It crashes through world after world, tracing the threads of a single soul, twisting it up into itself and accelerating like a growing snowball. 

Until--finally--it crashes. 

It doesn't, exactly, have a spatial location within the universes it passes through. It isn't that kind of phenomenon. But it links to specific concepts, and so while there isn't exactly any coordinate that it definitely occupies, coordinates closely linked with its central concept are places where it sort-of is. Generally it isn't in any one dimension long enough for this to matter, but when it finally stops--

Something happens to Areelu's laboratory. She--can't actually identify what; it's not like anything she's ever experienced before. Not that she's never been disoriented before, but this is--still different--

She takes notes, on what she can observe of it; she has the Concentration for that. Once it's over, she checks everything she can think of, to see if she can divine anything about what that was, or in case it let in any hostiles, or had any effects of its own--

The pieces of Seshka's soul are missing. 

Areelu does not handle this well. 

She looks for them, of course. In the entirety of her demiplane, first. There are test subjects who suffer, because she is unhappy. 

She tries scrying them. It isn't the first thing she tries, by some margin, but it's something she would give more than one attempt, before giving into despair. 

And there--

She smacks into the pavement. 

It wouldn't quite be accurate to say she falls onto the street; she didn't have a prior location above the street to fall onto it from. But she is, very suddenly, there, horizontally oriented on the ground, a ground which is made up of stones that are not sufficiently even and well-fitted that none of them poke her in any locations. 

Oof. 

Well, no point in just laying there. She rolls over, levering herself into a sitting position and looking around. 

"Are you alright?"

"What a good question." She speaks Hallit with a Sarkorian accent, if anybody happens to be able to recognize that. "Where are we?"

"In Kenabres, just off the main square."

"Kenabres...that's in Mendev, right?"

"Yes! And today, there's a festival." 

"A festival, huh? That's neat." 

"It is! Do you want to come see?"

"That sounds lovely." And maybe gives her more time to figure out...herself. 

"It's this way!" 

The square where the festival is occurring is lovely, draped in all kinds of banners, with musicians playing jaunty dancing music. There's free drinks, and dummies and targets to show off punching skills and marksmanship, and all kinds of other festival panoply. 

Oh, good! Dancing is excellent. She doesn't really feel like punching or throwing darts at stuff, and alcohol has got to be a bad idea with her head already as muddled as it is, but: dancing good. 

Ember hadn't really wanted to go to the festival by herself, but dancing is fun. She dances strangely, though. 

This approximately doesn't register to Lucy. Whee! Dancing is fun! Caring if other people give you weird looks is for suckers! 

--Huh, is it just her or is that kind of a lot of bugs around. 

You know what else it's a lot of? Demons! Teleporting into the square!

--Oh, fuck, that's bad. Why are demons invading a random Mendevian city. How are demons invading a random Mendevian city. Okay, first priority has got to be finding safe places to put civilians; even if her purification powers work on demons as well as could possibly be hoped, there are too many of them--

"BEHOLD, CRUSADER GODS, BEHOLD, iOMEDAE, YOU POOR IMPOSTER. YOUR CITY WILL FALL TO ME. YOUR FOLLOWERS WILL FEED MY HUNGER."

FUCK THAT IS FUCKING DESKARI WHY IS FUCKING DESKARI HERE WHAT THE FUCK HAS SHE LANDED ON. 

(Also, what does he mean, crusader gods???)

"Deskari, Lord of Locusts! Leave. My. City!"

That is a silver dragon--is that an ancient silver dragon--what in fact the fuck has she landed on--

That was a silver dragon. With one swing of Deskari's scythe, its head goes flying, and it is now an ex-silver dragon. 

THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD. 

Would...whatever process made her...really have dumped her in a situation she couldn't survive? What a waste. 

...But babies are stillborn all the time. There's no reason, really, to expect the process that produced her to work better than that. It feels like it should, but it always feels like bad things shouldn't happen to you, personally. 

There's so much that she wants to do, and she can't do it if she dies to a freak demon attack, but--

Think.

Okay, first of all, there's a child with her. Second--it would be pretty bad if they made an undead out of that dragon. Would they? They're demons, not necromancers, they could totally just decide to eat it--but they could also, like, not. 

"Stay with me," she tells the elven child who found her. "I'll try to protect you." 

She hesitates, but shakes her head. "I can help." 

A babau that was approaching the two of them falls over, asleep. 

