She is on the bank of a river running out of a lake, through a town of about fifty houses that cling to the river as if for protection; beyond them there are farms and then vast, dark, endless forest. It is dark and cloudy out, but there's a lot of very bright moonlight to see by nonetheless; the only sounds are the running of the stream, the occasional hooting of owls or other nightbirds, and the rare howl of wolves.

It feels supernaturally weird. Not anything concrete, just, different from the way both the earth's surface and the Neath usually do.

...Those noises...it reminds her of the Surface; she didn't spend a lot of time in forested wilderness, but the Surface is so much more alive than most parts of the Neath, at least outside of the water. 

Those look like real stars, too, not moon-misers. 

But this doesn't feel like the Surface, even the Surface at night. She can't put her finger on what's different, but there's something. 

It's night, so she can't call out to her grandparent--or whoever else--for an explanation. 

Feeling vaguely unsettled, she walks towards the houses and starts examining them. She isn't going to barge into someone's home in the middle of the night, but it's not like she has any better ideas for orienting herself. 

The houses all have locked or barred doors and shutters and do not seem to be inclined to let anyone in. They're made of sturdy logs, probably cut from the local forest, and none of them have any signs or writing on them or anything like that.

There are three buildings that look like they might not be houses; a watermill, which is locked and closed, a very large - town hall building? - also locked and closed, and one slightly-damaged looking - possible church? No unambiguous religion symbols she can see, but it's large, damaged, its door is open, and there's a graveyard behind it.

--Oh, a graveyard! That'll do. The dead have bigger problems than being bothered at odd hours. 

She makes her way into the graveyard, turns her arm into diamond, and plunges it into the earth, transforming it into its larger, crab-claw-like shape in order to grasp for a coffin or corpse below her selected gravestone. 

Coffin! Pretty sturdy one, too, not that that will matter if she has opinions on the topic. The lid looks very sturdily nailed shut.

(The gravestone has writing in a language she doesn't know.)

...Huh. She didn't really notice that, earlier, but--yeah she can't read that. Hn. Annoying. 

"Very sturdily nailed shut" is approximately no impediment to her; with inhuman strength and fingertips made of diamond, it's approximately trivial to dig into the join between coffin and lid and rip the latter off. 

The body is that of a man, rotted down to the bone. He's wearing also-decayed robes, plain, heavy-duty, and black, and there's an amulet on top of the body that she doesn't recognize with a spiraling comet pattern on it.

She doesn't recognize any of this!

Maybe they're in Russia. She knows Russia uses a non-latinate alphabet, and she doesn't recognize this one--she'd recognize the Chinese one, or the Arabic one--probably there are more alphabets on earth than she's heard of. 

She glows. 

And the man's flesh and skin regrows, and he looks up at her and then stands.

"- Incomprehensible," he says, picking the amulet off the floor of the coffin. "Incomprehensible incomprehensible?"

Welp, she was afraid of that. 

"Do you speak English? Uhh, sprechen sie Deutch? Parlez-vous Francais? Uhh, fuck, something, pǔtōnghuà?"

He does something magical with the amulet!

"Thank you," he says, soberly, bowing, "but that was not necessary. I was with my goddess."

"God...dess...? There's...someone hereabouts taking care of dead people? That's--very good to know--I came here by accident and have very little context."

There is a pause.

"This is the town of Corvischior," he says, "in the county of Varno, in the kingdom of Ustalav, on the world Golarion, on the material plane. I am a priest of Pharasma, the goddess of birth and death, and in Ustalav, humans, the species that I am and that you appear to be, call Her the Judge; Her other names are Mother of Souls, Lady of Graves or Lady of Mysteries, and the Gray Lady. She is the eldest of the gods, preserver of souls from destruction, and when a mortal's life ends, that mortal goes before Her court to judge where he shall go next."

“Oh, I’m only half human. And not mortal. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this lady, unless I very badly misunderstand, uh, some things. I don’t think Pharasma sounds anything like Mary anyway. The planet I’m from is called Earth! I was not expecting another planet to have humans!”

"We would not expect another planet to have humans, either," he says. "And I would have expected all of the elder gods to have been known in all worlds. But the universe is very, very large, and many strange things happen in it."

“I…guess…oh, is Pharasma the local star?”

"No."

“‘Kay, then I’m back to being stumped. So, is she nice? Are lots of people with her, and are they likely to not want to come back? If people don’t want to come back because they’re somewhere nice then knowing that is way more important than figuring out what the disconnect is vis a vis divinity.”

"Pharasma is neither kind nor cruel, and only Her servants remain with her. The good she guides to the planes of Good, where they have built great paradises; the evil she sends to the planes of Evil, where they torment each other forever; those who pursue Law are sent to planes of Law to build their realms of order, and those of Chaos go to endless lawless planes of chaos. Pharasma judges the dead, but She does not rule them; Her teachings to mortals are that it is the duty of parents and Her priests that children grow up to be adults capable of making choices among the fates among them, and that the destruction or - forced twisting? of a soul is an abomination."

“…Okay. Is there any way to check which afterlife someone went to, it sounds like the evil ones at least do need rescuing then!”

"There are magics given by the gods to their servants to allow them to speak with the dead, but She did not give me them the day I was killed," he says apologetically.

