"Make way! Coming through! Fetch a healer, quick!"

 "Hey, somebody! We got a wounded fighter! Can we get a healer over here?"

  "My, my, would you look at this? But why would you drag a wounded fighter into the middle of the festival square? Couldn't she be carted off somewhere else, like... oh I don't know... an infirmary? Or an accommodating ditch?"

There's a searing pain in Talion's chest.

It's not, actually, the worst pain she's ever felt. Awakening was worse, the parts of it she was conscious for. Bad enough the doctors kept her unconscious for most of it; bad enough that she spent most of the time she was conscious vaguely thinking that maybe Hell was real after all.

She's in less pain, now, than she was then, but it's close enough to be the comparison that comes to mind.

Despite that, despite everything she remembers from before the dungeon collapsed, she isn't backlashed.

"Make room, everyone step back! Now, what's the matter? What happened to her?"

He squints at her assessingly as he strides through the crowd. Not detectably Chaotic, nor Evil, but she could be under an Undetectable Alignment, or just too weak to register. The wound itself is bleeding terribly, worse than he'd expect just from an ordinary demon attack; it's a miracle she's still alive.

"Who did this to her?"

"Demons, Prelate! We found her barely alive outside the walls of Kenabres."

And they're claiming they brought her all the way from there to the market square? There's clearly something going on here, though there's always the possibility that the something is 'the halfling is an idiot' rather than 'the halfling is literally a demon or a cultist'. (The halfling doesn't detect either; he'd have pinged when Hulrun checked the girl.)

"The enemy doesn't usually stray this close to the city. We should fortify the defenses." (A cheap measure to take, given how many people are currently occupied with the festival and could be ordered to their posts, and the chance of stopping some kind of demonic plot is well worth pulling them away from their revelry.) "And you — hold fast, don't die, we'll see you right!"

"Cure Light Wounds. Lesser Restoration."

(He has to touch her to cast the spells. He's not an esper.)

She's still in a lot of pain and most of what she can see is the sky but she doesn't really think this looks much like the outside of the portal??

"...where am I?"

"Don't tell me you don't recognize the splendid sights of Kenabres's finest festival."

(Hulrun is ignoring her questions in favor of dispatching a runner for Terendelev. Even if she is as ignorant as she's acting, it's more urgent to prevent her from bleeding to death.)

"Where even is that?" She's pretty sure that sounded ruder than she was trying to be. It's not like she has all the cities there are memorized, there's probably plenty of big ones she hasn't heard of.

He makes a face of mock surprise, which he suspects is entirely lost on her at this angle. "My dear cousin would be shocked to hear you say such a thing, you know."

 "Northwestern Mendev," supplies one of his guards. "Near the Worldwound."

That doesn't help???

Having acquired a runner, he turns back to the wounded girl. "Now, who are you?" He's never seen her before, and he'd remember her face even without the exotic hair color. 

"Talion. ...do you also need my regular-person name?" She doesn't like it but it'd be really obnoxious to demand that everyone call her her esper codename all the time, like she's asking for special treatment.

...She isn't speaking Hallit, nor any other language he's familiar with, and yet he still understands her perfectly. Suspicious. 

"Yes, every name you're commonly known by."

"Mercedes Herrera Torres. But sometimes someone puts my name in as just Mercedes Herrera or Mercedes Torres, so if you can't find me in the system maybe check under those too. ...do you know what happened, I really didn't think they were going to get a teleporter in time." And she's not backlashed but she's having trouble holding onto the idea that that might have implications while she's in this much pain.

If she's a strong enough adventurer to have cause to interact with a teleporter, that would at least explain how she survived her injury, and for that matter the permanent Tongues, but it's not especially probable.

"And why are you in Kenabres?"

"I don't know! I don't even know where Kenabres is!"

Here's a silver-haired woman. She looks young to be going grey, maybe she's an esper?

"Kenabres is in Mendev, near the eastern border of the Worldwound." She turns to the older man. "My dear Prelate — please, for the sake of the festivities, stop interrogating this poor woman. She has been through enough already. Heal."

The wound in her chest closes, fading to a dull ache.

She is not an esper, Talion would have felt it, but that definitely did something—

"That's a lot better, thank you. Uh. But I'm still really confused, I've never heard of Kenabres or Mendev or the Worldwound — the last thing I remember I was in a dungeon in Vancouver, Canada Vancouver not the one in the States, and I thought it was collapsing, but I'm not dead."

...She's hardly in pain at all any more, she can take a moment to line up her thoughts.

