Huh, something felt weird about that one.

Anyway, you've appeared on a lakeshore. It's winter -- at the Worldwound it is often winter -- and the water is just starting to crust over with ice. Beyond it, a flat scrubby plain cut with smooth gray roads rises into a gentle hill, with hints of another lake around it. Dirty dark snow is falling lazily, blown into the lake from behind you by a gentle -

Wait, actually that's ash.

Behind you, there's a rippling series of explosions, and a crushing roar.

It's about three balors tall. The shape is roughly human -- two arms, two legs, head -- but in spiky black stone, and rippling with lightning. Just now it has its back to you: two small flying figures are contesting it while a shiny steel(?) wall slowly grows behind them. The one on the left jerks upward abruptly, and a projectile streaks away into the creature's shoulder with another string of rapidfire booms. It takes a heavy step forward and lashes out with one hand, spraying wide globs of lava across the sky. The figure jerks again and manages to dodge; the lava falls somewhere beyond the rising wall.

It roars again, and the other figure wavers in midair, but doesn't fall. If they're doing anything it's not having an obvious effect.

Between you and it is an enormous pit, glowing with heat, about the right size for the creature to have dug its way out of.

The pit is about 200 feet away; the creature maybe 250 more beyond that.

What would you like to do?

The roads are weird and the air smells wrong and it's not important right now because DEMON LORD. Is the resistance being put up against it anything other than totally doomed?

Well, something's building that wall. Or maybe growing it; the way it's creeping up says more "fast-growing plant" than "wall of iron variant".

An opening in the wall flicks open, just for an instant. You have a brief impression of a crowd gathered around a huge metal bowl, lying on its side, and then there's a new kind of explosive bang (would Samora recognize a sonic boom?) and the crowd is covered with thick red smoke as the wall snaps shut again.

The demon lord falls to one knee, balanced with a claw in the soft earth.

That's more than enough excuse to join in. She starts sprinting towards the demon lord, until she's in Holy Smite range or something interferes with her.

You have to skirt the pit a little bit, so it takes about four moments to get into range.  In that time two more fliers pop up over the wall: one firing big shiny balls, and one throwing...swords?  You're a ways away but those seem like they might be swords.  They're staying spread out, left/right and high/low, clearly trying to divide its attention.

It might be working. The demon lord is still down on one spiky knee, supporting itself with one claw and throwing fire with the other. It's switched to faster-firing sheets of flame instead of lava, but so far it hasn't hit anybody, and everybody it's not targeting takes the opportunity to open fire.

And then you're in range. Holy Smite?

You bet.

(There's nobody easily accessible who looks like they need healing; Good damage should hurt it more than most other things.)

Just for a moment, the demon lord disappears into a sphere of golden dawn.

Well that was an interesting new kind of energy.  Where did it even come from? It didn't do a lot of damage, but even so, Behemoth spreads out its senses and turns its useless head from side to side. What was that? Will it happen again?

Its next attack can wait a little bit.

She wants to hurt it, or hurt it more, but she doesn't want its full attention. She'll put a Shield of Faith on herself, for what little good she expects it to do, and if it doesn't attack her by the time she's done with that she'll add a Sure Casting, and if it still hasn't attacked her she'll drop a second Holy Smite. And she'll move sideways while she's doing all of that.

Samora has time to do all of that, because Behemoth is taking its time looking for her.  Was it the moving group behind the wall?  The bright thing by the pit?  Something else it hasn't noticed yet?

In the Denver PRT defense HQ, Armsmaster is wondering the same thing. That glowing sphere doesn't seem to be hurting Behemoth much, but it might be distracting him and that's rarer. If they can figure out who's throwing it, and get them to sync with the Crusher Cannon (not his tech, not his name), they might be able to do some real damage before Behemoth pushes through into the warehouse district.

But he doesn't recognize the power, and neither does Dragon, so they have no idea who to talk to. Pings for the blasters who aren't already involved all come back negative. It takes them almost fifteen seconds to start looking for someone uninvolved, someone who wasn't at the rally point, doesn't have an armband, and just...wandered onto the battlefield on his own.

One of Dragon's reserve drones starts dropping through the atmosphere, scanning for living figures with line of sight on Behemoth.

She starts by scanning the nearby hilltop; the idea that someone might roll up and start blasting Behemoth from 200 feet out is not really in her model of parahuman behavior. It would take her a few minutes to spot Samora, but...

As the second Holy Smite lands, Behmoth decides to commit. He lurches to his feet, and pulls a huge glob of magma from the earth with his right claw. He throws it underhand toward the wall, about sixty feet left of where the cannon fired. The wall bends inward for just a moment, then shatters, collapsing away from the impact point in a rain of rounded mirrored shards. Pieces of metal, and at least one human body, are flung into the air above the impact point.

At the same time, he whips his left claw backward, broadly toward Samora. His aim is a little off, but that's fine: the sheet of fire that engulfs her is almost fifty feet wide.

Dragon's drone diverts. If they're lucky, there's someone at the site of that second attack who needs medical attention.

Honestly, Samora, you could use a little medical attention; that fire attack kicked like a high-powered fireball, even if it was more shaped like a giant burning hands.

You doubt if there's anyone in need of healing at the direct site of the lava attack, but there might be survivors on the periphery.

She can eat another one of those, but she can't prove that was the strongest thing it had. She needs to get coordinating with the other defenders; they might or might not know more about this particular demon lord than she does but she can at least do some healing, maybe buff someone who can hurt it more. She starts moving toward the most likely location for survivors, yelling "On me for a channel!"

One of the fliers is showering the demon in glowing green water, which got its attention: it's moving away from the hole it made in the wall and pursuing with big waves of fire and lightning.  Nobody's been knocked out of the air yet.

That is to say, you have a clear path toward the space around the impact site. It looks like about a 3-moment run. Some folks are already up and moving. As the rest of the wall collapses you get view of the space it was defending: big boxy buildings cut into uneven rectangles by those strange gray roads. There are lots of people on the roofs and peeking around corners -- dozens, maybe even a hundred, gradually coming out of cover and aiming weapons or conjuring shields.

As Samora starts to run, though, a figure in elaborate full-body armor swoops down toward her. It's (he's?) about 8 feet tall, all angular metal in shiny greens and reds. A small pair of wings jut unmoving from its back. It's not carrying any obvious weapons, though of course in a getup like that the scope for non-obvious weapons is considerable.

The strange cape doesn't look like she needs medical assistance, but just in case: "Are you injured?"

By the bye, what does Dragon see, when she points her optics at Samora? What does she look like?

A woman of unclear ethnicity in a metal cuirass and a scarlet cloak, with a gem-studded headband on her brow, a shining metal shield in hand, and a sword sheathed at her side. She doesn't look old enough to drink, but she moves like a soldier and the burns the lava left on her arms don't seem to trouble her much. She's observing the armor with keen, curious silver eyes; it's strange to her, but a kind of strangeness she's accustomed to. 

"Moderate* non-urgent. Just 'ported in; sitrep?"

(In the back of her mind she's tallying unexpected things. The roads, the air, the strangeness of the armor, this demon lord who is neither baphomet nor deskari, the armor, the perhaps heartening fact that the Good gods haven't intervened yet against a demon lord on the material.)

*Translator's note: Taldane has half a dozen different words for amounts of injury specifically. Samora is attempting to convey efficiently that she could stand to absorb something in the Cure Serious to Cure Critical range but could be twice as hurt as she is and stay up. Alas, English has done its own form of violence to the sentence.

No mask.  Clearly not a newbie, that would be obvious even without her elaborate costume.  No match for any heroes -- or villains -- that Dragon has on file.  Almost certainly not American or Canadian, however good her English is.  Brute enough to take that hit and come out only singed.  That "ported in" is a relief; at least she knows where she is and who she's fighting.  Though, who teleported her, and when, and why here specifically?  

Dragon's thoughts can run in a thousand semi-relevant directions at once; her words, in moments like this, have to be rationed out like grains of plutonium. "Are you a blaster? We're falling back; I can fly you to one of the rally points." They'll have more time for details once they're in the air.

That question is unexpected and she suspects she isn't understanding everything about it but there's not time for a nuanced answer. "Yes-ish and please do." She prepares to be picked up and flown with in whichever of grab-a-wrist or fireman's carry this person prefers.

(Did that mean "Can you focus on damage output" or "Can you only focus on damage output" or "Do you usually focus on damage output" or "Did you prep a lot of evocations today"? Why is that the question and not "What circle?" Maybe this guy is from Tian Xia and has Tongues up; clearly the question makes perfect sense in his doctrine. Maybe something weirder.)

The armor's torso abruptly unfolds, like a clenched fist opening, into a curved seat and a waving set of dark metal(?) restraints. Underneath there's something softer, too firm to be cloth, in plain white. "Climb in. Face outward."

Assuming the stranger does, the restraints will wrap snugly around her torso and forehead, pressing her into the soft backing. Some people have a hard time with this aspect of the medevac suit, and Dragon will keep a close watch on her new guest's pulse and breathing just in case she needs to loosen some restraints or explain something. While she's at it she'll try a close sonic scan too, looking for nonobvious injuries. Depending on her Brute power Dragon might not get anything, but trying is free.

She won't distract the new cape with another question until she's oriented to the carrier. Once she's sitting, she'll go with, "What's the range on your glowing ball? What else does it do?"

Talking construct? That wants her to ride in it? Well, sure, okay, whatever. She doesn't like that it grabs her, but it isn't doing anything that would prevent her from Teleporting or Plane Shifting out, so it's more likely just a weird conveyance than a demonic ploy. Her vital signs don't suggest fear so much as confusion.

What a strange question. "That was a Holy Smite at about max range, it does Good damage, and the fact that you don't know that makes me think something weird is going on." 

(The sonic scan doesn't turn up any hidden injuries. Nothing but perfectly normal and healthy human organs in here, at least on the macroscopic level.)

There's a lot for Dragon to track in every Endbringer fight. This relatively straightforward bit of S&R was important, but in terms of processing power it was still Dragon's seventh or eighth priority.

Now it's third. In ascending order of confusion:

1. Some people name their attacks, sure. Mouse Protector loves it, just to pick one famous example.
2. The glowing ball probably does do pretty good damage by normal standards -- it did scorch Behemoth a little. But the phrasing and prioritization are both a little off: why put it so vaguely? And why make that one of the two things total she said about her power?
3. A few people name their attacks religiously. Most of those aren't Nazis or cultists.
4. Why does she think Dragon should recognize it?

Hypothesis: she's actually from an alternate Earth where she's much more famous, or lots of people have that same power for some probably-creepy reason. This theory has a bunch of blank spots (how did she get here, and why? Why did she just immediately square up to Behemoth?), but it does suggest a test.

"This is Earth Bet, United States, Colorado, Denver. We're eighteen minutes into a fight with the Endbringer Behemoth. What were you expecting?"

As she speaks, she plots a course that skims the ground in a wide circle around Behemoth, targeting a group of shielders at the leading edge of the fallback point. Even if she's a lost dimension traveler she clearly wants to fight, and that's just about the only place she can do it with a range that short.

"I was expecting the Worldwound on Golarion!" 

(Wordless inference at the speed of thought: If a description of being able to cast fourth-circle cleric spells prompts a description of what planet she's on, there aren't enough fourth-circle clerics on this planet.)

"I have healing, do you need healing or damage more right now?"

There are several known alternate Earths. Some of them are not very nice places to live. None have a "Golarion" or a "Worldwound" (!?!).

"You can heal?" she temporizes. "How fast, what limitations?"

Definitely not enough clerics. Maybe none. This might be a "convert everything to Cures" situation.

"Injuries not diseases, six 30 foot radius area heals and" mental arithmetic "23 single-target with a range of power levels, plus two that can get someone back up who died less than six seconds ago." 

Second priority now.  Dragon has a number of picky questions, like "what does your power think an injury is exactly?", "why those specific numbers?", "six seconds, how does that work operationally?" and "does that trade off with Holy Smite?", not to mention trivia like "what's your name?". There's time to ask a few of those but there isn't, probably, time to listen to the answers.

There's a point of view that says you shouldn't bring an unknown foreigner from a weird alternate Earth into contact with your wounded. She might have strange priorities, or strange pathogens. She knows who to see about the pathogens, but they're multiple minutes away. The priorities...honestly Dragon likes what she's seen so far.

"How long does your area heal take? If it's fast, we can try to stabilize all the survivors of that last big lava attack. But we can't linger there; if we draw Behemoth's attention back we'll just get everyone killed."

"Everything takes six seconds. Three of the midrange single-targets trade off against two more Holy Smites and one that makes eleven people move faster." 

One that makes eleven people move faster? One that does? They have a few seconds before they arrive..."Does all your healing trade off against other idiosyncratic powers like that?"

"Yes but the rest is either weaker or only works if I can touch Behemoth and then get very lucky."

The rhythm of this conversation seems to be "Samora explains herself and the construct integrates the information" rather than "the construct explains the situation and Samora integrates it" and that's not so objectionable she'll add friction trying to change it, so: 

"The two that can raise someone trade off against weak heals that hit eleven people, and I have one I didn't mention that can fix a weird set of problems or moderately heal eleven people." She genuinely has no idea how to explain Heal quickly; it will probably be faster for (whoever is talking through?) the construct to list the weird problems Behemoth can cause. Does it look like they're going for a channel on the survivors of the lava wave? If so, she'll add "And I need line of effect for everything, open the door."

There's not a door; Samora's body doesn't quite fit inside so her arms and legs are external (this is not the suit's only mode, but it is the only one compatible with high-speed flight).  Even so, it opens up again to let Samora out when they arrive.

It's all pretty hellish, for something that apparently has nothing to do with literal Hell. There are small charred bits of people all along the smoking path of the lavaball, and the grass along the edges is burning in a desultory way.

But along the edges there are survivors. Eight people altogether, moving or making noise. The burns range from "bad" to "horrific", and it's not always possible to distinguish their clothing or gender. What you can see of the clothes is bright and colorful, with lots of light cloaks and skintight fabric.

Samora's "Get close to me for healing!" is backed up by 16 Charisma worth of I am the most important thing that's happening right now as she heads for the center of the survivors' positions.

They're not super mobile but everyone who can, does.  Soon you've got them all in radius, no problem

Channel! It's a pretty average one, not quite enough to fully heal her burns, but close enough as makes no difference.

Nobody here has strong Brute powers of any kind; the ones who did got away on their own.

All eight are suddenly restored to full health.

That doesn't mean they're back to normal; that guy is still missing his lower left leg, and those two are both blind still.  But nobody's dying, and the problems they still have are all problems Panacea can fix.  The six with working eyes are all staring at Samora in awe.

Meanwhile, Sanguine finally texts Dragon back.  "I'm on the roof of Field Hospital B, does that work?  We can always burn the place down later if Behemoth doesn't."

Dragon addresses the survivors: "I've put a pin in your armbands.  Help each other to rally point C; you'll receive further instructions there."

Then to Samora: "Can you stand another flight?  I've arranged for someone to meet you and explain our situation more fully, answer your questions, and make sure we have all the same diseases."  Ugh, that's so awkwardly phrased, but she doesn't want to outright say "make sure you don't kill us all with some plague that your world's immune to".

The formerly-injured eight all get to their feet.  They don't immediately follow Sanguine's instructions, though; they're still watching Samora.  Finally, a woman in an elaborate bird mask gets up the nerve to ask, "Who are you?"

"I don't have any diseases. Why do you want to make sure I have diseases?" This construct has earned some trust, though, so she adds, "Another flight is fine; explanations can wait if more people need healing." To the woman in the bird mask: "Samora, I'm from another planet." Back in the weird seat to go to the next location, yes? 

"You don't have any diseases that can harm you, just as my real body doesn't have any diseases that can harm me.  But it's possible that either of us might still be contagious, in ways harmless to our own people but deeply dangerous to foreigners.  There are precedents."

A moment for that to land, then, "I'm Dragon, by the way. Thank you for" picking a fight with an Endbringer even though you didn't know what it was staying in the fight after you knew what it was volunteering to heal instead of charging into the front lines like everyone else wants to "helping us."

She really should have introduced herself when she arrived, she's realizing now, but she's out of the habit a little bit; she always already knows who everyone is and vice versa. Oh well, that's why she delegated the next part to someone less busy and less socially awkward.

And then they're off.

"Oh! Understood. It's good to meet you." What's the next-highest-priority information. It might be a question, actually. "Does your planet not have divinely empowered casters, or are they different? And what types of damage does Behemoth do?" So far it looks like fire and bludgeoning, but something that big could easily have half a dozen things she hasn't seen yet.

"Some people call their powers divide gifts, yes." Dragon says diplomatically. "In general their source isn't understood. We do know that everyone with the potential to develop powers has a specific brain region, the Corona Pollentia, that no one else has." Explaining that Samora also has one can, Dragon decides, be someone else's job. "None of them have the kind of healing power you've demonstrated."

