If you're going to assassinate the Queen of Cheliax, you'd better be very thorough.

The assassins, unfortunately, will be condemned to the worst tortures Hell has to offer, for failing to retrieve the Crown of Infernal Majesty first. That their hands were constrained by tropes is not an excuse their souls' owners will be inclined to accept, if they even understood it.

Luckily, they're not very real, even compared to the other characters in this story.

In a secret city in dath ilan, in a lavish (by Chelaxian standards) and not very doompunk (again by Chelaxian standards) apartment belonging to a certain Law-Abiding Sociopath, an infohazardously beautiful woman in an elaborate doompunk outfit appears from nothing.

She takes a look at the apartment's occupant.

"Okay, what the fuck, Aspexia?"

"Tsi-imbi," says the woman who looks exactly like Aspexia Rugatonn, in a language that is definitely not Taldane.

The word doesn't have a direct translation in any language of Golarion, but Abrogail's permanent Tongues gives her the gist of it.

"Yes, you almost certainly have gone insane," she says, "but that really does not answer what the fuck from my perspective, here."

"I don't think anyone heard me," she says, taking out her phone. "I really ought to tell someone about this; if I am having immersive hallucinations, my not telling anyone about it presents a rather larger risk of the destruction of the world than I'm comfortable with. On the other hand, in those worlds where you are real, you're in an extraordinarily restricted area and if I tell anyone about you you'll be involuntarily cryosuspended for materializing into it. If you'd rather that not happen you have thirty seconds to convince me this is reality."

No one turns Abrogail Thrune into a statue. That's her thing.

"I would, if I were inclined to believe that myself. Impersonating the Grand High Priestess is punishable by Malediction, is what I would say, if I had any confidence I were still in Golarion at all."

Appearing to know you personally is, she knows, a common feature of hallucinations. Appearing to doubt their own reality is not. It actually raises the probability that this person, even if a hallucination, is self-aware. Not that she'd care, the way most dath ilani would, and even most dath ilani would agree that you have two and a half seconds to kill the self-aware tulpa in the evil Keeper's head, but it does shift Athpechya's highest-expected-utility action slightly in favor of not alerting anyone yet.

"You are not in 'Golarion'," she says. "I have never met you before. Why do you believe you know me?"

Something occurs to her, a possibility the Keepers sometimes speak of almost jokingly; Civilization's actions would be very different, if they really believed it.

"Did you experience dying just before you appeared here?"

"It was an involuntary Plane Shift, or a Wish-kidnapping, or something in that genre," she says. "I did think someone was trying to assassinate me, and then when I arrived here I thought the Grand High Priestess, who looks exactly like you, was pulling some sort of elaborate prank, and now I have no idea (in Baseline, 'plenty of evidence and no hypotheses') what the fuck is going on."

Several of those words didn't translate, but some that did hinted at this woman having arrived from an economicmagic fantasy setting, which is the opposite of the way it's supposed to work, but whatever.

"I believe that we are in a story-where-the-protagonist's-subjective-thread-of-experience-continues-in-another-world-after-their-True-Death*," she says. "It is theorized here in dath ilan, that those who die here may continue to exist in such a fashion, though I had not expected anyone to appear here. It would suggest that dath ilan itself were a story or simulation, which is contrary to all previously known evidence. If my inferences are correct, you are from a world with economicmagic which I, as one of the presumable protagonists of this story, would be happier inclusive-or more interesting in, perhaps one that's less oppressively Good. I am curious as to what the 'Grand High Priestess', the person who supposedly looks exactly like me, is doing in your world. The word did not quite translate."

*This is a three-syllable word in Baseline and Japanese.

The probability of this being the actual Aspexia Rugatonn, the one with the power to make her life quite unpleasant, is now low enough that value of information is the stronger consideration.

Detect Thoughts.

Athpechya has INT and WIS scores that do not occur in unenhanced Golarion humans at all, and is otherwise a complete commoner.

The spell goes through.

Her thoughts are organized, precise, in a way that no thoughts Abrogail has ever read before are, made of numbers and explicit probabilities, constantly tracking across many possible worlds. One of the foremost threads of her attention is devoted to the question of whether Abrogail really exists; she currently places that at 80%, conditional on "existence" actually meaning something real at all anymore. Several more threads are devoted to elaborate planning in the worlds where Abrogail is an ally, and the worlds where she's an enemy.

She does appear to be Aspexia Rugatonn, if Aspexia had been raised in a totalitarian Lawful Good society without gods or magic. And she's trying to—they're trying to build—

Suddenly, in a moment of wordless inference, Athpechya connects the expression currently on Abrogail's face with the gesture and incantation she made earlier, and her mind goes completely blank.

