene directly in your struggles. However, they instead can be an important source of grounded and wise advice, if you are willing to listen. The Construct is an artificial entity of human-level intelligence and personhood who, in addition to being a helper who never has to sleep or gets bored, is liable to have magical tricks in their repertoire that you would be less able to access."

"I'll keep that in mind." They both sound better than the Maid but not so appealing she's going to scramble to pick them up. 

"Oh, also, each heroine will have a downgraded version of a minion--the Extraordinary Commoner will have a Classmate, but only one and not a pair; the Poor Princess will have a Maid who is less talented than the version you could hypothetically have had, though no less loyal; and if you had picked the Hero's Daughter, a Butler-ish figure would have been a staff member at the Academy." 

"That makes sense...you've mentioned an Academy a few times, but I don't think you actually explained that part; I get the impression that the, uh, romance story, is intended to be set at some kind of school? For noble and/or rich people? Is it a magic school specifically like Absalom's Arcanimirium, or something else."

"Ah, sorry, yes. The 'plot' of 'Roses of Villarosa' takes place largely at the Villarosa Royal Academy, which serves mostly the elite of the realm but, as the Extraordinary Commoner implies, is open to commoners of sufficiently outstanding merit. What the place actually teaches is more malleable...in a High Magic setting, there would certainly be classes on magic by default, but it wouldn't only or even necessarily primarily be about magic; plenty of nobles end up as martials, even amongst the adventurers of your own world." 

"A school with that wide a mandate seems kind of weird but I don't actually know such a thing doesn't exist on Golarion already, even. Okay, thanks for clearing that up."

"Yeah, Golarion has...lots of stuff," the angel agrees, glancing at her interface again, mildly perturbed. "Anyway. The last things to go over are the perks and flaws. Besides the ones you get for free from other options, like 'Ohohoho!' you get four perks for free, and then after that if you want more you can take another perk for every flaw you pick." She offers Seshka a folded-up piece of paper plucked from apparently nowhere. "I absolutely can list all this out loud, but it turns out when I do that a lot of people have a hard time keeping track. A document you can refer back to has this problem less often, when my client is literate. With most of the options there aren't enough of them to have this problem, but there are a lot of perks and flaws. Each, not just together."

"...Thanks." Sesha unfolds the document and raises an eyebrow. "It's illustrated?"

"Studies have shown that for basically human-brained folks, having a picture to associate each option with makes it easier to keep them all straight and find them again for reference than just plain text." 

"Well, I can't argue with science." 

She skims the perks. 

"...What does 'Alfirinic Heroine' mean? Like, I see the description, but like. Alfirinic?"

"Unfortunately your dialect didn't have a good word for 'women who are attracted to other women' already. Alfirin was a wizard during the Shining Crusade who got cut out of the Acts of Iomedae because she was briefly Iomedae's lover and the church thought she was a bad example." 

"Huh. Neat." 

A lot of these perks are only remotely interesting if you intend to seriously compete for the attentions of a guy who otherwise sees no reason not to throw you over...by no means all of them, though. Magical Prodigy is a must-have, obviously. Early Start looks good...she should not be as tempted as she is by Goddess of Beauty. It's not that she was unaware that she was objectively kind of vain but the amount of tempted she is by Goddess of Beauty throws it into sharp relief. 

"Do I only get these perks once I actually reincarnate, or can I have them now? Unearthly Insight seems like it could be really useful for this process."

"Unfortunately you only get them once you reincarnate. I can't finalize anything until we're done, and you can't test-drive the mental perks."

"Mm. Had to ask."

She finishes her first pass of the sheet and sets it aside. 

"I think...I think what perks I want is going to depend on stuff we haven't filled in yet about the world," she says slowly. "You've used the phrase 'magic system' a couple of different times in a way I don't think I quite grasped all the connotations of; can you explain?"

