"Razmir's dead. The aftermath is worse."

Another pause for wolf-petting.

"He has to be very dead or they would have brought him back, even if they needed - someone like me - to do it."

"...Well, I've brought back people who were very dead before, but I do need something to work with and he seems like maybe not the absolute highest priority, except, expand on 'aftermath's worse'?"

"Ustalav is haunted." Pet pet pet. "Very haunted. I am - unusual in some respects but not, not very -"

"Razmir attempted to fix this by inviting Iomedae's paladins in Lastwall in to destroy all the undead who didn't agree to work for him."

"The undead objected, and were sufficiently annoyed that every powerful necromancer of the Whispering Way decided to work together to destroy Razmir and his allies in Lastwall, then try to conquer Ustalav. They've overrun most of the country by this point."

"Also, Cheliax, a country ruled by Hell, assassinated him. I don't know why. One of their proxies rules the county north of me, Barstoi."

"I don't know if Cheliax or the Whispering Way actually managed to kill him but he's dead and most of his priests are dead and if Cheliax had failed to kill him he would have burned down all their cities and if he could be resurrected some very powerful church would have done that so he would burn down all their cities. So he can't be resurrected."

"Hm. Okay, well, the Whispering Way thing sounds like a problem I can solve using my favorite method, i.e. causing people to be less rather than more dead?"

"Some of them would try to kill you if you tried."

Pet pet pet.

"Because they after being undead wanted to stay undead, or became undead to escape Hell or the Abyss, or because you're stealing their undead slaves."

Pet pet pet.

"Or just because they didn't think they gave up anything that mattered, and they got more power out of it."

Pet pet pet.

"But possibly."

"People try to kill me all the time! It doesn't stick. I auto-resurrect." 

"Then they will try to trap your soul in a gem."

Pet pet pet.

"Or trap you in another plane. Or disintegrate you."

"...I...don't have any automatic defenses against being trapped in another plane," she muses. "Are there local ways to defend against that?"

"Be able to get back easily." Pet pet pet.

"Or just be very magic resistant or strong willed but that can usually be beaten by them being very good, or stunning and cursing you before casting the spell."

Pet pet pet.

(Count Ristomaur Tiriac spent some of his centuries as an Evil adventurer and does, actually, know all the clever ways that people try to kill vampires whose coffins they can't find.)

"Okay, do you have advice on becoming able to get back easily? I might be able to jury-rig something but I also might blow something up trying." She has a couple of jars of honey in her pockets, and the hand-mirror she uses to talk to her fingerking contacts, and she doesn't necessarily expect them to work normally here but they're a solid starting point. 

"The Plane Shift spell is seventh circle for wizards and sorcerers. Fifth circle for clerics. There are rare, powerful magical items that can cast it."

Pet pet pet.

"Razmir made some."

Pet pet pet.

"I don't know where they are."

"Hm. Do you know of any people who are currently dead who would know?" 

"Razmir."

That is not a helpful answer. Pet pet pet.

(Everything seems overwhelming. It's all happening very fast and everything is very loud and complicated.)

"His strongest priests. Those are mostly alive."

Pet pet pet.

"Most magic items get - inherited - when the last user dies. They don't sit, unless they're too well guarded to take."

"Hmm. How far are we from the geographic epicenter of the affected area?" 

Pet pet pet.

"Pardon?"

"--So, what I'm considering doing is, going up into the sky, and doing the thing I did here," she waves at the courtyard, "only, like, much much brighter, so as to be able to get a significant land area all at once. That way I'd get loads of them before they knew I was a threat. And I'm wondering where the most efficient place to do that from would be!"

Pet pet pet.

"Ustalav is about four hundred miles by four hundred miles. Varno is in the eastern quarter. I can -" he's going to try to have someone get her a map?

"I don't think it would get everyone inside?" he says.

"Nnnno, it wouldn't get people who are indoors, but since the priest I talked to said it might hurt people to be resurrected after being turned into non-human things in the afterlife, I probably don't want to get all the corpses that are, like, buried, and anything bright enough to penetrate stone is going to be bright enough to penetrate soil." 

"Oh. That's a very good point."

He stands up. "Well. If you aren't going to be fighting a war, how fast can we travel?"

"...Well, I think it would probably be best to be relatively discreet, so, less than three hundred knots? Going faster than a little under three hundred knots makes loud noises."

He nods. "We want to find a cleric of Iomedae so they can tell us what we're forgetting. There aren't any in Varno. But they have the west. And Lastwall is still on Lake Encarthan so we can be there in less than two hours."

"Yeah, that makes sense. I could try praying to Iomedae again? Last time I tried that I got Sarenrae instead, but she directed me here, which was good, and the process didn't take long. Plus I expect you've got swords here? The closest I had on me was a penkknife." 

"The gods rarely intervene directly instead of through their followers. And the Good gods - share information - so Iomedae probably knows -"

"But prayer never hurts."

"... To a god aligned with you."

"Well, Sarenrae seemed really really aligned with me? Iomedae, well, less so, but--" awkward shrug. "We seem to have roughly similar priorities? Based on what the priest said? Just different approaches. What with how apparently she is Lawful and I am Chaotic."