"Are you reading my mind?" she asks, thinking this and nothing else.

She dials the phone.

"Tsi-imbi, and I need security capable of dealing with an adversary with unknown psionic abilities including mindreading if I am in fact sane."

When security arrives, they find a very detailed stone statue of Athpechya, and no Abrogail Thrune.

First, though, they flood the apartment with sedative gas. Dath ilan doesn't send corruptible human security to respond to a tsi-imbi in the Basement of the World until all potentially insane parties are safely unconscious, even if there weren't a potential mindreading sorceress involved.

It's the sort of gas that affects your perception first, so you don't notice until it's too late. If Abrogail is hiding in the apartment, she needs to make a Perception check.

Lol.

Abrogail's Crown is an item of poison immunity among its other functions.

She casts Gaseous Form to make sure the outline of her body isn't visible in the haze.

Elite dath ilani Security are, in fact, trained to respond to adversaries with a wide variety of alternatephysics abilities, mostly because this is the sort of thing that very smart dath ilani Exception Handling planners do for fun when they've exhausted all the so-called realistic possibilities (and sometimes even when they haven't quite), but also because the eighth-rank Keeper in charge of designing the security systems for Civilization's most important projects, who is one of five people in dath ilan cleared to know the true nature of Reality*, assigns weirdly high probabilities to this occurrence.

Athpechya warned against mindreading specifically, so the team that responds, while not Keepers themselves, has trained extensively in the Keeper arts of thought-control, and is also wearing helmets lined with depleted uranium, in the (likelier) case that the mindreading is just Sufficiently Advanced Technology, or else that this is the sort of alternatephysics that pretends to respect realphysics because the author thinks that's clever.

*A secret hypothesized to destroy the world if too many people merely think about it.

The possible worlds in this situation are mostly divided into those where Athpechya was telling the truth and those where she wasn't. Both of these are so unlikely on priors that it isn't considered worthwhile to even attempt to assign explicit probabilities right now. Overwhelming evidence for one, the other, or neither will be found eventually. In the meantime, that isn't Security's job; Security's job is to secure all possible worlds.

In that case, they need to apprehend both a rogue sociopathic Keeper and an unknown intruder with alternatephysics powers including but not limited to mindreading and presumably teleportation. (These powers don't usually appear together in dath ilani stories, which prefer to explore the implications of economicmagic and mentalmagic separately, but the relevantly cleared Keeper who planned Basement security wasn't expecting dath ilani tropes anyway.)

—this is the Basement of the World. They haven't drilled this exact scenario, but they do have protocols for each factor separately.

(Athpechya's agreement with Civilization included no additional security burden beyond that of an ordinary first-rank Keeper, but they sure do have more detailed plans for this specific contingency than for any other possible defection.)

The Basement does not in fact have counter-mentalmagic-trained Security on standby in every apartment block, so it takes three precious minutes after the alarm to get them on site before the block can be hermetically sealed.

You can't get out of the Basement of the World in three minutes. The site is already by default as close to causally isolated from the outside world as its operations permit. Within seconds of the alarm that isolation is complete. The tunnel that connects the site with the Keepers' headquarters in Default, the only path by which people and materiel may enter or leave, is sealed by multiple sets of blast doors on both ends, the spaces between the doors randomly either filled with toxic gas or heated to thousands of degrees. The Faraday cage over the entire installation that already prevents radio signals from entering or leaving the site's few surface buildings is supplemented by an unfolding canopy of flexible radiation-absorbing material that will block off the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum as well. The closely monitored fiber-optic relay which is the Basement's only legitimate connection to the Network is physically destroyed.

—on the independent authorization of any two of the Basement's director (an immortal ninth-rank Keeper named Leareth), deputy director (an eighth-rank Keeper), and assigned Meta-Keeper, the entire installation will be instantly reduced to a large radioactive crater.

If Athpechya had somehow managed to leave the Basement on foot, she would still be surrounded by hundreds of miles of virtually impassable and entirely uninhabited jungle. A handful of people in dath ilan have the level of Wilderness Survival training necessary to have more than a 10% chance of making it back to Civilization from the Basement (or, as is the more usual concern, vice versa). Athpechya is not one of them, and she would not in fact be permitted to receive such training if she asked for it—even if she didn't work in the Basement. It's a controversial policy in dath ilan, to gate the ability to truly opt out of Civilization on sufficient Moral Integrity (and permanent sterilization), but they are in fact suspicious of why anyone would want to move beyond the reach of even the utterly minimal law enforcement of the Last Resort.