"That's totally fair. --How much torment are we talking here, like, I don't super want to bother someone who's, like, fine, but--I would want to be interrupted at being fine in order to, like, stop someone from hitting, uh, other people with rocks--normally I would simply resurrect the whole graveyard and the calculus is clearly different here but I am not actually certain it has a different answer--"

"Far greater than is humanly possible to endure in life," he says gently, "but you are right it would be - very bad, to the souls in the Upper Planes, to wrench them from their new lives in Heaven and Nirvana and Elysium to return them to this world." He pauses. "... I am not in fact sure that would be possible, with an old enough soul, our resurrection fails to work because the soul changes in the afterlife, but it would be - disastrously destructive to them, if it were."

She sucks a breath in through her teeth. 

"Okay. So...maybe worth it for people who haven't been dead long, wait 'till we can check for people who've been gone longer?"

"Resurrection spells the gods grant us do not work on unwilling targets. I am not - unwilling - but I did not notice the request when you returned me to life...?" Maybe he just forgot it? The Boneyard is not fitting very well into his living brain's memories very well; it's a different sort of place.

"It sounds like a desirable feature to have but I really don't think mine has it! I mean, nobody back home ever mentioned anything of the sort. And, uh, there's definitely non-resurrective stuff that doesn't involve consent."

"Yes."

He gives a look off in one direction, where, at the western end of the lake, barely visible to mortal eyes, there is a looming Gothic castle.

"There is magic to force an unwilling soul to return to a body that does not want the soul, and it is very, very bad for the soul, and very, very, Evil."

"--Well, I mean, I'm not trying to force it. I just don't know how to not! Anyway, the thing where old souls change isn't a thing where I'm from, and if someone wants to be dead, that's pretty easy to fix actually."

...She tilts her head. 

"At least, I think it's not a thing where I'm from. How old is old? The oldest person I've ever resurrected was--well, I'm not sure exactly. Something like eight thousand years?"

"I think the simplest would be to find a cleric," he says, "to cast Speak with Dead" (the meaning clearly translates, but it is equally clearly a proper noun) "on whoever you wish to resurrect, to confirm that they want to return - it is a much simpler spell than Raise Dead, and there are many clerics of Good gods who would be eager to cast it for you on whoever you want resurrected."

(He can, yes, tell that he is speaking to a powerful Good outsider, not a powerful Neutral outsider. Some things are clear.) "For the weakest resurrection spell, one minute. For the strongest, two hundred years. If someone dead for eight thousand years came back..." He shakes his head. "And they were well?"

"They were fine but our afterlife situation has less going on than yours seems to. How long does it take to cast Speak With Dead, that seems like a potentially serious bottleneck...I'm not saying no, you understand, just considering logistics..."

"Ten minutes, and I could only cast it a small number of times every day if I asked Pharasma to give me as many as I could bear. Pharasma does not judge the dead if she expects them to be resurrected soon, for a new trial is called for with every death, and so it could not harm the new dead?"

"Okay, that's good. --How new is new--" She looks around; she can't read the dates on the headstones, and wouldn't know what they meant if she could, but if there are any graves still visibly fresh with recently turned earth, that's not something a language barrier can get in the way of. 

There's a couple! "Hours or minutes will always be safe," he says, "and - I would not do it for those who do not have unfinished business, but I do not think you will cause damage to those dead weeks or months, though those who are in the Good afterlives or Axis will not thank you for it, you understand." 

He is, however, willing to point out the newest headstones, some of which are from after he himself died.

She looks at them, considering. 

"You knew them, right? Do you think any of them were likely to be at risk?"

He considers.

"I was killed by a servant of Razmir when he conquered Varno - a powerful wizard whose false priests slay anyone who denies his godhood. I... would not expect them to be damned... but Razmir is an Evil man who claims to be an Evil god and his priests preach ambition and avarice, and I do not know what they would have done if their only choices if their only choice was to obey a wizard's commands or die."

He pauses, looking at the gravestones.

"Die, I expect. May they have earned Nirvana." 

"Haaaaang on, back up a sec. Conquered? By an evil wizard?" 

"Yes. Razmir began in Melcat to the south by demanding its king submit to him and razed his capital when he refused, and then he began conquering other countries. He is an exceptionally powerful wizard, and even his false priest was far stronger than I."

She rubs her temples. "Oh boy. Well. I should probably do something about that, first, then--much as I love the healing and resurrections side of things, it's a lot more efficient to stop people like that than to try to clean up after them. What makes his priests specifically false?" 

"As a false god, Razmir cannot grant his followers spells as a true god can, and so they are arcane mages, wizards and sorcerers, using enchanted items and tricks to pretend they use divine magic. Arcane magic cannot return the dead to life or cure afflictions that divine magic easily can - and Razmir has no divine realm to accept his followers after death, and so those that pursue his path to rise in his esteem find themselves damned to the evil afterlives which they could in better circumstances have escaped."

"...Huh. Gods granting their followers powers pretty much isn't a thing where I'm from. Well, I'll put it on the list." 

"The gods in Golarion grant some of their most devoted followers - those who understand their natures best and have served them longest and are in most accord with them - divine spells," he says, sticking with what he knows. "It is also possible through circumstance or training or inheriting the power of a naturally magical being, to use other magic, arcane magic. Some of the gods are good, some evil, some neutral; some are lawful, some neutral, some chaotic. All normally select followers who will pull the world towards their nature and the way they desire the world to be - clerics of Pharasma are most often judges or midwives or those who destroy the Un-Dead to free their souls, who would do it better with Her aid, before they are chosen; clerics of Sarenrae, the Neutral Good god of compassion and redemption, are those who work to help others, clerics of Gorum the Chaotic Neutral god of war are soldiers, and those of Asmodeus the Lawful Evil god of Hell are tyrants who desire to oppress others, and so forth for the other gods."