"Right, so, the way magic works on Golarion--and the different ways it can work in other parts of Pharasma's Creation--are only one way that magic can work. Different worlds have completely different kinds of magic...and different cosmologies, too. Worlds without any magic at all either have no afterlife or can't access it, for example."

"...This is one of those things where if I decide to go ham Pharasma's going to tell me to fuck off, isn't she."

"Based on our acquaintance so far I absolutely believe in your ability to go ham hard enough to put Pharasma off."

"Th...anks?" 

She starts drumming her fingers against her leg again.

"What do you recommend? I--am really unsure of my ability to design a system from scratch without going ham. I assume just copying Golarion's would be fairly safe..."

"It would...and if you're not a witch, you won't get nearly as much use out of Ohohoho!..."

"I assume I can't give the place a totally different magic system and then also separately keep my own witchness." 

"With what patron?"

"Thought not." 

"Of course, you could start with Golarion's magic and then...tweak things a bit; perhaps not the underlying spell structures, if you want your current understanding of theory to go on being applicable, but the ways people actually practice your magic are deeply diverse and there's nothing to say that things can't be expressed here in ways that are different still." 

"Ooh. An excellent point--actually, you know what, it is bullshit that witches can't cast Prestidigitation and I would like to fix that." 

The angel makes a note of that. "Can do." 

"And...can I design my own patron?"

"I don't see why not. Although, fair warning, if at any point you decide to dump 'Magical Prodigy' I'm going to have to scale back your own personal magical goodies substantially, if you assign yourself anywhere near as many of them as you could."

"Not that I expected to do that anyway but fair enough." 

She drums her fingers some more. 

"...So...gaining circles by doing your spellcasting under pressure, in high-stakes scenarios...that's based on perceived stakes, not actual stakes, right? --Is that the kind of information you have?"

"I have...a lot of information that, if I gave it to you, it would be harder for you to go back to Golarion with it." Because it would come out of Pharasma's intervention budget if she ok'ed hooking up the new world to her Creation while a mortal with that information was super going to come over." 

"If you tell me or if I know it later, because I'm looking at the Unprepared flaw and I'm wondering if I could set things up so things happen to me that are, like, objectively dangerous, but for 'story' reasons, or for reasons I set up ahead of time to go through by normal causal means, I'm definitely not going to actually die of them, and if I don't know that they're secretly safe, or at least safer, could I still get the full benefit of doing reckless shit."

The angel cocks her head thoughtfully. "If you can set things up like that, will you definitely take Unprepared?"

"Yeah. Sorry, it's not that I want to forget you or anything, but--"

The angel waves a hand. "It's fine. I help a lot of people this way; you're far from the only one to take Unprepared, even if most of them just do it because they want another perk. And, you know, it's not like we're going to meet up again later for asymmetrical remembering to matter."

"I mean, I'm sorry about that too! It seems lonely!" 

"Oh, I'm not...actually the same as humans, psychologically. Or elves, or orcs--I don't get bored, and I don't get lonely, and I don't miss people the way humans do--I remember past clients fondly, but it doesn't hurt that I won't see them again, and it doesn't hurt that some of them forget me, and I won't get sick of someone even if they stick me here in this time-dilated demiplane with them for thousands of years." 

"--This place is time dilated? By how much?"

"A lot. Like, a lot a lot. I never bother memorizing the number because nothing has ever meaningfully happened when I leave. ...Nothing that isn't also deeply time dilated, sometimes I've been surprised by things that had also happened in time dilation."

"Huh." The demon that killed her probably hasn't even finished swallowing her remains yet. Morbid to think about. But-- "So, however much time I spend here doing design work, it isn't going to meaningfully funge against how much time Mom has to spend until I get back?"

"Not in any meaningful way!"

"Good to know. Anyway, yes, I am one hundred percent prepared to commit to taking Unprepared if this will help me get stronger." 

"Okay." She nods. "It will work, then; you're right about how circling up works. Although it doesn't just work that way for casters; martials, burglars, archers; everybody from Golarion works that way." 