(Dragon has not actually seen Samora's Corona Pollentia or Gemma; her sonic scan earlier was just looking for broken bones and internal bleeding, and barely touched her brain. But come on, what else could it be?)

And after that they've still got some flight time, so: "Behemoth is a dynakinetic, and seems to be able to freely manipulate most kinds of energy. We mostly see fire, lightning, radiation, sound waves, and electromagnetism. Within 32 feet he can heat your body to 1400 Celsius directly - " wait, if Samora's Earth diverged long enough back they might not have metric temperature " - which is hotter than even the hottest lava. Stay at least 100 feet away from him at all times, just to be sure."

A short, red-skinned person is waving to them from that roof over there!

Dragon brings them in right in front of him, and releases the flight restraints again. "Samora, this is Sanguine, a healer who specializes in blood. They're ramping up the next attack, I have to swap out, but I'll check back in when I can."

She'll give it about two seconds to see if Samora urgently needs something else from her, and if not the suit closes itself back up and sits down, knees tucked up to its shiny neck.

"Hi there."

That sounds like Dragon isn't sure whether the empowered priests he knows are actually priests or more of a Razmir situation. That's something to figure out later, as are the implications of all casters having something in common in their brains. 

"Goddess go with you." She pops out of the construct and goes to greet the other healer for, it sounds like, a preemptive Remove Disease. "How can I help you?"

His first thought is, huh, no mask. But, hey, Sanguine doesn't wear one either -- no point, unless he wants to go full bodysuit with gloves and everything. The silver eyes miiight be contacts? Armor, shield, sword, cloak, all very medieval chic. Looks heavy, but it clearly doesn't bother her. Yep, Dragon was right as usual: this person has been caping, or doing whatever her world has instead of caping, for quite a while. Her apparent age doesn't really register; he meets a lot of super-powerful teenagers in his line of work.

Also, geez, why are all high-end capes so hot. Except Eidolon of course. He's not going to do anything about it but like, a man observes what he observes.

At ground level it's clear that he's a little shorter than Samora.

"Well, mostly this is 'sposed to be me helping you. Dragon said you're from some other Earth, and you didn't come here on purpose?" He shakes his head, laughing a little. "Of all the times and places...you've got some kinda luck, lady. But I'll fill you in, no problem."

"But yeah, we gotta do the pathogen screen. The way my power works is, I can do all kinds of stuff with blood." He just barely restrains himself from doing his usual Bela Lugosi impression; she probably won't get it. "So if you give me a drop of yours, I'll compare it to a sample I got from a guy downstairs," he pulls a little potion vial out of his pants pocket, "and we'll see what we see. Mine wouldn't work, it's special. It'll take me a little bit and be really boring, so if you'd ask me some questions in the meantime I'd appreciate it." Dragon also wanted him to get a survey of her powers, but Sanguine figures they can work up to that.

He doesn't move toward her. He's got a syringe in his other pocket but between the sword and her general attitude she seems like she can draw her own blood sample.

People on Golarion do not, generally, give strangers drops of their blood for unclear purposes. But this man isn't Evil, and the purpose is only slightly unclear, and they're all fighting the demon lord Endbringer together. She draws her sword, carefully nicks her own arm, and presents the reddened blade-tip to Sanguine.

"Has Behemoth attacked this planet before? Is it from the Abyss, or somewhere else?"

He delicately touches the tip of Samora's sword, and the bead of Samora's blood flows smoothly into his palm. He pours out the blood from the vial, and then all the blood seeps into his skin. In a moment it's all gone.

As he's doing this, he says, "Yeah, he comes around every ten months, give or take. Him and his two best friends, Leviathan and the Simurgh. The Endbringers. They take turns, hit random cities, and we all scramble to stop them."

"We don't know where he's from. He first showed up, uh, about thirty years back? If we hit him hard enough he'll burrow back underground eventually, and just roam around until next time."

"What's the Abyss?"

Maybe not an outsider, then, maybe some kind of Darklands thing. "I'm very impressed with your civilization's rapid response capability. The Abyss is the Chaotic Evil outer plane--do you know what Good and Evil and Law and Chaos are?"

"Yeah, well, we get a lotta practice."

Then the conversation takes an awkward turn to the philosophical!  It's not really Sanguine's specialty if he's honest!  Why didn't Dragon do this part?!

"Well.  Sure, I guess.  Law is the law: pay your taxes, don't drive without a license, go to school 'til you're eighteen.  Chaos is, uh, anarchy, looting, the Sl - " wait, don't say "Slaughterhouse Nine", give her like an hour on the planet before you hit her with that " - uh, disorder.  Evil is killing people, robbing them, taking advantage of them.  Good's the opposite: protecting people, especially from things they can't handle on their own."

"The Abyss is...a chaotic, evil place?"  He has a sense that he's wrong about something here, but not what.

"Huh, I think you just resolved a centuries-old philosophical debate. You're aware of those as--ways people can act, but not as fundamental forces of reality? Uh, the Abyss is another plane--somewhere you can't get to except with magic, or by dying--defined by Chaos and Evil; it warps everyone who gets sent there into demons. There are planes for all the other combinations of Good/Neutral/Evil and Law/Neutral/Chaos."

Dragon would probably want him to get her to talk about "magic" some more, but he can't stop himself: "Oh really? What debate?"

Once that's settled: "Can you go there? Not saying you should, just, is that something your power lets you do?"

(The "or by dying" aside barely entered his brain; he's heard plenty about where people go when they die, a lot of it concerning him specifically, and it was never once worth paying attention to).

"The debate about whether humans would figure out the importance of Good and Evil and Law and Chaos on their own if there was no magic that interacted with them! Or did the gods communicate the alignments to mortals here some other way? I could theoretically go to the Abyss if I had an item for it, which I don't because I have never considered doing that. I can go to Heaven, the Lawful Good plane, or Nirvana, the Neutral Good plane, and I can and have gone to Axis, the Lawful Neutral one. They are, as you can imagine, much more hospitable."

That gets through. "...heaven? Like, heaven and hell?"

"There's a book that mentions those, yeah.  Supposedly God wrote it?  I'm not an expert.  But there's not, uh, you can't go there with powers, it's just where you go when you die.  Or so they say, no one's seen it.  And there's not an abyss, I don't think, or a neutral anything."

"Ah, so you do have communication from the gods even if you don't have clerics like Golarion does. The philosophical debate will continue. And yes, Hell is the Lawful Evil plane and people go to the plane that matches their alignment when they die. In what ways do the gods tend to intervene on this planet generally? Back home they all pick clerics who work basically the way I do."

Sanguine's been an atheist for as long as he can remember*, first by default and then out of sheer self-defense. She's...she doesn't even seem to believe, the way some people do. She just says stuff about gods and hell, the way you'd say stuff about cars or rivers. It's freaking him out.

*_{about three years}

But then he notices something weird about Samora's blood, and that calms him down some, and then he realizes that a true answer to her question will make the clergy look like assholes and that helps some more. So, after a noticably-disturbed pause: "A lot of people think he created the Endbringers. God, I mean. To teach us a lesson, or just punish us for being too 'evil'. Some people say it works to pray for healing but it's never, like, a leg grows back. It's always stuff people can get better from on their own. Nobody even tells stories like that thing you did earlier, with the Behemoth survivors. Nobody on the whole planet works like you do."

"How do you work, anyway? Dragon told me a little but it didn't really make sense. You can heal, but only 20 more times?"

It's very reasonable of him to be disturbed! Finding out the Lower Planes are real is disturbing! Also slightly disturbing: the possibility that the Endbringers aren't from the Lower Planes and the gods are keeping their interventions to a minimum. She'll need to think about the possibility that she's disrupting an equilibrium or costing the Inheritor way more budget than she thinks she is or something, and come up with a robust way to deal with that, before dawn tomorrow. Which may involve getting off this planet ASAP.

"It's possible an Evil god created the Endbringers, that's very much the sort of thing They would do, though if one did it wouldn't be because of mortal Evil particularly. I'm not strong enough to grow legs back but I've met someone who could; the strongest healing I can do is stuff like raising the recently dead and curing blindness or insanity. More generally, I have a collection of spell slots of different power levels, and every morning I choose which spells to prepare in those slots, and I can use a spell slot to either cast what I prepared in it, or cast a healing spell of that power level. And then separately I get six channels, which heal everyone in a thirty-foot radius. Also my healing harms undead. Also I might need to leave this planet today or tomorrow, if the gods don't intervene here and the reason for that is something I don't want to mess with, sorry." 

Why has no part of this gone the way Dragon said it would, she's supposed to be smart That's not true, she said Samora's blood might be unusual, and hoo boy.

"And there are a bunch of people like that where you're from? Because our powers don't work like that at all. Like, I can do stuff with blood, but I can pretty much do whatever I want as much as I want, it's not like I can analyze it three times, and replace it five times. No, I got an all-day pass to blood town."

...did he really just say that? Why? Keep going, maybe she'll be distracted. "I guess you're kinda like a Tinker. They build things, like Dragon with that power suit you rode in, and those can have limited charges or ammunition or whatever. And they can usually turn their things into bombs if they really have to. But really you're your own thing."

"How do you find out why gods do things? Is there, ah, a spell for that?" And could you maybe cast it on our gods, find out what's up with this place?

"You don't have any per-day limits? That's so cool, back home the joke is that casters go to bed at noon." And fighters stay up all night, but she's not doing the eyebrow motion that goes with that part at someone she barely knows. "There are clerics who can make items, and I know an alchemist who goes in for bombs, but I never studied crafting. Figuring out why gods do things . . . on Golarion mostly you look at their holy books and who they pick as clerics. There's a spell called Commune that can ask them yes-or-no questions directly, but gods have limited resources and answering Commune questions is expensive, so it's only for very important things. And people have summoned angels or aeons to ask them questions."

(Is it worth trying to cast a Commune for some of the questions about why the gods don't pick clerics here? No point trying to decide that until she's sat down with the questions themselves for a while.)

Around then Behemoth stops pretending to be distracted by Eidolon and the other fliers, and makes a short jump into the roof of a warehouse.  It collapses almost immediately, and he begins to wade forward through it, flinging melted hunks of debris in all directions.

He's still a good thousand feet from Samora and Sanguine, and not really heading in their direction.

Aw, shit, the old Endbringer rope-a-dope.  It's hard not to fall for it, even if you know better; it takes some irrational hope, a defiant sense that things might be different this time, to show up to an Endbringer fight at all.

Time to stop spinning this out.

"Okay, the good news is, I think you're clear to go heal.  You got no signs of disease in your blood at all.  You might get our diseases, but we won't get yours, you don't have any."

Definitely the less worrying direction, there being only one of her with good fortitude. The bad news is presumably Behemoth. "Great! Point me at your medical tent?" 

"Oh, we took over this whole building.  It's an abandoned factory, I guess.  Safer for the normal sick people than trying to do everything at the hospital, and it's closer too."  Sanguine leads Samora to a small door sticking up out of the roof, which turns out to lead to some stairs down to - 

- a metal catwalk around the edge of a room hundreds of feet long and at least thirty feet high.  Until very recently it was probably empty: right now, dozens of people below you are hanging sheets from white poles as dividers, wheeling beds into place, and carrying boxes of mysterious supplies.  There's a big open space in the center, marked in gray; the rest is semi-coherent chaos.  As you watch, a man in googles and a black and blue coat appears, surrounded by burn victims.

"The space in the middle is for incoming teleports, so stay out of it unless - yeah, like that."

"Got it. Which end is most serious and is there anyone I should talk to before I start dragging beds into a channel radius?"

The staff have, it turns out, been warned to expect that a strange cape will want to make weird alternations to their layout, and that since she's a powerful healer they should let her.  After a few false starts Sanguine flags down a Doctor Godiwala, who's in charge of organizing the space, and wants to know how exactly Samora wants things laid out?

(Doctor Godiwala's personal opinion is that this person obviously isn't old enough to officially be at an Endbringer fight, but if Dragon somehow managed to smuggle it past the Youth Guard he's not going to ask any inconvenient questions.)

He's not the first person to be weirded out by Samora being sixth circle at twenty (that position went to Samora herself well over a month ago). The important thing is that they get as many injured people as possible packed into six groupings sixty feet in diameter. She can pace off an appropriate circle very accurately if that will help. If there's anyone he's worried won't make it that long she can drop a Stabilize on them first and then they will.

At first they try to stop her from spending limited healing resources on just stabilizing people instead of healing them. Once she explains that Stabilize is a secret third power, not subject to any limits whatsoever, and that it only takes six seconds to cast, Doctor Godiwala takes Samora on a tour of all his even-slightly-badly-off patients, just in case. His minions can handle the sixty-foot circle; the white pipes they've been using to build dividers come in standard ten-foot lengths and they have lots.

"Okay! Looks like this is going smooth. Samora, I gotta get back, I'll catch you later." And he's striding away before she can stop him.

He has an armband call to make.

Dragon issues every cape in an Endbringer fight these armbands, so she can talk to them and show them maps and things. Sanguine hasn't been wearing his; she mostly uses it for casualty updates and it's depressing. But once he's in a private place, he finally pulls it out again.

"Okay, Dragon, I'm done with Samora. Clean bill of health, I just handed her off to Doctor God."

He probably doesn't like being called that, but Dragon doesn't scold him; they're in a hurry, here.

"And how was your conversation otherwise?"

If he doesn't like being called that he should quit acting like that, is Sanguine's opinion. Also he probably wouldn't get that it's an insult. Anyway.

"It was weird. We talked a lot of moral philosophy. You know, good, evil, law, chaos. She says her powers are magic, spells she can cast, and she got them from a god. They have lots, and some of them are evil apparently. She thought maybe one of them created the Endbringers, I guess that's the kinda thing they do where she's from. Oh, and there are lots more people like her. 'Clerics', she called them, and they all have the same thing she does with spell slots and power levels and channels. She thought it was weird that there aren't any clerics here. She was worried about that actually, she thought it meant that she might have to leave soon, which is another thing she can do."

This next part sucks to say but it'd be so wrong not to.

"She can go back to her home Earth, she says, she knows a spell for that. And, ah, she can also go to someplace she called 'Heaven'. She says that's real. And, ahhh, there's a place called 'Hell' too, but she couldn't go there because she needs an item for the place she's going and why would you want to go there, right?" He's babbling, he knows he's babbling, but he's worried that if he stops talking Dragon will say something like, "ah, yes, Heaven and Hell, I figured out that they must exist with my giant Tinker-brain, were you not aware?" He shuts his mouth and bites his tongue; the pain helps.

Dragon's focus is on another aspect entirely. "She said she was a 'cleric' who had 'spell slots'? Those specific words? Had you ever heard those terms before?"

Sanguine tells her about maybe literal Heaven and she wants to talk vocabulary. Tinkers, man; can't predict 'em. "Yeah, that's what she said. Or, she said the gods made lots of clerics that work like her, she's maybe a little different? I guess I heard the word 'cleric' before but 'spell slot' is new to me, why?"

Dragon has read vastly more books, and vastly more of the internet, than any human ever could. In one small slice of her spare time she moderates Parahumans Online. She's intimately familiar with the rules of Dungeons & Dragons.

"I'm not sure yet. It might be nothing, but it could be tremendously important. I need to think about it. Did you have anything else to report?"

Aaarrgh what a frigging tease. And she's just brushing the Heaven thing aside? That's fine, Sanguine didn't want to talk about it anyway. "Yeah, there's two things about her blood. A lot of things actually, but two I can put my finger on."

"So first of all, she's got a lot of antibodies for being as old as she looks. Nothing active, and that's a little weird in itself, but she's clearly been exposed to a lot of diseases at some point. And the antibodies themselves are pretty weird; I bet the diseases were on the nasty side. But absolutely nothing now, whatever got her is totally gone."

Sure, Dragon knows all about getting sick, her human body has been infected many times.

"That's a little strange, yes. What's the other thing?"

"Her blood sugar is normal, like she ate several hours ago. But there's this other hormone that shows up in your blood when you get hungry, ah, doctors call it ghrelin, and she doesn't have any. None at all. And that's weird because those always go together: there's not much right after you eat, and then there's more and more as your blood sugar thins out. She should have way more ghrelin, or else way more blood sugar."

"It's like that part of her bloodstream is just for show, and the real metabolic action is happening someplace else."

That goes together pretty interestingly with the rest of Sanguine's report! Dragon is already forming a theory, and if she's right they don't have to worry about Samora leaving, but she wants to cross-check with a few others before she acts on it.

"I see." She gives it a few beats, as though she has to stop and think, and then: "This is excellent work, Sanguine, thank you. Please keep these details to yourself for now. Likely the PRT will want to classify as much about Samora as they can, especially any weaknesses she may have, and this is the most dangerous moment for leaks."

"Sure, happy to help." Sanguine scoots back inside; his power is good for severe bleeding and that might matter soon.

