She'll show up in person, she's much better than most gods at god-induced-headache mitigation but there's no reason to bother with that in the first place.

Is Beryllia afraid? Does she want to be? Only the second one matters in Her presence.

They help Tsukiyo get oriented. Shizuru confirms that She's not in very good shape after all these millennia and Iomedae seems to have been doing a good job so far, She doesn't want Heaven back.

"Zon-Kuthon has His own afterlife, Xovaikain. He gets Lawful Evil people who worshipped Him, which wouldn't be that bad if He didn't have a country that's been doing that for almost ten thousand years. You're working on that one too, right?"

"Yes, the Glorious Reclamation is planning on shifting to dealing with them as soon as they're done with getting Cheliax stable."

"The plan for the Abyss is that Nocticula isn't actually attached to being Evil, and if She could make the Midnight Isles large enough to catch everyone who goes there they could move somewhere nicer."

"What's the limit on your resurrection throughput, could it be recharged with a Pearl or Runestone of Power?" She provides one of each.

Yes, always. She genuinely hadn't thought about it in a long time, but she's always afraid, her job is objectively concerning/existentially terrifying. She isn't sure how useful the fear is, it's certainly the case that she has a lot to be afraid of, and it wouldn't be a good idea to be reckless. And - there is an argument that she would be less herself if she weren't afraid, and what a cleric is is both herself and the divine. But then, in Iomedae's presence - she will at least try not being so, thank you. 

...It doesn't immediately feel very different, that's good. She'll see what difference it makes.

"If something bad happened to Xovaikain - how big is it? - would You get all the prisoners showing up here? We have some higher-end destructive options He might not see coming - we could attack His cult metaphysically but that doesn't help the ten thousand years' worth."

She doesn't think she's suddenly being too reckless with higher mysteries just because of the courage effect, but she's watching herself closely. 

"Clerics - sort of go out of harmony as we do miracles, we recover with rest and prayer and communion and so on. Resurrections are almost never normally done but I imagine I could do a few more of those today, probably not more than a dozen, and that's all I could do today."

She highly doubts those will work, but she'll try - 

It's not the good old days any more, there's no way they're compatibilising two superficially-similar but deeply-divergent metaphysical systems on the fly in an extracosmic cat-based Hell, come on Beryllia.

(Neither the Pearls nor the Runestones help.)

"The main problem with destroying Xovaikain is that it's His divine realm. He's much stronger inside it and Everyone else is much weaker. If we can resurrect Anyone He kills and He can't I think we can get enough power to win anyway."

"Is it the sort of thing that can be used more if you wear items that make you more Cunning, or Wiser, or more Splendid?"

"Do you have the Crown of Infernal Majesty?"

"No, it destroyed itself when He died."

"Does it go based on time somewhere else, or could you go somewhere that has a day pass for every ten minutes outside of it and refresh it that way?"

"Is there anything important in Xovaikain or is it touching anywhere important? If You can distract Him and we raid the Vaults for enough of the right kind of sealed horrors we can probably, er, end its usefulness as a prison fairly quickly."

"...I did not know there were such items. Except arguably these." She gestures at her robes. "I think... I think that would probably help a great deal, yes. It's based on time and recovery from my perspective - if such a place is possible, there's no reason I can think of it wouldn't work."

Here, have a Headband of Mental Superiority +6.

"This area of Nessus is at normal time relative to the Material, how about we have the rest of the conversation in a different part."

Her domain is under Her full control, they don't Teleport, the walls just have different designs now (still not cats).

"We can Wish you up farther than that, but it'd take some pit fiends. They're still Evil, there's just no way to turn them back into the petitioners they once were. Unless you have one. Do you have a way to do that? Doing it without them would cost a lot more budget if you affected something budget-bound but I suspect after today that won't really be an issue."

INT 14 -> 20

CHA 15 -> 21

WIS 26 -> 32.

...Well. How about that. That is seriously, seriously impressive magic, resurrecting gods feels a little paltry now.