"--Only from Golarion?"

"It's a relatively normal way for things to work in Pharasma's Creation, but even there there are planets where godagreements have things working differently; outside of Pharasma's Creation it's actually relatively niche." 

"Huh. Okay. ...Expand on godagreements?"

"Gods have the ability to communicate much more credibly and densely than mortals do, and direct godconflicts are insanely destructive, so most parts of Creation are under the jurisdiction of one or another set of treaties between various gods dictating what kinds of intervention are acceptable. That's why you don't get Good gods intervening to fix things directly more often than you do. The church of Iomedae in Lastwall knows more about divine budget constraints than most humans on Golarion, actually, Iomedaeans are all about doing things efficiently."

"...Huh. And the Age of Glory is allowed by these treaties?"

"The Age of Glory is specific to Golarion; I don't have that much data on exactly what negotiations occurred between what gods for it to happen; too much of that is considered 'private' and some of it is in denser formats than I'm built to comprehend, but I suspect it involved Aroden making concessions on other planets." 

"...Huh. Okay, well, I would be a whole lot more interested in this topic if the entire reason I got to learn any of it was that I wasn't going to be able to keep any of it; I will keep asking questions when things are relevant to building this place but I do I think want to focus on practical matters for now." 

"That's reasonable. --To get the effect you want, you're going to want to firmly avoid both the 'death' canonical ending, and the 'Off the Rails' perk, and you're going to want the 'Save the World' flaw--not just to provide a challenge to hone yourself against, but to draw out the 'plot' of the story to cover the conflict you're using to make yourself stronger, so the narrative protections will cover you for the duration." 

"Yeah...I'm going to have to think really hard about what kind of threat to the world I can engender while still, uh, leaving the world a place that is universally okay to exist in. ...Can I determine things about the afterlife setup? Are there obvious pitfalls there for putting Pharasma off." 

"I don't think so, but I've been surprised by what clients considered obvious before. You can determine things about the afterlife setup--oh, I should warn you, I don't think it's relevant to you specifically but it's a good thing to be aware of in general, if you take the Death bad ending your death is narratively guaranteed to stick; not necessarily forever but you can't just import Abadaran-equivalent resurrection insurance and walk away from it casually." 

"I hadn't thought of that but it does rather seem to follow the obvious narrative logic. Okay, so what I want, afterlife-wise, is--only one afterlife. No sorting. Nirvana, basically; to whatever extent entities are in charge of it, the entities in charge understand that the priority is for people to be okay. Most of the place is full of people doing whatever they want, self-sorted by freedom of association; there is a minority section for people who are not yet safe to let out among the general populace but the minority area is also set up for those people to be okay and not just recreating the abyss; probably the area also has, like, volunteers, who can handle themselves and don't mind hanging out with the unreformed. But, and this bit is important, everyone is not turned into animals. I mean, they can turn into animals if they want, everyone can be any shape they like, but people like to whine about maybe being a bird in Nirvana even though having wings would be amazing. --Can I give everyone wings. The alive people, I mean. The species I'm going to be." 

The angel note some things down. "Nirvana minus the animals theme, got it. And I do have a reminder set to revisit the 'other species' question; do you want to pick a temporary designation or actual name for the species you're going to be? You'd need it to distinguish yourself from animals, even if you don't set any other sentient races running around." 

"That's not a bad idea...I'm not thinking of a name off the top of my head; maybe I'll think of something good once the design has been worked out some more. Let's go with Species A* as a placeholder for now, and then if I have a great idea for another species to do but not a name it's easy to iterate on." 

*Substitute the first letter of whatever alphabet Hallit uses. 

"Sounds good. Species A has wings--do you know what kind of wings you want?"

She lets out a slow breath, thinking of the kinds of Outsiders-with-wings she knows of and what she knows about how those wings work, which in the case of approximately all non-demons mostly involves the animals with similar wings. 