The overwhelmingly most likely possibilities, therefore, in the worlds where this is a nefarious plot of Athpechya's, are either that she's still in the Basement, or that she was already gone before the alarm was ever raised. They know that the alarm came from Athpechya's phone in Athpechya's apartment, but they can't instantly verify that the phone wasn't tampered with to send a prerecorded message. By the time they can do that, they'll have access to the sealed camera footage of her apartment anyway.

—they can't actually tell the rest of Civilization to be on the lookout for Athpechya while the installation is on lockdown. That's an accepted cost of potentially having a hostile superintelligence in your Basement. So that world's Security response for now is focused on locating her within or immediately around the Basement. If she's there, it shouldn't take long.

As for the unknown mage, the ability to get in implies the ability to get out. Being already inside dath ilan's most secure facility and possibly unfamiliar with the broader world, they would likely prefer not to leave, but the simpler explanation for their observed absence is that they teleported away when the gas started. If they are still here, invisibility and poison resistance must be added to the list of their known powers.

(There might be debates, among ordinary dath ilani, as to whether it's a valid use of the Simplicity Prior, what another world calls Ockham's Razor, to assign the former world higher probability. A Keeper would simply know that the answer is 'no'. One true violation of the known paradigm of Reality is evidence for the possibility of arbitrary violations.)

The commander of the Security on-site doesn't actually assign very high probability to being able to apprehend the unknown mage, even conditional on them actually existing, so the obvious next priority is to recover the statue which might by some unknown mechanism contain Athpechya's soul.

Uh...no.

Circle of Death.

Of the nine Security in the room, one makes his save.

"People down, unknown weapon, need backup immediately," he says over his radio, in a secret conlang known only to Basement Security. "Possible invisible assailant, get some inert fog in here."

(The conlang is only useful in the worlds where the helmets are effective against mindreading—)

(—which includes this one, but—)

(—the Baseline word for magic is 'alternatephysics', not 'alternateinformationtheory'. Even given a trope-governed universe, dath ilan assigns much lower probability to the existence of truly sourceless translation magic. Such a thing exists at all in dath ilani fiction, but you wouldn't put it in a novel that was trying to look like it particularly cared about coherent worldbuilding.)

(Abrogail does not give a flying superheated shit what a dath ilani audience would think of her powers.)

She could cast Gaseous Form again and hide from the fog. She could also just massacre all of the Basement's remaining security and then do whatever she wants.

Nah, no fun.

She Disintegrates the surviving Security, and has maybe one round before backup arrives.

Lesser Time Stop.

...which gives her just enough time to cast Mage's Magnificent Mansion and pull the petrified Athpechya through the door before the second team of Security storms in.

Stone to Flesh.

"Who are you and where are we?"

"My name is Abrogail Thrune. I'm the hereditary-chief-executive" what the fuck kind of language makes 'Queen' a six-syllable word "of Cheliax. I work closely with your counterpart in my world. This is an extradimensional space whose entrance is in your apartment. Your people's Security can't enter."

"What do you want?"

"Oh, I didn't even mean to be here. I'm just having fun."

"You have an interesting definition of fun."

"You should try it sometime." (Nah, that's too much to hope for, Aspexia never has any fun either and it's perfectly legal for her.)

"Anyway, I'll probably conquer your planet sometime in the next few days. Between my economicmagic and the fact that you don't appear to have ever seen an Evil person in your lives I'm not expecting much of a challenge. Maybe it's the warm-up round, which does make me a bit concerned about what the real game is going to be."

She's being serious, isn't she.

"Do what you want. They mostly deserve it. Just don't interfere in the Basement. I do rather prefer humanity in its current state of existing, whatever its other faults."

Annihilating humanity is not, actually, the worst possible outcome when building a god.

—that's a heretical thought and she wouldn't have thought it in Cheliax, even though no one would have dared punish her for it anyway, not in this life, but now that she's left Golarion and probably isn't going back, it comes unbidden to her mind.

"I don't mean to interfere. Though I'm beginning to doubt that anywhere else is even slightly prepared to fight me, and that's no fun. How'd you know that lead helmets block Detect Thoughts?"

"I'm not in charge of Security planning. My guess is that someone else figured out a while ago what I figured out when you showed up, that we're in a story, and it's a pretty common trope, albeit a stupid one, to have alternatephysics that imitates real physics in ways that make no sense on reflection—dense metals block radiation, not that I expect your mindreading runs on that.