Oh she's a witch. She's a witch with Slumber. Thank Pulura. 

"Okay--try to cover me--" 

And she reaches down into the well of her own power, and slams her hands on the ground--

--And white tentacles erupt from the ground underneath the dragon's severed head, engulfing it and pulling it into some kind of storage demiplane. 

Okay. Hopefully that should prevent the demons from doing anything too nasty with the corpse? ...Necromancy is not her forte.

Okay, great, mission accomplished, how is kiddo holding up--wah!

Okay, so, like. 

She has wings. Probably she could have recovered gracefully from a chasm opening up under her feet. 

You know, if her first instinct had been to do that, instead of to lunge for the child close enough to her to also have been in the path of the fissure, and wrap her up tight to protect her as much as possible from the fall.

When she opens her eyes next she is at the bottom of some kind of crevice and there is a rapier tip uncomfortably close to her throat.

“Oh. You’re awake.”

The smile on this woman’s face is appropriate for neither of finding a survivor at the bottom of a hole, nor holding someone at sword point.

“Sure am.” What happens if she tries to take the tip of the blade in her fingers and lightly move it away from her throat.

Stab! Stab is what happens!

Hrglfrgl.

Wow okay this is definitely a situation that calls for a healing spell.

YEP. THANK YOU ADORABLE ELF CHILD.

This is also a situation that calls for a TELEPORT. …Not the spell, just the—general category of thing. Okay now she and Elf Child are on the OTHER SIDE of Rapier Lady and also a little way off.

”What the fuck?”

Under slightly less incriminating circumstances Camellia would be trying to smooth things over about now. But lying is almost certainly a lost cause at this point, so…

”You are today’s sacrifice,” she says gleefully, and lunges again.

What the fuck???

Does she actually have any offensive options—she can heal, she can teleport, she can purify stuff but whatever’s wrong with this lady doesn’t feel straightforward to fix—

OH WAIT RIGHT.

Time to tentacle a bitch.

Inconvenient but not insurmountable.

...

Maybe, like, slightly less surmountable than she originally thought???

"What. The. Fuck." 

...Okay, time to try the Mireya story. 

She holds up a hand partway through. "Okay, so first of all, bullshit, I can sense people-not-being-okayness and I'm not getting any from your necklace."

Shrug. "Most people can't sense the spirits at all."

"I'm not most people. Secondly, what is the Worldwound."

...

"A long time ago, a very angry person helped some demons open a permanent rift to the Abyss in Sarkoris, and now Sarkoris...isn't, anymore. Now people are working very hard to prevent the demons from getting out."

Uh

That's levels of bad she isn't entirely equipped to handle right now

"When...when was this?"

"A little over a hundred years ago, now."

...She feels like there was supposed to be something happening soon that was not super compatible with a giant horrible rift to the Abyss! But she can't even remember what it is so she definitely can't argue that a giant horrible rift to the Abyss shouldn't have happened, except, you know, for all the normal ways a giant horrible rift to the abyss shouldn't happen.

"I...guess that explains Deskari."

"No, that doesn't normally happen."

"Well, it contextualizes him, anyway. As for you," she turns back to Stabby Lady, "try again, but this time with less lying."

Okay but what if instead she tries REALLY HARD to get out of these tentacles and stab her again. 

Well, she doesn't actually have all that much experience wielding tentacles that aren't attached to her body, and like, the tentacle-related experience she does have is a bit awash in other identities, so the sudden lunge does get her out of the grapple, but the resulting stab isn't theoretically lethal this time, and she's capable of getting her hands on the girl's rapier and demiplaning it. 

Well shit. 

Maybe she should be asleep now. 

"Thanks." It's starting to get a little awkward not to know the kid's name but asking would open her up to questions about her name and that is not a kettle of fish she wants to fry right now. 

It really isn't obvious to her what's wrong with Violence And Shitty Lying Lady--on a root level, not an expressions of bad behavior level--and whatever it is, she's pretty confident it's something wrong with her, not some kind of abyssal contamination or anything, but...she really really does not have any better ideas than trying to magic her better. 

She kneels down beside the woman's sleeping body and attempts to examine her more closely with her People Being Not Okay sense. 

Oh there is DEFINITELY something wrong with her. But it super isn't a magic something! How good is she at the delicate tangles of the human psyche?

...Better than she ought to be, for magic reasons? Like, if there's some specific trauma that's turning you evil, or you'd benefit from a smack upside the head with a big Empathy Stick, she can work with that? Like, she does have a direct sensory apparatus specifically into things being wrong with people!