"Where does Asmodeus live?"

"Hell, the Lawful Evil afterlife, where He is mightiest and lord. He torments all who join Him there to make them serve Him as His slaves, and with armies of these slaves He desires to conquer all that exists."

"...So, I probably want to go to Hell, and resurrect people directly from there, and probably also fight Asmodeus," she concludes.

"You are very, very powerful," he says, "if you can raise the dead eight thousand years gone without harming their souls. Your resurrection of me - to full health, with no lingering effects, not even my uncast spells gone - is something only the most powerful clerics could have done."

"Asmodeus is almost certainly much, much, much stronger than you are, and - not the sort of enemy who can be fought, directly; the last time the gods engaged in battle direct, collateral damage that it is taught They were largely trying to avoid killed - one in ten people across the world? And opened a pit to the Abyss, Chaotic Evil realm of warring demons, that is still open. But if you want to find a way to do so anyway because He is among the greatest evils ever to exist, you should speak to the priests of Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of the war against Evil, whose domain is doing this and who cares a great deal about doing it safely, and you should perhaps pray directly to Her, for this is Her nature and she values every ally in it."

"--Okay, sounds like a plan." She is used to being a very, very big fish in a smallish pond, but the fact that the ocean has sharks in it is not new to her. She isn't ready to fight the Judgments yet, so she plausibly isn't ready to fight Asmodeus. 

"Do I have to do anything specific to pray to Iomedae?"

"I have not met a priest of Iomedae before, so I do not know what they would tell you; if I wanted to pray to her, I would kneel, with her holy symbol - a sword - in hand if I had one, and focus on Her domain, and how good things should happen for everyone, and how it is terrible that suffering exists and evil people can do bad things, and how you want to reduce this in the most - Lawful, organized, effective, strategic - planned? way possible. She was a good person until She became a holy warrior because it was better for fighting evil and then she was a general because it was better and then she became a god because that was better still, and try to open your mind to her and talk to her, so you can serve as Her champion for achieving Her goals."

(He is the sole priest for a town of three hundred plus more distant farmsteads. He knows about all the gods, not just the one He serves. Not a lot, though.)

She nods thoughtfully. 

She does not, actually, have a sword, but she does have a knife in one of her several pockets; it's plausibly better than nothing. 

She fishes it out, and folds her hands around it like she's seen people do around prayer beads, and kneels, and thinks. 

She thinks about her favorite word, and how fiercely she means it; she thinks about how she is objectively bad at being strategically effective at pursuing this goal, but she's better than she was when she was eighteen and haring around London putting out every proverbial fire that had most recently come to her attention, and she intends to become better still, with age and practice. 

(She spares a thought to the Law-light of the Judgments in case this is relevantly Lawful in some way.)

She thinks about her project to spread personality-preserving apotheosis, partly because she believes people ought to be able to reach the fullest potential they want, and partly because realistically she is going to need Judgment-tier allies in order to overthrow the current cosmic order. 

She thinks about really wanting to kick Asmodeus's ass but also collateral damage is bad. 

... She does not, actually, get Iomedae. Basically the moment she thinks her favorite word, her mind is immediately filled with sudden flashes - if she was a human it would be best to describe her brain as completely overloaded with the fire of joyous love, but she is, in fact, not mostly human; it is the sort of thing that someone who can't think in Correspondence couldn't bear but she can - which sort of in words translate into:

:The absolute confidence that this person praying, being a person, is very very good and deserves to be happy.:

:A thronging chorus of celebration, that there are many people who can help each other and there are now more:

:An observation that there are very miserable wronged people in that castle over there who need her help:

Oh. 

That voice is beautiful. 

"I don't think I got Iomedae. I think I might have gotten someone else? I like them. They pointed me at that castle, d'you know anything about that castle."

He - stares, sort of. (He didn't hear a voice, but he sort of got a distance - whiff of flowers? is the best way he can describe it.)

... Right. Empyreal lord.

"It is Castle Corvischor, and once the lords of Varno ruled from there. It is said to be haunted." He pauses. "... There is a story that may be true - that there was a count, Ristomaur Tiriac - first of that name, ours is the fourth and he is far away - young and brave and full of promise who was unjustly slain, and that his servants - from this very town - tried a dark ritual to save his life, to save his life whatever the price."

"Since then, nothing that lived has ever entered the castle has returned, but they say in the village the dead count's horn still sounds in the hills, hunting in death as he did in life, and none of the monsters that afflict other villages come to us here save man alone, because he remembers that whatever darkness the servants unleashed in their folly, it was love that drove them to the deed."

"That sounds like a problem I am qualified to solve!"

"May all the gods aid you," he says warmly. "- The spell to translate is on me, not you; I don't have another one today, but I can give you a spell to let you understand other languages?"

"--Oh, that's a good thought. And can I give you a sentence or two to translate--you can say them in the local language, and I can transliterate them to say to people--"

Sure, he'll do that! What phrases does she want?

"The spell will only last for fifty minutes," he warns, "and it is only the literal meaning."

And he will then tap her while holding his holy symbol and invoking Pharasma's name, and suddenly she can understand him even if he wants to speak Taldane instead of English, which was the language she first spoke to him in.

The sentences she would like from him are: 

"I am powerful and from very far away and I do not speak the language." 

"I currently have Comprehend Languages up." 

"Hello I have come to solve death-related problems, please direct me to your death-related problems please and thank you." 