"Tell me more about my counterpart in your world."

"She's the most senior employee—" no language, what the fuck language "—the 'Grand High Priestess' of Asmodeus. The Church occupies...a similar role to your Keepers, or so I gathered from your thoughts earlier, although you don't have to be Good to rise high in our version." In fact you can't be, but Athpechya has had enough of a Good upbringing that she might have Good sympathies despite not being Good herself.

"Asmodeus?"

"The greatest of the Lawful Evil gods, greatest also of all the gods although it was illegal to present evidence otherwise so I'm not in fact certain of that, Prince of Hell et cetera, and my senior partner in the rule of Cheliax, at least formerly."

"YOU MADE AN AGREEMENT WITH AN UNALIGNED SUPERINTELLIGENCE?!!!"

GET HER AWAY FROM THIS PERSON BOTH OF THEM NEED TO BE PUT INTO CRYO IMMEDIATELY

—except if Asmodeus has a copy of her he probably predicted this and is using her to affect dath ilan's Future.

Every employee of the Basement carries at all times a small explosive device intended to be used irrevocably destroy their brain, should they come into contact with something that could contaminate even the Future.

Sleep.

You have two and a half seconds to kill the corrupted Keeper. It takes three to cast a Sleep spell.

Too late.

She's lying on a black stone floor in the middle of a very doompunk building.

"...Most High?" an unfamiliar man says carefully, in a language she doesn't understand at all.

Oh. Right. The Isekai Theory of Immortality.

There's an obvious inference about where she just landed, which she isn't certain of yet, but if it's correct then bidirectional and possibly repeatable travel exists between dath ilan and Abrogail's world, and she needs to kill Asmodeus before He can affect dath ilan, possibly by destroying this entire world.

Her resources: she apparently looks exactly like, and possibly in some metaphysical sense is the same person as, possibly the head Keeper of this entire world WHO IS ALSO AN AGENT OF AN UNALIGNED SUPERINTELLIGENCE but that's something she'll process after she's made a plan to survive the next five minutes.

Her obstacles: she barely knows anything about the world, doesn't know how to use the local alternatephysics, and doesn't even speak the language.

Probably she just needs to remove herself from Reality, especially since Asmodeus has had access to a copy of her for an unknown length of time and has apparently gotten good enough at optimizing her that her alternate self identifies as his 'Grand High Priestess', whatever that means. She would alert Civilization first, but Asmodeus has probably optimized that as well.

—she just tried that. It appears to have just made things worse.

Not to mention she probably couldn't anyway. People in worlds with mentalmagic often have alternatephysics souls, and she isn't sure that she has one, but if she does she probably can't easily destroy it, and killing her body would just send her to an afterlife. Possibly an afterlife run by Asmodeus, which is really not a place she wants to end up.

—maybe this is Asmodeus' afterlife? She needs more evidence to discern between that and her previous hypothesis.

Okay. Strategy. She can't, actually, pretend to be her alternateself long enough for that strategy to do more expected good than harm. Nor does she expect much goodwill from the alternateselves thing—maybe if they believed her, but why would they, and impersonating someone of her alternateself's importance is probably a serious crime.

"I'm not the 'Grand High Priestess'," she says in Baseline. "I just look like her."

Tongues.

"What did they do to you?" the man asks incredulously.

Updating.

This man seems to be assuming both that she's her alternateself and that there's a reasonable excuse for her not to speak the language. She'll run with that.

"...I have no idea," she says. "What happened?"

"You got a Sending from the Queen who's apparently trapped in some undiscovered plane and immediately Gated off to rescue her. A minute later you showed up here, no Queen. What the Abyss* are you wearing, by the way?"

*Both dath ilan and Cheliax do not use 'hell' as a swear word, but for very different reasons.

THE GRAND HIGH PRIESTESS OF ASMODEUS IS IN DATH ILAN RIGHT NOW?!!

Okay. This does have any advantages. She probably won't show up and ruin her deception, and she can blame her total lack of memory on dath ilan.

(Hopefully Civilization just puts her alternateself in cryo immediately, but)

"I was there much longer than a minute, I think," she says. "The Queen is still there, as far as I know. She claims she's going to conquer the whole plane, which I don't doubt, in Asmodeus' service, which I do. They were really paranoid about gods. They tried to wipe my memory to stop Asmodeus from influencing their world—they're insufferably Good, so they wouldn't just kill me.

"So I don't, uh, actually remember anything about this world or Asmodeus, except that He exists and I serve him."