She is getting the distinct sense - no, she can feel it, a little dimly at first and then with clarity, of course - that the crown is reaching into her and accelerating parts of her - Cunning, Wisdom and Splendour, are the obvious guesses - in a way that's distinctly uneven, even specialised, the way brilliant wizards often can't tie their own shoes or add numbers in their heads, that makes sense - she is moving from thought to thought much faster which would be potentially extremely dangerous if she weren't also far better at steering them. 

It is maybe not exactly the capacity for divinity but it is pretty damn good. 

"This definitely helps. Thank You. Pit fiends used to be petitioners - souls of the dead, I infer - right, it depends on if they're meaningfully the same person, I speculate they could simply be resurrected, Power Word: Heal would definitely do it if they were willing but trades off against resurrections. If we're talking significant fractions of the whole population that's a job for Heaven Itself. Are there priority warped ex-mortals to restore?"

"Pit fiends are mostly made from around twenty different souls, all mashed together. I don't think there's anyone that's now part of one that would be more useful than the marginal Good god."

Fifteen pit fiends come in. "You're ready? This will be a little less of an increase than the headband gives."

"Well, You win the prize for most horrifying sentence I've heard this week. I think I will not use my newfound mental powers to think that one through just yet. Resurrection should definitely work, then."

She's ready. 

And over the next thirty seconds, fifteen Wishes get cast. They go in five smaller jumps.

INT 25/WIS 37/CHA 26 makes the spikiness much more apparent, but it also makes ordering and prioritising come more effortlessly to her. 

She is more herself, like this, in some ways. In the back of her mind she can be reviewing her own life - there are, of course, failures obvious in hindsight, 

"If a day in ten minutes is possible I can very comfortably do a hundred resurrections in a sidereal hour like this. Enough to kill Zon-Kuthon with acceptable casualties? Can petitioners be destroyed in Xovaikain or the Abyss?" 

That had not occurred to her before, it sounds almost grammatically wrong to suggest destroying a soul, which is silly, but there's no way she could miss it now. 

...She is leaning into a vague semi-conscious imagination of what a Greater Beryllia would sound like, not actually being herself, which is silly so she stops it.

But it is so much easier to hold things clearly in her mind and articulate them.

"The resources I have on this scale are mostly useful for breaking things, or at best making large, blunt changes. Actual governance and operations and... building, keeping up civilisation," we're much worse at, or rather "- we're fucked."

"Petitioners that are killed don't show up anywhere. As far as we know, they're just gone. The Neutral Evil afterlife eats everyone who goes there but almost all of them choose to go to Hell instead, and then Nirvana."

"What's so hard about building civilization? You need to make sure that you have trustworthy institutions, and ways to verify that they're trustworthy to people outside them, and non-stupid policies, and that's mostly enough. Most places have never had those but once you build them they stick around. You can get a lot of it done on the strength of truth-detecting magic alone."

"Right. Horrifying. Rules out a lot of possibilities. How's our intelligence on Xovaikain? How centralised is it? First thought, there's - a Doom that spreads exponentially in cities and captures souls, burns out at low population density but otherwise hard to stop. Means making a deal with a Necromancer but worth it if we can distract Zon-Kuthon enough. With the time-warping it could be seeded... maybe fifty times each hour, low confidence. Ah, Asmodeus, would You mind taking all the refugees at once? I'm not totally sure what it does with the souls otherwise."

"...The easiest truth-detecting magic in my world is extended attention from a specialised Enchantment wizard who is completely trustworthy, and the Inquisition is using both of those. - Hyperbole, but not by much. Even then it's not totally reliable, I bet I could beat it. There's one whole trustworthy institution and we're busy. Though possibly our policies are in fact stupid. ...Also, last time real civilisation happened the universe nearly ended."

"Zon-Kuthon in the seat of His power can cancel fifty attempts an hour easily, millions might give Him trouble. I'm happy to take any hypothetical refugees that don't prefer Nirvana but I don't think anyone that isn't a god is getting out of there intact."

"And you don't know what almost ended it because if you think about it too hard mysterious bad things happen?" She can do basic pattern-recognition.

"The easiest truth magic here is Abadar's Truthtelling, He gives it to His clerics at first-circle, it's very easy to resist but unless they use rare countermeasures it's visible when someone does. We don't seem to be able to mimic what you did before but maybe you could copy our spells? I also give Mark of Justice, which curses the person who has it if they violate the conditions it's given with, at a circle lower than usual."