"Feathered wings would be prettier than membrane wings, and probably be less suspicious to Golarionites once I get back...Dragon wings aren't suspicious, but if I make the wings look specifically draconic to avoid looking Abyssal then that implies a connection to dragons that isn't there...but feathered wings would get waterlogged if you try to go swimming. Maybe unless they were based on, like, ducks or swans. But I don't think I want the wings to be that greasy...insect wings can be very pretty and they aren't scary but they're also extremely fragile."

"You could have dragons," the angel suggests, "lots of apparently unrelated planes and places and so on have dragons. You could even design your dragons after Species A, and give the dragons a ton of traits for Species A to have gotten from them." 

"...That seems like that would imply a humanoid sapient species without all those fun draconic goodies, such that Species A is a hybrid of them with dragons." 

"Well, in the past, yes, but the draconic traits could have by the present achieved fixation in the population." 

"That feels...a little bit sad, like, I feel like a lot of people would feel like something was lost if humans were all replaced with dragon-blooded humans. I'm not sure I agree with them but this world is presumably going to have a bunch of historical people hanging out in the afterlife to have opinions on their descendants." 

"That is true."

"I might want to separately design some dragons later, though, that does sound interesting." And if time is approximately not passing at home right now, not in quantities worth worrying about, then she might want to procrastinate finding out what getting reincarnated into an amnesiac baby feels like.

"Do you want some documentation about existing dragon varieties?" 

"Sure."

The angel pulls a stack of documents out of thin air and hands them to her. 

Seshka sets them to the side. One neat thing about this environment is that it seems to have approximately whatever surfaces she wants it to, which is sort of unsettling and sort of fascinating but mostly convenient. 

"Right, so, back to wings--actually, do you have documents on wing design?" 

"Uhhh, let's see." The angel turns to manipulate her invisible interface. "--Yes, enough wizards in Creation like messing around with creating life that I can find you some of those." 

This pile of papers is much larger and messier than the previous one. 

Seshka skims the pile. There are a lot of diagrams; some of them have notes that she can read; others have notes that she cannot read. The ones she can read tend to be heavier on the notes, and sometimes contain pages of entirely text with no images; every single page with text she can't read contains at least one diagram that she can mostly infer the purpose of from just the image.

...Okay, Seshka is going to get kind of nerd sniped now doing research on wing mechanics. 

The angel continues to be an entity that doesn't get bored on human timescales. 

That's good because Seshka is going to be buried in this pile of information for, like, a while. 

"...Okay," she says after an amount of time that she can't super estimate because she has neither a timepiece nor bodily functions right now, "I actually want to do feathered wings even more now, you can do some neat stuff with them, but I don't actually have a solution for the waterlogging problem. I guess Species A can mostly just not swim, probably swimming is less interesting if you can also just fly. Although that does make me want to design an aquatic species--which was something I should probably do anyway; a non-aquatic species just...can't live on an entire planet. Unless it doesn't have oceans at all, which would just be sad."

"So should I put down 'Species A: Feathered wings' and 'Species B: Aquatic'?"

"Definitely the second one yes but actually I have much more specific parameters than just 'feathered' for the wings--can I have some blank paper and a pen--"

The angel provides a large roll of sketchbook-quality white paper and some pencils and a pink rubber eraser. 

Seshka is briefly distracted by the unfamiliarity of this last element; once a sufficient explanation has been solicited, and she's tried it out, she's delighted that this falls within the purview of the Marvelous tech level. And then she starts sketching. 

"Okay," she says, pulling out some other peoples' diagrams for additional reference, "I want the bone structure of this one, except amended like so, and then I want basically this design of feather except with the barb structures of this one, and..."

They're going to be at this a while. 

So the thing you have to understand about this angel, is--

She's designed to be genuinely helpful to the people she guides; and that implies a certain level of sympathy, empathy, and general goodwill that, with the right clients, ultimately blossomed into a sense of ethics that her creator never actually intended to instill in her. 