Usually if something is this confusing it means you've been taken by a dungeon, maybe a psychic one, but espers don't get taken, and this really doesn't look anything like the dungeon she was in before. But she's somewhere different, and not backlashed, and she just got healed by someone who isn't an esper, and — is the man who was talking to her wearing actual metal armor like you'd see in a movie—

He is! So are several of the other people standing in the area, though she doesn't have a great angle on them.

Well, she can sit up and take a look around—

Some of these people don't really look... human. The short ones could maybe be little people, maybe they look like that sometimes, she doesn't know. But those people have pointy ears, and that guy has a tail, and that lady is green. And they're all acting like normal people rather than dungeon monsters, and in any case dungeons don't kidnap espers — does she still have her radio—

Her radio and gun are missing. She still has her flight harness. She technically still has the bulletproof vest and the clothing she was wearing with it, but there's a large hole in the chest where she was bleeding. 

"That does sound scary," says the silver-haired not-an-esper. (Terendelev is also pretty confused about the situation, but it doesn't exactly take a stellar understanding of humanoids to figure that much out.) "...Is something else the matter?"

"I think this might be, like, some kind of portal fantasy situation? Is that the kind of thing that happens around here?" 

...Did he survive, is she going to have to track him down again just to make sure he gets what he deserves—

She looks faintly confused by the phrasing. "You mean some kind of... interplanar portal? It's possible, but most ways to do it are difficult and rare, and moreso if it's permanent."

 "I think the demiplanes that started showing up a few months back are technically on different planes? Otherwise they wouldn't be... demiplanes? But I'm not a sorcerer."

  "Technically, a Rope Trick is second circle."

"Portal fantasy is, like, you go through a magic portal and end up in another world where there's magic and stuff. Like, magic besides espers and dungeons — well, people disagree on whether those are technically magic or just science we don't understand, but you know what I mean. Uh, but unless you count dungeons I've never heard of it happening for real."

"This world certainly has magic. I'm afraid I don't know what an 'esper' is."

"Okay. Uh." Wow, if they don't have espers this is going to sound really weird. "Espers have magic powers, different ones depending on the person. Mine is that I can fly. But then, when we use our esper powers, there's a bad thing that happens, we call it a 'backlash', and the more you use your powers, the worse it gets. And I know you're not an esper because espers can tell who other espers are by touching them." 

"But it's innate, not learned through study or granted by the gods?"

Blink blink — probably that's a normal sort of thing to say around here.

"Yeah. As far as people know it's mostly just random, maybe a bit genetic. ...Uh, I don't know if you know about genetics, you've got kind of a medieval-fantasy vibe..."

"I'm not familiar with genetics. What do you mean by 'medieval fantasy'?"

"Fantasy's like I said earlier, and then 'medieval' is... I mean, if this is another world, it's probably not exactly the same... but it's like, a historical period? Uh, we didn't spend that long on it in history class... but it's like, castles, and knights in shining armor running around with swords, and that sort of thing — in real life it kind of sucked, I'm pretty sure they didn't have women's rights or democracy or, like, the Internet, but I think it would still count as medieval fantasy even if everyone, like, decided not to be sexist?" As opposed to things like the internet, or guns, or phones, where people can't just decide to have them, they'd need to invent them first.

"I don't follow human politics very closely. Mendev is a monarchy, but I think that... Andoran?... might be a democracy? The legal and social status of women also depends on the country, but again I'm not familiar with all the details."

"...are you not a human?"

"I am a dragon."

"...Back home it's all just humans. And a couple dungeon monsters, I guess." She sounds deeply contemptuous of the dungeon monsters.

It is at this moment that several more nonhumans make their appearance.

A few feet from Talion and Terendelev, a large red vaguely human-shaped creature appears and impales a festival-goer on its spear — a few feet beyond it, a man transforms into some kind of winged creature and goes at his neighbors with his sword, cackling with glee—

—some kind of enormous insect descends from the sky, surrounded by buzzing locusts—

"Behold, crusader gods. Behold, Iomedae, you poor Imposter. Your city will fall to me. Your followers will feed my hunger."

Her first instinctive reflex, before she has the chance to think through what's happening, is to treat this like a surprise dungeon break. She reaches for her gun and takes off into the air.

...She doesn't have her gun, but she can at least manage to get airborne.

"Deskari, Lord of Locusts, LEAVE. MY. CITY."

Terendelev is also getting airborne (which is to say, turning into an enormous silver dragon).

