Hagan and the pharaoh's father both kneel.

Nobody else does. Korva's talking to the alone Karen; both of them stop to frown at the pharaoh. Cecelia's breastfeeding her baby and eating pizza, and doesn't acknowledge him at all.

The magic Karen waves. "Hi! Sorry for grabbing you like this, we didn't have another way to contact you. Your brother thought we should talk to you about how to kill Asmodeus and fix Hell before we proceeded with our plans to do that. Uh, don't tell lies and don't use your birth name. Those aren't my rules, it's just that there are fairies here and if you lie or use your real name it'll cause a bunch of problems."

He says something imperceptibly quiet. Hagan answers him. 

"...hello," he says. "Is there a name that I should use instead?"

"Anything that's not your birth name should be fine, I think?"

"I am the Ruby Prince Khemet III, we take the name on selection. Is there a name that I should use for you."

"Um." She points at Connor. "Hey, dude, gimme a name."

"...the ...diamond...queen...Elizabeth the 10th. If we're gonna be all fancy with our names now."

"I probably should have asked anyone else on this plane. Elizabeth works."

"Hagan would've been just as bad, actually. He tells me that this is because that one is his alternate universe duplicate. I have to confess I've never heard of alternate universe duplicates."

"Yeah, we have about a day of experience with them. All of the women in this room are alternate universe duplicates of me, that guy's an alternate of your father and I really think that those two have the strongest resemblance, even though the other one's a fairy, and there are four of your brother and two of you now. This is the other you." She gestures at Matt.

"It's a pleasure," he says to Matt.

"Why are you trying to kill Asmodeus?"

"Um, 'cause he's evil and tortures presumably at least millions of people, and we object to that sort of thing, and probably he would object to us trying to stop him."

"Does he know that you exist?"

"He might, but there's a very good chance that he doesn't. Your world's been paused since I kidnapped your brother. I guess the existence of the Pathfinder roleplaying game kind of indicates that someone from my world probably had some kind of contact with your world at some point, but other than that, like, there's no real reason to expect that any of your gods are aware of us. ...except I guess Nethys, that's kind of his shtick."

"Okay. Unless you're very sure you can't be killed it seems important he continue not to know that you exist. - are you very sure you can't be killed."

"No, I can super be killed. I have reason to believe that I can rectify this situation pretty quickly if I focus on it, but at the moment, nah."

"I don't think I know of anything that's safe and as difficult as killing Asmodeus, such that you could try it and be pretty sure that if you succeeded you were ready. But I can think of some things that would be only a little bit easier and are safe enough to try, and if you can't handle those then you definitely wouldn't be ready. Is that helpful?"

"Yes! Absolutely. Mostly I need to know what things I would need to be able to do and which specific abilities I would probably need to have, such that I can work on developing spells for them. 'Get stronger' is not really enough of a plan to be getting on with."

"I've never heard of anyone who wasn't a god killing one. To fight a tough enemy that wasn't a god, you'd need spell resistance, a magically-boosted reaction time, the ability to throw off mind-affecting magic, cursebreaking, healing and the ability to counter the kinds of physical harm that healing doesn't handle well, the ability to bypass other peoples' spell resistance, the ability to do harm in lots of different ways to be able to work around invulnerabilities to most kinds of harm, and the ability to withstand grievous physical injuries without losing your ability to keep moving and keep working."

She conjures a notebook and pen and writes this down. She frowns at her list.

"This is gonna take a bit. Might be able to get it done inside a year without resorting to any risky shortcuts, though."

"Okay. I don't actually know if that's enough for it to be a good idea to go after Asmodeus but you could go after the Tarrasque or something and if that worked I would think you could go after the Starstone."

"Okay! That's enough of a plan to be getting on with, for now. Would you like to stay here or be returned to your home dimension? This is in effect asking if you want to stay here or be paused until I'm stronger, your dimension is probably not going to move until I'm ready to do that."

"I don't think I know enough about where here is to answer that."

"Oh! Sorry. This is my personal demiplane and current base of operations. It's, um, sort of a work in progress. But we have access to food and water, and we're working on getting tents set up for people, so if you want to stay here and talk to people from other universes I think that would be fine. As long as you don't lie or break promises or attack any of the fairies if you end up with any fairy debt. Don't attack anybody, really. Or bother those two," she says, pointing at Alex and the Karen from hell. "I think they don't want to be bothered."

"Can I talk to some people and get you an answer in an hour or so?"