Yeah, well, the thing that's wrong with this lady is more complicated than her intercessor is going to be able to sus out in the time it takes for Slumber to wear off. 

DAMMIT SHE DOES NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT. 

She teleports out of the woman's attempt to strangle her with her bare hands. 

Her Golarion instincts say to kill the bitch and ask Nirvana to send a good lawyer. Instincts formed in more civilized areas say MURDER BAD. Less instinctive responses from civilized places say killing in self-defense is fine but, like, she's not that worried about preventing this woman from killing her now that her sword is gone, and--

Hey, what if she tries to hit the raggedy beggar child with her buckler. 

Tentacle dashes her head against the stone of the cavern, is what. 

"Well, fuck." 

The elf child sighs sadly and closes the woman's eyes. 

"...I'm sorry." 

Hug. "You were doing your best."

"I hate--people going to Evil afterlives. No one deserves that. No matter what." 

"No. They don't."

"...We should go back to the surface. People are going to need our help." 

"Can you fly us up?"

She peers up at the crack in the ceiling they fell through. "Not in that, I don't think. But I can teleport! Ish. It's not the spell, it's--even smaller than dimension door. But it'll do."

"Okay!"

Pop. Deskari is gone by now, thankfully. Attempting to tentacle him seems like, uh, a bad idea. There are still demons everywhere, though. 

"If we find somewhere safe-ish, can I put you there and bring you survivors? Do you have Stabilize?"

"Yes, I can do that."

"Wonderful." 

Okay, well, there are a bunch of armed groups of people with only normal amounts or less of thing-wrong-with-them fighting the demons. She picks the largest and most successful-looking group and bops over.

”Hi, I have an unlimited,” technically inaccurate but it doesn’t run on spell slots and she isn’t, like, immediately about to run out of mana or anything, “short-range teleportation ability, if I can get you guys somewhere halfway defensible can you protect wounded.”

“—Yes. The temple of Iomedae, over there—“

Leave it to Iomedaeans to build their temples defensibly—although actually that’s definitely a good idea here in demon borderland. Okay. She waits a moment for the commander to give appropriate orders and then starts teleporting soldiers one at a time into the temple.

They immediately start fortifying all the doors and windows.

Excellent. She drops kiddo with them and then starts gathering survivors.

And when she hits something of a lull in finding survivors, the half-orc woman who seems to be in charge asks, “What’s the range of your teleportation ability?”

“Uh—a little over three hundred feet, I think.”

That’s not ideal, but any kind of at-will teleportation ability is a resource they weren’t expecting to have. “How many passengers can you take at a time?”

“That is—sort of complicated—uh, ‘at will’ was actually a huge oversimplification. I, uh, don’t have spell slots? Instead I have a thing called ‘mana’ that I regenerate over time, at a rate that depends on stuff, and any given spell costs a certain amount of mana, and teleporting more people at a time is faster but costs more total mana than teleporting the same number of people in smaller groups.”

That is very weird. This person does not detect as Evil, but there are ways to fake that, and “demons playing silly buggers” happens a lot more often than people with really weird magic.

But then, “demons playing silly buggers” just happens a lot anyway, and it’s not like weird magic is unheard of. Not using spell slots at all is weirder than the fact that the evil Count Arendae channels positive, but not by that wide a margin.

And being incredibly suspicious of helpful people is Hulrun’s job.

”Okay. This place was a good choice in the short term, and useful for collecting the survivors clustered around this area, but in the long term I’d rather have a base less centrally located to the spot where Deskari showed up.” And Terendelev was horribly murdered.

“That makes sense. Do you have anywhere in mind? I, uh, only arrived in Kenabres today.”

“Someplace that we can get out of on our own if we have to—demons can teleport too.” Not literally all of them but enough that it’s not worth explicitly qualifying. “If the Gray Garrison hasn’t fallen, that would probably be the best choice.” Especially since it looked like that was the direction Deskari launched the Wardstone in. It’s probably fallen, though. 

“Which is—where, sorry? Uh, my teleportation targets off of distance and direction, and the better I know my destination the less precise about those I can afford to be.”

Most of the rank-and-file present would have no idea what the straight-line distance is between the temple of Iomedae and the Gray Garrison, but fortunately Irabeth has occasioned to work with people who could, or had familiars who could, fly, such that it happened to come up. Direction is easier.