Meanwhile, Doctor Godiwala has lots of questions about Stabilize! If you use it on someone who's bleeding to death, does the wound close or does the blood just stop flowing out of it? Or does it make new blood? What about organ failure from sepsis, or dehydration? What about radiation poisoning? That, and Stabilizing the eleven most-at-risk patients, carries them through the creation of the Channel Circle, and then they can start carting patients in. They have some wheeled beds; the rest arrive on a mix of military stretchers and stretchers improvised from divider fabric and PVC pipe.

Samora has roughly the medical training of a medieval peasant, but she has seen lots of bodies in various states of having violence done to them, so she can answer some of the questions. If you're bleeding out it makes the blood thicken at the wound and stop flowing, but you still need to heal them properly to prevent the wound from going foul. Dehydration is a tricky case to say anything about because anyone who can cast Stabilize can create water. If you're dying of a disease you still have the disease, it just takes several hours longer to kill you so there's time to do something else about it. She has no idea what radiation poisoning is but probably if you Stabilize someone who's dying of it it'll buy them some time like it does anything else.

Doctor Godiwala tries to explain radiation a little, but his explanation relies on large amounts of atomic theory and could never have possibly landed. He's just started a slower, more condescending explanation when the blue-and-black guy from earlier teleports back in with eight burn victims in various stages of "dying".

"He broke through to field HQ!" he shouts. "No sign of Scion yet! Back soon with more I hope!" And then he's gone.

Volunteers converge on the wounded and then hesitate, eyeing Samora. They have protocols for this -- or at least, they got a sketchy briefing that they all still remember -- but it didn't include AoE super-healing. Even Doctor Godiwala seems uncertain.

Samora, it seems you have a window to put yourself in charge of crisis response here, if that's something you want. If not, Doctor God will come up with something in a few moments.

Stabilize Stabilize Stabilize Stabilize Stabilize Stabilize Stabilize Stabilize. Picking up the wounded as she Stabilizes them (she's strong enough to be fast and gentle at the same time) and stacking them next to other people in the beds in the assembled circle. And then she's going to get in the middle and Channel.

You need help from the volunteers to spread everybody out through the circle fast enough, but they catch on pretty quickly; efficiently moving people into the treatment area was a core part of their sketchy briefing.  You make it to the center and then, WHOOM, everybody's healed except the burly guy in the executioner's hood and boxer shorts, and even he isn't dying anymore.

That's not to say everyone's OK. There are still lots of crippled limbs and damaged eyes, and even the healthy people are a little disoriented. Powered healing can be fast, but it's never instantaneous, and you can see in their eyes that their minds haven't really caught up with their bodies yet.

But they'll have to figure it out fast, because the teleporter is back with another seven injured, and a woman with dirty gray power armor and an Evil aura is carrying two more people through the door, one under each arm.

And then after that crisis there's another.

And another.

And another.

Samora was on her way to join the army for the first time; she has never seen a battle on this scale. They say at the Battle of Three Sorrows the wounded were piled up like cordwood.

She uses the last four channels, none on less than seventy people. By the time those have run out, it's clear that most of the people here, even among the heavy hitters, bleed and heal like common soldiers. The patterns of their costumes are strange to her, and she can't be sure by looking who can use a Cure Serious Wounds and who'll be as healed as they can get with a Cure Light, but she asks the other workers who among the wounded can take the heaviest hits and they sometimes know. Still she expects to run out of spell slots long before she runs out of wounded.

But not out of orisons, never out of orisons. Stabilize. Stabilize. Stabilize.

Nobody finds the time to tell Samora what radiation poisoning is exactly, but Stabilize does work on it.  Nothing else does; people who have it are whisked into Samora's line of effect, then whisked away again into their own special corner of the factory.  Samora gets a few more Evil patients, passed to her with the same harried efficiency that her helpers use on everyone else.

Finally a woman in a black tailcoat and goggles bursts through the door, for once not carrying any injured capes.  "It's Scion!  Scion's here!  He's fighting!"

Everyone's too worked up to cheer, but the whole room sighs together.

Oh, must be the local archmage-or-gold-dragon-or-similar. Excellent. She'll ask who that is the next time there's a break in the flow of casualties, which seems like it might be soon.

At first it picks up; apparently Field Hospital A overflowed at some point, and now they finally have the teleport resources to do something about it.  But Stabilizing the worst-off arrivals doesn't take much time, and there are plenty of idle patients around to talk to, so Samora can have all the cape tea she can drink.

Scion is the first cape.

The best cape.

No, not best, just strongest.

The strongest, yeah.

Nothing can hurt him.

He's probably punching Behemoth in the face right now. You should go watch, it'll be cathartic.

No she shouldn't, don't be such a tourist, Scarf.

He usually comes to Endbringer fights, but sometimes he doesn't.

Having all that power did something to his brain.

He doesn't talk.

He doesn't smile.

No one knows how he thinks.

Yeah, sounds like an archmage analogue. What's he do when there isn't an Endbringer, hang out in his private demiplane? Who are the other capes everyone should know about?

Demi-plane?  He doesn't need a plane, he can fly.

He just flies around, helping with things.

Puts out fires, stops earthquakes.

Grabs children out of war zones sometimes.

But, sometimes he'll stop a forest fire in the middle of nowhere instead of an Endbringer.

He never, ever explains himself.

For capes everyone should know, well. First there's the Triumvirate, everyone agrees on those three: Legend, Alexandria, and Eidolon.  Leaders of the Protectorate, the organization that led the Endbringer fight.  Well, not leaders leaders, the Protectorate has non-capes in charge, but the Triumvirate are the most powerful.  Legend flies, and shoots lasers, and turns into light so you can't hurt him.  Eidolon has any power he wants, but only three at a time.  Alexandria is super-strong, and she flies, and you can't hurt her.  Lots of capes have that basic combination of powers, to a greater or lesser degree -- they call it the "Alexandria package".

The second tier is a lot more chaotic. There's Panacea, the best healer ("except maybe you now? But she can fix missing eyes, that's pretty big."). Dragon ("the queen of tinkers -- oh but you met her already, right?"). Narwhal ("she uses forcefields for everything, including clothing"). Myrrdin ("he says he casts spells too, you guys should meet"). Chevalier ("he's got a really big sword", but no one can agree on what's special about it). People start talking over each other. Exalt (some kind of air control?). Rime ("she makes these huge ice sculptures"). Lung (he can turn into a dragon, apparently, but everyone flinches when his name comes up). Armsmaster ("he's a tinker, like Dragon, he made this cool halberd...") . Jack Slash (everyone else shushes the person who said this one). Cinereal (there's a big sub-argument about how her power works, something something ash).

If you wanted information about their personalities or anything you're going to have to insist on it explicitly; it is not where these peoples' minds are going.

She wants--well, everything, but mostly she wants information on powers, factions, alignments in whatever sense they understand that. It doesn't all have to be from things they say; she can tell everyone else agrees Dragon is great, and that this Jack Slash guy is bad news.

And she has one other question that's been in the back of her mind since she saw the city and the number of casualties: best guess, how many people are on this planet? 

People will enthusiastically try to tell you about powers!  It doesn't work super well because no one knows where powers come from, and if they have limits at all they're mostly not known, but people will try!  People who can get powers have a specific brain region that nobody else has; there's a big argument about what proportion of people this is.  Then maybe one day you fall asleep (and to Samora's Sense Motive, everyone gets weirdly shifty at this point), and when you wake up you've got powers.  It's called a trigger!  Powers usually don't get stronger over time -- though apparently there's one guy, Dauntless, who does -- but you can get better at using them!

There are lots and lots and lots of different kinds, even just right here in this room: this lady duplicates nearby objects, and they explode after a little while!  This guy summons monsters from peoples' emotions!  Those two little girls are actually one person, and they can split a lot further than that!  Every day is an adventure when you're working with powers!  (Some of Samora's retinue is being sarcastic about that, but not all).

There's something called the Manton Limit, which means that you usually can't use your power to mess around with someone's insides directly.  Like, if you had the power to create kittens, you couldn't create one inside your opponent's skull and give them brain damage.  Behemoth's kill aura does not follow this rule, which is why we stay 100 feet from him at all times.

There...probably isn't mind reading?  Apparently somebody did some research showing that this was impossible even with powers, but not everyone buys it.

You can go to school to learn about powers, but you'll learn about tendencies and patterns rather than hard rules.

People are willing to talk demographics.  This planet has about seven billion people.  The city you're in, Denver, apparently has either about 2 million or about 600,000, depending on whether you mean just the city core or the whole area.  There's a little pause after they settle that, where someone could say "fewer now, of course", but no one does.

People...are a little reluctant to get into factions.  The Protectorate is the organization that's running the defense here, and the Triumvirate are all members, but lots of people here aren't.  Some are members of other teams of heroes (this seems to be the general term for "person who is trying to use their powers to do Good").  Some are heroing solo.  Some are mercenaries, just using their powers to get paid.

And some, apparently, are villains; people who use their powers to commit crimes.  A lot of the time, the Good heroes are trying to do is to catch them and put them in jail.  But there's a thing called the Endbringer Truce: if you show up to fight an Endbringer nobody's allowed to arrest you or mess with you, and you get the same healing afterward that everyone else does.  They're not even allowed to try to find out your real identity.

That's another thing that gradually becomes obvious, now that Samora has brain space for things other than channels and Stabilize.  Except for her and Sanguine, all the powered people here, all the "capes", are wearing masks, and they have codenames like "Acrobat", "Leitmotif", or "Sanguine".

They're just starting to try to explain how that works in practice - 

- when a tall, muscular woman in black and gray floats through the factory doors.

All eyes turn to her immediately.  Voices cut off in midword.

"Behemoth has retreated.  While he did great damage, and was able to destroy the Tinker lab which we suspect was his primary objective, we were able to hold him back from the city center for long enough for Scion to arrive.  This was a good day, and you should all be proud."  Her voice is low, and utterly commanding.

Her focus had been spread through the whole room; now it bears down on Samora.  "Endbringer battles are always difficult, and always bring terrible loss of life.  But today was remarkable: fewer capes were killed than in any other Behemoth encounter.  And for that, as I understand it, we have our visitor to thank."  She floats closer, until she's just outside Samora's personal space.  "Samora, may I speak to you privately?  I want convey our thanks for your extraordinary work today, and discuss your future plans."

Unless prevented, she'll lead Samora back up to the rooftop where she met Sanguine.  "I'm also here," she adds on the way up, "to answer your questions about our world, and about the conflict in which you found yourself.  My time here is sadly limited, but I want to make sure that you're oriented enough to be able to rest and recover over the next few days.  Assuming, that is, that you're not able to return to your own world."  She gives the sense, through her featureless gray visor, that she's watching Samora very closely.

Goodness that's a lot of people, especially when you consider that that's only the ones they know about.

The Endbringer truce is a great accomplishment of their civilization and Heaven rejoices in it.

Samora is happy to talk to the important ~government person who's probably Alexandria. "Whether I return to my own world depends on some things I don't know yet, but I'll definitely be here until tomorrow morning. One of the things I'm considering is that I may in fact be able to do more good here than there, with your lack of healers and the possibility of getting more people powers similar to mine. To that end, I want to know about the strategic situation. The next fifty years." Is this someone she can ask straight out? Yes. "I need to know if you're winning or losing."

Hah.

It isn't usually Alexandria's job to make this kind of approach. Legend is better at gladhanding, at being welcoming and reassuring - and at not scaring people. He'd guessed, when they were arguing about who would float down to meet Samora, that she would be stressed from being dropped unexpectedly onto an Endbringer, and that spending hours healing strange people would have frayed her nerves still further, and so she'd appreciate a friendly, low-key invitation to a quiet bedroom somewhere. Alexandria, watching Dragon's footage after that first glowing-ball attack, guessed differently.

She expected to be right; she typically does. She had not expected to be proven right that quickly.

What answer serves Cauldron's goals, and thereby humanity's? With most people she'd be tempted to lie, much as she dislikes it; everyone, to a first approximation, likes a winner. But there's a certain kind of person who sees giant monsters, and wounded heroes, and weak infrastructure, and the wholescale collapse of civilization, and finds it motivational.

She lets herself smile, just a little.

"Perceptive. We're losing. It's happening slowly; our best Thinkers loosely estimate that we have between twelve and forty years before our civilization reaches an unrecoverable breaking point. Today was a good day, but it will not alter that trajectory. We're all deeply interested in finding something that will."

"On that subject, what do you mean by 'getting more people powers similar to mine'?" Samora didn't say, 'more people with powers similar to mine`, which suggests that she has...something analogous to Cauldron vials, maybe.

She observes that she doesn't feel surprised. An attack like that, in a random location, multiple times a year? This civilization is very impressive, from what she's seen of it, but not enough to survive that, not when their strongest ally has multi-hour response times and every engagement is at a time of the enemy's choosing.

"I'm assuming Dragon briefed you; let me know if I need to back up. I don't know why the gods who intervene so often on my planet intervene so little on yours. If I need to leave, it's because whatever that reason is applies to me. If I can stay, then I can explain my goddess and Her allies to others, and some of them may be chosen as I was. They'll start out much weaker than I am, but grow stronger by facing danger and challenge, and even the weakest priest can heal and create clean water and cast Stabilize. And there are benefits just from having people who are known to be aligned with a particular god, who would lose their powers if they betrayed that god's principles."

"I would not share information about the Evil gods, or the Neutral ones who make civilization weaker. I cannot guarantee that they will not intervene here if the Good ones start intervening. But the Good gods can find allies freely and those allies can work together, while the servants of the Evil gods are mostly desperate fools who fight each other as much as anyone else. I believe I can create a significant asymmetric advantage for Good. I can tell you more about the risks if you want to know; I welcome additional considerations."

"I don't think I can save your civilization alone. But I'm not alone, and maybe with Heaven behind me I can help you save yourselves."

Alexandria has met one god, and eaten from the corpse of another. They gave her incredible power, and put her in place to decide the fate of nations. And yet, on the whole, it would have better by far for everybody if she and the gods had never met.

Now, those gods clearly aren't the same kind of thing that Golarion has. Samora's type makes capes clerics that start strong, and get stronger over time. Modulo the occasional second trigger, powers just don't work that way. The things infesting Golarion have their own way of working, and their own values, that this child thinks she understands well enough to label as 'evil' and 'good'. She may even be right. But Alexandria didn't get this far -- didn't get humanity this far -- by hoping for the best. The burden of mankind's survival belongs to Cauldron, and they don't dare cede it to any ostensibly higher authority.

Though, no, she didn't call them 'good', did she. She said 'Good'; the capital letter was audible even through the cultural gap. This is a fundamental concept for her, maybe for her whole society. Striking that our languages are so similar, even though the underlying idea must be - wait.

She smiles more widely. "That's a heroic response. If you do choose to stay you'll be welcome; that much I can promise myself. But before you explain your goddess to anyone else, I want to understand her, and the philosophy behind her, for myself. In aid of that I have another question, one which may seem strange.

Are we speaking the same language?"

"Oh, no, almost certainly not, I have Truespeech. Is something translating oddly?"

Ah.  Truespeech.  Of course that exists, and Samora has it.  "And that means that you speak in your language and I understand you in mine?

I ask because I think there was a miscommunication earlier, close to the heart of what I want to understand. You said to Dragon that Holy Smite does 'Good' damage. We took that to mean that it was an effective, powerful attack; one that did more damage than a merely 'decent' attack, but not as good as an 'excellent' one." Alexandria hates spelling things out this much, it's so slow and inelegant, but she's not sure what else to do with a translation power like this. "But that wasn't it, was it? You meant that your attack was in some sense ontologically Good, that it hurt Behemoth through its Goodness instead of through its sharpness, or heat, for example. That suggests that Goodness as you know it is very different from our understanding.

So. You say you have a Good goddess. I believe you - " well, she believes that Samora believes it, close enough for this conversation " - but I need to hear much more, before I could hope to understand what you really mean. What is Good?"

A powerful person from another world has asked Samora about the nature of Good! Samora visibly takes a second to Lock In.

"Good is the flourishing of all beings. Good is life and health and freedom and happiness and friendship and love and laughter and peace. My goddess is the goddess of prioritization and defeating Evil and She's Good, and the god of farmers and hunters and family and duty is Good, and the goddess of love and art is Good, and the goddess of travel and dreams is Good, and the god of courage and parties is Good. Not all the gods whose works are helpful to humanity are Good, because a couple of them are Neutral, but all the Good gods are helpful. Good is helping people who need it and protecting the weak and building paradise in this world and the next. Good is driving off the Endbringers and healing the casualties and repairing the city, and it's raising your children well and sharing with your neighbors and doing your job as well as you can. There are a lot of ways to be Good and they're all necessary."

"And if you're thinking that something is missing from that description, the thing that's missing is Law. Law is keeping your word and being someone people can predict, being someone your allies can work with and your enemies can surrender to. It's telling the truth, and fair dealing in business, and taking your grudges to the Watch instead of settling them yourself. Whenever you benefit from something you could only get because someone knew what you'd do with it, that's Law. The Endbringer Truce is Law."