(If he has any other suggestions for sentences she might find useful she is totally taking suggestions!)

He can provide those! He also suggests "Yes," "No," "Maybe," "It's complicated," and "A goddess sent me," if she can memorize all those!

"... Do you know which goddess?" he'll ask.

"...She, uh, seemed less with the fighting evil and more with the boundless compassion for all living things?" she hazards. 

"Sarenrae," he says immediately. "Neutral Good. 'Sarenrae sent me,' then?"

She nods and writes down transliterations of all the things. 

Great!

The castle is looking very gothic and loomy, over there allll the way at the other end of the lake where the forest has grown up and nobody goes.

She strides off towards it. 

Once she is out of potential freaking-out view of the village and the Pharasman priest, she takes off her shoes, and rearranges her lower body, and flies the rest of the way there. She doesn't want to waste more of the Comprehend Languages duration than she has to. 

She touches down in front of the castle gates, reverts her legs to a humanoid configuration, steps into her slippers, and, turning her hand diamond, knocks VERY firmly on the castle gate. 

"HELLO. I AM POWERFUL AND FROM VERY FAR AWAY AND DO NOT SPEAK THE LANGUAGE. I HAVE COMPREHEND LANGUAGES UP. I HAVE COME TO SOLVE DEATH-RELATED PROBLEMS, PLEASE DIRECT ME TO YOUR DEATH-RELATED PROBLEMS PLEASE AND THANK YOU. SARENRAE SENT ME," she yells, with a slightly more than human voice. 

The castle gates have a moat, which she can, obviously, fly across!

Her fist strikes the door, and there is a... pause...

The door slowly creaks open, giving her enough time to get out of the way first. There's a portcullis. It lifts. There's a long, dark, gloomy passageway with murder holes in the ceiling above and more portcullises (steadily lifting) and another door.

She sees nothing particularly ominous about this and will stroll* right in!

*Power-walk; she doesn't want to waste spell duration. But, like, cheerfully. 

The last door creaks ominously open as she approaches!

There are a lot of people waiting in the courtyard when she gets there. Most of them are ghosts. Some of them are various types of nonhumans she doesn't recognize, like three-feet-tall blue-skinned white-haired-and-eyed people, or huge stone monsters with claws and fangs who look sort of like decorative castle gargoyles. Most of them are carrying weapons or under magical effects. There's probably more people waiting in ambush!

At their head is a black-haired, ruby-eyed man in formal dress that is actually not that different from the formal dress of London Below, if rather old-fashioned; he is visibly magical. He carries a hunting bow (magic) and has a quiver of arrows (magic) and has a wide variety of other magical items on him, as do a number of the other people present. At his feet is a very large black wolf or wolf-dog, which looks at her with a not-quite animal intelligence and as though it is considering ripping her throat out if she gets anywhere near the man.

"Count Ristomaur Tiriac," he says. "Count of Varno," he says, bowing. "I have Tongues active, so we can speak freely. I believe you have the advantage of me, ma'am?"

(He bows with his upper body very straight, not taking his eyes off of hers for more than the briefest moment.)

She curtsies. "Lucy Whitman, the Light-Hearted Wastelander, daughter of the Mountain of Light. Are you dead? I can make you stop being dead." 

"Charmed."

"Do you know, this is a very plausible story," says Count Ristomaur Tiriac, who has been working on this exact goddamn thing for two hundred years. "Nonetheless it seems more narrowly plausible that the Church of Sarenrae sent you, if it did send you, to put an end to the un-life which, cursed though it is, I still prefer to the Hell that awaits me when I die."

His eyes study her expression, and she can tell that he's making - some effort to influence her? which has no effect whatsoever.

"--No, not, like, the Church of Sarenrae, I'm from really really far away, and I landed on that village over there, and I wanted to orient but I didn't want to bother anybody, so I resurrected someone from the graveyard, and he told me, that you guys have gods and a way more complicated afterlife situation than I do, and I was like, 'oh, I should go to Hell to resurrect people and fight Asmodeus,' and he was like 'consider praying to Iomedae before attempting to fight Asmodeus,' so I tried to pray to Iomedae, but instead I got someone that the guy said was Sarenrae, and she said that there were people in the castle who could use my help!"

"... I would think you were just insane, but in fact your aura of Good and Chaos has reached the level where it is simply too bright to distinguish the great from the greater." He's not drawing his bow, or even raising it, yet.

"Nonetheless, a cleric of the sixth circle has reached that strength of aura, and I kill multiple such every century for attempting to destroy me." His expression is dispassionate, polite, considered. "I would ask you for an oath that your intentions are positive towards me, but you are Chaotic."

She plants her hands on her hips. "I don't obey laws very much, because people who make laws where I'm from aren't Good, but I can keep my own word."

"The word of some Chaotic people can be trusted, the word of others cannot be, and I have only your word that you will keep your word. I can expend a scroll of Zone of Truth, but you are certainly powerful enough to resist it if you choose, and if your story is as you say you moreover have no reason to think it is not a scroll of Dominate Monster or some other hostile enchantment, instead, that would be very unwise not to resist."

"So, you don't trust my intentions, but you do want to be more alive than you currently are, and if I am telling the truth you would agree?"

"Precisely. I am in no hurry to verify your intentions, to be clear; we may be able to -"

She lights up. 

For a moment, it is brighter than noon on a cloudless day. 