THAT IS AN ACTUAL FUCKING DRAGON

Okay. Focus.

Dragon lady is going after the giant bug monster. That leaves an awful lot of other monsters, which she would also love to kill, but she doesn't have her gun. And then there's a huge crowd of panicking civilians, and some of them are already dead but not all of them. Getting civilians to safety is her actual job, and the sooner she starts the more people she can save — fifteen feet away from her is a little kid whose mom just got speared, she'll start with him—

He is sobbing inconsolably but he'll cooperate with being picked up!

—just in time to see him cleave Terendelev straight in two. 

"Let the feast begin."

She wants to hurt him very very badly and she still doesn't have her gun. She touches down next to another child, picks her up, and flies off again. Her left leg is already twinging and they don't even have espers but this time tomorrow it'll be chronic backlash and the kid will be alive. Probably. If someone else here knows how to kill the bug guy. They've got their own magic, there has to be something — he can't just get away with this—

As she's flying off with the kid, she's approached by one of the short people! 

"What're you going to do — fight or flee? If fleeing's your plan, let me help you out, I've got a scroll here with a good protective spell!"

Those are not the only options??? What is this guy's problem???

"I'm evacuating civilians," she snaps, and returns to doing that. 

Ugh. She would actually love some help fighting the medieval-fantasy-dungeon-monsters but the other thing he's holding is a crossbow. Which, like, probably they don't have guns here, but she doesn't know how to use a crossbow!

It does not really seem like anyone here knows how to kill the bug guy. He mows down four people in a single sweep of his scythe, flicks his tail carelessly at another one—

She drops off the second kid, flies back for another — if there are even any still alive—

—from behind a wagon, the short guy she was talking to earlier shoots his crossbow at the giant bug monster—

—it strikes true, somehow, where few of the other weapons have been able to touch him, burrowing past his armor, and he howls in rage. He smashes his scythe into the ground, carving an enormous rift into the ground—

—and as he's pulling back, the butt of his scythe collides with her body.

Riftcarver's blade would have killed her outright. Even the butt is enough to smack her out of the air, sending her tumbling towards the rift below. 

She comes to in the bottom of a cavern, about fifty feet below the surface. The sounds of fighting have faded, even to esper hearing.

A little ways down one passage, she can hear someone grunting as she strains to move something heavy.

But her backlash hasn't turned chronic yet, so it's not like she was out for a day or anything like that.

She will go see about the noises.

"Just stay with me a little longer, I think I hear someone coming. HELLO? IS SOMEONE ELSE DOWN HERE?"

As Talion approaches, an armored woman comes into view, straining to move some rocks off another woman.

"Hang on, I'm coming!"

"You're the one who was flying around, right? I don't suppose you've got an Ant Haul prepared, or a Bull's Strength?"

"...I'm not as strong as a bull, but I'm pretty strong?" Definitely a lot stronger than an ant. "I bet we can move them if we work together."

She takes the other side of the biggest rock!

Espers are pretty strong, and so is Seelah; together they can get the rocks cleared out without too much trouble.

"Thanks for the help, I don't know what I would've done without the pair of you." She moves to stand, but stops with a wince. "Damn it, I think my leg's broken."

"Here, I've got you." She lays her hand on Anevia's leg for a moment. When she removes it, the injury is mostly healed. "I'm Seelah, paladin of Iomedae. It's nice to meet you both, even under the circumstances."

Is she also a dragon probably if she were a dragon she would have turned into dragon form when the bug monster showed up.

"Anevia Tirabade, of the Eagle Watch."

"I'm Talion. Uh, but I've never heard of paladins or Iomedae or the Eagle Watch. Or, uh, probably a lot of other things, I don't think I'm from" (did medieval people know what planets are??) "anywhere around here."

She must be from really far away if she hasn't heard of Iomedae! Seelah is from Garund and people there had still heard of her.

"Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of fighting Evil. A paladin is... a Lawful Good warrior who's been chosen by a god, a little like clerics but more focused on fighting."

Technically the orthodox position is that she's the goddess of defeating Evil, but it doesn't really seem like clarifying that will actually make anything clearer for the new girl.

"Okay, uh, a couple things."

Wow, all the ways she can think of to say this sound really dumb or really insulting.

"...So, back home, people don't agree on what gods there are, or whether there are even any gods at all. And some people think esper powers came from God, even though people of lots of different religions can be espers." And 'esper powers are a gift from God for fighting dungeons' is basically the least bad thing anyone ever means when they talk about God choosing people to be warriors. "So, uh, how do you know that Iomedae... exists... and actually 'chose' you?"