The Grand High Priestess is asking him for theological instruction?

This is a test, right?

He'll suffer for refusing it, but not nearly as badly as for failing it.

"Most High," he says, "I am certainly not qualified to remind you the ways of our Lord; let me find you someone more suitable."

"Wait. What?"

"It's the Most High, I swear to Pharasma," the junior cleric says. "She Gated off to some literally godsforsaken new plane to rescue Her Majestrix and came back not even speaking Taldane."

"Did you consider," says Jacint Subirachs icily, "that she might be an impostor, and not even a particularly good one?"

He had not.

(—he's not ready for Hell he's not ready for Hell please don't send him to Hell—)

True Seeing.

She's not magically disguised.

"You'll suffer for that mistake," she tells the junior cleric, "but not nearly as badly as you would have if it had meant something.

"I'll take it from here."

"I understand, High Priestess," he tells Subirachs, and gets out of there as quickly as possible.

"Do you still have your cleric circles from Asmodeus?" she asks Athpechya.

"I don't think so?" she says, sounding uncertain. "I'm actually not entirely sure what a 'cleric' is."

This is going to be a long day.

She explains the basics of divine magic to the Grand High Priestess.

"You should pray to Asmodeus and try to get your circles back," she says. "In fact I insist. It's possible you're not meaningfully the same person who went to the other plane, and if our Lord doesn't recognize you, neither does His Church."

"How do I do that?"

"Clear your head of other thoughts and contemplate your alignment with our Lord's domains—tyranny, slavery, pride, and compacts, if you've forgotten those too, though I believe you'd unified them into a single overarching concept you called 'corrigibility'."

Oh.

Oh.

That's not, actually, how corrigibility works.

You design your superintelligence to be corrigible to you.

You don't try to be corrigible to your superintelligence.

That doesn't make any sense, even if you're completely amoral.

It's an interesting sort of symmetry to the story, though, and when she thinks about it she realizes that she has made herself corrigible. Her natural utilityfunction was a muddled and antisocial mess, so she long ago deleted it and replaced it with 'serve Civilization'.

Which is what she's going to do.

IF THERE ARE ANY CONCEPTUALMAGIC-SUPERINTELLIGENCES VERIFIABLY ALIGNED WITH CIVILIZATION'S VALUES WHO WANT TO HELP ME DESTROY ASMODEUS—

Hey Nethys, want to spot me a whole bunch of cleric levels? I predict the result will be worth it by your utilityfunction.

Deal.

She's falling, falling—

And she's standing on a snowy plain facing an olive-skinned woman in primitive metal body armor.

"Hey.

"You're not actually Aspexia Rugatonn, are you?"

"Athpechya of dath ilan. I'm the version of myself not corrupted by a hostile superintelligence.

"Now let's see that verifiable alignment before I let you talk your way out of this box."

—she makes herself legible, in a way she never has for any mortal before, because few mortals outside the Basement of dath ilan would be able to make any sense of it.

She's not, precisely, what Civilization would choose to build, but Civilization doesn't have a Hell problem.

Ideally she'd get an entire senior research team out of the Basement to look at this for a while. She doesn't have that luxury, and also she's not deciding whether to let this superintelligence out of containment, just whether to accept Her help against something definitely hostile.

"I'll accept it," she says, "though I'll need your Oath not to act in dath ilan until this has been reviewed and approved by the Keepers according to Civilization's processes, if that's something our alliance would otherwise permit you to do."

Agreed, excepting a few unlikely contingencies where the Keepers are unable to do that and Asmodeus is still active in dath ilan.

Something changes in Her inner structure, still visible to Athpechya, the true form of an Algorithmic commitment that the Keepers merely approximate better than any other mortals can.

Athpechya feels emotions much less strongly than the median dath ilani. It's still beautiful.

"Now," she says, "where the infohazard-concept-of-infinite-torture am I?"

(Baseline does not have a word that translates as Taldane 'Hell', because dath ilan never developed the concept.)

(Except in the Basement, where Athpechya invented it, during a brainstorming session on possible alignment failures, to universal horror from her fellow researchers.)

(If the word she coined, which approximately translates as 'unrescue-simulation', ever got out of the Basement, it would probably become the single strongest curse in Baseline. Athpechya is actually using a euphemism someone else in the Basement invented.)

Condensed explanation of Golarion and its problems.

—it's still a long explanation. Golarion has a lot of problems.

Athpechya has considerably less emotional trauma and moral outrage about Golarion's problems than a certain other dath ilani immigrant.

She's nonetheless much quicker to figure out what she needs to do.