But her basic purpose is to chivvy people through designing their future incarnations, and the depth with which Seshka is engaging with the process right now is satisfying on the same kind of deep level that a human being appreciates a hot meal and a good night's sleep. 

If Seshka understood that she would be glad to know that she was helping to promote the flourishing of another sapient being! As it is she is just being entirely self-indulgent about following her wing and nerd related whims. 

Eventually she finishes explaining how she wants the anatomy of her third set of limbs to work and sits back as the angel rolls up the large paper and causes it to vanish. She sets her wing references aside; she's probably done with them, but if she turns out to suddenly have another brilliant idea later she wants them already organized the way she has them.

"That was fun," she admits, stretching. 

"I'm glad. Meeting people right after they've died...it's nobody's happiest time. It's always good to be able to help." 

"...I mean, right now, I'm fine. Dying wasn't fun--either time--and neither was being a little grub, but--I mean, physically, right now, I'm okay."

I just...want to go home."

"I'm sorry." 

"And it's not--I mean, it's not mostly about this being inconvenient for me. This is going to be so awful for my mom. I really, really wish there was some way to let her know I'm okay."

The angel nods. 

"I've tried, before, to figure out a way to make the system do that, putting my heads together with several prior clients. Nothing's shaken out." 

"I didn't expect it would have. Just." She shakes her head firmly. "If this place is as time-dilated as you say it is, there's no point in not indulging every creative whim I can think of...but I'd rather not spend too much time moping. It won't help." She squares her shoulders. "Right, so, before I got sidetracked by wing design--not that I regret it--we were discussing the afterlife and so on. I don't immediately have more details about the afterlife itself to dictate...but since there isn't going to be any equivalent to the Lower Planes, that does slightly limit what kind of scenario we can devise for Save The World. Which is not a huge problem or anything, just--it reminded me." 

"Right. Of course, there are plenty of threats to Golarion that have nothing to do with the Lower Planes. Tar-Baphon, for instance."

"Obviously I'm not going to emulate Tar-Baphon too directly, since the undeath-related situation is going to be designed to pander shamelessly to Pharasma, but that's a good point. Save The World can be from a threat of originally mortal origin...although I'm not sure the threat in question should still be mortal. Hm. Is Pharasma liable to have opinions about my god situation?"

"There are certainly configurations she's liable to object to, but I'm not thinking of configurations she's liable to specifically prefer promoted besides the baseline 'dead babies and undeath bad' situation."

"Right. I can't have just Good gods, or even just Good and Neutral gods, because there's no way of doing that that leaves it plausible that mortals have to save the world. But...I think one major evil god, and then a handful of evil demigods, and the reason this doesn't just result in nothing bad happening is that the evil god is--the god of not getting squished, of escaping to cause trouble another day."

"Hmmm...define 'handful' and the distinction between god and demigod?"

"--I don't know exactly what I meant by handful, like, whatever makes sense, I guess, but--so, the thing I'm thinking is, if the biggest evil god is the God Of Not Getting Squished, then probably other evil divinities do get squished sometimes--is the difference between a god and a demigod not obvious, like, you have demon lords and archdevils and empyreal lords, those are all divine but not actual gods--"

"True, but the line between the two is less bright than it looks from the ground. As is the line between 'demigod' and 'powerful mortal.'"

"For the purposes of the idea I had, the important things are that the God Of Not Getting Ganked is the most powerful evil god, and that the lesser evil divinities have non-negligible turnover because the Good gods have enough of a power advantage that they can get some of them."

"Hm...we can make that work, I think...another reason the Good gods don't just get together and try really hard to kill Asmodeus is that godwars can have very bad consequences for the Material plane."

"...I definitely wouldn't keep that if I didn't have any constraints, but," sigh, "I do have to have something to save the world from. So alright." 

Sympathetic nod. Tap tap tap the invisible interface. 