Every dead person--Count Tiriac, every ghost, any other vampires, any other undead of any stripe--are restored to full, breathing flesh, hearts pumping liquid blood through bodies that need it. Any greenery in the castle courtyard perks up, growing lusher and thicker; dead seeds scattered on the ground awaken and sink in roots. 

It's all over in less than half a round. 

The short blue-skinned people scream and scatter before realizing they are not horrifically maimed but deciding fleeing the powerful outsider is the best trick anyway, and the clawed fanged people flinch.

The un-undead - are mostly going to scream, start patting themselves, start crying, flinch, start talking - start babbling - 

... Count Ristomaur Tiriac bursts into tears and collapses.

His wolf licks him.

He will pet his wolf, sort of mechanically.

--Oh no. 

It's not like she's never gotten this reaction but she has not, in fact, gotten this reaction from someone who was totally functional a second ago? It was bound to happen eventually but she does not yet have a cached response. 

She darts forward, dropping to her knees in front of him. 

"Do you want a hug?" 

The wolf gives her a DEATH GLARE.

"No."

He's going to continue the mechanical petting.

"Thank you."

You can't meaningfully harm her, wolf, shhh. 

...She will see if she can comfort any of the ex-ghosts. 

Some of the ex-ghosts definitely want comfort.

... Apparently none of them are old any more? They were definitely old before they were ghosts!!!

- There's one person who is desperately trying to stab himself with a dagger while other people try to grab and stop him with warnings of "Stop! Please! Think! You don't want to go to Hell!"

Hoo boy. 

She will come over and gently restrain him from stabbing himself and...not ask what's going on, because it was Tiriac who had Tongues, but she will sort of gesture in a way indicating she would like an explanation???

"- I swear I won't say hat today," he says, "Hat, let me die -"

(Tiriac is kind of out commission)

"- He was one of Count Tiriac's alchemists," says someone who seems to be comparatively together? "- They - everyone heard the screams -"

She sighs. 

It would be really nice to be able to talk to these people! 

She consults her sheet, and says, "I have come to solve death-related problems," in case that helps. 

... Someone who is comparatively together can poke a comparatively together wizard to give her a Tongues.

"Thank you," she says sincerely. 

To the alchemist guy: "If you are fucked up about having tortured people to death I can bring your victims back. I mean, I want to do that regardless. But the Evil afterlives sound really bad!"

" - I don't want to keep existing," says the alchemist. "Please. I just - I want to stop."

Pet pet pet

"Please eat a meal and get a good night's sleep before trying to make that decision, it sometimes helps." 

He will let people take away his knife and lead him off and cast Deep Slumber on him.

"If it helps," she tells the crowd at large, "I have a guy who was turned into a horrible agonizing giant snake for a few thousand years living in my Mum's spare room, and he's improved visibly in less than a year." 

That may actually help?

There are other people who would like hugs.

And/or to thank her. Fervently. And Sarenrae, also fervently.

She will hug people! And assure them that people being alive is great and she likes causing it. Also Sarenrae seems neat. 

Sarenrae is basically the god of the sort of thing she just did, they will explain. This was an unusual Sarenrae intervention because the gods don't usually intervene this directly or blatantly and because this was not... actually... possible before she arrived, they've been dead too long to be resurrected by the most powerful clerics alive and Count Tiriac looked.

Well, she's not a cleric? She's a weirder thing from really really far away. She got a real kindred spirit vibe from Sarenrae, even though they only talked briefly. She resurrected a guy who was, they think about eight thousand years old, once, and has resurrected as many as several people between three and four thousand years old, she can, uh, approximately just resurrect people. She has a vault, back home, of severed and re-grown fingers and toes, so that if someone dies in a way that doesn't leave a body she can still get them back. 

She should see about Evil people getting her those, for insurance.

(Most of them are not, actually, sure what alignment they are; they weren't Evil when they were alive, they definitely were when they were dead, and they don't know how many of the Evil deeds will count against their alignment in judgement because they did them when they were undead.)

Count Ristomaur Tiriac will, after a while, look up at her, and say, voice slightly cracking, "I need a good cause to die heroically in. Do you have one available?"

(he's still petting his wolf.)

"Well, at some point after I get some advice from Iomedae I plan to fight Asmodeus? In the nearer term I heard something about a conquering evil wizard."

"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."

"Yes. She - leads and manages and organizes - the war against Evil. Many powerful Chaotic Good beings also fight Evil in a disorganized way. I heard a very good speech about the balance between them and how they are both very important when I was young but I think I forgot it while I was dead."

"I'm not, like, ideologically Chaotic, there just--wasn't much of anyone to ally with, where I'm from. I'm probably less Chaotic than I was when I was eighteen." 

" - I'm surprised, most outsiders have fixed alignment here."

"Of course, most outsiders are older than I am, not a mortal age."

"I'm half human!"

"Hm."

"... Is your nonhuman parent a god?"

"Uhhh, good question? Like, my non-human parent can't make people clerics, because that's not a thing where I'm from. But, like, out of all the definitions of god I'd heard proposed before today, none of which involve that, only the very narrowest would exclude my father, and even that one doesn't exclude my grandfather?"

"Right."

"There are probably not any other half-gods alive in Golarion right now but the sort of thing you do is the sort of thing they might do." Kurgess was before his time.

“What sorts of things did they do?”

"Mostly kill very large monsters and overthrow governments and do ninth circle magic very casually - the - sort of thing mythic heroes do."

"In - general - mythic heroes are a known and established thing, though there are never - very many at once - but you are stronger than normal for that category. Half-god makes you make more sense."