Seelah attempts to puzzle this out.

People don't agree on what gods there are: That makes sense. Plenty of people don't agree about whether Ragathiel counts as a god, or Deskari, and she's heard that in distant lands they sometimes worship different gods entirely. She's even heard some people say that Shelyn and Sarenrae are actually the same god, and others say that Sarenrae is actually one name for two gods.

or whether there are even any gods at all: What?

some people think esper powers came from God: She's not sure what "esper powers" are, but Seelah's heard plenty of sorcerers say their magic is really from the gods, and one time she even met a wizard who claimed that his magic was a gift from Nethys. (She's not sure why Talion is only talking about one god, though.)

even though people of lots of different religions can be espers: People who... favor lots of different gods, the way she's a paladin of Iomedae or Craftsman Vhane is a cleric of Torag? She can't think what else Talion could mean, but why would that mean that esper powers can't come from the gods? 

How do you know that Iomedae... exists... and actually 'chose' you?: Seelah has never met anyone who didn't believe that Iomedae exists! Obviously Iomedae exists! And Seelah knows Iomedae chose her because she prayed to Iomedae and Iomedae made her a paladin, who else would it be? 

"—All the gods can make clerics, and it's not just Iomedae who makes paladins," she clarifies. "But I prayed to Iomedae to choose me, and she did. That's how I healed Anevia."

Anevia nods. "There are some disagreements over what exactly counts as a god, and what doesn't, but basically everyone I've ever met agreed that Iomedae counted, even if" (the name 'Nidal' isn't going to mean anything) "they followed a god who was her enemy. And I've known hundreds of people who prayed to her and were chosen, and I've never heard of anyone who said they were a paladin or a cleric who didn't get their powers from a god. —Sometimes a cleric is chosen without praying for it specifically, but clerics need their god's holy symbols to do most things, so it's not hard to tell who chose them."

Well, alright, that sounds legit? Probably? Or at least as legit as she's going to get? Like, it's definitely possible that everyone is just wrong, or lying, but she sure did see Seelah just heal someone, so clearly she's getting some sort of magic from somewhere. (And it's not just that she's a confused esper. They bumped into each other a couple times when they were moving the rocks.) 

...Which could be great, or it could be really bad.

"Okay, second question, you said she's Good and wants to fight Evil, does that mean she wants to fight, like, people who murder innocent people, or rapists, things like that, or is it more like... she thinks gay people are Evil and wants you to go around" she's pretty sure medieval fantasy people aren't going to know what 'hate crimes' are "getting into fights about that?"

"...My wife is a paladin of Iomedae." (Anevia is parsing 'gay people' as 'people who have sex with other people of the same sex'. Are there people who think that's Evil?? Why???)

"Around here Iomedae's mostly focused on fighting the demons, but she is also in favor of arresting the sort of people you mentioned, it's just not her biggest focus."

"I don't know what demons are either."

"The creatures who attacked the festival. They're Chaotic Evil, from the Abyss."

Well, she's definitely in favor of fighting demons! But—

"...The Abyss?"

Wow, she really doesn't know very much about the world. "The afterlife for Chaotic Evil people."

"There are a few exceptions, but most of the time, when people die, they're sent to one of the nine main afterlives, based on their alignment — Good or Neutral or Evil, Lawful or Neutral or Chaotic. The Abyss, where the demons came from, is full of torture — all the Evil afterlives are." Brief pause. "And we know that the afterlives exist, and which ones have torture, because powerful spellcasters have spells to look, and because sometimes people get resurrected from an afterlife and tell other people what it was like."

"...And just to confirm, people go to the Evil afterlives for things like attacking a random festival for no reason, not for things like being gay?"

She nods. "It's not always that extreme, but that sort of thing." Obviously it would be better if even murderers went to Nirvana, but it's not as bizarre as Talion keeps worrying it is.

Well, alright then, it sounds like they're basically on the same page — or, like, it could turn out she's leaving out something important, it's not like she asked for a list of everything Iomedae thinks is Evil, but it seems like she's against obviously bad things like showing up to a festival to murder a bunch of innocent people for no reason and in favor of obviously good things like hurting people who try to do that. (Maybe she'd rather they arrested them first? Since she's apparently 'Lawful'? But self-defense is legal basically everywhere.) And if she's telling the truth, there's even some sort of setup like Hell but specifically for punishing things that are actually bad!