"Make more trustworthy institutions. One is not enough, not if it doesn't have the slack to address everything that needs one".

"Right. I'm assuming He is a god and fundamentally incapable of surrendering and letting them go in exchange for His life or some other arrangement, and I should check that assumption?"

"In that case we can't think about it very well. Part of it was just an enormous explosion, but there were definitely far worse parts we don't know much about."

"If we had First-Circle clerics with truth magic that could be enough. I tried to look at Your version of Wish and it looked completely and totally unlike anything I'd ever even imagined, so I'm not hopeful, but if that works..."

Make more trustworthy institutions, as though that's a straightforward primitive-action like doing a miracle.

"We're trying, that's what our kingdoms are, but we don't have the slack to make them trustworthy even if we knew how. Is there a way without truthspells?" It's much easier, like this, to map out in her head all the tensions that conspire to trap them where they are, possibly she could see a way out...

"He isn't going to do that, and also if we kill Him we might be able to resurrect Dou-Bral instead."

"It's a lot harder, and almost impossible if there are hostile forces trying to corrupt everything you do. Kingdoms basically never work, barring immortal rulers or other ways of preventing succession crises. You want to either have a mechanism that means the people in charge will never be Evil and/or stupid, or a way to have being in charge not be enough to do much damage before being replaced, ideally both. You need to straightforwardly tell everyone your reasons for doing things, I don't know what's up with knowing too much causing problems but if people can't follow your reasoning they won't have trust in your competence or intentions. You need to have a long-running reputation for honesty and not making people worse off for dealing with you, you can't really get there without a lot of time passing but it's worth it. You need the laws to be very simple and very short, you need to have unbribable judges but without magic the closest you can get is judges that don't have any particular immunity to being themselves tried and will be tried if they're caught. Having everyone be literate is nice if you can pull it off but it's hard to if they aren't already."

"Here's the spellform for Abadar's Truthtelling, even if you can't replicate it I assume Abadar is going to be very interested in opening trade relations and local clerics are going to be a part of that."

Apparently "WIS 37", which Beryllia does not know is significantly higher than some things called gods, is enough to sort of - intuit what a spellform is and what this one probably does, at a glance. And to know that it is indeed entirely different from any kind of magic she's seen, and that she is not sure how one would go about doing it, and that at this level she could probably at least begin to crack what's going on with the gods and whether it's possible for Them to do this and if so why They haven't already, and to notice that that would constitute theology and be stupid. 

"Ah. We have a lot of those. Some of them are what we are trying to build civilisation out of. It has been done before, but - the only mechanism we have for making sure people in charge aren't evil or stupid is 'use clerics', we are trying to get more clerics but it's slow going. Most people are literate, we've pushed that hard and we do seem to have more witches than we used to. ...In retrospect it was way too easy, Gospeltongue itself is ancient magic somehow, clearly. The Church doesn't make people worse off for dealing with us, realistically most people trust us because we saved their baby brother's life when he was born or grew their mother's hand back or something, but I can't imagine how a government would do that even with the unbelievably impressive intelligence magic, possibly it'll be obvious once I'm used to it, I'm being cautious around possibly-dangerous thoughts for now."

She will memorise Iomedae's list of criteria, still marvelling at how effortless that is. It has been done, in her world and presumably this one. 

"Abadar? We would be fantastically excited for trade."

"Assuming your clerics don't work differently than ours do, they're not really the right way to establish people as trustworthy, except for gods that don't mind having to restrict themselves to Lawful clerics. The thing you want for that is paladins. Not making people worse off for dealing with you is a large part of what Law is for, you want governments to be capable of making promises they'll actually keep, including confidentiality promises, you want that either you don't have an inquisition or if there's no other way to deal with Evil gods and cultists for anyone they arrest to have the option to defend themselves under a truthspell, which they'll only be charged for if they're found guilty. You need governments to be stable, it's more important for a lot of things that people be able to predict what the rule will be than that it will be any specific way. Abadar's holy book is approximately just a list of a bunch things like this, here's a copy, you can read it while waiting to refresh your slots." Behold, the Manual of City-Building.