“…Also what happened to them, is the answer disintegrated and/or plane shifted.”

"Either they die, or they become the sorts of things the gods are, or both. Kurgess was not immortal when alive, but he is now the minor Good god of heroism. Iomedae was not a demigod but she was a mythic hero."

"Tar-Baphon, who is - sort of - responsible for Ustalav - is trapped in a magical prison with minions who try to let him out sometimes. He's also a mythic hero. Just - very evil."

“Well, that’s not how the word hero works in my language, but you learn something new every day. I don’t have any plans to become more god-adjacent myself, but I was working on a project to help other people with apotheosis. It had a pretty long time horizon though.”

"The Starstone transforms some people who touch it into gods and kills others and no one knows why."

"...So...are any of the gods stars, or...?"

"No, stars are large spheres of - something very massive and burning, with portals to the positive energy plane at their centers."

"Okay, that's really fucking weird, because where I'm from, stars are people. Stars--Judgments--are the single most restricted category it makes sense to isolate as 'gods,' the thing my grandfather is." 

"I would not be surprised if some stars were people, just as some trees are people and some swords are people." He's going to scritch under his wolf's chin. He's a very good boy.

"I...guess...there could also be not-people stars without them mentioning it? But--I don't feel like that explains it. I think I'm still missing something." 

She shakes her head. 

"But digging up forbidden secrets is not urgent." She glances up at the sky, tracing the infinitesimal movements of the stars over the course of a fraction of a second, then looks down at the map again. "Lastwall is...that way?" she hazards, pointing in a direction that is, in fact, south-west. 

"Lake Encarthan is, at least; we can follow the shore of the lake from there."

And then he is going to do some very brief castle management things (his people are used to him going on journeys off to exciting foreign places), collect his Bag of Holding, and he and his wolf will be ready to go.

She starts taking her clothes off.

He'll blush. "Ah, ma'am - a changing room -" one of his servants can show her one?

“—But I won’t fit in a room when I’m done changing.”

- then he will ask everyone to turn their backs, at least.

(And do the same himself, obviously.)

What a gentleman! Lucy is charmed. 

They won’t see any of the intervening stages, but when Lucy merrily says, “I’m decent!” in a voice coming from significantly more than six feet above the ground, they can turn around to see an enormous diamond crab-like shape, the shell of her back rising in spires.

This will not, actually, be the first powerful outsider he's seen who was actually a Gargantuan monster polymorphed into a human form for the sake of convenience and/or hands.

(Though the last Gargantuan monster polymorphed into a human form he ran into was a dragon, as is not unusually the case.)

He'll incline his head carefully. "Then I am ready."

She picks him up gently and carefully and places him on a comfortable crevice between spires. 

She will pick up the wolf much more carefully, since it doesn’t like her.

Does anyone else want to come along?

Nope! Everyone else is adjusting to the new situation where they're all alive again. Count Tiriac is the main one who goes on adventures, and he has a different household when he's off in Absalom where he has his town house.

Then her legs will start doing doing an odd dance-like movement, and she rises into the air. Once she gets above the castle walls, she starts zooming off towards Lastwall.

"Now, then," he says, once he and his wolf are settled, "are there any other questions I can answer for you?"

“What kind of magic is there here, besides the kind that gods give clerics? I think I got the impression that all the walking dead people were something else, but I don’t know what. I want to know as much as possible about stuff in the plane shift category.”

" - The world is extremely large and I am almost certainly missing something," he says. "The three main categories are the innate magical abilities of supernatural beings such as yourself, which cannot be learned by mortals, and then divine and arcane magic. Divine magic is usually from the gods, but there are people who get it from lesser beings - powerful spirits, say, or the world itself. I have... a little magic like that, if I concentrate and think of how it feels in the forest and all the life around me, but I have never studied it."

"And there is arcane magic, which is the magic of - people who study magic. Divine magic is given by the source in - crystalized? form; arcane magic is woven into this form by exceptional skill or unique talent. For some people it is a matter of learning and study, for some it is in the blood; others make deals with powerful beings for the knowledge of how to use it."

"Undead can be made through divine or arcane or innate magic, but Good gods rarely give spells to raise undead, and Pharasma never does. But if you are a very powerful wizard, someone who has studied magic, and you fear your next life, there are ways to remove your soul - this damages it and you, and all known means involve sentient sacrifice - and hide it to become a spirit possessing your body, impossible to permanently harm by anyone who cannot find your soul."

"These are the people who would not want to be returned to life. Because then they could die."

“Hmm. That specific thing doesn’t happen where I’m from, but I won’t say I haven’t seen people make terrible life choices for, longevity, and power, and other things.”

She’s silent for a moment.

”I…could do something to make them more dead rather than less,” she admits reluctantly. “I don’t like making people more dead rather than less, but if they’ll still be magic, and really mad…I’m not, actually, stupid. It’s probably a better idea. But it wouldn’t be able to distinguish between dead people who are causing problems and dead people who aren’t.”

"If you make them more alive, they will then be possible to make more dead individually, which is chief objection to you. Also that you will help their undead slaves."

He pauses. "I would guess there are... ten to forty liches in Ustalav? And thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of other undead. Liches are dangerous because they are very gifted necromancers of the fifth to ninth circle, not because there are very many of them."

“Wow, yikes. How—the guys at your place weren’t exactly uniformly okay, you weren’t okay, how bad do you think it is, in the armies—“

"That bad."

"Or worse."

"I think most of the Evil ones prefer it to their afterlives."