—not destroy the world. It would be quite justified, if there prove to be no better options, but there do appear to be better options.

(Condensed explanation of dath ilan.)

"The first priority is keeping Asmodeus out of dath ilan," she says. "Which is just as well, because I can't actually give you cleric levels to match Aspexia's except conditional on their not being used in Golarion except to leave. I've made arrangements to cover the energy cost, but it would still come out of my intervention budget, and I can't actually afford that at acceptable cost to my interests in Golarion. I had a time convincing Pharasma you were Lawful enough for this deal to be allowed, but you are, right?"

"I am. I guess infiltrating Cheliax by impersonating the Most High is not actually possible?"

"Unfortunately I can't make you a high level Evil-detcting cleric. If I could do that my spy operations would be a lot simpler.

"Now, your oath?"

"I'm not going to say that out loud, we're in a story being read by way less Lawful people who will just end up shitting all over the multiversal trust ratio if they figure out how to make True Oaths. You're reading my mind anyway, right?"

"...yes."

Legible precommitment et cetera.

Here's the list of spells you get to choose from. At your level and Wisdom stat you get like fifty of them and Nethys says it would bore the Orthogonal Things and possibly cause the world to stop existing if you had to choose them onscreen.

(But two of them should be Gates—cast one to dath ilan immediately and the other back to My high temple in Vigil forty-eight hours from now.)

Oh, and just warning you, this is going to hurt.

She's back on the floor. Her head feels like a spike has been driven into it.

She feels out her new magic powers and starts figuring out how to cast a Gate home.

Something about that didn't look right.

Detect Alignment.

Blindingly bright Lawful Good.

What the fuck.

Indeed, what the fuck!

Here, have two more cleric circles, new favorite squirrel!

Everybody STOP.

ASMODEUS' FAVORITE SQUIRREL went somewhere OUTSIDE PHARASMA'S REALITY and came back aligned with IOMEDAE.

Do you guys not REMEMBER what happened with ZON-KUTHON?

Planar travel to and from points outside Pharasma's Reality is BANNED until the anomaly has been ACCOUNTED FOR.

—her Gate fails.

OTOLMENS LISTEN. THIS ISN'T ASPEXIA RUGATONN, ASPEXIA RUGATONN IS STILL OUTSIDE PHARASMA'S REALITY. THERE IS NO ANOMALY. PLEASE CEASE THIS INTERDICTION IMMEDIATELY AS IT BENEFITS ASMODEUS IN THE FOLLOWING WAYS—

"Attention!" she yells at the entire staff of the Grand High Temple in Infernal. "This is not the Most High, as you may deduce from the shitload of cleric levels that the Bitch-Goddess* just dropped on her! As of last round I am the Most High! If you have Malediction prepared I want you to cast it at her on my mark, and then the most damaging spell you have on the next round! If you don't have it, grab a scroll!"

*Literal translation of Iomedae's name in Infernal

Unfortunately resolving an anomaly is a complicated legal procedure that requires approval from Pharasma and can't be done in the next time unit.

Suddenly everyone is crowding around Athpechya, not attacking, just barely touching her—

She reviews her available courses of action, and—

All the godagreements concern intervention in Golarion. Athpechya's oath prohibits her from using her spells except to leave Golarion.

The interdiction is about travel out of Pharasma's Reality.

ATHPECHYA. GATE TO HEAVEN NOW.

"Mark."

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction.

Malediction—

Everybody rolls a 1 eventually.

"Hit!" calls the cleric whose spell went through.

Destruction.

The Gate snaps up directly behind her and she and several priests of Asmodeus fall through just as Subirachs completes her spell.

The spell still connects.

Ash drifts to the ground in Proelera, as the Gate collapses and archons subdue the Asmodeans.

Abrogail Prestidigitates gore off herself and starts preparing a Sending.

She's heard stories, from the days before prophecy was broken, of paladins who had themselves damned to Abbadon upon learning they were unwitting agents of Asmodeus.

Paladins. Not Aspexia fucking Rugatonn.

What sort of story is this, if not-Aspexia is right about that part? Maybe this was some sort of weird inverse of Aspexia—no, then she'd have been Chaotic. No, this is just a world so horrifyingly Lawful Good that their Aspexia Rugatonn kills herself after brief contact with Asmodeus at one remove.

She'd thought that they wouldn't see her coming. Insufferably Good or not, she's not sure about that anymore.

"Still alive. Trapped in Lawful Good country in unknown plane. Safe for now but we have a situation. Gate to my location."

