Even if the gods have agreed not to let their conflicts destroy Golarion, the same doesn't necessarily apply to dath ilan.

Too much of her infra-probability mass is still taken up by unknown unknowns to make anything resembling an expected utility calculation yet, but there are at least some plausible worlds now where what Athpechya has told her is true. What they really need now is more information, and either a logically consistent version of Golarion or clear evidence for all of this being fake will arise eventually.

That said, are there any worlds where immediate action by Civilization might have a large impact?

—Asmodeus can probably see dath ilan. That's not a certainty, but He's far more likely than any other power to have sent his agents here. And assuming that He can, copying people from dath ilan and instantiating them in Hell is well within the current expected range of His capabilities. In Golarion He's restricted by agreement only to do that to otherwise-dead 'Lawful Evil' people, but there's no reason to believe those agreements apply in dath ilan.

In the worst of these worlds He's already copied the entire population of dath ilan. But the fact that He bothers to capture already-existing people at all, instead of just creating His own, weakly suggests that either He can't do the latter (in which case He might not be able to trivially copy people either), or that He only values torturing people who would counterfactually exist, and possibly only those who are otherwise destroyed—because, right, there are hypothesized forms of personality-death that leave one's experiential thread unable to be resumed by rescue simulations elsewhere, and extended torture might be able to induce them.

It's still one hypothesis among many, but that is quite possibly the most horrifying utilityfunction a being could possibly have where the shit did this thing come from.

And Asmodeus sent human agents to dath ilan rather than act there directly, which suggests that His resolution and/or attentional capacity in their world is actually quite limited. It all adds up to a reasonably likely set of worlds in which Asmodeus hasn't yet started torturing the entire population of dath ilan, but will start doing that soon unless stopped.

Well, there's a god of that, if Civilization can trust Her.

HOW DOES ONE CONTACT IOMEDAE? she asks Athpechya.

MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT GODS CAN BEST SEE THE MINDS OF MORTALS WHEN THEY ARE CLOSELY ALIGNED WITH AND/OR CURRENTLY CONTEMPLATING THEIR DOMAINS. I ASSUME THAT, AT LEAST WITH MYSELF AS HER CLERIC PRESENT, IOMEDAE HAS ENOUGH SIGHT ON DATH ILAN TO RECOGNIZE YOU DOING THAT. HOWEVER, FOR HER TO ANSWER WOULD CONSTITUTE AN ACTION IN DATH ILAN WHICH SHE IS CURRENTLY SWORN NOT TO TAKE.

UNDERSTOOD. I'LL HAVE SOMEONE SEE ABOUT LETTING YOU OUT OF THIS BOX. (The final decision, obviously, will be made by someone who has never interacted with the possibly-compromised Athpechya directly and has only read a transcript of the conversation as summarized through two third parties.)

She calls the Chief Executive and informs him that recent evidence is pointing away from the supervillain theory and towards First Contact, but there are certain matters that need to stay causally isolated to the Basement for now. For infohazardous reasons, Civilization should until further notice try extra hard to prevent True Deaths. (She would tell him more, except that she suspects that merely knowing about gods may improve their ability to read one's mind.)

Then she informs all relevant people of what she's about to do, goes to one of the other isolation cells (positioned throughout the Basement so as to minimize the expected travel time to the nearest one), turns on all the recording devices, and locks herself in.

Elsewhere

The True Resurrection completes, and Aspexia Rugatonn rises from the bier on which her body was remade, sizing up the woman who resurrected her.

There is now, in Cheliax, that intolerable situation where one god has two ninth-circle clerics alive on the same planet at the same time.

Asmodeus could, given the unusual circumstances, simply take back Subirachs' extra levels, and remain in compliance with all relevant agreements. However, this situation is also implicitly a contest for the leadership of His church in Golarion, and such contests, He has decreed, ought to be settled in an Asmodean manner.

"Fail your save," she says.

There never was a question of how this was going to end, was there.

She obeys.

Destruction.

She doesn't have time to make it hurt. Hell can do that for her.

Some time later, Aspexia Rugatonn, accompanied by Gorthoklek, enters the throne room of Cheliax, having summoned the chief nobles thereof to attend upon her there. She walks up to the throne and stands directly in front of it, not sitting, but positioned so that any who did wish to sit there would need first to move her from her spot.

"The queen lives, but may be presumed to have betrayed us, and the Crown of Infernal Majesty is lost," she says. "Which of you next sits upon her throne is of little concern to me; the leading candidates are all, in my opinion, equally unsuited for the job. However, Cheliax has, in the course of these events, encountered an emergency which it will not survive if it now engages in its usual method of choosing a ruler. In recognition of this, by this writ of Asmodeus' own will, I have been appointed regent of Cheliax until such time as the emergency has passed, and while it persists, any attempt to better your future position by any means other than loyal and competent service to your country and your god will be met with the severest of punishments, in this life and the next. Those who wish to argue with any of this may do so in Hell. Is this to all of you absolutely clear?"

