At roughly the same moment, Contessa pulls the trigger.

Only a little of the sound of the gunshot makes it through the portal; it's barely louder than Sam's body hitting the sidewalk. No one wakes up, or looks out the window to investigate.

Right, that was the idea.

Contessa doesn't kill all that many people, really. Cauldron doesn't know who they might need later, and there's almost always something more efficient she can do. When she does fight the point is usually to create a big complicated spectacle, carefully tuned to teach some kind of useful lesson to the survivors. Here, for once, she'd rather not have an audience: they're not sure how Golarion gods see Earth Bet, or what kinds of things they can learn from. Or how quickly. Cauldron policy, finalized after the first Good clerics were selected, was to check for clerics with negative channels once an hour, and portal-snipe them from a dark cavern in an unused dimension whenever she saw one. It might sound onerous or repetitive, but Contessa has Paths she checks every few seconds, for her short-term personal safety. Once an hour, for a Path that never even led anywhere before today, is easy.

She has Doormaker drop the gun in a volcano, just in case the gods can trace murder weapons but not murderers, and reports in.

They didn't know this was going to happen eventually, but it's not a surprise. Earth Bet does not get to have unambiguously good things.

It's a shame they don't know anything about this man: which god he made contact with, say, or how, or why. She'd like something they could use to predict these incidents and head them off early, and they could have had it. Talking to him in the real world was never a consideration, but Contessa can have conversations in Paths, as quickly as she can think. And yet, there's risk there too: they don't have any specific reason to think that Golarion gods can see Contessa's Paths, but it seems like the kind of thing they might be able to do, or might learn to do with practice. Best not to give them any. What they're trying instead is basically operant conditioning. Making clerics costs something, and every time an Evil god tries to make a cleric here, that cleric will mysteriously die. Can they learn to stop? Will they?

It does make Contessa a target, but Doctor Mother isn't very worried about that. Contessa can't Path the Golarion gods, but their servants Path just fine. Given even one full second of warning, of any danger originating anywhere on any Earth, Contessa can escape. It isn't perfectly safe, but safer, they all think, than letting Evil Samoras sprout up all over the Earths.

Well. That was interesting.

It didn't turn out as expected, but he learned a lot, and there are those who believe that knowledge is the greatest treasure of all. Not Mammon; to him the greatest treasure of all is a certain enormous gemstone, floating lost in the dark. Someday he'll recover it. In the meantime, though...

A whole world full of humans, almost totally without gods. He didn't get to see it very clearly, but once he's made that new cleric his guest in Erebus, he's sure he'll learn everything he wants to know and then some. The new world is far away, to be sure, and hard to access, but easier the second time. He could share the trick of it with select parties, for the right price. And then he could share the trick of keeping clerics alive, for a much higher price, once he's figured it out.

Abadar got there first. Abadar and the Good gods. Perhaps it's an unusually Good world? Or, perhaps it was almost as new to them as it is to him, and they were just lucky. If Lastwall had a new, secret source of technology, one not covered by the usual agreements, it would explain some confusing spies' reports. That's a tidbit he could hand to Asmodeus for free; it's always wise to give Him a little slice of any really big deals, lest He come collect His share Himself. He prepares a little packet, I have a guess as to where Lastwall's sudden interest in chemistry and druidic magic is coming from..., and sends it on its way.

For his first real customer...Hello Gorum, his second packet says. I've learned something I'm quite sure you'll want to know about, even coming from me. Here are some initial negotiating parameters; what do you think?

Scattered fragments of himself prepare more pitches, modeled on that basic template, while a larger fraction considers those last few seconds of his cleric's life. Clearly the Good gods are defending this world somehow, trying to keep him and his kind out. What triggered it, exactly? How did his cleric die? Whatever the mechanism, it won't work; it never does. On every plane, on every planet, people are people.

Samora reads listens to the Book of Revelation, and takes notes. It makes a lot more sense than you'd expect someone who received that long of a vision would be able to make, but that's a low bar. She reads the commentaries of a dozen scholars, and takes more notes.