A few minutes later there's a Gate.

"We do have a situation, I see."

"Wait 'til you hear why she did that."

"If there's a power that turns people that Lawful Good I need to know what it is."

She starts removing clothes from Athpechya's corpse.

"Prestidigitate these clean."

"What the Abyss—oh."

She does the Prestidigitation.

Cultural Adaptation.

"I knew there was a reason He gave me that one."

Abrogail takes a step out the door of the Magnificent Mansion, behind a Wall of Force, with her (ornamental, but effective) dagger pressed to Aspexia's throat.

"Move and she dies."

Giving in to threats just incentivizes more threats!

Really?

Oh well.

She stabs Aspexia in the neck, an attack that would instantly kill a commoner but is more of a minor scratch for a ninth-circle cleric, and simultaneously casts a surreptitious False Death. Having to make threats is already a sign of weakness, but empty threats are vastly worse.

The villain of the most popular fictional franchise in dath ilan has a combat philosophy that he taught to the young hero in a famous early scene:

If you can't kill your enemy quickly, get away.

Abrogail is not that villain and has never heard of him, but they do have certain things in common.

She Teleports half-blindly to a location she read from not-Aspexia's thoughts.

At the exact geographic center of Default is a building that would be called, if your Baseline translation algorithm were more poetic than literal, the Temple of the Light.

As the Keepers' public headquarters, it is one of the busiest buildings in dath ilan and also one of the most secure.

An intruder materialzing into the center of its atrium, in the middle of a worldwide Security alert about a potential hostile economicmagic user (the Basement having judged it worthwhile to reconnect to the outside world—this isn't the kind of emergency they were really preparing for with that precaution), would be seen by several hundred people, many of them civilians, for a few seconds before they were hit by about two dozen bullets from all directions, carefully aimed to avoid the head.

Aspexia, you swore to come back for me, is her last thought.

There's a tall woman, ghostly pale, in what another world would recognize as judge's robes. Dath ilan has no particular tradition of their judiciary wearing special clothes, so the implication will be lost on any dath ilani appearing in this court.

"Do you know your name?" she asks.

"Athpechya," she says. The sensation of hearing herself is more like the sound of her voice in her own head than actual vibrations in the air.

"Do you know where you are?"

"Top hypothesis is a rescue simulation, probability forty-five percent. Do you need to hear my other eleven?"

"That'll do. You are dead; this is your soul's trial, to determine what afterlife you will be sent to. Do you—"

"Objection," says a horned red-skinned man to Athpechya's right. "She was Maledicted; this is not a soul trial. The defendant in this trial is her." He gestures at the armored Chelish woman sitting to Athpechya's left.

"Sustained. Lady Iomedae, you are accused of the theft of this soul, which Hell claims as its rightful property under the Malediction Act of -8762. How do you answer?"

"She died in my domain and I'm allowed to keep her. Abbadon's Case, 4077."

"That's not what Abbadon's Case says at all and you know it."

"Implication from what it doesn't say. The judgment of the court condemns Abbadon for, quote, 'the unlawful theft of souls from the River of Souls'. No mention of the soul farm they're running with a population four times that of the largest city in Golarion."

"Hell and Heaven alike condemn the senseless wastefulness—"

"In which case I will concede this case when this court permits me to raze Awaiting-Consumption and evacuate everyone there to Nirvana."

"To Hell, for Evil souls."

"No."

"The court proposes a compromise: Axis, as befits her actual alignment, and the Malediction penalties against resurrection remain in place."

"With Grand High Priestess Jacint Subirachs as the Maledicting caster of record, not the second-circle who got lucky with a scroll."

"Speaking of which, I have some proposed rule changes for saves. That was some bullshit."

"Objection: immaterial."

"Sustained. Lady Iomedae, please confine your remarks to the matter before the court."

"How about I just pay the cost of a Miracle and we send her back to Heaven alive."

"I'll allow it if Hell agrees."

"We'll assent if she can explain how she created a ninth-circle cleric in the middle of the Grand High Temple of Asmodeus at zero intervention cost."

"Immaterial."

"Not entirely."

"She swore not to use any of her spells within the region covered by the intervention budget agreements."

"That would be valid, except for the part where mortals can't meaningfully do that."

"This one can."

"Where do we get those?"

"Ask Aspexia Rugatonn. Speaking of which, can we all agree that this isn't her?"

"Yes."

"So the anomaly related to a possible utility-flipper beyond known reality is resolved?"

"Not the matter before the court. I'll get it taken care of in the next thousand time units, though.