Alexandria nods, slowly. She's remembering the time she lost her eye, the time a teammate used a civilian as bait to keep a notorious villain in place for their ambush. She was so angry, then. She'd be angry if it happened now, too; ambushes don't work on the Siberian, so it would be a pure worthless waste of human life. But back then she was angry because using innocents as bait is wrong.

It's been a long time since she had the luxury of thinking so simply. Was it Good, by your lights, what we did back then? What we're doing now? Would Samora's goddess call their methods Evil, when they're prioritizing ruthlessly to slay the most evil thing there is? If so, well, someday Samora will learn. Or, no, probably she won't; if you serve a Good goddess, Samora said, you can't surrender your ideals without surrendering your powers too. You have to follow them, no matter where they take you.

And Samora didn't quite answer her question about Holy Smite, did she? Goodness is all those good things; Samora clearly believed that with every fiber of her soul. But it's also a way to hurt people, if you have the kinds of powers Samora does.

These aren't reasons not to work together. Lots of things can hurt people, and Good clerics with the simplest powers Samora described would be a huge boon, even if they couldn't lead. Capes die for all sorts of stupid unlikely reasons, despite Cauldron's work. It would be worth a lot, to add a few more percentage points to that survival rate. It's just a matter of retaining control.

"The greatest risk inherent in your plan, as I see it, is the potential involvement of the Evil and Chaotic gods. It could fail in several ways, but that's not a reason not to try. But if it could make things much worse than they are now, on net, then we have to think more carefully.

What sort of intervention would you expect? Would they create anti-clerics, who kill at a distance instead of healing? Would they send their own champions to Earth Bet, as I've begun to suspect your goddess sent you?"

She'll switch to Norwegian for that question, just as a test.

Samora gives no sign of noticing the language change and continues speaking in what sounds like English. "If the Evil gods intervene, I would expect it to be by choosing Evil clerics who channel negative energy, yes. I do not know whether my goddess sent me, but if she did, yes, it is possible other gods will do the same. The battles of the gods extend across many planets, and I do not know how expensive it was to send me--only that if it was the Inheritor's work, She must have believed it was the most effective use of those resources to accomplish Good. And gods are generally correct about such things, even with--oh. Prophecy isn't broken on this planet, is it?"

"Powers can sometimes show us the future, but never well," Alexandria says, very persuasively.

"I'll need to think about the implications of that later. I think you have another question about Good?"

Dangerous.  That particular question is fine, but maybe someone else should do the follow-up interviews, just to be on the safe side.

She'll switch to Spanish, just because she doesn't get to use it as much as she'd like. "I'm still wondering about your Holy Smite. Hurting people can be necessary to do Good, if I've understood your framework correctly, but is never Good as an end in itself. What does it mean, then, for an attack to do Good damage? What effect does it have on a human body?"

"Oh, I see. Yes, hurting people is never an end in itself, even if we sometimes have to hurt or kill to stop worse things from happening. Good damage is a type of damage that doesn't harm Good people, harms Neutral people some, and harms Evil people and especially beings from the Evil planes more.  It's very handy when you've got a bunch of allies and a bunch of enemies all in melee, at least if your allies are all either Good, or both Neutral and don't mind taking some weaker hits. And it gets through the resistance that Lower Planes beings have to being damaged. The other aligned damage types work symmetrically. I don't know if the gods made it be that way or if it's just inherently that way, but I don't know that about fire or acid either. The effect on the body is similar to fire or radiant* damage."

*Translator's note: not the same as damage from radioactivity exposure. More like damage from a very bright UV light.

"Type of damage" isn't a fundamental concept in Alexandria's ontology, the way it apparently(??) is in Samora's. She resists the urge to follow up with more detailed questions like "what does it do on a cellular level?" and "can it set fire to flammable evil targets?"; that's what power testing chambers are for.

"So Good and Evil aren't just properties of gods and goddesses, or ways of acting; normal people have it too, in a sense which your powers can act on. I wasn't present when your attack struck Behemoth, but field reports say it did affect him a little. We infer from this that Behemoth is Evil -- or at any rate, not Good? Does being Good or Evil have other effects that we could straightforwardly check for? Or for Law and Chaos?"

What would have happened if it struck Alexandria? Nothing, obviously, even Behemoth's famous kill aura can't touch her.

You've made it back up onto the roof by now. The sun is much higher in the sky, and on a different side of the building -- it must be a little after noon. Toward the east, everything's intact: giant, blocky buildings laid out in a grid, with shining towers in the distance. To the west it's the same, but cut with a wide, wavering swath of jagged rubble. One distant tower seems to have had a big chunk ripped out of it, and is noticeably leaning.

This was a big city, and still is; to the north there's the lake and field where you landed, but in every other direction it stretches as far as your eyes can see.

Samora takes a moment to scan the skyline, looking at the strange technology and the scale of the damage. 

"I have constant Detect Evil, and there are spells I could prepare to detect the other three. They only work on sufficiently powerful beings; most ordinary people don't show up as anything no matter what they've done. My range is too short to say for sure, but I would be very surprised if Behemoth wasn't Evil, if he's enough of a person to be responsible for his actions."

She doesn't say anything about Alexandria's alignment. One doesn't, generally. Alexandria isn't Evil, but if you go around reassuring people who haven't specifically asked about it, it gets to be conspicuous when you don't. 

Her turn for a question. "Downstairs, I was asking about capes, and when I asked how people come to be capes, they said people just woke up one morning with powers. They were lying."

Huh, so Alexandria isn't Evil; if she were, it would show on Samora's face.  A good sign, in terms of longer-term collaboration.  And Behemoth is a person, at least according to this strange world's rules.  The Endbringers can plan somewhat, and bluff, but so can a dog.  Their real intelligence level isn't well-understood.  But the gods of this other world already have an opinion.  That would be pretty surprising, if the two had never encountered each other before today.  Or maybe they just made up their minds quickly. And I don't show Evil because I haven't done anything Evil since Samora arrived.

She accepts the change of topic with a nod. "They weren't quite lying, but they were holding something back. When a person gets powers, they always lose consciousness for a few moments, and so does every other powered person around them. We don't know why. We do know that it only happens at moments of extreme psychological strain; typically, the worst moment of that person's life." At least, up until then. "It's easier for people whose parents also had powers, but not really easy for anyone. Never ask a cape about the day they got their powers, not unless they bring the subject up themselves. Even among heroes, it can be a sensitive subject."

And then, as though the idea had just struck her, "Are animals ever Good or Evil, that you've seen? How smart do you have to be, before the gods begin to judge you?"

That's useful information; she will avoid prying.

"Hmm, you might say that question gets a bit circular, because one of the ways you can tell how much of a mind something has is if it has an alignment. Generally speaking most creatures that can use language can have alignments and vice versa, but there's edge cases both ways. Kids under twelve or so almost never have alignments, but I don't know if that's because they can't make the kinds of decisions you have to be able to make, or because most kids just don't do much. And then griffons and pegasi can't talk but can understand human speech, and pegasi have alignments and griffons don't." Shrug. 

"Pegasi are winged horses, and griffins are part lion, part eagle?"

Assuming Samora agrees: "As far as anyone knows, those creatures never existed in our world. They're what we call mythological: things we make up stories about, even though we know they aren't real." Like friendly gods. "Striking, that our worlds should overlap this way."

Alexandria's armband beeps twice, in a rather demanding way.

She barely glances at it. "It seems I'm needed elsewhere. We'll send you a phone - a way to communicate" she corrects. "Your new friends inside can show you how to use it. We'll have food for you, and a place to sleep, and if you have any other needs, please ask. Samora, I'm very glad to have met you, and I think in time the rest of the world will be too."

There are worlds where that isn't true but none, she thinks, where it's the wrong thing to say. She'll give Samora a very short beat to interrupt, and then she's up and gone.

A phone, or at any rate a rounded gray rectangle, does quickly appear, brought by a knee-high woman who runs incredibly fast.  If Samora so much as hints that she doesn't know how to use it she'll be instantly drowned in eager helpers.

The eager helpers will be much appreciated, because Samora cannot read any Earth languages! There's a spell she can prep tomorrow to get the ability to read for a couple hours per casting, but tonight she does not know what any of the symbols in the little glass box mean. She will occupy the approximate social role "charmingly confused exchange student" for as long as people want to tell her things.

That...is not a problem anyone was expecting her to have!  But plenty of the folks she's healed have time to kill before they catch their rides or teleports home, and they're willing to sit with her until, through pure repetition, she can receive calls and use the built-in map function.  If this can't be made to work, she can also have her choice of native guides.

(PRT-issue phones have about 40 hours of charge, so no one has to explain what electricity is or how to get it into the phone battery.  Just as well, since right now most parts of Denver are running on generators or not at all).

Samora dutifully memorizes the button for picking up calls and how to scroll around the map, and also where on the map the PRT building is. She is So Impressed by the size and detail of this map and the accuracy implied by people's apparent level of trust in it. 

And then if nobody needs her to do anything in particular, she'd like to spend a while walking around the city and getting a sense of it. She can aim to be at a particular place at a particular time if there's a time and a place it would help for her to be.

If people need her to be somewhere they can call her and say so, and if that somehow doesn't work the PRT can find the phone.  Probably that will happen around dinnertime, in 3 or 4 hours?

Then she will wander Denver until that happens!

Samora's conclusions from wandering Denver:

- This society is very rich. There are richer and poorer neighborhoods like she's used to and even the poor ones seem pretty rich. Even if there are a bunch of regular poor people out in the hinterlands, they're still quite rich on net.

- There's very little magic around, given how rich they are. Maybe capes are worse at crafting than wizards on average, or maybe they've all specced into fighting Endbringers (and each other) and don't have enough collective slack for crafting, or maybe they've gotten so good at doing things without magic that they just don't need crafters for anything.

- Almost nobody has pox scars and some people have scars from injuries that healed the long way, which squares with what she's heard about their healing situation.

- Cars will only go on the wide black part of the street and not the narrow gray part on either side, which is good, because it would cause a lot of trouble if she got hit by one. Also they obey the red and green and white and orange lights, except the ones that themselves have lights and make extra noise and clearly have priority over all the other ones. And they all smell terrible.

- When everyone can read you end up with so much text on everything.

- Crime: they have a basically normal amount of it. 

- Nobody has any kids??

There will be some more crime eventually, but not during the day and not in front of the obvious cape.

After a while, an unusually large car with a big window in the side stops by Samora, and a man leans out to offer her something he calls a "green chili burrito".  If you served in the Endbringer defense there's no charge!

And then, as the sun is just starting to set, Samora's phone starts to vibrate and sing.  The caller is a PRT officer; she explains that the teleports home are being arranged now, and would Samora please return to field hospital B?  If she likes, a guide can be sent to escort her.

She politely declines the burrito; it's a nice offer but what with all the Behemoth there might not be enough to go around.

She made sure not to go too far in any one direction; she can be back at Field Hospital B in about half an hour.

That's plenty.  Another large car is waiting for her; the boxy back end of it turns out to just have two long benches, about half-full of PRT officers (Samora can tell by the distinctive outfits and lack of masks).  The general vibe is "too tired for small talk, or to even look at each other much", but they just barely manage to nod to Samora when she arrives.  The car is even louder from the inside but the trip is short...

...and when you emerge you're greeted by a tall man in heavy blue power armor.

"Samora?" he asks, as though another woman in breastplate and shield might emerge from the car at any moment and he doesn't want to make a mistake.  "I'm Armsmaster, head of the Protectorate team in the city of Brockton Bay.  We had a discussion among the Protectorate leadership" - more like a five-sided knife fight, but despite his reputation Armsmaster can be diplomatic, a little, sometimes - "and we'd like to offer you guest quarters there for as long as you choose to stay.  You're free to make other choices, now or later, but we think Brockton Bay is the best environment for you to learn about our world and pursue your stated goals."  He shrugs, a little irritably.  "Of course, this may all be moot if you have to leave tomorrow, but we'll see."

"I have no reason to prefer anywhere else, but I'm curious what features of Brockton Bay make it the best option." 

"Some would require more context than you have now, but for example: one of our strongest powered healers is already based there.  Her healing has very different strengths and weaknesses than yours, and we hope you'll both be able to learn from and support each other."

"Oh, that is exciting, I'd be happy to meet her." No telling whether any given person will be cleric material without meeting them, or whether she'll be able to learn any of what they do, but if nothing else they can be a single destination for people who need healing and divide up according to their strengths.

Armsmaster nods crisply.  "Is there anything else you need to do before we depart?".  This is just a formality; it's not like she brought luggage.

Actually, if she's going to be in another city before her next spell prep, there is something. "If I can stay on this planet, I might be able to Raise some of the people who died today. The catch is that it requires intact remains and a diamond this big." She holds up two fingers at a distance indicating a smallish diamond of the type one might find as the centerpiece of a simple, tasteful engagement ring. "If those are available here, I should either stay here or be prepared to come back here or someone should determine the priority Raise Dead targets and I should bring them with me. I didn't want to mention it until I could be sure it wasn't false hope."

She can what.

"Diamond. Pure carbon in a tetrahedral lattice?"

"I'm sorry, I don't know what that means. They're stones, they can be white or clearish or yellow or brown? Kinda sparkly?" Would she know one if she saw one? Probably? She hasn't seen every kind of rock, there could be ones that look almost exactly like diamonds but aren't. "I think I would know one if I saw one."

His first thought is, obviously she can't do that, and if she could she wouldn't need a diamond, this is the point where the ruse breaks down somehow. But that thought doesn't go anywhere; all he can do is be alert, and test her claim as quickly as possible.

"Hold the Brockton Bay teleport," he says into his helmet.  A beat to switch channels, then: "Sergeant, I need your squad to locate a jewelry store. Purchase diamond jewelry in a variety of sizes. Start with engagement rings and work your way up. Use mine, I'm at Field Hospital B. Highest priority. Endbringer cleanup. Hand that off or get back to it later, this is more important. That's classified. Keep the receipts, we'll probably want to return some. Good."

After that, it's not long at all until a group of PRT soldiers is trying to hand Armsmaster a big bag full of elegantly presented jewelry. It was a real pain in the neck to obtain, and settling up with the owner later is going to be tricky, but they were acting under documented orders so everything's fine. Still, it's probably best to leave Armsmaster holding the bag, so to speak.

Armsmaster doesn't want it. "They're for her," he says, pointing to Samora. "Do any of those look right?"

He's still on high alert, but he doesn't know for what. This can't possibly be a scheme to steal diamonds. If you had Samora's powers you could just earn them, fairly and openly. If it's a scheme, it's something weirder. If it's not...?

That's almost enough time for Samora to finish boggling about what Armsmaster said on the radio! And when they get here she's right back to boggling!

"These look right but I can't prep Raise Dead until tomorrow, and why are they cut up? You just wear them as jewelry? People who aren't kings or archmages wear diamond jewelry?" 

Okay, getting it together. "This one and the, secondary ones, on this piece are too small, this one is borderline, these ones are good for sure, these ones can be used for spells I'm not strong enough to cast so it would be inefficient to use them for a Raise Dead. But we might be bottlenecked on spell slots, praise be to Abadar. I can do three a day, maximum age of the remains is eleven days but there's a second circle spell that makes the sand stop falling on that and I can cast seven of those a day."

Ah, she meant that some of the people who died today could be raised later, not that she could do the raising today.  Did she make that ambiguous on purpose? Armsmaster needs to find the time to actually build that lie-detector software he's been daydreaming about; it would solve so many of his problems. But right now he's unprepared, so he continues to feel intensely suspicious without any clear target for his suspicions.  Distracted, he replies "Married women frequently wear diamond rings.  It's common in other jewelry as well. The cut improves the look, I believe." He catches himself trying to remember if he's ever seen an uncut diamond -- maybe at a science museum? Inane.

What should he be doing, or asking, if this is real? It's a hard thought to hold on to, but one thing suggests itself right away: "Thank you, Sergeant, dismissed."

He'll watch the squad leave, trying to think. After a moment he manages, "We can arrange to have you returned to the bodies tomorrow. How intact do they have to be?"

"If someone is missing a hand or a foot or something they come back still missing it. If their head's off it's no good. Burned or full of holes is fine."

Armsmaster nods jerkily, and turns toward the teleport zone. "Well. We'll see what happens tomorrow. In the meantime, if you'd please step into the painted circle..."

Meanwhile, at Cauldron HQ

It's a small gathering tonight: just Doctor Mother, Alexandria, the Number Man, and Contessa. Eidolon is busy in ways he can't shake without suspicion, and this conversation might involve topics they don't want to discuss in front of Legend. They all have Alexandria's report, and Dragon's, and Armsmaster's, and haven't yet gotten over them.

