"Obviously." 

"Was it - what you expected...?" 

"Mostly. The differences, I - am not sure I can convey to you now." 

Nod. 

"- Do you miss her." 

"Parmida? I - yes, I suppose so. But, well. Only a very small part of me does." 

Nod. 

"...I know you are very tired." 

(Aroden is not, in this moment, trying to make his voice sound very human at all.) 

"But - I suppose all I can say is, the world will go on anyway. And you will find a way to bear it. No matter what happens." 

"Yes. I know." 

"- So, what are our considerations here," King Leareth of Cheliax is saying, in the shared space where all of them are. 

Pause. 

"We - have an avenue to defeat, permanently, a very powerful enemy. ...Probably. They won in the other Golarion but I am not sure how much of that was luck." 

"- I think it was mostly overdetermined. I cannot say if we were lucky or unlucky or a median case, but - in the end I think that would affect only the final cost, and not the outcome." 

"Right, that fits. So - we have this option. And I think even the median case here will go better, since we have better chances at infosec. Though not perfect; I think we had better be ready to move at any time, and to respond to offensive action from Asmodeus in the scenario where He does learn of it." 

A pause. 

"That being said. Once we have that basic contingency-plan in place, I - would prefer we find something better than the default, here." 

"We have unanimous agreement on that point," god-Aroden agrees. 

"We already know of more worlds than I did at the time Iomedae and I made our own decision," the human Aroden offers. "And we have significantly more capability to explore more of them. And, most importantly, we - hopefully - have time." 

And in parallel, somewhere else and yet in the same place: 

"I'm so scared," Ma'ar says to Aroden. "I'm sososo scared - I don't want this to happen -"

Aroden wears the face of a tired young man in a rain-soaked waste. "Yes. I know." 

"Can we make it not." 

"...I think that our chances are better. At worst, if Asmodeus does move, He will probably not catch us unawares, and very likely we will still know much more than He does - and it ought be persuasive, really, informing Him how it went in the other world - 

- but I cannot be certain of that. We do not have Foresight, here, anymore." 

And Aroden who is almost ten thousand years old, who has been a mortal and an immortal human and a god and a human and then a god again - who remembers less of it than would be convenient and yet, in some ways, far more of it than he would prefer - holds out his arms. 

"If we have our resources ready," Leareth is saying, "and backup plans for the various worst-case scenarios, then - I think that will give us a much better negotiating position." 

Mhalir is tired and scared but all of that is beside the point, right now. 

<...I will need to coordinate with the Andalites, and with the Yeerk leadership - my position there is unclear, right now, to be honest. We are in a decent enough position with the Andalites, currently, and they - will be strongly motivated to fight for this particular cause. I think.> 

"I would sleep better if we had the ships and their weapons within a day's travel of here, ideally less. And from there, of course, in the best case scenario they will never have to fire their weapons..." 

"- We know there are many, many worlds. And that - perhaps some of them will have something else - if we had the power to evacuate the souls from Hell before destroying it..." 

"I know what you want to do. It does seem worth trying, in expectation, but I have not given the matter enou–"

"They should do it. It will not cost us very much at all, here, and the odds of success are low but the payoff is high."