"I don't know of any magic that can create a plane, even a demi- one. That's not to say it doesn't exist, lots of things exist, but the things we call 'hell dimensions' in English are definitely not created by anyone I've heard of. And there's thousands of them all full of assorted hazards and rumoured on very thin evidence to be related to the afterlife. I suppose they could've been created a long enough time ago that the records were lost. It wouldn't entirely surprise me to learn that Earth was the hobby project of an extraordinarily powerful person with strange priorities and a messed-up sense of humour."

"I'm unfortunately not powerful enough to cast any of the spells that would let me follow up on the eventual fates of the souls here."

"Well, that doesn't leave me any more ignorant than I was yesterday," she says philosophically. "Hmmm... check." It's a pretty weaksauce check but she had the shot so she took it.

He takes the offending piece. "If I keep fighting vampires on a nightly basis we will probably have a good idea whether I can circle up here or not soon, I'd expect to notice some of the intermediate stages. If I can - well, if I can it will happen if I'm risking my life, so I might die, but if I do not die then Sending is fourth circle for clerics."

"And that's a spell that will talk to a dead person?"

"Yes. It has some failure rate, but, like, 'I'd want to do it three or four times' not 'if I fail every day for a month there's no one there'."

"Hmm. Good to know." She's mostly getting serious at this stage in the chess game but it seems she has room in her heart for at least one more wild knight move... no, wait, this one might be legitimate good strategy artfully disguised as more nonsense.

Blai has the high ground control of the center. "Check."

She weasels out again and takes advantage of previous setup to improve her position slightly but it's not going to save her. "Is risking your life strictly necessary, for gaining circles?"

"No, you can risk someone else's life, and some people get there off - political intrigue, at least if they don't have a secret adventuring hobby on top of their political intrigue - but it has to matter in roughly that amount and roughly that way."

"Huh. Well, fighting vampires is a risky business but I'm going to be trying pretty hard to keep you alive, if you do decide to join up."

"I appreciate that."

"And we do have access to some decent protective magic."

"What does it do?"