Doctor Mother is skeptical. She's been running a world-saving secret society for a long, long time, and, yes, she always knew that she'd need some kind of unlikely-looking longshot in order to actually win. Even so, this is strange. Real, general resurrection is not a power anyone has ever shown before. The closest she knows of are unsatisfying cases like the Butcher or Glaistig Uaine, and discrete power limits ("three times per day"!) are just as rare. And the Entities are supposed to have influenced every alternate Earth, in greater or lesser ways. For things to be different in Samora's home...it doesn't fit what she's seen of the multiverse.

The Number Man is running projections in his head. Suppose a given Good cleric can heal K injuries per day, bounded by availability, movement, and resource constraints. If Good clerics are made at a linear rate, or a sigmoid with various parameters, what impact should we expect on social tension as predicted by my existing models? The effect isn't strictly positive, since criminals will also have access. The effect of Evil clerics can likewise...

He hasn't made up his mind about Samora yet; he just hates having arguments about things before he knows whether they'll matter.

And Contessa will Do Something About It when someone tells her what, specifically, they want done.

It is, as ever, Doctor Mother's job to direct the conversation. "There are two questions I want to settle tonight. First of all: what do we think is really going on? What else can we do to learn about this situation, ideally without trusting Samora herself? Most likely she isn't trying to deceive us," a little acknowledging smile for Alexandria, "but she may be deceived."

Alexandria shrugs. "Most simply, we can wait until tomorrow. If she's telling the truth, and she has to leave, we can stop thinking about it. If she can't raise the dead after all, or there's some drawback that makes her power effectively unusable, then we can stop trying to model it." She nods to the Number Man.

"Assume she stays, then, and claims that she can't or shouldn't return to her own dimension." He hasn't decided how to model the resurrections yet. ...if we assume for simplicity that the value of non-powered resurrections at such a low rate rounds to zero...

"Contessa, do you see a path to opening negotiations with Heaven directly, or to induce clerics without Samora's direct involvement?"

Contessa looks; she barely distinguishes between herself and her power, anymore.

Path to make contact with Samora's alleged goddess.

None found

Path to visit the Heaven she spoke of.

None found

Path to get Samora to open a way to Heaven.

None found

Path to visit Golarion.

None found

Path to get Samora to send someone to Golarion.

None found

Path to create another cleric.

None found

Path to remove Samora's powers.

None found

"It's blocked," she hears herself say. "No paths to anything like that."

Almost everyone is pathable, except the Endbringers and Scion, so probably that means the divine elements aren't real. But just in case: "Can you path anything to do with her at all?"

Path to feed Samora a delicious muffin.

Six steps

Path to kill Samora.

Nineteen steps. That sure was a lot of plastic explosive!

Path to kill Samora without collateral damage.

Forty-four steps. She does know how to use that sword, and "sneaking up on her while she's asleep" doesn't seem to be an option, for whatever reason.

Path to kill Samora while she's asleep.

None found

Path to kill Samora while she's unconscious.

Forty-eight steps. She's not too Brute for tinkertech tranquilizers, but it takes a little while.

Whatever. Path to get Samora to cast the spell that reaches the other world.

None found

Path to get Samora to cast a spell.

Twelve steps. Here's what Blade Barrier looks like!

Path to get Samora to cast Holy Smite.

None found

Path to get Samora to cast Raise Dead.

None found

Path to speak with someone Samora has resurrected.

None found

Contessa looks tense, at least if you've spent twenty-plus years working with her. "She's not unpathable. I can kill her. But I can't read anything to do with her goddess or the other world, and only a little to do with her powers. Nothing at all with Raise Dead."

Doctor Mother nods, as though she expected that answer. She doesn't have anyone to perform that for, here, it's just habit. Inside she's disturbed. Contessa's powers don't work partway; either she sees the path to her chosen goal, or she doesn't. It suggests another possibility: that Samora's gods are real, but unpathable, like the Endbringers are.

"That naturally leads to the second question I wanted to address tonight: should we kill her? If we believe her story in broad strokes, then we're facing an incursion of powerful forces with unknown goals. Right now we may be able to shut them out, but if that chance exists at all the window is certainly closing."

Alexandria stirs uneasily. "Samora believed, very strongly, in the things she told me. Goodness and Law, as she believed her goddess defined them, really mattered to her."

Doctor Mother nods. "And Scion is the world's greatest hero. Ask anyone."

She sighs. "I don't like it either. This woman has, so far, done only good. But our charge is all humanity. We can work with other powers, we can try to get their help if the price is not too high, but we cannot give up our ability to steer. That's what it is to take responsibility, instead of giving it away."

Yeah, point taken. This isn't about Samora, particularly. If she's just a powerful, delusional healer then there's no issue.

"Kurt, what's your opinion?"

"In the modal scenario most of us die. We have to get out of distribution. Safety is risk." Most of the Number Man's attention is still on his models.

"Yes, of course. But this is a bigger, riskier bet than anything else we've attempted. The vials are dangerous, yes, but we can contain the bad outcomes and sometimes even turn them to our advantage. Here we could wind up like the man in the story who solved a plauge of rats with a plague of snakes. And if Evil clerics who can kill in an area just by deciding to start showing up in numbers..."

Path to meet an Evil cleric

None found

"So far I can't find any."

"Check once per day from now on, please, even if we decide to take drastic action."

The Number Man leans back in his chair. "I've finished what look like the primary scenarios. Samora herself, with only the powers we've seen so far, adds between two and six years to the central collapse timelines, mostly through Endbringer relief. The rise of Good clerics asymmetrically, assuming Contessa can suppress the Evil ones the way she does cape assassinations, add between minus one and nine years, turning on how we model the societal propensity for violence in a world where severe injuries are easily healed. Neither factor changes the sign of the collapse curve. The impact of Good clerics in the dispersed-survival scenario is likely high, but can't be assessed without more data."

That feels right. Earth Bet can have nice things, sometimes, but never quite enough of them to be safe.

"I'd like to meet her, but the risks are substantial. Rebecca, did she hint at all about whether her Evil-detecting ability would work over a video call?"

Right. Alexandria still read as non-Evil despite the things she's done for Cauldron; the Number Man, who was known as Harbinger back when he was helping found the Slaughterhouse Nine, definitely won't.

She shakes her head. "We'll have to find out both what sorts of people Samora reads as Evil, and how she deals with them. I'll have Armsmaster's team study it. The pretext will be that we want to use Samora's vision to try and refine our understanding of her goddess' morality. Based on everything we've seen so far, she'll go along."

"We can arrange some uncontrolled-looking Evil encounters, in contexts where lethal violence isn't necessary. Contessa, do you see a path to that?"

Path to a safe encounter between Samora and a villain.

Fifty-three steps. It takes a lot of work to set everything up tonight!

Hmm. Path to a safe encounter between Samora and a villain tomorrow.

Fourteen steps. She didn't use any of her flashier powers in the fight, strangely enough, just some Brute speed and toughness.

Path to a safe encounter between Samora and a villain tomorrow where she defeats them with Holy Smite.

None found

...where she uses that whirling blades power.

None found

...where she heals them afterwards?

None found

"I can set that up for today or tomorrow, but she doesn't use any of her powers except the Brute ones."

"But you can see her tomorrow? She's not leaving?"

Path to feed Samora a delicious muffin tomorrow.

Seven steps

Path to watch Samora leave this dimension.

None found

Path to get Samora to heal someone injured tomorrow, in any context at all.

None found

"I can. Just, nothing to do with her powers, even the ones we've seen her use."

Doctor Mother pulls herself back on topic, with an effort. "Samora's powers come from her goddess, she says. Whatever she's wrong about she's likely right about that. And her goddess appears to be unpathable. Should we kill her tonight?"

"No. Sacrificing innocents for a good cause is one thing; here we'd be sacrificing them to our own fears. We don't know enough to justify it."

"Also no. This is a good gamble."

It's in Contessa's employment contract that no one will make her answer questions like that.

It's a relief, on the whole. "All right. We'll leave her alive and continue to monitor, both directly at Brockton Bay and for worldwide influence. Alexandria will be the point of contact in the rare case that we can't work through the BB Protectorate. How did she come to be there, by the way?"

"It was Dragon's idea originally, for closeness to Panacea."

"Well, it's convenient; they have a rich rogue and villain scene, to study Good and Evil in the wild. We'll do so through Contessa where we can, and in live action otherwise."

Everyone nods. There's a little more discussion of practical details, and then the meeting breaks up.

And here's Brockton Bay, Samora! It's full of tall shiny buildings, like Denver was, but there are far more people out on the streets. And it smells a little better than Denver did: similar, but sprinkled with sea salt instead of ash and charred rock.

The Protectorate HQ turns out to be offshore, built on top of an enormous metal platform that's only reachable by a shining road of force. That's where most people are heading; it's been a punishingly long day, and they want to unwind in a quiet place and then sleep. There's an unstated assumption that you're going to want the same thing.

She follows the crowd, but right now what she wants most is more information. She has a lot of thinking to do but she'd rather do it later and better than do it right now while missing something that turns out to be the key to everything. Probably everyone with powers is too tired from the fighting to want to talk, right now, but if there's a logistical support person who didn't get in a teleport and doesn't mind explaining Earth technology and society to a strange visitor . . . ?

Absolutely!  The offshore base has unpowered guards, to process visitors and the like.  It's one of the most prestigious and least interesting positions in the whole Brockton Bay PRT, and on the evening after an Endbringer attack they have lots of time to entertain random questions from a visitor. They've been told their guest is a cape from an alternate Earth with less technology, which is enough to give them a basic sense of what to tell Samora about until they get to know her.

After some of that, a lawyer appears! She's also here to answer Samora's questions, and incidentally give her a quick rundown of the laws of the country she's visiting. Samora is technically an illegal alien right now, so sometime in the next few days they'll have her sign a statement saying that she didn't come her on purpose and intends to follow the laws of her host nation, and then they'll fast track an exceptional-circumstances visa, no problem.

This can all eat up as much time as Samora wants it to, before she's ready to retire for the evening.

Samora appreciates the orientation and especially getting the legalities sorted out! And once she knows some more about this planet and everyone is going to bed for the night, she will go to her assigned guest quarters and do her thinking.

There are several entangled questions here. Start by laying them out and mapping the dependencies between them.

1. Why did her teleport go here and not the Worldwound?

2. Why do the gods intervene so rarely and subtly here compared to on Golarion?

3. How much impact, in terms of improving and safeguarding the world, does she have in expectation here versus on Golarion?

4. What course of action best serves her interests/the Inheritor's interests/the cause of Good?

Question 4 is technically multiple questions but she doesn't see any reason, yet, that the answers might come apart here, so leave it as one. If the answer to question 2 doesn't affect whether the Inheritor wants her to stay here, question 4 collapses to question 3. If the answer to question 1 is that the Inheritor sent her here, the answers to questions 4 and 3 follow pretty straightforwardly from that, so see if that's solveable first.

After a few minutes of turning question 1 over in her head, it's pretty clear that she's not going to become sufficiently certain of an answer that she can skip everything else. Teleports simply do not become Interplanetary Teleports for no reason; the power has to come from somewhere. She's not enough of a wizard to rule out that permanently burning out the boots might provide enough magic to do that exactly once, but she also has no reason to believe that's what happened, and anyway Detect Magic says her boots are fine and still have two charges. A god could certainly have done it, and it seems likely that an Evil god could have put her directly on top of Behemoth and gotten her killed that way if that was what one had been aiming for. Conversely, appearing somewhere she had the opportunity to save a lot of lives is evidence the Inheritor sent her. Also you'd expect it to be cheaper for a god to move Her own cleric than someone else's. But just because she isn't thinking of a non-divine explanation doesn't mean the divine explanation is correct. It could have been something on this end grabbing her somehow. It could have been another planar rift situation, goodness knows there's enough of those in her life, though if it's that she should consider that she might be in a demiplane and not on the Material. It could be something that will never occur to her if she spends a year thinking about it. So, the most likely specific guess is "the Inheritor sent her" but she's not ready to say that's more likely than not.

What are the options for question 2? The obvious one is "none of the gods wanted to be the first to start doing things because then all the others would start doing things and it would just be a budget sink". In that case, either there's an explicit agreement to keep it that way or there isn't. If there is an explicit agreement, and Samora is accidentally breaking it, when then? She didn't get renounced the moment she landed, which is what she'd be inclined to expect in that situation, so the next likely case is "getting her back off the off-limits planet as soon as possible".

Which might, now that she thinks of it, be "the next time she uses the boots" and not, as she had previously been considering in the back of her mind, "the next time she gets the opportunity to prepare a Plane Shift". It's getting close to midnight when the charges on the boots should reset; she should try using them again just in case she's supposed to do that to get home and it's cheaper to mess with a teleport than just move her for some reason. It doesn't seem likely, putting it that way, but it's a cheap test. Should she tell someone? No, everyone is asleep and she warned them she might vanish in the morning: if someone comes looking for her in the morning and she's not there, it'll be plenty clear why. 

Teleport across the room?

Okay, that worked normally. Weak evidence that it's fine for her to stay on this planet but she should keep the "explicit non-intervention agreement" option in mind because it's the biggest opportunity for the right thing to do to be deeply counterintuitive. 

If there isn't an explicit agreement she's violating, then what? She doesn't know how much budget starting a church on a new planet costs, or how much cheaper having one existing cleric makes it, and all her guesses in this area are going to be very low confidence. That said, she'd expect it to help a fair bit? She doesn't have the Acts memorized or anything, but she can summarize or paraphrase big chunks of them, and now that she's here that saves the cost of dropping a translated copy or whatever gods usually do. And she can answer questions and give advice and share what's been found to work and what hasn't, ongoingly. And she can do that, to greater or lesser degrees, for a whole bunch of Good and Neutral gods, while steering well clear of any information on the Evil gods. That has to be an asymmetric advantage. If she got here by some accident it would be expensive for another god to replicate, great. If she was sent here, either the Evil gods aren't going to contest this planet and she should go full steam ahead, or the Evil gods are going to contest this planet and she should go full steam ahead while on the lookout for deadly coincidences, assassination attempts, and especially clerics of Evil gods showing up in the maximally advantageous-for-them places. Which means keeping back as much information as she reasonably can on her items, the less healing-oriented cleric spells, the details of her Protection from Evil, etc. Or the Old Fiend might just smite her directly, which is a frightening thought but not one she can reasonably do anything about. It hasn't happened yet, anyway.

The other big possibility, for question 2, is that the gods don't do much here because they for some reason can't. She should be prepared for the possibility that she won't get spells tomorrow. This takes a lot of turning over in her head to really feel emotionally ready for it, but she gets there eventually. If she doesn't get spells tomorrow, she's a competent swordswoman who knows a fair bit about Good and Law and can Stabilize and Create Water and notice things other people don't and teleport three times a day, and she'll do the best she can for the cause of Good with that set of resources.

That feels like it might be it for question 2, for the moment, apart from the non-intervention agreement case, so best get back to that. If she's not supposed to be on this planet she needs to Plane Shift off it. How will she know to do that? Well, she could try a Commune. Apparently diamonds are cheap, when nobody's burning them for spells. Maybe cinnamon is cheap here too. Or maybe it doesn't grow here and she'll need to figure out how to prepare Commune incense out of whatever plants this planet has.

(Phrenk could have done that easily. She misses him already. If she stays here she should send him a Sending. . . . If she stays here she should send her parents a Sending. This train of thought is getting shelved until she's done with the main questions.)

Anyway. Communes. She doesn't know all the math for doing Communes efficiently, but it might be worth one anyway, here. She certainly has enough possible plans and subplans to fill one.

The other possibility: it's known that one of the cheaper ways for gods to intervene is to put a thumb on the scale during their clerics' spell prep. Samora has gotten a spell she hadn't been going to ask for once. It's not common, and there's a lot more ambiguity and room for miscommunication than there is with a properly conducted Commune, but this seems like the sort of situation where it might happen. Therefore:

It is the case that Samora will attempt to prep five Raise Deads and no Plane Shifts tomorrow. It is the case that if she receives an unrequested Plane Shift, she will use it immediately at the end of her spell preparation to Plane Shift to Axis with the intent of returning promptly to Golarion.

Now, what to do in the event that she doesn't get a mandatory Plane Shift? In that case she'll assume that being on this planet is not causing the Inheritor more than one spell-prep-nudge of inconvenience and proceed to doing the most she can for the cause of Good on whatever planet best enables that. Which might well be this one. This one is only humans, apparently, so who knows which planet has more people, but they're both under existential threat and need something unexpected to stabilize themselves against those threats.

If she can start one or more Good churches she should almost certainly stay, but even if she can't, there are other people on Golarion who can do what she does and here she's much harder to replace. By the same token, someone like Sanguine who can do only a couple things, but can but do them all day without limits, would be a bigger deal on Golarion than he seems to be here. 

