:We could do that but it's not out of the question that Asmodeus would notice that and be curious.:

:...Yes, that is a good point: Sigh. :And selecting for people he would be less likely to notice would bias the randomness. It - seems worth doing your grandparents, though, since there are other reasons you might want them back and so I think it ought be less suspicious.: 

:I don't in fact know them well but it wouldn't be very surprising if I did so it gives us cover in that sense.: Frowns. :We probably want Khemet to do it? Since Nefreti has lots of ways to gain information and is more unpredictable?:

:...Honestly I expect Nefreti already knows about this, but - I still do not care to make it more salient to her. I assume she will involve herself if and when she sees fit: 

Sigh. :What'd the other one do.:

:Helped Aroden kidnap some Andalites - apparently this prevented some badness that would otherwise have occurred in their unaltered timeline - and then accompanied him to his demiplane when he used the Rod of Security to help research magic with him. And died fighting in the sixth circle of Hell, much later: 

:Hard to imagine Nefreti dying, somehow, even though - of course neither of them can actually fight a god -:

:Well. We have something of a suspicion that she did not, precisely, die... The human Aroden had already thought that possible, and - the timing lines up perfectly with when you were kidnapped and dropped on top of little Ma'ar: 

She is speechless for a moment.

:It seems hard to verify for sure, but...it really would be exactly like her: 

:It really would.: Sigh. :How's Mhalir? He seemed so sad last I saw him...:

:I think he is coping: A crooked smile. :Not necessarily worse than I am. Aroden was nagging me about taking care of myself: 

:Someday we'll have fixed all the terrible emergencies and we can find a new you who has had no human contact in three centuries and doesn't know what loneliness is and give him a hug and a nap.:

Leareth just chuckles, shaking his head. :Someday. ...I love you very much, you know. Your majesty: 

:And, right now, I want to think about something happier than all of this: 

Leareth twists over to kiss her.

And, elsewhere - or, more accurately, not really any 'where' at all - a different meeting is happening.

The gods may no longer have access to Foresight, but Their minds are still designed for it, for swimming through a thousand possible futures. And so Aroden maps it out, by judgement and guesswork, finding decision-points, forking paths, a vast web of it held only in his mind. 

When the gods speak, they don't, exactly, do it in words. 

Aroden holds up the possibility-space where Iomedae can see it. 

I cannot say I like our chances, but - it could be worse. 

And she reaches for it and colors it, by how much is won and how much is lost, in likely worlds. 

It is worth doing. 

And a frustrated estimation of the value of contact with the other Iomedae who has already done this; it would be very high. She would trade fully twenty percent of these worlds for it. What could be conveyed by humans is hardly worth conveying, She suspects She knows already most of it.

Aroden agrees. He has everything that he read from the human Aroden; they can communicate unusually frictionlessly, for a human and a god, and the human Aroden was there, and talking to the other Iomedae almost every day. Aroden can hold up the gestalt of all he learned there to Iomedae; beyond that, he's apt to agree, more isn't worth conveying.

Leareth thinks the Andalite engineers might be able to help him with this, he tells Iomedae, and includes along with it all the context of that conversation. You cannot easily leave this Golarion - and not without a high cost, and your departure being very noticeable to Asmodeus - but, Leareth thinks, perhaps a Gate can be held open at that distance, if it has a power source sufficient for it. 

A pause while he holds all of that up for Her consideration. 

...The problem is that that, too, would be noisy. 

Iomedae considers it worth trying.

What would be clean would be to have a Golarion where they aren't half-blind, to use its foresight. It might be out there somewhere. Aroden's own exploration from other worlds never revealed two Golarions -- the planes change, over time, and must have changed in a way that brought distant worlds closer -- and given two, maybe there will be three, one from the heartbeat earlier in history when prophecy worked. She has some models of how likely they are to find that, fuzzy, with different-shaded threads to represent the different contributing uncertainties. There are many, and most of them wind their way through the whole estimate. 

It is better for the playing-field to grow, the expected value of the future is higher, but it does not straightforwardly improve any of the things that can easily be seen, and errors elsewhere are both likelier and costlier. Dissatisfaction.

Aroden is unhappy about it as well. He deeply dislikes not knowing, and the growing fuzz of uncertainty on everything is bothersome and distracting. It...could well be worth it, he knows that not all of his desire to be oriented and in control is strategic, but still. 

Something does seem different about the planes, now. It is an unusually high value time for exploration, I suppose - but, perhaps, unusually high-variance as well...

She presents to the interface of their conversation all of the things that might affect the variance. What caused the planes to change in this way; whether they'll continue to change; the distribution of gods and mortals on other worlds; whether there are powerful entities less bound to a place than they are; what is going on with the stories that repeat across the universe -

- it's a very fuzzy picture. Weighted towards good things, but only slightly. They know of one god not bound to worlds, and it's Rovagug. 

Carissa and Ma'ar's mission might be very important, she observes.

Yes. 

I would rather it be Leareth, Aroden confesses.

But the tradeoff is a worse one. We need him badly here. 

Yes. In the other Golarion Aroden led the war, in the sense of actually martialling the resources of the Material Plane to invade Hell; here it will have to be Leareth, because Aroden is a god, and can intervene through many other values - more avenues - but not command starships.

A possible-future, crisp; she spent lots of resources on it: She has considered making Catalina-Carissa her cleric, so She can see them for a ways away, at least, and heal them even past that; Catalina-Carissa would not refuse it, but is not actually shaped for it, and wouldn't be improved by shaping herself that direction. That might be important.

Aroden could pick Ma'ar.

...He could. Ma'ar is, almost by definition as a person, a shape that Aroden can use. The outlay of resources would not be terribly costly. It would give Asmodeus minimal avenues toward more information, assuming he starts with only one or two cleric levels; dropping ten at once would be conspicuous. 

It's not among the questions he brought up with Ma'ar, earlier. He suspects that Ma'ar won't feel entirely comfortable with it, for reasons that feel hard to tease apart. But, nonetheless, that he will still agree.