“How hard is it to change alignment?”

"You must do Good on the scale of the Evil you have done - more than a third of the people do roughly as much Good as they do Evil and so are Neutral - though there is a trial, and it takes mitigating circumstances and the true desire to change into account. There is also a spell, but it is very expensive and so beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest, and if you do not then act your new alignment it will swiftly revert." He plans to buy one at Lastwall while he's there.

"Why is it expensive? Is a it very difficult arcane spell?"

"Divine, of the fifth circle, and requires expensive material components to cast - many spells do, resurrection for instance."

"What kind of expensive material components?"

"Valuable incenses, I believe? Other spells call for gemstones, commonly diamonds."

"...Well, if the incense is expensive because the recipe calls for rare plants, or something, I can do something about that. Diamonds I can definitely do something about." 

"They sell it premixed in the Absalom markets," he says quietly. "I've never inquired about it."

"... If you can make diamonds cheaply and want to supply Lastwall and the churches of the Good gods, then that is a... fundamental and extraordinary shift beyond what mythic heroes and demigods usually cause? And Cheliax will probably attempt to destroy or kidnap you within the twenty-four hours after they learn about it."

"I don't actually object to being somewhere I can do that kind of good but I won't pretend it's not a rude wake-up call, being a big fish in a little pond and then swimming out into the ocean," she grumbles. 

"You have my sympathies," he says.

And - "the main use for diamonds is resurrection spells, and after that restoration spells - healing more complicated than physical injury, and some of the most powerful and dangerous arcane magic." 

"Well, I can't be everywhere at once, and the consent mechanism built into the divine resurrection spells is a good thing," she says philosophically. "What kind of powerful and dangerous arcane magic?"

"Wish," he says, "can do anything, does what you say not what you want, and apparently what you say is usually to produce a crater dozens of miles wide and sometimes destroy your soul. There are safe words to teleport anyone anywhere in the known universe to you, enhance your mental or physical abilities, and replicate weaker spells. There is exactly one wizard on the continent who can cast it and I don't know if there are any others on the planet." The last time he checked he came up empty, but that was generations ago.

"Okay, I've read my share of stories where poorly-worded wishes go wrong, but usually the way they go wrong isn't an explosion." 

"We're used to it."

"I want to know why it happens, and I want to know if making a wish in my native language makes a difference, but it doesn't sound like there is any safe way to test it." 

She sounds personally aggrieved by this. 

"My studies suggest that coming up with a clever idea for a wish is the most common way for ninth circle wizards to die."

"My native language works differently from other languages! It's a valid question! I'm not going to try to answer it because I'm not that stupid!"

"Very fair."

"...I admit to being slightly less idly curious about 'enhancing your mental and physical abilities,' though. If it's safe." 

"There are six known wordings for humanoids that enhance strength, grace, health, cleverness, wisdom and social abilities; I don't know if they would work for type of outsider, but though I expect it would be safe - I would still use divination spells to check and do it outside Golarion, where most prophecy does not function. It is extremely expensive for anyone not you, and the only wizard I have located who can cast Wish is Felandriel Morgethai, who is responsible for the free republic of Andoran, the first place in Avistan to ban slavery, not being subject to Cheliax and Hell. You'd like her, I think; she's Chaotic Good and - takes Good seriously."

"Oh good! Most people back home did not take Good seriously, I really am excited about that part of being here." 

"Why not?" He always did.

"Well...it's not that nobody was trying to do good. But the overlap between people who had power, and people who cared about the people who didn't have power, was pretty small. There were lots of people who thought, 'if I just keep this one narrow area of concern stable and within the status quo, that's fine' and didn't question whether the status quo was good enough. And lots of people who didn't care what happened to anyone else, as long as their own goals were achieved. And lots of people who couldn't recognize someone as a person who looked very different from them until you ground their nose in it like a misbehaving puppy."

"My father was the only other person I met who really recognized that things systematically weren't good enough and did something meaningful to change it. Father invented the life-light. It took a long time. Before that, they could only put out sunlight, like their father, my grandfather. But now that both kinds exist, people like us who are part star can switch back and forth." 

He nods. He's met people like that, but - the gods may not be all good, but the Good gods are, and they're something to look to. "And the life-light is what you used to restore me and mine?"

"Right! Sunlight--the kind of sunlight that shines on my planet, anyway--enforces the laws of the Judgments. It's what I would use if I did decide to kill all the undead in Ustalav instead of healing them." 

"Sunlight on Golarion destroys vampires and a few other types of undead, weakens others, leaves some untouched; most explanations involve the positive energy at the sun's heart to explain why candlelight has none of this effect, but this is not a very good explanation, given that we still don't understand why different undead types differ." Even Ristomaur Tiriac doesn't understand why, and he's plausibly the leading expert on vampirism on Golarion.

"I've never heard of positive energy before." 

"The fundamental essence of life, from which it is rumored souls are formed; clerics of Good gods can wield it to heal the living and damages undead, and there is also negative energy, which heals the undead and wounds the living and clerics of Evil gods can use."

"...Why would it damage undead???"

"Undead are animated by negative energy, and positive and negative energy symmetrically cancel out when they meet, causing the magic animating undead to fail."

"Why would one animate undead using negative energy. It sounds so much less efficient than using the thing that is more closely linked with aliveness to make things more alive!"