"Do you have to do anything special to get her to give you magic—"

"Is something wrong?"

She takes off into the air reflexively — she's faster that way — but a moment later she realizes that's not actually going to help, it won't make her companions any faster.

"There's someone else down that tunnel. It, uh, I can't be sure, but it sounds like maybe there's another demon attacking someone? Come on, let's go—"

Seelah doesn't hear anything! Talion must be a powerful adventurer to be able to pick out whatever she's hearing.

She takes off running.

Well, she doesn't think the girl is lying, at least. She'll follow.

As they turn the corner, they see a woman with pointy ears standing over the mutilated body of a different person with pointy ears, covered in blood and holding a rapier.

"Who's there?"

...Seelah glances nervously in Talion's direction.

Well. Hopefully this girl didn't have a really good reason to murder that guy, because if so she totally just ruined that plan.

"What happened here?"

Camellia, for all her faults, is in fact capable of noticing the pounding footsteps and the edge in the stranger's voice, not to mention the way all three of them looked at her rapier. She could say he was possessed — no, that doesn't explain why his body looks like that—

"There was some kind of beast in the tunnels." She glances down at her rapier, feigning a grimace. "I was able to drive it off, and I tried to heal him, but... I was too late."

"What kind of beast?" she asks pleasantly. 

She shudders. "I don't know the name for it. It was taller than I am, with terrible claws... truly, it was a gruesome sight. ...It ran off in that direction, if you think you might be able to defeat it."

She definitely did not hear any large animals running away.

...Talion isn't particularly hiding her skepticism. Which is a little helpful, it's good to know they both think this story is sketchy, but the half-elf can probably pick up on how she's feeling, and that seems likely to make things messier than they need to be.

"She doesn't detect," reports Seelah doubtfully. "—so she's not Evil, or she's not powerful enough to show up."

Or she's got an Undetectable Alignment up, but Anevia is guessing they want to come across as less suspicious of her than they actually are.

The stranger eyeing her suspiciously is accompanied by a paladin. What a pleasant surprise.

She smiles sweetly at the group. "Have you had any luck finding a path to the surface? Under the circumstances, it may be safest to stick together."

"I was just going to fly everyone out."

It'll cost a bit of backlash that she won't be able to guide off, but it should really only take a couple minutes to get everyone out, which seems like a much better idea than wandering around in the dark and hoping they find some other way out. (For some reason it's already a little harder to get her legs to do what she wants them to, even though the pain isn't actually that bad yet, but she's been working as an esper for long enough to be confident that a few minutes in the air won't leave her incapable of walking or anything.)

(...Jade is totally going to think she's dead. That really sucks, actually! There's nothing she can do about it, but it still sucks!)

She must be third-circle, then, perhaps even higher. It isn't especially surprising for a wealthy foreigner to be powerful as well, but it's still nice to have confirmation that she would be useful to cultivate as an ally.

"You must be quite the experienced warrior."

"...I mean, I know how to use a gun? But I don't think you have those here." Because this is some kind of medieval fantasy planet and guns were invented in like 1700.

Anevia doesn't know enough about Alkenstar to correct her!

(Solku is actually pretty close to Alkenstar! Seelah doesn't know a lot about guns, but she's heard of them! But she thinks Talion means there aren't any guns in Mendev, and as far as she knows that's true.)

"Lead on, then."

Before she leaves, she'll take a moment to listen for anyone else down here.

There are some giant centipedes a little ways down the corridor, moving with an insect-like rustling sound! To esper hearing they sound much more like some kind of bug-based dungeon monster than anything human-like.

Anything else?

Not within earshot!

(Esper hearing is quite good, but not good enough to hear a conversation a quarter-mile away, and they're farther than that.)

Great! Time to head back towards the crevasse! And then... figure out what to do about the fact that the new lady probably killed someone, she guesses.

Seelah is keeping her eyes on the new arrival, but she's perfectly happy to go back to explaining how Iomedae chooses people, like she'd been going to do before they were interrupted.

She still doesn't care about being Lawful, but as ways to decide who gets to have magic powers go, choosing good people who'll definitely use them to do good things and taking them away if they decide to suck is a lot better than literally picking at random and not taking them away no matter what!

Not only did she have the misfortune to encounter a paladin while she was in the middle of enjoying herself, the paladin's companion is trying to devote herself to Iomedae as well? Her luck just keeps getting worse.

Before long, the four of them have made their way back to the bottom of the largest rift.

"I trust you will be willing to transport me to the surface before these commoners?"