That suggests that what she should be doing is trying to get reliable back-and-forth travel between Earth and Golarion, possibly using the locals' existing knowledge of interacting with what they call "other Earths". But that, even more than starting churches, is something to be approached carefully and in cooperation with the governments here. Both worlds have resources to trade, but they also have dangers, and people whose minds bend more to conquest than cooperation. Something to think about.

The one case where it seems most important that she not stay here, given the option, is the case where everything she does will be matched by the Evil gods and Earth will end up worse off, or no better off, than before. How likely is that?  More likely than she'd like, but still not very, she thinks. It's always possible that the Evil gods will spend vastly more on this planet than the Good ones, but they could do that with or without Samora being here, and anything spent on this planet can't be spent elsewhere, so the question is, assuming a balance of investment, who wins? If the Inheritor sent her here, She thinks it's a good idea for Samora to be here so it can be assumed to be one. If the Inheritor didn't send Samora here but now she can operate here freely, that's an asymmetric advantage worth using. And more broadly, this question isn't a bet on her own skill. It's a bet on the people of Earth, on whether they stand to gain more from working with the Good gods than they stand to lose from being manipulated by the Evil ones, and from what she's seen she's inclined to take that bet. These are a people who send their strongest warriors across the world to help a city in need, people who invented the Endbringer truce and held it for years without a single Lawful priest. She knows she's mostly seen them at their best; she thinks their best is good enough.

Her boots recovered their spent charges hours ago; the sky is beginning to lighten. She stops pacing her room and kneels, sword in her hands.

And that fragment of Iomedae which is there for Samora every morning is there again, bright and exhilarating and the same as always, a well of magic from which Samora can drink freely. No spell structures leap into her mind unbidden; she can prepare whatever she wants. 

Except Plane Shift. No Plane Shifts today. That spell structure is missing as though it was never there, no more available than Teleport or Cloudkill.

Well. That settles that, then. Two Raise Deads and a Blade Barrier at sixth, please, and three Raise Deads and a Dispel Evil at fifth, and five Restorations and a Holy Smite at fourth. At third, four Remove Diseases and two Symbols of Healing and the one Searing Light. At second, Bless Weapon and seven Gentle Repose. At first, the required Shield of Faith, plus four Comprehend Languages, plus a Bless and an Air Bubble in case of emergencies. 

She wonders, as many have before, if the point of required domain spells that can't be turned into healing is to simplify the tradeoff between combat and non-combat spells on days you're probably not going to have any combat. She prays for wisdom and discernment and courage and the leverage to get this planet onto a better path.

And when she's done, she goes looking for Armsmaster or Dragon.

This place is a maze, and some areas are restricted, but a passing staffer can help out:

"Dragon's a Tinker, miss, she operates out of Canada somewhere. But Armsmaster should be in his office. I'll let him know you're coming."

Armsmaster should not be in his office. Armsmaster should be asleep. But he had to file a report about his last conversation with Samora, and then there was a long argument about who Samora should Raise today (which probably would have been much worse except that nobody involved including Armsmaster really believed she could do it), and then he still hadn't done his routine post-Endbringer log review and maintenance so he needed to catch up on that, and then he got an incredibly bizarre report from Dragon that he still hasn't figured out what to do with. Test it, fine, yes, but then what?

The Protectorate has some of the most powerful coffee in the world, so he trusts that his voice, through the mild filter in his mask, is only normally tired. "Ah. Samora. Good, you're awake. And...still with us. I wanted to discuss the Raise Dead. The consensus is that, at least for today, we should prioritize likelihood of success. I shared your criteria with the Denver office, and they've produced a list of fatal Behemoth casualties for your review. Please pick whichever your power is most likely to work on, and we'll have them conveyed here for you later today."

He slides her a folder full of phenomenally high-quality pictures of things that, frankly, are best not seen in phenomenally high quality. "Mostly intact corpse", after a Behemoth fight, means "hideously burned and/or electrocuted", plus the occasional "lucky" impact that kills without bursting the body. These particular corpses vary a little in how intact the head is, but it's always there.

She flips through the pictures like she's seen worse, albeit less because she's seen worse gore and more because there are worse things a man can be than dead. Today she can Raise five and buy another eleven days for seven; that is unlikely to change, so can be extrapolated out to . . . oh no, math. Can she have a pencil and paper? 

She can get fifty people raised and seventy people preserved over the next ten days before time runs out for the rest. The preservation can be renewed indefinitely so "Raised in the first ten days" and "preserved in the first ten days" can be separate groups and then she can spend the next eleven days clearing out backlog. She's not good enough at math to figure out how to extend that indefinitely as people die of something other than Behemoth, except that she can always preserve more people than she Raises and should avoid the trap of keeping people preserved forever who are never going to get Raised. But for now she should just pick a hundred and twenty, and five especially likely candidates for today.

It is, she should warn them, possible for a soul to refuse to return. This doesn't usually happen, especially for people who died in combat in the prime of their life and double especially for people who get Raised in the first couple weeks of death, but it could happen. The biggest risk is people who lived bad lives, repented of their sins, died heroically and reached paradise*, and are sufficiently relieved by this that they don't want to take their chances with living and dying again. She absolutely understands the importance of giving heroes and villains who died in Endbringer fights the same access to Raise Deads if that's how the truce is interpreted, so she doesn't want any details on any of these people, she just wants to prepare everyone for the possibility that four people will come back and one will choose to stay dead. She apologizes in advance for any PR trouble if that happens. With that said: these five corpses are the best prospects.

*Translator's note: colloquial term for any afterlife someone is glad to have gone to. Deliberately vague to avoid discourse over whether Axis or the Maelstrom is more fun. 

Armsmaster finds that he isn't, yet, capable of asking any questions that assume this will work, such as "how does your society figure out who should stay dead and who should live again?".  Especially since...undetectably behind his mask, he glances back toward the icon for Dragon's report.  He manages instead, "Very well, we'll have them transported. They should arrive by midafternoon".

He's so tired. He needs time, time to think and to loop in Alexandria and to sleep. Does he have something for Samora to do in the meantime...? Ah.

"We sent a message to Panacea's mother. Ah, Panacea is the healer I mentioned last night. She and her sister, who's also a hero, expressed an interest in meeting you. They want to take you to the mall - " how will her translation power deal with "mall", do they have anything bigger than a village market where she's from " - to a place where you can buy clothing, and whatever else you need. And, it's a normal activity for young people, so it will also give you a chance to observe more of our culture." He's basically just quoting Brandish's email now, which he strongly suspects was quoting her daughter, but, what the hell, it makes sense. He and Brandish can chuckle politely about it, the next time they cross paths at one of those mayoral functions.

"If you're interested, I expect they could be ready to pick you up by the time you finish breakfast. See the desk sergeant on your way out; he'll have a card for you that will let you draw on our accounts. It isn't unlimited, but it should easily cover anything you'd buy today." He pauses; he has ever met Victoria Dallon. "Though you might ask Panacea, if you're not sure." he amends.

The Earth clothing system where you have a massive pile of clothes and wear a new set every day and wash them all in a batch in a technological device is still very weird to her, but it has its own internal logic. The system where instead of getting paid she gets given the things she needs is exactly what she was expecting two days ago, albeit from a different organization, but is being implemented kind of incoherently. Ah, well.

"I'd be happy to go to the mall* with Panacea and her sister. There's no particular need to wait for me to have breakfast."

*Translator's note: the concept she's thinking of would be more perfectly translated as "bazaar" but the translation magic privileges transitive and round-trip consistency a bit.

Blink. "Do you. Have a dietary restriction? Does your goddess demand that you eat in particular ways, or at particular times?"

Then, in case that sounds like a non sequitur: "People are usually hungry, the day after Endbringer fights."

"I'm a bit odd even on my home planet; I had a magic accident as a kid and now I don't need to eat or sleep. It did some other things too but that's the relevant bit."

"It's like that part of her metabolism is just for show." I see.

But all he says out loud is, "I see. In that case, I'll let them know right away. I'll give them your phone number, so that they can tell you when they're nearby."

This leaves Samora with a little time to kill, but before too long...

"Hello? This is Panacea, calling for Samora? Uh, Armsmaster called my mom last night -- our mom -- and said you wanted to meet up?"

There's a crackling sound in the background, but her voice is still understandable.

"Yes, hello! I think it would be interesting to meet a local healer and talk shop. Also I've been told I don't have an appropriate type and amount of clothes and I'm supposed to get your advice on that," she adds with a laugh in her voice. "Where would you like me to meet you? I'm sure I can find my way out of this building eventually."

"Yeah, the Rig can be a lot.  If you see one of the troopers you can ask them for directions, they don't mind.  Anyway, just get outside in front of the bridge and we'll come to you. My sister flies really fast."

And indeed, one maze of twisty passages later, you emerge to find a pair of young women waiting for you, one blonde and one brunette.

The one is wearing a heavy dark coat and thick boots. She gives you a wave, and smiles a little nervously. "I'm Panacea, better known as Amy."

"And I'm Victoria!" The taller blonde one isn't bothering with a coat, going with a pants-and-short-sleeve-shirt combo that Samora's untrained eye is starting to recognize as the local indoor standard. "We're so glad to meet you. Our mom -- she's a hero too -- told us how you saved all those people in Denver yesterday. And now you're going to be working here, at least for a while? Amazing."

She eyes Samora thoughtfully, lingering on the sword and shield. "I'll just order us a cab real quick, and you two can get acquainted!" She takes a few steps back with a fending little please-wait gesture, and pulls out her own phone.

"Pleased to meet you both! So, Amy, what sort of healing do you do? Or would you rather I went first?"

"Ah, we call it biokinesis.  When I touch someone, I can see all the cells of their body, all their blood, their bones, and I can fix the things that aren't working.  My power helps a lot with understanding it, but it still takes a little while to find all the problems and figure out what to do with them.  It's...intense."

"Wow, that's so complicated! But it must be really thorough. Someone would have told me if you could raise dead people with it, but can you regrow limbs? Can you make people stronger and healthier than they've ever been, or only put them back how they used to be?"

She sighs.  "I can regrow limbs a little, but my power can't just give you a new hand, I have to make a hand out of something else living, so that part can get tricky." And icky. "I can stick them back on if you get to me right after they get chopped off, that's not hard. But yeah, I can make people healthier. I can fix up their eyesight, tone their muscles...I try to do things like that if there's time, especially if they got attacked, or something, just to make it up to them.  It's nice to help."  It's nice to do something more interesting than attaching torn arteries for the millionth time, is what, but honestly her spa-in-a-can routine is starting to get old, too.

"What about you?  I heard it was really fast, but the details didn't make sense."  She has already decided that she will not die of envy when Samora explains it.

"Mine's a lot, hmm, stupider? There's this stuff called positive energy, and dumping it into people can fix a lot of problems but not replace missing parts or cure diseases. And there's a couple of other spells for things like curing diseases or fixing energy drain or raising the dead, and every morning I choose what spells to prepare, but most of them I can turn into more positive energy. So I can fix anything that can be solved with enough positive energy and otherwise it's very limited and hit-or-miss. I wonder what watching someone get healed with positive energy looks like to your power. Maybe you'd be able to, hmm, catch it? And get it to do things it's normally too undirected for."

Snrk.  "I think most powers are stupid that way. We have this Ward Clockblocker who freezes people in time, and nobody knows how that works, including him. He just decides when it should happen, and then it does. He cant even control how long it lasts! My sister takes college classes on powers and she says that's normal, most powers don't need thinking about."

and Amy's doesn't either, really, what's challenging is to get it to stop

Wait, should she have mentioned Clockblocker? Samora will hear about him eventually but it doesn't make a good first impression, does it? If Carol finds out she said that...well, maybe Samora's translation power won't explain the joke.

Wait, raise the dead? "What do you mean, raise the dead? Can I watch?" Wow, way to sound normal, Amy.. "I mean with my power? I probably won't be able to do anything with it. Not with positive energy either, that really sounds like normal power bullshit, no offense. But it'd be interesting." And she really, really needs something interesting in her life.

"I'd be happy to have you watching if the logistics work out! Even if you don't turn out to be able to do anything with it, it's still neat." 

And then Victoria puts away her phone and spins back around.  She only caught the end of that, but it sounds like things are going great. "Hey, the car will meet us at the end of the bridge, past that checkpoint there.  But we've got a few minutes, no rush." She'll turn and start ambling down the force bridge.

It does not take that long to book a cab in Brockton Bay. She wanted to give the healers a chance to talk, and she wanted to give herself a chance to think a little more.

Armsmaster, that dork, said Samora was wearing a "medieval-period costume, including sword and shield". And that was kinda right, she sure is bringing her sword and shield with her to the mall, but the fabric of the shirt-thing she has under her breastplate doesn't look like what you'd get if you asked a good costumer to make you an undershirt, or a bad costumer, either. It just looks like clothes, maybe hand-weaved (handwoven? They both sound wrong). Kinda the cloak too, even though it's so fancy. Victoria knew Samora didn't know about cell phones, and that's one thing, maybe her people just didn't invent them for whatever reason, but now she's thinking the gap goes back a lot further than that.

She'd decided on the way over that she wasn't going to ask Samora any questions about her home planet, just in case it made her homesick. But now she's thinking maybe that won't work, because she doesn't know what Samora will think is weird or confusing or scary, and apparently no one thought to check even though she's talked to like twenty high-rank PRT guys already. She needs a new angle, fast.

"So, Samora," she'll call over her shoulder, "what do you think of our planet so far?" This might lead to her saying "I don't like how you guys get attacked by giant monsters all the time," but if she does then honestly fair, Victoria doesn't like that either.

"Your wealth and technology and disaster response procedures are impressive! Not having wizards or empowered priests or anybody other than humans is very strange. Or perhaps it's strange that both our planets have humans and also that you only have one kind of people."

Okay.  That doesn't sound like Samora's fighting the trauma of being torn from everything she knows and loves, that sounds like she's on an adventure.  Cool.  She decides to risk another question: "A 'wizard', that's another kind of power, like a cleric?" She would love to talk foreign power classifications with the new cape, and she can share their classification scheme to keep it fair. She'll leave the "more than one kind of people" thing for Amy to ask about if she wants.

Amy does want; she replies so fast she actually talks over her sister. "Other kinds of people? Uh, non-human people?"

"Wizardry is a kind of magic you can learn by being very smart and studying a lot; I'm not smart enough to get anywhere with it but some people can get really powerful. And yeah, we have so many kinds of people! Trolls and gnomes and drow and mitflits and morlocks and kobolds and goblins and caligni and urdefhans and elves and dwarves and halflings and crowfolk and catfolk and dragons and that's definitely not all of them--destrachans, I forgot destrachans, and loads of people I've never heard of because they only live in the oceans or the deep Darklands or Tian Xia. Or on other planes, though that doesn't really count as Golarion having them except that they visit."

"Do wizards also heal people or do they do something else?  Are there more kinds of powers, or just those?  We have someone named Myrddin who calls himself a wizard but as far as anyone can tell his powers work the same way everyone else's do."

"That's crazy, that's so many different...species?" It sounds like species; they can't possibly all be interfertile, right? "What are they like?"

How come their visitor had to be a member of the one species she already knows everything about?

Those answers, and the answers to the many excited followup questions, will carry you all the way to the mall.

This is so weird. In a good way! They have different powers! Different kinds of different powers! Everyone thought the alternate Earths were all pretty similar to Earth Bet, and right here right now she's the first one to learn how wrong that is!

Well, not quite; you can learn a lot from a person very quickly if you're running Path simulations of them instead of talking to them.

Ominous interjections aside, you are now standing inside your first ever American mall.  It's still early in the day so there aren't a lot of people around, but it's brightly lit, brightly colored, and full of little shops for your convenience.  Victoria wants to take you clothes shopping, but is there anything else in particular you'd like to see or do?

Oh yes. Samora definitely knows how to go shopping. She is so good at shopping. "So do you guys have any equivalent of magic items? I know I'm only authorized to get clothes right now but I'd like to know what to save up for. And you might have things that I've never even thought were possible."

Blink.  "You usually can't buy tinkertech, it mostly just works for the person who made it."  Let's leave aside, for now, complications like the Dragonslayers; it's not like you can get a Dragonslayer suit at the mall anyway.

Time to Test A Theory!

"I think what they have here is mostly technology. Like your phone, it's not magic but it lets you talk to anyone on Earth, that's pretty good, right?" Later, she will find out what magic items Samora knows about. Maybe she even has some herself! "But take this store," she points to a small shop that just seems to sell posters. "These aren't even technology, really, they're just pictures. But they're cool. The idea is that you pick one you like, and put one up on the wall of your room, so that it feels like your room and not just some barracks somewhere. And of course it doesn't have to be a poster, it can be a lamp or something. It's about making your space, and your life, more pleasant."

Victoria is pretty vague on the material conditions of medieval people, even rich medieval people, but she doesn't think they had this much decoration, and of course it wouldn't be as good either. How is this landing? Is Samora flinching at all at the idea of making a space for herself, staying a long time? Did she overshoot and explain the concept of "posters" to someone who already understands them perfectly?

