Malduoni nods, glancing at the pharaoh. "I will unfortunately need to make it before I transport it, since I do not intend to, myself, enter Hell. I am sure Asmodeus was hoping I would take the bait and I do not wish to find out what He had planned if I did." 

"I suppose I can step out to be safe."

Malduoni nods. Looks at the Andalites. "Should your people also step out for it?" 

<We can morph a form that can handle it.>

Nod. He turns to Nefreti.

"My plan is to cast Major Creation first, since it will take ten minutes. Then I will attempt to cast Gate to Parmida, and if that fails I will conclude she was in an inner circle of Hell. I already tried to Wish her to me while I was waiting outside and it did not work and is probably not worth trying again. If Gate fails as well, I will Wish the weapon to her location instead. Do you have True Resurrection prepared today? I have diamonds for it. We are not going to be able to retrieve her body even if it is not entirely destroyed." 

"I do," Nefreti says. 

He nods. Waits for the Andalites to all be in morph before he starts casting Major Creation, generating a vast quantity of weapon from the very small amount they showed him. He confirms first that it will be stable for at least a minute after he's done, to give time to cast Gate and/or Wish. 

This is not responsible weapon design procedure at all but it should be stable until it is deliberately set off and they'll be able to notice if it's not and presumably he can turn it into water or something because magic is ridiculous bullshit.

Magic is ridiculous bullshit, that does help. Malduoni is still very much hoping the weapon doesn't go unstable because having to start over on this will cost precious time and Parmida is in Hell. He's very calm about this fact but it takes a deliberate effort of will to stay that way. 

He casts the spell. 

It's a complicated spell and takes a long time. 

Halfway through there's a Sending.

"Aroden! Frankly, I hoped not to see you again, but so it goes. With your promise to depart for the alien planet and not come back, I will return your wife."

He does not deign to answer that. He keeps working on the spell. 

" - you're not going to have ten minutes, he can destroy her faster than that -"

And Asmodeus will have no reason not to, since Aroden - it doesn't feel like there's much point in continuing with the fiction that he's only Malduoni - is unwilling to negotiate. 

He abandons the half-cast spell scaffolding, letting it crumble, and reaches for his Rod of Security, doing rapid mental calculations from the count of nearby Andalites in morph. "Nefreti, how fast could you get Mhalir and Carissa here -"

She opens a Gate on them. "Hey!" she yells. "We're in a hurry!"

Mhalir is the one piloting their body and he reacts fast, turning toward the shout and hesitating for only a fraction of a second, while he parses the scene, before diving through. 

And Aroden activates the Rod of Security and all of them are suddenly in a lush little meadow demiplane, with time outside of it approximately paused. 

Aroden sits down and makes an irritated noise. "I dislike Asmodeus." 

"The alternatives are even worse."

Aroden frowns into the distance for a while, then shrugs. "I cannot cast a Gate from here to Hell directly, with the time dilation, but I think it ought not interfere with using Wish to transport the weapon. And - it was always a long shot to get Parmida out alive. Asmodeus has to be expecting I would try that. So - I think the correct strategy is to do that from here at some point, and also do all of our planning," he glances around at the Andalites and Mhalir in Carissa's body, "and research the spell needed to transport the ships here when we are ready to leave." 

Mhalir listens, stony-faced. 

The Andalites glance at Mhalir a little nervously and direct estimates of how many ships they have that could be Gated in on short notice to Aroden directly without sharing them with Mhalir. They're - not totally clear on how their ships will fly on other planes? Presumably the ones that are big and flat are doing something really weird with gravity and they can do correspondingly weird things with anti-gravity but only if they know what's going on.

He knows a lot about this (at least, Aroden thinks, he did as a god, and can likely retrieve some of those intuitions at the cost of a horrible headache). It's complicated so he'll save the explanation for later.

Aroden could in theory cast Major Creation again right now, he has a Pearl of Power available for it, but - maybe better to wait. They're no longer crunched for time, even with this many people they could stay up to a week. And he might think of something better in a day or two. 

It's distracting, feeling like he hasn't made a decision one way or another on whether to murder his wife in Hell, but he can set that feeling aside and focus anyway, working with Nefreti on how they need to modify the structure of Gate to meet the new requirements. 

Mhalir feels very useless right now. Carissa's knowledge of magic is nowhere near adequate to keeping up with Malduoni and Nefreti. 

Instead he turns to the Andalites. "I suppose we are not going to have time for further back and forth on our negotiations. I cannot contact the Council from here, but we can at least use this time to discuss and finalize some agreement amongst ourselves." 

<We also do not speak for our Electorate. But if you stop enslaving people and pay reparations to the people enslaved then I cannot imagine we would have any further quarrel with you worth pursuing at the cost of this war.>

They can talk about details of reparations, then, while the ninth-level casters do their advanced research. The time-dilated demiplane has water, and fresh fruits and vegetables; after a while he feels less miserably hungover. 

He wishes he could do more for Carissa's entirely emotional misery, but - what is he supposed to say. He's going to help the others conquer her homeland and destroy Hell. He can't ask her not to be upset about that, even if he has no other option.