...What?

"What the fuck is your problem?"

"...My apologies if I have given you offense. I simply meant to suggest that, since you must choose one of us to bring with, I would be the most worthy candidate."

That's not better???

"It doesn't make a difference to me."

If their suspected murderer wants to be first, that's reason enough to prefer otherwise. It might still be a bluff, there are definitely some obvious reasons she might want to be last, but it's hard to imagine a secret plan that would require her to be in the middle. 

"It's probably safer if you're second, so we can check to make sure there aren't demons waiting to ambush us at the surface."

She squints upward, trying to detect any trace of Evil. "I'm not seeing any! But we're far enough down that that doesn't mean much."

She sighs theatrically. "I suppose that is acceptable."

(She had in fact been planning to attack the strange foreign mage once the pair of them were at the surface, but she supposes she'll simply need to come up with an alternative plan.)

Well, she can get Seelah strapped safely into the safety harness, and fly them up to the surface.

What do they see?

The square is more-or-less completely destroyed. There are bodies littering the square, mostly human but some demons and a few with pointy ears or tails or other non-human features. Some of them are largely intact — the demons didn't have the patience to desecrate all of them — but some of them have been torn into several pieces. Near Talion's feet, she can see the body of a teenager, a few years younger than she is by the look of him, positioned in a final unsuccessful attempt to shield a much younger girl.

 Wagons and tables and tents have been overturned at best and smashed into pieces at worst. A single, solitary festival pole is still standing, its streamers mostly intact but spattered with blood. A few blocks south, smoke is rising from the smoldering ruins of a group of houses.

The demons that attacked the square have apparently wandered off to find more victims; the only people left are a group of humans, dressed in dark green robes with red accents, who are busy painting some kind of symbol on what remains of the wall of a nearby building.

"Sorcerer! Run!" shouts one of the cloaked figures. (He's not sure what circle you have to be to fly, but definitely higher than he wants to deal with right now.)

...She doesn't actually care that much about a group of graffiti artists?? She has bigger problems.

(Seelah would love to chase after the cultists, but she's not going to be able to catch up to them in armor.)

She removes the safety harness and flies back for the other two.

Camellia displays the absolute height of restraint and refrains from stabbing her even a little.

"...so, uh, is there a specific place we're supposed to go?"

"Fly me up?"

Sure, she can do that.

There's a stabbing pain in her right leg as she straps Anevia back in, and she stumbles slightly, but she manages to catch herself, and then the two of them can fly straight up.

The city is, if anything, even more of a mess than the square itself.

From this far up, it's easy to confirm that the smoke is rising from the wreckage of some burned-out buildings, and that there are other buildings that are actively on fire. Many of the buildings that aren't on fire have collapsed, and even some of the relatively intact ones are full of holes that are definitely not supposed to be there. The rift they came up through is one of many others like it, strewn throughout the city, turning what remains of the streets into something resembling a maze.

There are demons prowling the streets, skeletons wandering the graveyard, corpses lying in alleyways of victims who managed to flee the attack on the festival only to be caught defenseless by a demon. 

There are some non-demons scattered throughout the city. Some of them are fighting demons; some of them are even winning against the demons. The largest visible group is gathered inside a walled area with no visible demons at all, standing in some kind of yard surrounding a large wooden building.

Anevia points. "Looks to me like people're gathering at the Defender's Heart."

Alright, sure, they can head on over to that building, it's not like she's got a better idea. It would be really annoying to get there if she couldn't fly, but she can, so they don't have to detour around the giant rifts and it's easy to figure out which streets are still passable.

...and on the way, she'll try praying to Iomedae.

Hi Iomedae! Uh, so, I heard you're the goddess of fighting Evil, and you give people magic to help them fight Evil too? I do that! Uh, I'm not sure what kind of things you want to know—

Seelah said that Iomedae's the good goddess of fighting evil. As far as Talion's concerned, that seems pretty straightforward! She knows what good and evil are. Hitler was evil. The Putumayo Genocide was evil. Dungeons are evil. Demons showing up to a festival to murder a bunch of random people for no reason are evil. Serial killers, rapists, sex traffickers — all evil. 

But sometimes it's less dramatic things, things people think of as normal. Sometimes it's come on, Mercedes, be reasonable, think of what we'd do without him, we can't afford to ruin his life over something like this. It's "charities" that take the espers who suck so much as people that no agency in a rich country will hire them and ship them off to Indonesia, like it doesn't matter if they're feeling up victims if their victims are poor. It's child abuse or bullying or the seal of the confessional or animal fighting or homophobia or "turn the other cheek" or cops that won't do their fucking job. It's that asshole she saw on social media last week who was bragging about stealing a homeless guy's stuff.

