"I would not expect a god trying to prevent the war to escalate to superweapon use to try to do that by having their followers use superweapons"

"Yeah, the less generous account is that they were pursuing arcane god-things that plausibly included the continent being destroyed, and then I got in the way, so then they tried to kill me, and when that failed tried to soul-manipulate me, and when that failed - gave up? We may not want to count on that."

"I am not clear how much it - the warning to Iomedae so that she could go far from any inhabited areas - was on the direct orders of Vkandis, the god involved, versus - just a decision that one of his followers made, for understandable human reasons. ...My own sense is that the gods of this world are mostly pursuing arcane god-things that may or may not be relevant to mortal wellbeing, though I - have since had a better impression of the Nameless God of Eternal Flame, which is the one Iomedae thought might correspond to a Good god in your world." 

The angel wing is very comfortable to lean against. He didn't really have a chance to notice things like that on the previous (highly memorable) occasion she used that particular magic. 

She doesn't really have a half-automatic response to that, for some reason. She knows it's a topic she has opinions on.

"Hm."

Iomedae kind of feels like Alfirin should not meet Urtho right now and should take a couple of hours to decompress first. But - she doesn't have the right to tell Alfirin that, really, and maybe comparative magic with another genius archmage is just what Alfirin needs. 

And it's probably too late, they told Urtho to come in.

He hasn't actually called Urtho in, yet, it's just that asking the question was the first non-stupid topical thing that came to mind to say in a conversation he was failing to keep up with at all. He's been waiting for a reasonable-seeming moment to actually ask Iomedae about it. It seems like it might not actually be a good time? 

:I told Urtho it would be a few minutes: he sends to Iomedae, privately, once it seems like there's a pause happening. :Should I tell him to wait longer?: 

:I'm not sure.: Which means she should be a mature adult with enough wisdom she could in principle be a priest, and -

"Alfirin? Urtho will be eager to meet you, but I've thrown a lot at you today and - for the last month, I assume - and you don't seem entirely okay - and we could also get you a guest room if you want to process things first."

She doesn't seem okay? She thinks she's probably not terribly okay at the moment but that usually would not have very much to do with how she seems, and Iomedae would often be able to tell anyways but - wouldn't usually say anything.

"I'm fine. I'd be delighted to meet Urtho." She's not sure why she said that.

That's nonsense but - Alfirin has never appreciated anyone trying to protect her from herself.

"We should tell him to come on in, then," she says, "or go meet him, I suppose, there's no reason this has to be in a Work Room."

The problem with having it not in the Work Room is that then he has to get up and walk somewhere it's fine. He's had a couple of minutes to catch his breath and he's not on the edge of passing out or anything, he can walk. 

(He...vaguely wants to say something sympathetic to Alfirin, having - recently experienced some overwhelming and disorienting changes in circumstances, that were good news overall but weren't easy to absorb - but he does not currently have the headband that would maybe suggest an actually-helpful thing to say, and in this case he vaguely suspects the headband would just point out to him even harder that he is lacking so much context here and shouldn't try to intervene because he can't expect to do so productively.) 

"I will tell him we can meet in a conference room, there is one nearby." Telling him in Mindspeech will be easier but that requires being outside of this room first. He will put in the effort to stand up, though he's leaning kind of a lot of his weight on Iomedae. 

Her wing is there to support him. 

There are absolutely no supportive actions she can think of that'd be helpful to Alfirin.

That's fine she doesn't need supportive actions.

Ma'ar looks tired but she can't cast a restoration about it. Is there anything she can cast about it? Oh, bear's endurance? No, she didn't prepare it and this isn't an emergency. OK, then. She can...get the door at least...

"Sure, a conference room sounds good."

Urtho will meet them in a conference room. 

(He's kind of concerned! It's not clear that anything went wrong but Iomedae did get Plane Shifted away and came back with obvious-to-a-scry spells on her, which Ma'ar snipped, and then they just had a conversation in the Work Room which seems...kind of tense, in some way? Urtho is currently wearing the headband and it makes him better at reading people but not amazing at it.) 

