"Thousands of people are already dead. It'll be so much worse if the invaders have several days to dig in before we're able to respond. I'm recruiting for the legitimate Queen of Cheliax, the sixth in her dynasty, and I've never been involved in any criminal activities and my country isn't perfect but it doesn't have orphan street gangs and you have no right to tell people that it's tragic, that they might care about that more than they care about the afterlife being full of flowers and fucking bunnies."

"Look, miss, you've got to tell us at the watchhouse so we can take down notes, it's the protocol..." 

She's not resisting. She is crying but there's probably not a law against that.

(Meanwhile the priest of Anathei, still with tears on his cheeks, is headed off to the mercenaries' guild to inform them of the horrifying, incredibly upsetting glimpses of Asmodeus' work that Anathei just showed to him.) 

Aroden sees a woman sitting in what looks like a city watchhouse, in tears, while several extremely conflicted-looking guards interrogate her about her country's practices in war. 

He sighs. It at least doesn't look like she's currently in the process of handing gold to mages. 

He releases the scry without watching more than a minute of it, no need to wear out his crystal ball, and moves on to the list of Chelish soldiers believed to be evacuating through a forest, presumably to gather at some specified location. 

Soldiers are hurrying through the forest to the rendezvous point with the rest of Cheliax's army, under illusory cover. They pass an abandoned mine, and pick their way carefully across the ground since it's the dead of night and they can't afford to fall into a mine shaft or something.

Aroden gets out a map, compares it with Vanyel's earlier notes on the locations Leareth glimpsed, this lets him pin it down. He'll do a Sending back to the camp before he heads off to sleep in his demiplane. 

Can he figure out where the rendezvous location actually is? 

He can narrow it down to a couple of candidates, and could scry them all.

Then he'll do that! 

He can find the rendevous point. It's on the western edge of the forest. There are maybe twenty thousand people there now, with large groups still on their way. Cheliax's population is a tenth wizards and they don't have Gates but there's still a lot magic can do to make a march faster and less exhausting, and it looks like they used some demiplanes as bridges to bring people in from across the country. There's an open portal to Hell. Equipment and supplies are being passed out of it.

This is very unsurprising - he would be unimpressed with them if they weren't at least this competent - and also inconvenient. 

Aroden carefully notes the location, numbers, and observed magic, and then releases the scry and prepares a couple of Sendings to convey all of the information to one of his wizards back at the Ostenso camp. Leareth or the Heralds can take care of passing it from there. 

It's about an hour past midnight now. If he sleeps now and then prepares his spells, they can attack in the early hours of the morning, well before dawn. Most of his wizards should be sleeping, now, covered by the Velgarth mages who don't require a night of sleep to prepare spells and can push through better on catnaps and stimulants. Everyone at sixth circle or above has a Ring of Sustenance, it's well worth it as an investment, and they should have gone to bed early, usually you can't do that and still get your full night's sleep but they'll have been plenty exhausted enough after an entire day of fighting. It'll mean disproportionately fewer of his high-level wizards will have spells left for the rest of the day, but if they take out the army tonight, while they're still gathering and tired from the long march, they'll have less fighting to do later. 

He Plane Shifts to his demiplane and goes to sleep. 

Leareth has been in bed for an hour. And wakes up an hour after that, his Ring of Sustenance finally helping him out; he feels fully rested. 

He surveys the city, checking what's going on, and then gets out his book on cleric spells and starts reading through it. 

As a cleric with second-circle spells, he can also channel energy more powerfully; doing so would be definitely deadly to anyone who doesn't have personal shields or the local form of adventuring-related resilience, and so is probably a bad idea to test. Once he is neutral he'll be able to learn how to channel healing energy instead. Other skills that can be learned with channeling include how to exclude some people from it (so he doesn't heal enemies or injure allies), how to do it more efficiently, and (when he's much more powerful than he is now) how to channel energy at someone who just died hard enough that they are restored to life. (This only works if they died in the last few seconds.)

Other than Lesser Restoration, interesting second-circle spells include Fox's Cunning, the one that enhances intelligence (which won't stack with his headband), Owl's Wisdom, and Eagle's Splendour, Aid, which gives everybody he touches very good personal shields though they'll only last a minute, Consecrate, which has varied effects in different circumstances but is mostly relevant here because it cuts Asmodeus's temples and shrines off from Him, and Share Language. 