"I was thinking, the Save the World threat could be a new evil demigod, one who used to be mortal--riffing on the Tar-Baphon theme, you see, without involving any undead." 

"Ooh, yes, that could be fun. A very literal demon lord to thwart." 

...

"...I don't mean fun like actually a good thing to have happen, I mean, fun like the Will will eat it up with a spoon."

"Fair. Anyway, the evil demigod can be Neutral or Lawful if that works better, they don't have to be a demon specifically." 

"Oh, sure--Demon Lord is, mm, more or less metonymous, for various trope-related reasons." 

"Fair enough. ...If my team and the heroine's team are going to sort of fuse together into a single adventuring party, especially but not exclusively for saving-the-world purposes, then...I do want more rather than fewer 'named characters.' The There's Two Of Them flaw says I can introduce the third heroine...but I don't really want to kill off the parent of one of my future friends, even if I won't remember having done it when I befriend them. That's--cheating to try to pretend to work with someone in good faith, not really doing so."

"Yes, I see your point...hm." The angel taps her cheek. "This is something we might be able to solve via personality selection...you don't know anything about your father, and that doesn't bother you, right?" 

"Mom says he wasn't worth keeping around. Which is enough information for me. But the Hero's Daughter is, well, the daughter of a hero..."

"You'd be surprised how many deeply Good people are actually really terrible at their own interpersonal relationships. I can put in an order for a set of Hero and Daughter such that the daughter is fine with her other parent and neither of the two of them are deeply harmed by the separation--and you already specified a good afterlife."

"...You'll be exquisitely careful about this?"

"My bosses are not amazing at ethics but the system is actually really, really good at personality selection."

"Alright. I'll take a third heroine, then." 

The obvious next place to get more party members is perks, especially the extra minion perk...hm. 

"Okay, for my four free perks I want Early Start, Magical Prodigy, and...does Good Ending do me any good alongside Unprepared?"

"Yes--it's Not a Fan that it doesn't go well with." 

"Oh, of course, that makes sense. --If I take Unprepared but not Not A Fan, will I believe that Roses of Villarosa really existed in the Golarion I grew up on." 

"Yes." 

"Then I'd better take Not A Fan, too, since I do plan to go home eventually, and the lack of said book when I get back would be...confusing. Okay, Magical Prodigy, Early Start, Unearthly Insight, and...Equal Friend. And I think I'll take the Royal Princess; I don't want to rule anything, but being friends with someone who does could be useful." 

"It often is." Tap tap.

"And with the flaws Unprepared and Not a Fan...hm. What exactly is the difference between Surprisingly Useful Skill and Marvelous Talent, besides that in the former case I already know the thing?"

"Well, firstly, Surprisingly Useful Skill only applies if you would otherwise expect the ability not to be especially relevant--skills from your past life that you would expect to transfer well, just do. But, also, Marvelous Talent makes something a traditional, socially approved of skill, at which you particularly excel; Surprisingly Useful Skill doesn't imply that anyone else will be able to do it at all."

"Fair enough..."

Fundamentally, Seshka is more interested in improving herself than in improving her advantage over other people. She'd rather be capable than special. So, Surprisingly Useful Skill is right out. 

"For Unprepared and Not A Fan, I'll take Marvelous Talent and Extra Minion, and the minion will be a pair of classmates--" very efficient in terms of gaining party members, that "--and as for the Talent--does crafting magic items count?"

"Mmm...it's a little broad. Pick a kind of magic item?"

"Rings." She never got around to learning to make rings the first time around. 

"Okay, can do. ...Did you forget a perk to go with Save the World, or were you planning to do something else with it, or...?" 

"...Slipped my mind for a moment, yeah." 

She is still tempted to take Goddess of Beauty. She is not going to take Goddess of Beauty. She could take Silk Hiding Steel, or another minion or another talent. Any of those three things would be more useful than Goddess of Beauty. It's one thing to be self-indulgent enough to take self-improvement perks instead of maximizing her party membership; she is not going to take an objectively unnecessary perk to make herself prettier. She is already pretty, it's not like she's actually unsatisfied with her looks! This is objectively absurd! And yet!