He's still going to try his best to be welcoming! - and pull out a chair for Ma'ar immediately, he's honestly surprised Ma'ar is still able to walk after doing a solo Gate back from the other world. 

"I am very pleased to meet you!" he says to Alfirin. "You had questions about the weapon-artifacts I made?" 

Ah, Urtho is the man she didn't feeblemind.

"Yes! Iomedae briefly mentioned that you thought the one we'd be using on Dis would be bad for nearby planes, but she didn't know which metric of planar distance is applicable for which planes count as 'nearby' - I'm also curious about the others but that's more of an academic curiosity with no immediate strategic implications."

"I was not sure at the time how the planes behaved in your world! I have fewer uncertainties now but - I still know very little about the afterlife planes, I was not doing the Gate-routing through them -" 

He can go into a lot of detail on what factors are relevant in Velgarth, in terms of how various other planes would be affected by an enormously disruptive magical discharge in the material plane. It depends partly on active connections. In Velgarth it's rare but not unheard of to summon and bind elemental spirits, for example, which leaves an open connection back to the relevant elemental plane. He's learned from Iomedae that summoning elementals is possible in Golarion, but he doesn't know much about the frequency for it, or whether it even works the same way...

The ethereal plane or spirit world - also where some magical theories say the Velgarth gods have most of their power - likely has a brief link to the material plane every time a mortal dies, and so setting off the weapon in a place that would kill a lot of mortals would...have significant effects...but that probably doesn't apply if they're using it in Hell, which is already an afterlife plane, and might not be relevant in her world at all... 

Open Gates are of course a huge issue, they route through the Void which is in some sense in contact with every plane, but he doesn't think the Golarion form of instantaneous interplanar transport works the same way... 

It's very quickly going to be beyond what Iomedae can follow. And also mostly beyond what Ma'ar can follow, when he's this tired. He leans on Iomedae's wing and tries to pay some amount of attention, in case he ends up having anything relevant to add if Alfirin asks questions. 

Interesting! A lot of these phenomena rhyme with similar phenomena on Golarion, at the very least, in a way that's probably indicative of a shared underlying nature - the Void sounds fairly analogous to the Astral plane, for example, and of course they have the Ethereal plane too - or at least another plane whose name translates the same as the Velgarth Ethereal plane and seems to have some properties in common -

(She registers in the back of her mind that the Ethereal plane is an unusual place for gods to live, which is some evidence that the Velgarth gods are a different sort of entity than the Golarion ones)

Alfirin can carry on a spirited conversation about planar dynamics and superweapons and follow Urtho into a tangent about notation and mathematical formalizations and is, to almost any eyes, thoroughly recovered from whatever was troubling her earlier.

Ma'ar does manage some amount of participation! He wants to hear more about the Astral plane, whatever Alfirin knows of it, he's done an unusual amount of research on interacting with the Void and can help check if it's actually the same.

(The Void is - basically the lowest-energy point among the Velgarth planes, a sink for all interplanar magical discharges, and it's violent and chaotic and nearly impossible to build anything in or safely interact with at all. Also spatial distance behaves unusually, there, and so it's a useful shortcut for Gate-routing, though clearly not enough of a shortcut by itself to reach Golarion, they had to do a lot of additional weird interplanar routing that Urtho will be able to explain better.) 

The Astral seems to have similar spatial properties - Almost all Golarion teleportation and planar travel routes through it for this reason - but is much more stable. There's life adapted to the astral plane, and if you plane shift the plane itself is perfectly habitable - or at least not less habitable than the emptiness between planets -

There is variance, though, some parts of the astral plane are quite unstable, and some scholars speculate that the Maelstrom is in fact just a particularly large unstable region of the Astral plane, and if the Astral plane and the Void are in fact the same rather than just having some similar properties, probably the region of the Astral Void "local" to Velgarth is another large unstable region.