Even among people who claim to believe in the existence and divinity of Jesus, there's no consensus that it's a prophecy or that it wasn't about this one long-dead emperor. Even among people who believe it's a prophecy yet to be fulfilled, some people think it's about the United States government. And she knows things about herself that Goliath doesn't. The bit that seems most likely to have anything to do with her says:

Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people. Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

It really seems like she can just not do any of that. She has no reason to. She couldn't even do most of it if she tried. Yes, she has power on another being's behalf and is calling on people to worship that being, but that's as far as the resemblance goes. Averting prophecies isn't supposed to be that easy, but she's not trying to avert it, she's trying to not be the person it's talking about. 

She tries to check the 666 thing, with the help of websites claiming to calculate it because even Comprehend Languages doesn't tell her how to transliterate names correctly, and three different calculators give her three different answers and a computer virus. (The unpowered Rig security guy who showed her Lord of the Rings helps her with the virus.) 

She doesn't think it's worth asking any Commune questions about Revelation, but she's been thinking for a while that she should try a Divination, and since she can't run all over the eastern seaboard healing people today there's no time like the present. She burns the incense and the silk scarf she acquired for the purpose, and meditates for ten minutes on the question, How do I best protect the people and civilization of Earth?

On Golarion, where prophecy is broken, Divination can see one week into the future, and returns only silence one time in five and cryptic messages the other four. She's not sure what will be different here, but any differences ought to be for the better.

You are also here to kill.

That's not the most comforting thing it could have been, in terms of not being the Beast, but she didn't ask for comfort, she asked for advice. And it wasn't evidence that she is the Beast, either, just that her other projects are far enough along that it's fine to seek out some combat. She spends the rest of the day finishing her plans for a scry-and-die on the S9 and sending them to Armsmaster for feedback.

The next day they let her go back to her healing commute, but with the motorcycle replaced by a PRT van with a driver. She can't teleport the van, so instead of going southbound every time she alternates northbound and southbound. The driver gets a Lesser Restoration every day when they stop for lunch. Samora has a lot more time to listen to the Bible in the original Hebrew and respond to blog comments.

The troopers are all sure that the driver's unofficial second job is "human shield", so it's an unpopular, white-knuckle posting despite the incentive pay and overtime. But a week later there haven't been any more assassination attempts, and gradually everyone starts to believe that the PRT's aggressive manhunt has at least scared the perpetrators off of a second strike, even if it didn't manage to catch anybody.

It's very annoying, everyone agrees, that they haven't managed to catch anybody. Part of the problem is that their best lead is not cooperating, even under threat of the Birdcage. Goliath did confess to attempted murder, saving a world of legal grief, but even so it will be hard to both get him sent to the 'cage and also avoid a public spectacle of a trial.

Perhaps they shouldn't Birdcage him, then, if it's so much trouble.

It's important to make an example here. Capes risk each others' lives in all sorts of stupid fights without serious legal penalty, but lethal ambushes are -- and should remain -- something else altogether. And anyway, they've already threatened him with the Birdcage if he didn't talk, and then he didn't talk. What are they supposed to do, admit they were bluffing?

Yes!

No.

None of that is Armsmaster's problem anymore. Armsmaster has two problems: one, what if they can't figure out a good way to hit the Nine, and two, what if they can?

Bonesaw's plagues are the biggest obstacle. Her power lets her Tinker with biological systems, diseases and viruses very much included. She claims the plagues they've seen her use aren't her best work, that she handicaps herself to keep things fair with the rest of the Nine, and the PRT analysts believe her. She also claims that the really extreme, creative stuff is packed into her body, to be released in the event of her death; the analysts believe that, too. So, how do you kill her without ending the world? Overwhelming force is not necessarily the answer. Armsmaster once read a file for "Project Red Spot", the gist of which was that the PRT should nuke the Nine the next time they showed themselves. It was popular for a few months in 2008, until somebody pointed out that Bonesaw could think of nukes too, and could probably engineer a plague that fed on radiation.

But suppose you can deal with Bonesaw somehow. Next question: how do you target your strike? Say you Scry Jack Slash, he fails his save, and you see the Nine standing in front of a red-painted house with a bunch of trees in the backyard. You have some architecture and botany experts on hand, of course, and they tell you these particular trees and this particular style of house only co-occur in rural Louisiana. There are maybe thirty thousand square miles of rural Louisiana. Now what? Maybe you Scry them at night, and hope they're outside on a cloudless night, far enough away from artificial lights that you can get a fix from the stars? Maybe you just keep Scrying them until they happen to stand in front of something distinctive? You can do that, but each Scry trades off against a Raise, and those are still in incredibly high demand.