"The phone is very cool, I'd love to learn about more stuff like that. We have paintings but those don't look painted, they're too smooth and flat. How are they made?" She's not exactly flinching at the concept of staying a long time, she just doesn't have much sense of what she personally wants for mall objects.

"There are machines to press ink onto paper.  There are probably ten thousand other posters just like this one."  Actually she thinks this one might be laser printed, but she doesn't know how that works except that it doesn't involve the cool kind of laser.

Anyway if Samora isn't sure what she wants they should ✨visit✨more✨stores✨. This place has highly decorative lamps! This store sells books and greeting cards! These people have towels, candles, and soaps! That store sells jewelry -- including, yes, lots of diamonds right there in public view. Over there is a big store full of children's toys! That whole cart is just full of sunglasses! Victoria will cut this short if it seems like her guest is getting tired, but she personally is having a great time; she thought she was getting too grown-up to really enjoy the mall, but having someone along who's never seen it before is really enhancing the experience.

At some point in all this, Amy will lean over to Samora and murmur, "It's all right if you don't get anything. She's just enjoying showing it to you." Amy has never really been that into shopping, but Victoria is and that's worth a lot.

Samora doesn't particularly have a use for anything except the books, but she might want a book? She's not supposed to spend Armsmaster's money on random things, but if they have time for her to cast Comprehend Languages and read a lot of titles looking for useful ones that could be neat.

They could also just read her the titles but if she wants to use her power Amy certainly won't stop her.

Most of these books are fiction, it turns out. They have Someone Committed A Crime fiction, Two or More People Fell In Love fiction, What Might Things Be Like In The Future fiction, and What If Powers Worked Differently fiction, among many other categories. Some of the alt-powers ones have dragons on the cover, but as far as anyone knows there are no real dragons except the one who lives in Canada (no one mentions Lung).

The Dallons are sure that Armsmaster didn't mean you weren't supposed to buy anything frivolous, just not anything too expensive, which nothing here is. But, if you want something more useful, how about this Science for Common People section? This one is about simple machines. That one is a history of large city fighting off a pandemic. This one looks like it would probably explain radiation, if that's something you're still curious about. This one is just about how to measure temperatures for some reason?

Well in that case the pandemic one and the radiation one both sound interesting! It's so cool how books are cheap. 

The clerk manages not to boggle at Samora's outfit; she's seen plenty of capes but this is the first time she's sold a book to one.

Having Samora along is weirdly convenient. Amy always feels like people are watching her when she's out in public like this, even if nobody comes up to her and tries anything, but right now she'd be surprised if anyone even knew she was there.

But of course she still has the hood of her coat up. Just in case.

She's being an awfully good sport about all this.

It's not that Samora isn't having fun, exactly, but she's kinda just watching the show, seeing the sights. How can I get her more invested? Victoria wishes they had some "magic items" to show her; she was so excited about shopping for those!

Their next stop is clothes, which Victoria does not think Samora will be as excited about. She'll just have to make do with what she's got.

"All right, now for the clothing stores. We have lots, and I'll show you all the good ones, but first we have to decide what you want your clothes to say about you. Like, right now what your costume says is, I'm ready for trouble! Some bad guys might invade the mall, and if they do I'm going to stop them! And of course we would stop any crimes if we saw them, but we're not expecting any, you see what I mean? We're not patrolling, we're just out having some fun."

Amy snickers. "Can you imagine? Like if Uber and Leet popped up to rob a jewelry store or something?"

"And then the three of us were there?" Victoria cackles, then sobers. "The thing is, probably nothing like that's going to happen. But people don't know that, they see you dressed up and they wonder if there's a cape thing going on. You don't have a secret identity and that's cool, we don't either, but right now I'm Victoria Dallon, not Glory Girl, you see what I mean? And sometimes I'm Victoria the high school student who's here because she has to be, and sometimes I'm Victoria going to a party with my friends, and sometimes I'm Victoria auditing college classes and I want them to take me seriously.

So I guess what I'm asking is, who are you, Samora? And what do you want people to think about you?"

Oops, got a little heavy there at the end. Well, she can pull back if Samora finds it overwhelming, but so far it seems like Samora doesn't overwhelm easily.

No worries, that's a totally reasonable question! And she clearly needs to make some kind of change, because some people are looking at her nervously and she doesn't like it.

 "Hmm. I need to think about that for a minute; back home I've always been aiming for 'ready for trouble' and the culture was such that people found that reassuring. Gotta figure out if there's anything true I can say that doesn't have 'ready for trouble' as the biggest part of it." She looks around contemplatively at the shopping strangers. "Is 'friendly and curious' the right sort of thing? Or 'competent but not dangerous'? Someone you can come to with a problem even if I'm not looking for trouble at any particular time, but also someone you can just talk to."

The problem, she muses, is going to be continuing to wear all her magic items without explaining why. The fact that some of her abilities are removable rather than inherently part of her is a vulnerability she'd rather not disclose. At least she can truthfully claim that the boots and cloak are extremely durable and waterproof, unless that's true of all the boots and cloaks here.

"'Competent but not dangerous' is definitely a thing. We'll give you some outfits like you had a normal office job. And we'll get you some more casual things, like what a person would wear on vacation." Although, does Samora take vacations? Victoria's suddenly unsure; her little hint about wanting clothes for parties seems to have flown over Samora's head completely.

But they're going to run into trouble right away. Victoria Dallon is not too picky about civilian fashion, she doesn't think, but she has firm opinions about which outfits go with low boots (fewer than one might hope) and cloaks or headbands (basically none).

"The belt is fine, the boots I think we can work with, but if you try to put modern clothes under that cloak it's just going to look like you started masking up and forgot what you were doing halfway. Nobody wears cloaks except capes, and usually we go for shorter, lighter styles." Like, does Samora's cloak never get caught on stuff? Admittedly, it hasn't happened today, not even in the revolving door. She never whacks anything with her sheath, either; she just always seems to know where it is, and what's behind her, and adjusts it a bit with one hand on the hilt when she needs to. Anyway. "Same issue with the headband. It's cool, my costume has a little crown on it, but just says cape, you know?"

"Maybe she just wants to be in costume all the time," says Amy. Her voice is suddenly thick with an emotion she doesn't want know how to name.

Oh no, this is so inconvenient. "I definitely don't want to conceal the fact that I have powers. And, uh." Not telling people things is hard. "If I just say that I'm going to keep wearing my boots and cloak and belt and headband for personal reasons I don't want to get into, what kind of problems will that cause?"

"Oh, people will know you have powers. You're going to have fan pages, threads on PHO, the works." Wait, Samora definitely doesn't know what PHO is. She probably doesn't know what the internet is!

...should they try to hide the internet from her? Yeah, that seems kinder. Someone will tell her eventually, but Amy will let Samora live in blissful ignorance for now.

"With the powers you have you'll be famous, is what I mean. People will come up to you in the street, wanting you to heal their husband or mother or whoever, no matter what you're dressed like. If you were worried" it's getting hard to breathe "that that wouldn't happen...you don't have to be."

Victoria glances uneasily at her sister. They have rules about how much healing Panacea does, and when, but not everybody is chill about it and enforcing them is hard for her. She thought they were doing better lately...

"You can definitely wear whatever you want to wear," she says to Samora, "you just to have some way of showing when you're doing cape things versus not, so that you can have some kind of normal life." Her gaze flicks to Amy again, and away. "But Amy's right, you're gonna be famous, so it's OK if it's a little subtle. Like, uh, what about the sword and shield? Maybe it could be that, if you're carrying those you're on cape business, and if you're not you're not? We can edit that onto your fan page."

She has some thoughts on that idea but Amy is having a hard time. "You're probably right that I'm not prepared for being famous on any scale larger than a small town. I've never--I mean, the world has always had more problems than one person can deal with, but it's always been clear which problems were mine to deal with right now and which weren't, and I need to not--try to pick up more than I can carry." Hopefully that was a good balance of "sympathetic without calling attention to Amy's suffering" for this culture. "I appreciate you looking out for me."

She puts a hand on her scabbard, not in a way where she looks like she might draw the sword, just reminding herself it's there. "Not having the sword and shield on during my downtime makes sense. If I put them in my bag, is that sufficient? It's really not that I'm worried I'll get attacked at the mall, just--my dad made me this sword to celebrate my being chosen as a cleric and I haven't been more than ten feet from it since I first saw it." And she apparently needs more time to process being somewhere she can't get letters from home, but that's not happening in the mall either.

Amy is fine. Amy's feelings do not need to be taken into account. Here, she'll prove it. "That's...cool. That he did that."

Oh no, there was exactly one thing that could make Samora homesick and Victoria somehow found it. Abort! Abort! "Hm, if it's like that then how about your shield and armor, instead?" Assuming that suggestion doesn't instantly create another crisis: "How about we talk about it over lunch? I don't know about you guys but I'm starving." They have, it's true, somehow spent literally hours wandering around and looking at things.

"That works, or I'm fine with it being the sword and shield if having them hidden in my bag counts. And lunch sounds great!" This city hasn't just had its everything disrupted by Behemoth and there's clearly loads of food and it looks so exotic and interesting. She gets her sword  and shield into her bag of holding, which may be entertaining to watch for anyone who hasn't seen that before, and angles towards the food court.

"Ohhhh that makes so much more sense!  I thought you were going to put your sword into, I don't know, a backpack.  It seemed like it would be awkward, was all."

"Are those common, where you're from?" At least now she's starting to know what Samora meant by "magic items", way back at the start of this trip.

Anyway, food court! There's a mix of sweet and savory things, including something called a "cinnamon bun" that your guides agree you have to try later if you haven't before. Here is pizza (though Amy says this place has pretty bad pizza and you should get it somewhere else; the guy behind the glass counter seems resigned). Here is food from Thailand, Mexico, and China, which are all pretty far from here. This is sushi, though Victoria wrinkles her nose at it.

Bags of holding are like, the thing adventurers buy when they first get some decent money, yeah. They're awesome. Anyway, food! She will make a note of the recommendation to eat a cinnamon bun (things continue to be so cheap here!) later and avoid the bad pizza. All of the foods from far away look good, so she'll try the Thai food! Fried tofu and coconut rice, please, because neither "tofu" nor "coconut" is translating and that's intriguing.

Coming right up!  The Dallons get some Thai too, in chicken and beef.

Victoria really wants to ask what caping is like in Golarion, but after that weird moment earlier she doesn't quite dare.  So she'll come at it sideways: she'll start talking about cape life in Brockton Bay, and various fun times when she managed to swoop down and stop a crime.  Maybe Samora will feel like reciprocating.

Wow, that certainly is a santized view of Glory Girl's activities, without any references to unfortunate accidents that her hardworking sister has to come clean up after!

But it's fine, Amy's used to it. She'll talk a little about the hospital, though she can't really tell stories about it exactly. Glory Girl gets into dramatic encounters with tension, and climaxes, and all the other stuff they tell you in school that stories are supposed to have; for Panacea it's always "that lady was hurt really bad but they got her to me in time so she was fine" or "by the time I got there he was dead already, no dice". Or, ok, "he had something weird wrong with him and I had to take some time to figure it out," but nobody actually enjoys those stories except her. And they're getting rarer, anyway, as she gets better with her power.

Samora thinks stories of saving the day by solving a mystery are great! Saving the day by swooping down on people is also great! She reciprocates with her own stories, which even keeping the gross details to a minimum involve kind of a lot of walking corpses, angry ghosts, and devils out of Hell. She's had an interesting year. But the guy who was having his life-force drained to teleport monsters into the town square is fine and the guys with giant clawed limbs implanted in their backs are not mind-controlled anymore and the ghost librarian is in Nirvana now.

(She doesn't tell them about the woman who sold her soul to an imp, not because she isn't fine but specifically because you can't have someone's first time hearing about diabolism be a case where it turns out okay.) 

"Holy crap, it's like your whole world runs on power bullshit."

Amy winces.  Victoria Dallon, master diplomat, at least until she gets distracted.

But on the other hand she's kinda right. "Yeah, I wonder. If I could use my power on the guys with the clawed limbs, would it just not work? Or does that part run on normal biology, more or less?"

Samora's story actually raises a lot of other concerning questions, like "what are ghosts?" and "do people from Earth Bet go to those same afterlies, and if not what happens instead?". It isn't just the ghosts and the demons and the magic items, even normal people -- if you can call Samora that -- are weird by Bet standards.

Hmmm. In fact. Now that Amy thinks about it.

Samora looks awfully human, except for those silver eyes. She'd been assuming the eyes were a power thing, but what if it wasn't? Or rather, what if their idea of "power things" just doesn't apply the same way in Golarion? These people have had powers for centuries, it sounded like, maybe even longer than that. Maybe Bet and Aleph just don't have ghosts yet. Maybe their humans started out like ours, and then...

She can find out, at least a little. She just has to get Samora's permission to look, and...um. How does she ask this. Usually she just says, "Do I have your permission to heal you?", but Samora's not hurt.

Can I please touch you?

Hey, I want to see you...from the inside.

Can I take a peek at your organs real quick, just to see if they work the same way?

I'm thinking you might not actually be a human -- but I still like you, honest!

Come on, Amy, quit being weird about this. Just say...er, just say...

"_{^{Can I use my power on you?}}" It comes out in a squeaky rush.

It would be giving away information she doesn't have to, but it's so tempting to know what she looks like to Amy's power. And if it turns out Amy can duplicate adventurer toughness, or not having to eat or sleep, or the thing where cold mostly doesn't bother her, or the darkvision, then it would absolutely be worth it. And Amy's probably used to people having these exact reservations anyway, what with the thing where most capes go around in masks. 

"It's very tempting, I'm so curious. What's your confidentiality policy?"

The question helps focus her. "Well. For cape things we mostly don't reveal anything we learn during treatment unless the patient requests it. That's mostly meant for secret identities, but it also goes for, um, secret weaknesses or things like that. There are certain kinds of crimes that I have to report, but that's usually not about you, and not really about powers either. Like, uh, if I treated one of your children and I thought you were the one who'd hurt them, I'd have to tell the police about that." Or tell her shift supervisor, who told the police, as it turned out; she'd been really nervous that she'd have to testify in court but it never happened. "Oh, or if like there'd been some mysterious acid attacks, and I healed you and I found out you had a secret acid sac, I think I'd have to report that. But mostly the rule is that you're my patient and I'm supposed to help you, and not random other people who might want to know things about you. Well in this case you're not my patient because you're not sick. But same idea." She cuts herself off, finally. How is Samora taking it?

She's not sure about the acid sac thing, actually; she had a lecture about this once but it was a while ago. Maybe she's not supposed to report it, but she has to tell the police if they ask? Or maybe they need a warrant? She'll look it up if it ever happens.

If it was just her own personal curiosity, she wouldn't do it, just to cultivate the habit of keeping secrets. But she doesn't want to cultivate the habit of keeping secrets so hard she misses opportunities for awesome power interactions, or for that matter friendship with excellent people who seem like they could use additional friends.

"That makes sense. Let's do it. What's a good nearby place where we can talk about whatever you learn without being quite so easy to overhear?" A moment's assessing. "I don't mind if you come too, Victoria, so long as you consider yourself bound by the same rules Amy does."

She doesn't usually but Samora's good people. "Yeah, I promise. How about we go to the trainyard? It's really private, and - "

" - not close at all, for people who can't fly at eighty miles an hour. Let's just go under the bridge at Madison street, it's a block away and there won't be anyone there this early."

Victoria did not forget that the others can't fly like she can. She...might have forgotten that she can't carry them both at speed. Never mind, the underpass is fine. They can go right now, it looks like everyone's done eating?

The fried tofu and coconut rice was great, if a little salty, and unlike anything you've eaten before.

And soon enough they're under the underpass and Samora cannot detect anyone in a position to eavesdrop, which doesn't mean nobody is eavesdropping but is closer to that than it is for many people, and she holds out a hand to Amy.

Samora is weird.

Her stomach processes her food and hands it to her intestines, which ignore it completely; nutrients materialize in her bloodstream at a slow and steady pace with no apparent connection to anything else.

Her blood vessels are constantly ready to seal themselves off; someone could cut her femoral artery and she wouldn't bleed out. Her bones are to a human's what a human's are to a bird's. Her musculature has some enhancements similar to Manpower's, obscured by the fact that it's continuously interacting with her belt by some pathway Amy can't track. All of her natural healing processes are unusually thorough and extremely efficient. Her liver has strategic reserves to rival the Roman Republic. 

Her circadian cycle is currently at "just woke up" and shows no sign of moving off it. In addition to the silver pigment in her irises, she has a tapetum lucidum and several types of photoreceptor Amy has never seen in a human (though a couple of them may be familiar if she's ever looked at a bee or a pit viper).

Ah. So that's why she didn't want to take the belt off. What do the boots do, or the cloak? Nothing she can tell from here. What would happen if she took the belt off while Amy was watching...?