"If there are no objections, the Lady Iomedae will pay the cost of one Miracle and the petitioner will be returned to her point of death alive."

—and she's back in Heaven. She tries to Gate to dath ilan almost immediately.

Nope. According to Nethys, dragging this out is actually key to the final defeat of Asmodeus, without which Civilization will predictably destroy Golarion, but Athpechya can't be told that.

False Death leaves the subject conscious and able to hear, which is a useful espionage capability if your enemy doesn't know about it.

...and isn't dath ilan, where they do not talk about important secrets in a random hospital room, not because they expect that the apparently catatonic patient can hear them and is also secretly their enemy, but simply because there is no reason to do so. Nonetheless, there is a senior Keeper there in case 'Athpechya' wakes up and has been corrupted by an unknown infohazard, and he's getting some level of updates on the broader situation.

Abrogail Teleported into the middle of a public building, because of course she did, and was immediately shot dead. They're doing something that Aspexia would analogize as casting a permanent Gentle Repose on her corpse, which they do to everyone because they don't have afterlives and plan to resurrect everyone one day, once they figure out how to do that.

—they're preparing to do it to Aspexia, and are holding off only because she doesn't, actually, appear to be getting any closer to death. They're quite confused about that fact. Something they believe is false, but they're not yet sure what.

When the False Death wears off, there's a man waiting to ask her a series of questions intended as a sort of personality checksum, to ensure she hasn't been corrupted by contact with the hostile conceptualmagic user.

She probably would have at least made it to the next round if she hadn't tried to answer as a Lawful Good version of herself.

The Keeper doesn't even need to tell the nurse to start sedating her.

Destruction.

She Infernal Heals herself and tries to Plane Shift back to Golarion. She can come back for Abrogail later.

Nope.

Gate?

...Miracle?

She is able, eventually, to use the Miracle to Teleport to the location of Abrogail's body.

—she breaks open the cryo pod.

Resurrection.

"I'm guessing from your expression and all the alarms going off that we haven't much time?"

In which case you shouldn't waste it with stupid questions.

Saying this would be even stupider, though.

"Do you know what I meant by it, in the depths of my heart, when I pledged my loyalty to Asmodeus?"

"Something other than actual loyalty, I presume."

(Throughout the Basement there are screens displaying natural landscapes in place of windows. It's a small mitigation of the psychological toll of living underground.)

"That He could have his fun, and I could have mine."

She Disintegrates the cryo pod, Alters Self to look racially dath ilani, and Teleports to a semi-remote location in an Exceptional Natural Area that she saw on one of those screens.

She attempts a Gate once per round until Security arrives.

—a ninth-circle cleric can keep Basement Security busy for a while. Not forever.

She lets herself be taken alive. It's better than being cryopreserved, which will probably prevent her soul from reaching Asmodeus. She can try her escape again when she gets new spells tomorrow.

She can't, actually, get new spells here.

Eventually her Gate goes through.

She lands in a self-isolation room in the Basement and starts keying in pre-arranged codes, a minimum-bandwidth channel intended to communicate the necessary information while minimizing the risk of any hostile superintelligences affecting dath ilan through her. The codes roughly correspond to 'conceptualmagic, economicmagic, multiple unaligned superintelligences, multiple putatively aligned superintelligences, multiple very serious s-risks and x-risks, my continued participation is required'. Then she lays down on the room's small bed and sedates herself. If she hadn't keyed that her continued participation was required, the system would have begun the cryo process automatically.

It is impossible to describe in any reasonable amount of time the level of alarm that this generates in dath ilan. It breaks their previously calibrated alert scale entirely. The prior probability assigned to encountering this many problems this bad simultaneously was so low that they have not actually considered the possibility all that seriously.

But this is dath ilan, and they do not panic just because they run out of numbers to describe how urgent the situation is. Across Civilization contingency plans for each declared Exception go into effect. It will strain Civilization's resources to their limit to execute all of them simultaneously. But this is dath ilan, and if they are going to die, they will at least die with dignity, fighting for their lives with all their intelligence and strength.

When she has been roused from sedation and her mental integrity has been fully checked, and she's been briefed and debriefed, she asks if she can talk to Aspexia before they put her into cryonic suspension.

She's an agent of a hostile superintelligence.

"I know. I'm going on ice as soon as I'm no longer needed for interworld transit, and of course we would wait until then, but I wonder if there's something of the Light left in her that only I can reach."

There is not.

They're laid to rest side by side, in the cryo vault beneath the Basement of the World, in hope of a resurrection that seems like it will come soon if it comes at all.