Samora has a solution for that: her Mover power lets her teleport herself and three other people to anywhere she's familiar with, including a place she's Scrying. So, which group of three plus Samora do you think can beat the Nine all by themselves? Every one of the Nine is unreasonably dangerous by normal cape standards, but the big problem is really the Siberian. She's more invulnerable than the Endbringers; those you can tear bits off of, sometimes, but the Siberian has never been harmed in any way. Alexandria fought her once, alongside Legend, Eidolon, and Hero, and then Hero died and Alexandria got her eye torn out. And on top of everything else she can share her invulnerability with anyone or anything she's touching, just in case Bonesaw's enhancements didn't make them all tough enough.

He sends Samora a long reply, full of links to analyses of the Nine's conjectured powers and exploits. He's not saying no. The ability to Scry and ambush the Nine gives them a real opportunity. They just have to figure out how to avoid recreating the Protectorate's greatest defeat.

The second problem, of how to make sure Armsmaster gets most of the credit if this works, goes unaddressed even in his thoughts.

She listens to the analyses, and to the dossiers of every Protectorate hero who could potentially be convinced to join the strike team. She doesn't come up with anything better for the Siberian, or for Crawler, than "Scry them too, looking for a time when they're split up, and confirm with Augury before teleporting." (If she could prepare Plane Shift she'd have a chance of making Crawler someone else's problem, but never a certainty, and anyway she can't.)

She has a couple ideas for avoiding dead-hand plagues, ranging from the straightforward (Remove Disease on Bonesaw right before or after killing her), to the slightly sideways (kill her with specifically an Inflict Critical Wounds, if the plague is likely to be sufficiently part of her body for narrowly targeted negative energy to kill it) to the thorough but laden with timing risk (bring her body back to somewhere isolated and decontaminate it with repeated castings of Purify Food and Drink) to the Abadaran (bring her body back to somewhere isolated and pay Panacea to look at it). The whole question might be worth its own Divination, and whatever they end up doing the strike team should all get Diagnose Disease cast on them and then spend a while in quarantine. 

They could test some of those in advance. If they got a pig, for example, surgically implanted some viruses and bacteria in sealed containers, and then had Samora Inflict it to death...but maybe it's a waste of time. If it worked, they still wouldn't want to rely on it, and if it didn't they'd still try it if they could, just in case. He orders the experiment done anyway, and a similar one for Purify Food and Drink. Maybe something surprising will happen.

They need more than one layer of defense. Really they want more than twenty layers of defense; they'll see how many are practical. Is there a Protectorate cape who'd be good at establishing a quarantine zone on the battlefield, quickly? Ergregore? Mmm. She's technically a rogue, and probably can't be teleported anyway. Scarf doesn't really seal areas off, Armsmaster is pretty sure; she just pretends. Dispatch, maybe? He doesn't use his power that way, but it seems like it ought to work. He pulls a few files, to read in detail later. Who else...

Separately, he'll ask Emily to have some people look into the practicality of building a quarantine facility somewhere barren and inhospitable. That sounds expensive, but Armsmaster suspects that the expensive part is building a bioseal that your scientists can walk into and out of every day, near a city where they'd want to live. If your facility is only accessible via Teleport, you can probably economize.

There doesn't end up being space on the strike team for someone who's just there for quarantine reasons, but many layers of preparation they can do. Delay Disease is a second-circle spell that lasts a day; if everyone on the strike team gets one shortly before dawn on go-day, they won't catch anything they're exposed to during the fight and will have a day to decontaminate after. They were already going to punt on any day where the scry shows the Nine too close to a populated area; they can widen the definitions of "populated" and "close". They can do an Augury before leaving the post-fight quarantine. They can this and that and the other. 

And they can do absolutely none of that until they're sure they've gotten the remote ones that will go off in some other city after her death, and for those there's nothing for it but a second Divination. 

This is a series of timestamps. Presumably they're the timestamps when the remote dead-hand plagues were set up, but Samora cannot Scry the past. Armsmaster, Dragon, can you get anywhere with this?