"...How good is Silk Hiding Steel? Approximately." 

"It is very good. It certainly wouldn't get you from where you are now to standing up against the fear aura of a great wyrm, but it'll hold up against almost anything a caster of the same circle could throw at you."

"...Yeah, I'll take that one, then." Even if she is tempted to take a Marvelous Talent for crafting rods. 

She glances at the list of flaws again. 

Logically, she should take Anything You Can Do. She expects to end up on the same side as the heroine, so it would just mean an upgrade for one of her friends and allies.

But...

It's not that she minds the idea of someone else being overall better than her. But the idea of not having even the littlest niche to distinguish herself...it offends her sense of dignity. Which--dignity is something you discard when it gets in your way, right. 

But she can't bring herself to ask for the flaw. 

...Maybe dignity isn't the word for the part of her that it offends. She'd thought her dignity less firmly attached than that. 

"I feel like I really ought to take Anything You Can Do, but I...don't want to." 

"...Well, it's not popular. Most people don't like being overshadowed like that." 

"Most people are bad at throwing away their pride when it's getting in their way!"

"That's...not false, but--there are, actually, quality of life concerns--I'm not saying that the concerns are necessarily overriding, or that they apply to everyone, but a lot of people find someone who is actually better than them at everything really unpleasant to be around." 

Seshka starts to reply, and then stops. 

...She isn't going to remember any of this. 

If the heroine is someone she genuinely doesn't want to be around, she can't just grit her teeth and get over it because it's important; she won't know the importance of this specific person. 

Not befriending the heroine is not worth one perk. If she hadn't taken Not A Fan or Unprepared--but she did, and putting either one back would cause problems. 

So. 

If it's an excuse, it's at least a good excuse. 

And if it turns out to be the wrong choice, at least she won't remember making the choice later to beat herself up about it. 

"Okay, fair enough." 

"If it makes you feel better, the heroine is a lot likelier to specialize differently from you if you don't take that flaw, which could increase your collective effectiveness by more than Anything You Can Do would increase her personal effectiveness."

"Some." But it does not give her another perk, you see. 

She eyes the pamphlet again. Most of the flaws she hasn't already taken are hard nos, but...

"The flaw Dark Secret, is that guaranteed to be disastrous if the heroine finds out, or just if it gets out, like, generally?"

"It's not guaranteed...it does depend on what the secret is, but it's likely that even if her learning of it didn't turn her permanently against you, it would take some work for the two of you to get past it." 

"I don't suppose heroines are automatically open-minded enough that if the dark secret is a family secret, of the not remotely my fault variety, she would definitely not care." 

"Well, that's a possibility, but then you can't engineer your culture to not blame you for family secrets that are not remotely your fault, because the dark secret has to be genuinely damaging if it gets out." 

"...Hmm. Good point." 

Her eyes flick to the pamphlet and back again. 

"The Abhorrent Admirer, is that a permanent situation, or just for the duration of the plot?"

The angel wobbles her hand. "It's only guaranteed to be for the duration of the plot, but that doesn't mean you'll automatically be able to make him go away as soon as the 'story' is over." 

"But it's not permanent."

"It is not."

"I will take that, then, and a Marvelous Talent for crafting rods." 

"Sure thing." Note note.

Seshka eyes the perks and flaws critically. 

She...thinks that's it, for now? None of the other flaws are jumping out at her as acceptable to take--maybe if she thinks of an acceptable Dark Secret, but she hasn't yet--and there aren't any more perks she particularly yearns for, although she should probably avoid thinking too hard about other Talents she could be Marvelous at. 

It would be really convenient if taking a third heroine did count as another flaw, but oh well. 

She's nowhere near done with the nitty gritty of the world to come, though. And she expects to enjoy designing her own patron.

It's time to get down to work.