It's not quite as powers-bullshit as she expected. You could build bones that way, all hexagonal and cross-connected, if you were doing it from scratch. Bee eyes do work rather like that. She sees how the blood vessels are different from normal ones, and - ah, but no, if you did that to a normal person all their blood would just stop flowing. It has to be tunable. What's controlling it? She pokes around around a little and comes up empty. Probably it's nothing she can affect directly.

The sleep-cycle thing...is probably just more nonsense, she tells herself. Even if she looked at Samora's brain, she wouldn't be able to figure it out. It would be pointless to try, so there's no reason to.

...

She'll just take one quick peek, and incidentally settle another thing she'd wondered about. She doesn't do brains, sure, but she can look.

"When's the last time you slept, Samora?" she'll ask, hearing herself from a very great distance. "If you remember, I mean."

Samora's brain is weird too! No corona pollentia, but that's not really the strangest bit. That would be that the headband is part of her brain the way the belt is part of her body, information constantly disappearing into it and reappearing out of it. The visible parts of her mind have a lot of extra redundancy, circuits cross-checking each other and standing ready to correct any discrepancies. Her core motivational loop in particular is extremely robust. Her visual cortex is set up to handle all the unusual inputs, and also just really good at its job. 

"Uh, three years ago and change," she says, a bit sheepishly.

She could definitely duplicate some of this now that she's seen it. nopenopenope time to focus on something else. The headband makes her smarter? How does that work? Could she figure it out by -- asking. She can figure it out by asking. "What does your headband do, exactly? I can see that it works with your brain, but not how."

"It makes me wiser! Better at noticing little details or when my assumptions might be wrong, better at putting all those little details together into a big picture. It helps a bit with spellcasting, because spell structures have a lot of those little details and it's easier to manipulate them when you can see them better, but it's also just really handy for daily life." That was all basically true while hopefully underselling the extent to which it's her secret weakness.

Panacea could probably be amazing at detecting lies from people she's using her power on, even little mild subtle ones, but she's never practiced it and so takes Samora's statement at face value.

"You also don't have a Corona Pollentia. Everyone on Earth Bet who can get powers has one of those, so you...work by different rules than we do. Though I guess we knew that already."

Victoria wants to try it on! But Samora was kinda squirrely about taking it off before so she shouldn't ask, probably? Then her sister says that other thing about the Corona and the headband issue goes clean out of her mind because no, they did not both know that already!

"Oh come on, that was like the one thing that we knew about powers absolutely for sure! Everything else has exceptions at least sometimes, but not that! Or, it didn't used to." She continues, in a somewhat more normal tone. "I mean, it was weird enough that there was one kind of thing that breaks all the laws of physics as we used to know them. If there are two, why not twenty? And if your thing really is the same as ours, why does it look so different?"

"I think there's just a lot of different ways to be! Some people study magic, some people inherit magic because one of their ancestors was a dragon or an elemental or something, some people live in the woods and understand the forest so well they get magic from that, some people don't have any magic and just get so good at fighting it doesn't matter. And then there's your thing! Mind if I look at you with Detect Magic to see if it thinks you're more different from all of those than they are from each other?"

The Dallons seem a little bemused that Samora's asking permission, but they both nod.

...ancestor was a dragon?

Detect Magic!

Victoria will do a little midair twirl, in case that helps.  It shouldn't, her force field is up and that should count if anything does, but any excuse to do a little midair twirl is a good one.

No magic detected.

"Apparently you guys aren't magic at all, according to my magic's definition! Which makes sense, I think? If I had the brain thing for your kind of powers I'd've expected your magic to be the same kind as mine. Maybe it's like monks? I've heard stories of monks who can become immune to poison and kill anyone they've ever touched with their thoughts and walk through walls and supposedly it's not magic. I always figured it was magic and the stories were just wrong but maybe not."

Okay, so maybe there are twenty different kinds of powers. Aleph has none (more or less), Bet has one, Samora's world has, let's say, seven. Is there a hierarchy? Do worlds get weirder and weirder, with more and more physics-breaking things, the further away you go from Aleph, whatever "away" even means when you're talking about dimensions? That doesn't quite sound right, though. She doesn't know anything about other Earths but there are some and she doesn't think they're weirder than Bet.

Then she realizes something, and snaps her fingers frustratedly. "Samora! I just realized, we never bought you any clothes! That was the whole point of us coming here!" Well, that and making friends and learning things, and that part went pretty well, but still! "Though honestly I think the things you need aren't in the mall anyway, you need a costumer who can make textiles like your shirt. New Wave (our team!) has a company that does our stuff, I could ask them for you."

"Why does my fabric need to be the same kind as my shirt? Is it sturdier? A lot of the fabric in the stores looked a bit flimsy."

"Sturdiness is part of it but it's also about the look. With the pieces you have now it's obvious that they were made by, uh, not literally the same people who made your cloak and boots but the same kind of people, the same level of technology. It all fits together, it makes sense. Putting a normal t-shirt on under that would just look really weird."

Hm, maybe that was too pushy. "I mean you can if you want! We could go get some shirts and have you try them on and see how it works. But I bet it'll look strange to you, and it'll definitely look strange to someone who's from here. But it's OK! You can meet with a costumer later and get it all figured out, we just can't do it today."

"For what it's worth, she's usually right about stuff like this. One reason my costume is a simple robe " - she'll go dig up her photo from the wiki, so Samora can see - " is so that I can just put it on over whatever, because it covers everything. But you've got a lot of pieces, so they should all be the same kind of piece, if that makes sense." Honestly Amy doesn't care, but other people do and two of those people are her mom and sister, so she's learned a few things about it anyway.

"I don't care either way, so if other people do I'm fine with it, especially if it will also be sturdier that way." Even with the Mending orison, keeping her clothes in one piece is tedious.

Victoria nods. "Ok, I'll call our people when we get home and set something up. It'll probably take a few - "

And then Samora's phone is ringing! "Hello, Samora, this is Armsmaster. We've just received the delivery we discussed this morning. Come by my office at the Rig when you're ready to try your spell."

Awesome! She'll be right over! 

"Time to go Raise some dead people! Victoria, do you mind calling me another taxi? I should really get some local money at some point."

"I think that credit card was supposed to be for you, including taxis and things."

"I can get this one, I wanted to come along anyway." They...might not let her in, depending on what exactly they think is going on? But if she says she can help make it work then they probably will and who knows? It might even be true.

"Can you show me how you're doing it? I don't understand what happens to the credit card when you buy something, it keeps looking the same to me and I'm not sure how to tell when it will be used up."

"Yeah, that's not an accident," Amy snarks, then feels bad because that's really unhelpful in this context. "A computer keeps track of the money" oh no, she's going to have to explain computers too "er, when you show your card to the machine at the cash register, it tells another machine somewhere else that you're trying to buy two books that cost 24 dollars. That machine keeps track of how much money you're allowed to spend on that card, and keeps a list of the things you've bought and how much they cost, and then later your bank sends you a list. Except that last part probably doesn't matter to you, because the card belongs to the PRT, and you probably can't run it out of money just by buying things at the mall. If Armsmaster gave it to you you should just use it on whatever you need. I think?"

Wow, that was unhelpful, maybe Samora should ask someone who's actually self-supporting, but she can't just say that.

She thinks about this for a bit. "So you're not actually paying for it right then, you're promising to pay for it later, and this works because everyone knows Armsmaster's word is good?"

"It's not really based on peoples' words, because the computer keeps track of everything," Victoria puts in.  "The way it usually works is, you get a credit card from your bank, and they give you a limit for how much you're allowed to borrow before you have to pay it back.  Five thousand dollars, maybe."  Is that a normal credit limit, even for people who aren't part of famous hero teams?  Well, in this case it doesn't matter, Samora will definitely be part of a famous hero team as soon as she decides she wants to be. "And then the computer knows how much of that you've spent. But usually you never get to that limit, you just pay it off every month."

She frowns. "Actually I guess it kinda is based on peoples' words, because what if you just didn't have any money and didn't pay it back? I guess that happens sometimes. But everybody has credit cards, so that can't happen too often."

Amy will pull out some dollars and coins, just so Samora can see what their money looks like. The valuable ones are all paper, see? The coins are mostly copper and nickel she thinks. Cheap metals, anyway, so they're easy to make.

"How are they worth anything, if they're just paper?"

Shrug.  "If everyone agrees it's worth something then it's worth something, right?"

"It used to be based on gold, I think?  Like, the government had a big building full of gold somewhere, and you could go there and trade your money for gold.  But not that many people did it, and then finally the government got rid of it and no one really cared."  They did cover this in US history, but it went by pretty fast and she's remembering both that Nixon did it, and it happened during the Great Depression?  That can't be right.  Oh well, Samora probably doesn't need those details anyway.

"So it works because everyone believes that it works, and because it works there's no reason for anyone to stop believing . . . I think I see it," she says approvingly. "I don't think I would have thought it was possible, for mortals. But what stops people from just making more of the paper whenever they want something?" She's not sure why it would be a problem to make more of the paper, because it isn't a problem to mine more gold, except that it would be a way of getting money without working and all such things are immediately problems.

"They make it pretty hard: see how fine drawing is?  The paper's special too.  And if you can make more anyway, with a power or whatever, then the police have ways of finding you."

"That makes sense. One more question that's probably a foolish one: if this money weighs so little, why do people go around to stores doing the recorded notes thing and then go around to the stores again to hand over the money? Wouldn't it be simpler to just hand over the money the first time, and save the second trip? It makes sense for my case, because then there's a record of what I bought and I couldn't run off with the extra, but why do people doing their own shopping with their own money do it that way?"

It takes a sec for Amy to unravel what Samora means.  "Oh, you don't have to go around twice.  When you showed your credit card, the bookstore got the money right away, from the credit card company.  Later you just make one payment for everything, to the credit card company.  And nowadays you don't do that with paper money either, you just use your computer to tell your bank to pay the credit card off, no cash involved."

"But cash is still useful!  If a place doesn't have a credit card reader, cash still works.  And it's good for cheap things too, because the credit card company does charge a fee to the bookstore or whoever.  It's small, but if the thing you're buying just costs a dollar in the first place..."

"And of course criminals love cash, because they don't want to make a nice list of their purchases for the police to read."

"Oh! We have a little bit of that back home--you can get a note from a bank saying you gave them an amount of money and give it to a merchant who goes to the bank and gets the money--but it's very cool that everything is like that. And then the records make it easier for people to do ordinary business but harder for criminals . . ." She grins. "This is a really Lawful planet, especially for one with no Lawful churches guaranteeing things and selling truth magic. I think I was underrating humanity." 

She doesn't totally understand the compliment she just received, but that won't stop her from taking it.  She smiles.  "What do your people do for money, anyway?"

"Apart from the bank notes from the church of Abadar that I mentioned? We carry bags of gold and silver and copper around, or in towns where everyone knows everyone people will just keep track of who owes them what and then pay their taxes in wheat." Shrug. "It's not as elegant as your system but it works."

"Our way uses computers a lot, without those it'd be pretty hard."

And now the taxi is here!

Victoria spends the ride over describing various medieval-style cape costumes she knows about.  "Heavily armored knight" turns out to be a reasonably popular theme, and there's a guy named Myrddin who calls himself a wizard and goes around with a robe and staff.  Some people have witchy themes, here are some examples, is that familiar at all?

But really she's just killing time. Once they're back at the Rig, she'll wave goodbye to her sister and new friend(?), and fly away.

The PRT lets Panacea in with only a moderate amount of fuss and ceremony, a PRT trooper is dispatched to collect Armsmaster, and soon Samora, Panacea, Armsmaster, and three PRT soldiers are gathered in the morgue, where five body bags and a cardboard box of loose diamond jewelry are waiting for them.

Armsmaster has no idea what's about to happen. He doesn't even know what he expects to happen. It's like the moment before he engages a new cape, without any hope of a nice cathartic fight if things go wrong somehow. None of that, he trusts, makes it through his mask and voice filters.

"Samora. Thank you for coming. We've prepared an assortment of diamonds in the size you specified; do you need anything else before we begin?"

Samora is about to say "No, let's get started" when she is seized by a last-minute worry. "I just want to make very clear that each casting completely destroys the diamond used for it. If that's not a problem, then we can begin now."

Armsmaster nods.  Samora never actually said that but it was reasonably clear from context, and also Dragon's theory predicted it. "That's just as we expected."

The five corpses they've brought have helpful little infosheets attached, giving name, gender, age if known, and little biographical notes. But of course Samora can't read those, thank you Dragon for reminding him about that, so Armsmaster goes down the aisle, describing each fallen cape as he comes to them.

"Rotor. Independent hero, female, age estimated in the early twenties. Described herself as a 'spin tinker'. Died by electrocution or injuries sustained in the subsequent fall."

"Palisade. Rogue, female, age unknown. Created heavy metal barriers, other powers unknown. Killed by a shockwave."

"Snapback. Independent hero, male, age twenty-eight. A defensive, sharable Brute power, no other details given. Extensive burns."

"Pride. Protectorate hero, female, age late twenties. A summoner-type Master. Killed by smoke inhalation."

"Scramble. Protectorate hero, male, age 19. Graduated from the Denver Wards program last year. Teleportation and close-range clairvoyence, well-suited to search and rescue. Died by electrocution."

There are, not quite by chance, no villains here today.

"Whenever you're ready."

Amy Panacea, for this she's Panacea, isn't really listening. It's depressing, and one way or another it won't matter. She stands ready to lay a finger on each cape as Samora comes to them.

"Only other warning is that people often come back feeling weak and ill. If that happens here there's a spell to fix it that requires a bit of powdered diamond, or Panacea or somebody might have something for it. We'll see how it goes."

Closest one to the tray of diamonds first because why not. She holds the diamond in one hand and lays the other on the fallen woman's forehead, and begins to chant. "Lady Iomedae, by this sacrifice I offer and the power of Heaven I hold in stewardship for You, call back the soul of this mortal from the River. Restore her to life, to health, to memory, for her business in this world is not yet done . . ."

After sixty seconds of chanting with no visible effect, a great many things happen at once. Bones straighten out and knit together, blood vessels reattach, burned tissue blossoms with renewed fine structure. Rotor's entire brain is replaced with itself, alight with electricity once more. The diamond crumbles to dust in the moment of her first heartbeat, and Samora steps back smiling.

Panacea doesn't like touching corpses. Old ones, like Rotor's, are bad enough: it feels like her power should reach out and make a connection but there's just nothing, like walking up an escalator. Fresh ones are worse. Her power works on living tissue, not living people, and peoples' bodies don't quite stop living all at once. They fail in waves, as the dependent pieces start letting each other down, and when the brain is already dying there's nothing Panacea wants to can do about it even if they bring her in in time.

Touching Rotor, Panacea gets to watch that process in reverse. First the meat, as unsettling as chalk. Then living tissue in a dead person: heart spasming, nerves twitching, antibodies lining up for war in a body there's no reason to fight for. And then, all at once, a living person.

Though, not perfectly living. The eyes are a mess still - ah, but Samora did say that was one of her power's weaknesses. That's all right, she can clean that up. What else? The bones are aligned but the marrow production is...there, fixed it. What else? Is that liver...ah. Hm. If she...

Rotor's eyes open, and focus. "Hey. You caught me." She takes in the PRT troopers, Armsmaster, and the two mystery capes, none of whom are full of dreadul urgency. "I guess you got him? Sorry I couldn't hang around longer." She tries to move an arm, and runs up against the body bag. "Um..."

Does Samora, by chance, have a standard social script for this situation? Because Armsmaster does not.

She has to adapt it on the fly for people who've never heard of resurrection and don't believe in the afterlives and aren't going to be reassured just by seeing her holy symbol, but yes she does! She smiles warmly, body language relaxed and unworried and friendly and Present.

"You're going to be alright. You were dead for a bit, but you're alive now and you're going to be be fine. It's the day after the attack and you're in the Brockton Bay PRT building. I'm a new healer who arrived yesterday and I can bring a few people back from the dead every day. I'm using it to get back as many of the people who died fighting Behemoth as I can." 

She'll take her cues from Rotor for the next sentences. Does she look like she's disoriented and wants more information on her own circumstances, like she's surprised and wants more information on Samora, like she's miserable and wants to be reassured that options for curing Raise sickness exist, like she's socially uncertain and wants to be reassured that she doesn't owe anybody anything, like she's philosophically concerned and wants to know about the afterlives, like she's overwhelmed and wants Samora to be quiet and let her think . . .?

"Died?  And you brought me back?  That's new. Or is it...?" She sits up, not notably impaired by Raise sickness, or any other kind. She takes in the body bags around her.

"Very new. Samora only...appeared...yesterday. We're focusing on Behemoth casualties, as her limits permit. You're in Brockton Bay; the PRT will provide transport to the destination of your choice, once we're done observing you."

Around him, the PRT troopers straighten up, and try to look observant rather than slack-jawed.