Good is the opposite of that. Volunteering at a food bank is good. Giving money to charity is good. Policarpa Salavarrieta was good. Fighting dungeons, rescuing people from dungeons, both are good, you know, as long as you don't use it as an excuse to get away with forcing yourself on the teenage daughter of someone on your support staff. Prosecutors putting violent criminals behind bars are good. Inigo Montoya finally getting to kill the six-fingered man is good.

And looking at someone who's done terrible things to you, hearing everyone around you try to convince you to pretend like it never happened, and deciding no, I don't care how good of a fucking combat esper he is, I'm going to make sure he pays for this, finding an opportunity, giving him what he deserves — that's good.

And she's not sure how good gods are at just reading the words out of your head, so just in case, she balls up some emotions and shoves them in what she hopes is the direction of Iomedae. Anger and hate and the desire to make someone pay for what they've done, burning hot and bright, fueling the conviction that drove her to kill him, that she draws from when she's fighting dungeons — she feels the same way about the demons that attacked the festival—

—I've only been here for like an hour and they've already murdered a bunch of innocent people, I want to fight them, I want to make them pay, if you give me magic to help with that I will, I assume you can't just magically give me back my gun but if you've got something that can hurt people from range that would be really helpful—

...This mortal is very confused.

Iomedae does sometimes choose people who have some significant confusions about Her, particularly in Mendev. Nearly everyone She chooses in any country has at least a few confusions about Good and Evil, though not to this degree. Considering the extreme risks to the state of Worldwound containment resulting from the situation in Kenabres, She is in fact empowering people whom She would not have been willing to empower yesterday.

...However, that would not extend to the point of empowering this mortal, even if she had a compatible alignment (which she doesn't).

With that being said, Iomedae does expect, on balance, that if this mortal were to be granted a cleric circle by some other god who would not otherwise spend the budget in ways more conducive to the cause of Good, and who is non-Lawful (...not that any Lawful god could cleric her regardless), the mortal would in fact use it to oppose the demons. Considering the present circumstances, She also predicts that in expectation the benefits thereby achieved would outweigh the harm resulting from increasing her capacity for vigilante violence. She transmits an information packet to Calistria with the contents of the mortal's prayer.

Calistria appreciates the thought but She actually already noticed that mortal's prayer! It's a pretty visible prayer, if you're Calistria!

In any case, She's definitely interested in clericing this mortal! If She does it now, though, the mortal is totally going to assume it was Iomedae, and given how little she seems to know about the gods it might take her a while to figure out who it actually was. She'll wait a little while, give the mortal a chance to learn that She exists, see if she tries Calistria on her own.

...Eventually she gives up. It's not like it's weird for a Lawful god to not want to give her magic powers, if she'd even be able to in the first place. 

Can she get some more information about, uh, the general situation around here?

Sure, Anevia can give her a summary.

A hundred years ago the Chaotic Evil Deskari cultist Areelu Vorlesh ripped open a giant portal to the Abyss, the Chaotic Evil afterlife, where the demons live, called the Worldwound. It destroyed Sarkoris, the country next door. Thanks to the efforts of the Crusades, they were eventually able to place the Wardstones, giant magic rocks that make it hard for the demons to get past, but they still have to patrol the borders to stop the demons from getting past. The political situation there is pretty complicated and probably won't make very much sense until she knows a bit more. 

That seems like a really sketchy thing to call their wars??? ...Maybe it's less sketchy in, uh, whatever language Anevia is speaking?

So, the defenders had been slowly losing ground for a while now, but they'd been holding out hope that something would change for the better, and occasionally it seemed like it might.

...Then, a few months back, hostile demiplanes started popping up all around the world, mostly but not entirely in cities, Gating people inside of them. It's usually not that hard for adventurers to get the people back out, but there are kind of a lot of them (Nerosyan, the capital of Mendev, is generally getting hit a couple times a week, and some places are even worse off). It used to be that the Worldwound saw plenty of adventurers, looking to get more powerful or do some Good, but ever since the demiplanes started appearing a lot of foreigners have decided to stay home/go home and fight the demiplanes, and they've been getting fewer donations. To make matters worse, sometimes the demiplanes just... vanish. There are rumors that if you die that way you don't even go to an afterlife.