The Golarion planes are mostly energy-balanced, but there is a known lowest-energy plane, it's just not the Astral plane. It's, the, uh, "negative energy plane," she's sorry, it was discovered in the middle of a scholastic fad for names that were as purely descriptive as humanly possible.

Urtho doesn't think they know of that one! What are its properties aside from the obvious?? 

...In Velgarth there are known energy gradients between the planes, that can be exploited by opening a channel between two of them - for example, the Elemental Plane of Fire has a higher density of mage-energy than the Elemental Plane of Earth, and you can open something like a Gate between the two and siphon off some of the mage-energy downflow and this is...perhaps related to the design on the superweapon that caused an enormous explosion and nearly killed Iomedae except that Ma'ar Gated in to rescue her and nearly died. 

The negative energy plane does not actually have very many interesting known properties besides the obvious, partly because the obvious properties make it kind of hard to study and partly because studying it is discouraged. Negative energy is damaging to a living creature's lifeforce and is restorative to undead, so it mostly winds up used for sinister purposes. You can cause an energy flow between another plane and the negative energy plane, though it's a pretty advanced technique to do on a large scale. On a smaller scale, that's how a lot of magic items are powered.

After a couple of mental self-nudges, her brain manages to produce some words to the effect that she's very glad Ma'ar was there to save Iomedae, Iomedae does not need saving very often but it's very good and important to have someone who can step in in those cases where she does.

It is good and important, and it's also good and important that Iomedae has her powerful ally from her own world back. Ma'ar smiles at Alfirin. 

"It actually happened twice in the space of three days, it was very embarrassing. - anyway, if we're lucky, Hell's most importantly adjacent planes are more of Hell. If we're maximally unlucky, and they border Axis - conceivably it's worth burning a lot of diamonds - Tantara has a lot of diamonds - to get to Erebus and use it there. I figure - the farther in we go, the worse our individual odds of ever getting out including by True Resurrection, Miracle, etcetera, and the worse our odds of pulling it off., but I'd expect it to minimize damage elsewhere."

(Yes, well, Iomedae wouldn't have needed saving if Urtho had been...better at things...and now he's reminded of that and internally cringing. He tries to hide it.) 

Is there enough travel between the afterlife planes that there might be documentation on which are more closely adjacent? What's Erebus?

...Also, they don't as far as he knows have 'undead' here, how does that work? And is there an opposite of the negative energy plane, here the highest-energy of the known reachable ones is the Elemental Plane of Fire. This is more in the category of general curiosity than likely to be that relevant to afterlife plane adjacency but he's so curious. 

Ma'ar is smiling at her, so she'll have a mildly positive facial expression back and try to figure out what that means later.

"My first inclination is to say that we should stick to Dis, I'd need to actually check Urtho's numbers but Erebus is much, much larger and I don't think it has correspondingly more magic in it - it might not be dense enough - Erebus is the next level of Hell, after Dis, it's where Hell keeps its treasury - Phlegethon or Stygia would probably be dense enough if Erebus isn't but it's going to be even harder to get there and -

Dis is small, comparatively speaking. Unless we're talking Caina or Nessus, there's not that much to choose between when it comes to which layer of Hell we'd most prefer destroyed, as long as we get one, any one, Asmodeus is blocked off from Avernus. I'm sure He'll find a way to route around eventually but -

My point is, for any level of Hell the main thing we achieve by destroying the whole thing is the same, and destroying nine-tenths of it is much much less valuable than destroying the whole thing, and it seems much more certain that we can get all of Dis than all of any other level."

"...Yes, there is a - " sigh "- Positive Energy Plane. Energy from that plane - in small doses - heals the living and harms undead. Undead are corpses animated by negative energy and by, typically, the tormented spirits or parts thereof of their former occupants. It's a lot more complicated than that, some don't have bodies and are just tormented spirits, but I think the whole Apprentice Necromancy lecture isn't the most important conversation for us to be having right now."