Neat. He's curious what Owl's Wisdom feels like, but for wartime purposes he probably ought to get more of Lesser Restoration and maybe Consecrate, to help out with the temples part. He presumably can't get any additional spells until dawn - he has one use of Lesser Restoration which he's likely to need if they do end up attacking the army, which one of the Heralds on night watch confirms Aroden was able to locate. (Also, it sounds like at least one of the Chelish recruiters sent to Velgarth is confirmed to be suffering a string of ill luck. He smiles a little to himself at the though of the Velgarth gods finally helping a cause he cares about.)

He doesn't much like the channeling negative energy part and is hoping something will flip over and make him neutral soon, but can keep it in reserve in case he's cornered by enemies he in fact wants dead. 

No word yet from Aroden, so he goes on to look at third-level spells, since Khemet mentioned Abadar could maybe give him more levels if he would have any idea what to do with them. 

Interesting third-level spells: Aura sight lets you see peoples' alignments from a distance. Channel Vigor lets you pick from a fairly appealing set of benefits including halving your reaction times and letting you move twice as quickly, more intelligence enhancement, or improved ability to throw off spells. Remove Disease cures diseases. Speak With Dead lets you animate a body to ask it questions. Water Breathing does exactly what you'd expect.

Fascinating. The dead-animating one is weird but what do you expect from a world with magic as weird as this one. Anyway, if Abadar decides to drop more levels on him, Leareth now has some idea what to do with them, and he'll keep reading if he has more time. 

He does not, unfortunately. Aroden, with Alter Self back in place to wear his former human face, rested and full up on spells again and equipped with his usual Pearls of Power and a stash of diamonds in his Bag of Holding, leaves his demiplane and quickly tries to scry the army again before heading back to the makeshift war camp. 

At the rendevous point more Chelish troops are streaming in, some of them having marched a magic-aided thirty-five miles in the last eighteen hours, and resting in illusion-shielded camps when they arrive while Hell ships out potions and armor and magic weapons for their defense of the country.

Aroden would like them to stop getting supplies promptly, but - hmm, actually, the vague plan shaping in his mind works a lot better if they're caught completely and utterly by surprise. He's not sure it's possible - he could consider using Wish to help but he doesn't have a safe wording, obviously...

He Teleports back to the camp and finds Leareth and they confer, briefly. 

Then, after a quick check that everything still seems quiet-ish, he takes Leareth's arm, and Plane Shifts both of them to Nirvana. 

They land in a glade of trees next to a gloriously pretty waterfall. There's a bridge across the river and exquisitely pretty wooden houses on the other side. Most of them are not the right shape and size for humans. Perhaps relatedly, there's a centaur-like creature with the antlers of an elk resting at the water's edge, and half a dozen creatures who look like cats to ordinary vision but not at all to Thoughtsensing gathered around listening to a story one of them is telling.

Aroden approaches the group and politely interrupts. "I would like to speak to someone with authority to hear our rather unusual request. Who ought I seek?" 

Leareth is trying not to stare, fascinated, his Othersenses extended for magic as well. 

The houses are full of magic things. The kind of magic is unfamiliar; neither Golarion's nor Velgarth's.

The centaur straightens and raises an eyebrow. "I would expect most people to have the authority to hear requests, even if it's rare to have the authority to grant them. And I can't guess who'd have the authority to grant your request without hearing it." 

He doesn't have the ability to read alignments at will, like the archons; he can detect divination magic pointed at him, and notice immediately that both of these people are reading his mind. He is not especially troubled by this. The material world trains bad habits into people by virtue of being completely horrible.

Leareth thinks this commentary is pretty fair. He wonders what the centaur would think of Velgarth and all its horrors. 

Aroden nods, and straightens himself up. "I am Aroden, returned as a human and currently fighting to reclaim Cheliax from Asmodeus and the rule of Hell. I think there is likely someone here who can verify my identity, if you wish to do that; I know that Iomedae and Her people are aware. In any case, their army is regrouping and we would prefer they not have a chance to do so, however, I do not wish to kill them because then they will be in Hell and very annoying to rescue from there. Leareth, my colleague, has magic from another world that allows very large portals between planes. We would like to transport twenty to thirty thousand Chelish troops to Nirvana, where they will be out of our way; we can, of course, retrieve them after the war once I know what to do with them."