So it's a Church coup, then.

You don't particularly argue with a ninth-circle cleric to her face about that, though, and you definitely don't argue with a pit fiend.

Everyone is absolutely silent.

"The Grand High Priestess has asked you a question," says Gorthoklek, holding up the writ for any who dare to inspect it.

"Yes," and "Clear, Your Highness," say a chorus of terrified voices.

Rather a lot of people would really desperately like to be literally anywhere else, possibly including some parts of Hell, right now.

And some time after that, Gorthoklek sits at the head of a table with Aspexia to one side and Contessa Lrilatha to the other, addressing an audience of Cheliax's most senior military officers.

"Our Lord saw somewhat of the world we have discovered—which has discovered us—during the Most High's time there, though His sight is ended with her death and return to Golarion," he says. "It is not a place which, by the ancient agreements between the gods, you ever ought to come into conflict with—but dath ilan, as this place calls itself, has no gods of which our Lord is aware."

(Yet. Asmodeus does know about the Basement, and His absolute first priority is to destroy dath ilan before it can create a scalable intelligence and point it at Him. He's spending quite an unsustainable amount of intervention-budget on it, actually.)

"Dath ilan is a fanatically Lawful Good civilization which will not hesitate to utterly destroy Cheliax when" (if) "it finds that it cannot take it from our Lord's grasp, and is quite capable of doing so. Their Intelligence, Wisdom, and mastery of Law exceed that of any unenhanced mortal in Golarion, and they have used that mastery to create weapons whose power no mortal caster short of the ninth circle could equal. But they were entirely ignorant of magic until today, and this will be our advantage. We intend to press it by invading very shortly, before they have the chance to learn much. Cheliax shall have the full support of Hell in this."

There are certain things Gorthoklek is carefully not saying, which are nonetheless obvious to someone with sufficiently enhanced Intelligence. To begin with, the reason Cheliax doesn't usually have the 'full support of Hell' is that that's insanely expensive for Hell. More than Cheliax is worth to Asmodeus, if His attention is spread as widely as the Church claims. For Hell to be behaving like this, they must themselves feel threatened by dath ilan, and Hell is prideful. If they're looking this panicked in front of their mortal slaves, they might actually lose.

Gorthoklek looks directly at the colonel having these thoughts, reaches across the table, and snaps his neck.

"Observe now the fate of that man's soul in Hell," he says, raising the image on the room's scrying mirror, "lest any of you also forget the consequences of betraying Asmodeus. Now, to begin with our agenda, there are certain truths known to Hell, which were not previously permitted to be told to you..."

dath ilan

He's three days' hike from Civilization when his satellite phone stops working. He knows little about electronics, but he can tell this isn't an ordinary failure; there's smoke coming from it, and he opens it up to find the chip partially melted.

It's not like he was going to use it anyway. But his father once warned him of a day when all the computers in dath ilan would fail at once, and though he was oathbound not to tell of why this might happen, he didn't have to explain that it would indicate something very bad. They have a contingency plan to execute if it happens, and though he doesn't know all the details, on account of some of them presumably touching on secrets of Civilization (ugh), he knows that he needs to meet up with the rest of his family as soon as possible.

Ugh. He kind of hates his family sometimes, and there's actually a lot about this situation that triggers his dislike, but he doesn't actually want to be anywhere else, if the world is ending.

He turns around and starts heading back the way he came.

Some time later, in the woods a few dozen meters ahead of him, an infohazardously attractive naked woman just...appears out of thin air.

"Um," he says. ('Tsi-imbi' is such a stupid phrase but it's not like he can really thing of anything better to say to this.)

When she notices him, she does—something—and clothes, which are for some reason incredibly doompunk, appear on her body as instantly and inexplicably as she did.

"You're the first person to see me and not declare himself insane, you know that?" she says, walking toward him.

"Civilization already thinks I'm insane," he says. "I'm not going to give them the pleasure of hearing me admit it.

"But, uh. What the ass."

"Do they really not have economicmagic here?" she asks. (This language. What the fuck does magic have to do with economics?)

This is really something that she ought to get explicit clarification on, although if they do but it isn't widespread, Random Guy in the Woods admittedly might not know about it.

(Detect Thoughts.)

"No?—well, only in fiction. Are you not from dath ilan? You look human." This is really incredibly bizarre. He'd assume the woman was the insane one, here, if he hadn't seen her appear from thin air.

(—if she really is an alien then maybe he should call someone qualified to deal with that—not that he can—)

"Hmm. I'm from a planet called Golarion. Lots of places we know of have humans but I'm not sure how you would have gotten here without economicmagic."