...so, it sure looks like the demons are taking advantage of the situation to break out of containment. 

(Seelah came to the Worldwound anyway. The demiplanes also seem like a big problem, but supposedly you can't even Smite the monsters.)

"...So, uh, this might sound like a weird question, but do the 'demiplanes' have, like, a big black circle that you walk through to get inside them?"

It's weirdly specific that she knows that but isn't sure of it. "Yeah, why do you ask?"

"...So, back where I'm from, we've been getting what we call 'dungeons' for about sixty years. I'm not positive, but it sounds like the 'demiplanes' are the same thing. But it's really weird that they've only been around for a few months, I'd've guessed that either you wouldn't have them at all or that you'd also have had them for sixty years."

Anevia doesn't think she's lying. But she thinks she'd probably know if every city in Tian Xia had been plagued with hostile demiplanes since before she was born — most people wouldn't, at least if they were staying put in Tian Xia, but the Worldwound does actually get the occasional Tien adventurer. 

...Maybe they wouldn't if it were only a couple of them. Or she could be from someplace even farther away, like Arcadia or something, but either way there's clearly something very weird.

"Maybe the gods sent you here to share what you know?" She would've thought they'd put her somewhere that wasn't about to be attacked by demons, though.

If the gods sent her here it would have been really helpful to let her keep her gun, she's just saying. 

"Well, I can do my best, but, uh, it seems like there's a pretty big demon problem right now, so anything beyond, like, the basics might have to wait a bit. ...Do you also have espers? Where I'm from they showed up at the same time but I don't know if it's the same here."

"I must confess that I have never heard of 'espers'. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us?"

(Camellia wandered away from the stranger's stretcher once Terendelev had healed her injury.)

"So, back home espers showed up at the same time as dungeons. We've all got some kind of special power, like how I can fly, but some of them are a lot more useful than others, and then we also get some other helpful things like better eyesight. It's one in fifty thousand people, basically random — it's not like your magic, you don't have to be a good person, so espers shouldn't get, like, special legal treatment or anything. Espers who've got a power that's good for it mostly fight dungeons."

...That might be different here, depending on the local kind of magic? Back home there aren't people who can, like, turn into dragons.

"So then, each esper has some kind of bad thing that goes with their power, sometimes it's kind of the opposite of the power but other times it kind of just looks random. When you first become an esper — uh, that's usually between, like, sixteen and twenty-three — you spend a week having a really bad version of the drawback. People hardly ever die from it any longer, but I think in history they said it used to kill, like, way more people? Anyways. Once the week is up, you can use your power, except the more you use it the more of the bad thing you get. You can get rid of the bad thing by touching other espers — uh, this is going to sound really weird — basically, some espers are 'compatible', you can tell because it feels good to touch them, and they can make each others' bad things go away by touching for a few hours. And if you don't do that then instead the bad thing turns into a different type of bad thing, we call it acute versus chronic, where instead of being specific to you it, like, makes it more likely your heart stops working, that kind of thing."

"I admit, I had thought you some variety of exotic foreign sorceress."

"Kenabres doesn't even have fifty thousand people."

"What kind of bad thing?"

"It depends on the person. Like, mine is pain, but I've heard of, like," what are some things that would make sense to a medieval-fantasy person "getting a fever, or going blind, or seeing things that aren't really there?"

"I've heard of fevers and blind people and illusions. I don't think they usually give people magic, though."

"There's a spell that can delay pain for a few hours. I wonder if it'd work on you."

Huh. She... doesn't actually know. Probably it'd turn chronic eventually.

She'll spend the rest of the walk going through topics like "what is a dungeon core" and "make sure you rescue people from the dungeon before you go for the core" and "if you don't kill a dungeon, it'll come back and get worse".

Irabeth is handing out weapons to a patrol group, but she breaks into a relieved grin when she sees their group walk into the Defender's Heart. "Nevi!"

"Beth!" She glances back at the group. "Can I grab you for a quick chat?"

The way Nevi put that, she means a private chat. "I'll meet you upstairs once I've finished getting this group equipped. Room four."

Oh, wow, she's green. She did not realize Anevia's wife was going to be green. ...Not that there's anything wrong with being green, she's not racist against green people or anything. She's seen Wicked. Probably green people are just like anyone else.

"You can post me wherever you need me," she says to Irabeth. "I spent my smite in the attack, but I've still got two working arms."

She nods tiredly. "Once I've finished talking to Nevi. In the meantime, you can rest for a few minutes inside the tavern."