"Positive energy cannot - attach to the body? Interact with the body? Know what to give life to? after the soul has departed. Resurrection spells do channel positive energy as part of the same spell, after calling back the soul, to heal the body - or, at the ninth circle, build a new body around the soul - before it simply dies again. Negative energy can... if I say 'fill the space the positive energy has now abandoned' I am making several important errors but not, I think, critical ones; the intuitions it will give are reasonably accurate. You cannot use negative energy to reanimate what was never ensouled."

"...Huh. That's...does positive energy also not promote plant growth?"

"I don't know if anyone has investigated the topic. Not enough to matter greatly? Different spells are used for that."

"It seems like positive energy interacts with a narrower definition of vitality." 

"It does, yes. There are poisons it does nothing for, even ones that damage your health - specialist spells are needed for those." They're extremely useful dealing with adventurers who have clerics, especially if you're immune to poison due to being dead and don't need to worry about accidentally poisoning yourself.

"What kinds of poisons? Do they have anything in common?"

"- Ah, poisons it generally does nothing for, and disease. But the damage poisons cause, it usually cannot heal, separate from removing the poison."

"I could see doing nothing for disease, diseases are alive too--mostly--but poison doesn't have a handy explanation. Hmm. --Oh, just so you know, pieces of diamond that break off me while I'm not glowing are safe, but pieces that break off when I am glowing should be handled with care. Just waving them at people so the people get glowed at is fine, but, like, if someone tries to eat it, or shoves it into their body or whatever, that's really bad. It happened with a shard off my father once, and the guy turned onto an island, and everything on the island is alive. Separately. If you take money there the money starts screaming." 

"I see."

"Thank you. That's very useful information."

"What Good gods are there besides Iomedae and Sarenrae?"

He's happy to list them! Erastil, who likes peaceful farming communities and whose clerics are responsible for about a third of the world's agriculture; Torag, god of construction and craftsmanship and quiet common sense and the dwarven race that embodies them; Shizuru, who hasn't done anything since her husband Tsukiyo died except avenging his death but before that bound laws on the evils of the world to restrict just what cruelties they could enact; Shelyn, goddess of art and love and beauty and music and joy, Desna of exploration and dreams and travel in far places and the distant stars, Cayden Cailean the adventurer who ascended on a drunken dare and is now god of revelry and courage and wine...

"Did Tsukiyo leave a corpse." 

"The priests say yes, but a rat ate it and ascended to become Goddess of Rats. I suspect this is a metaphor but have no idea what the metaphor is for."

(His voice has, actually, been fairly quiet since he stopped crying; not the soft, deadly voice he had before, but just that of someone who doesn't have as much vitality as he's used to.)

"There are still priests of his in Minkai, the center of his faith, who get spells, so there's something giving them, but not many and they worship him as the Good god of madness. So I think there's something left -"

"I am not going to run off and do that right now but I am putting it on my list of things to do. I might have run off to immediately go do that when I was eighteen. Probably not but I might have done it, like, immediately after talking to some priests of Iomedae. Who were those blue guys at your place? I don't think they were undead, but I didn't recognize what kind of person they were. People end up weird colors sometimes back home but that shade of blue isn't nearly weird enough." 

"Derro. They're small humanoids, undergrounds, light-vulnerable, uncommonly often Evil and Chaotic, with poor judgement and a knack for investigation and alchemy. They say they're under a hereditary curse of madness and I hired some of them for - my research - because I was looking for any option -"

"Small humanoids?"

"If there are fewer than two hundred intelligent species on Golarion I would be surprised."

"--Wow. There are a bunch of kinds of people where I'm from but the only kind that isn't human that you could mistake for human are the space bees, and then only because they build human-looking bodies out of paper mache to pilot around. Unless you count half-human hybrids like me, we can pass pretty often. But, like, the Rubbery Men, the Clay Men, the Curators, unless they're wearing an ominous all-concealing cloak, they look way less human than that." 

He nods. "Humanoid is a very standard design on Golarion."

"Weird. The Clay Men and the Rubbery Men are only as human-like as they are because they were made to be so on purpose. The Curators aren't really humanoid even if they can fake it. Did all the near-human people just, like, evolve that way? Humans evolved, on my planet..."

"There are claims that humans grew or were shaped out of another race, claims they were created out of whole cloth by a now-destroyed nonhuman civilization, claims they were created by the gods, and claims their ancestors were taken from another world." Quiet, slightly shy smile. "Pick your favorite."

"Most people where I'm from don't know most of the things I know. I only know them because I'm really powerful and keep poking my nose into places where it doesn't belong." 

And after a lot of conversation, the three of them (space crab, ex-vampire and hunting wolf) will see the great city of Caliphas with its gothic spires and bountiful estates on the east side of the Path river and can turn upriver, to where Vigil, shining city of the Knights of Lastwall, stands guard a hundred miles down against the twin threats of the Whispering Tyrant and the orcs of Belkzen.

Once Lucy has Vigil identified for her, she sets down politely outside the city gates instead of bypassing them entirely. If people seem to have noticed her she will wait to be acknowledged; otherwise she will knock on the gate with her enormous claw. 

People absolutely notice her. Vigil is a city built for siege, with enormous understand caverns whose permanent wards against scrying and teleportation were placed by a witch whose power was only matched by Baba Yaga for the purpose of storing food against siege and huge cisterns refilled by Create Water (to bolster the empire, and two inner citadels, one inside the next, and walls that can in fact be considered magic items...

... But it is also a city that is a living city, and that means there are people coming in from the countryside to deliver eggs to the hegglers and cattle to the butchers and flour to the bakers, and empty carts or carts with furniture and clothes and pots and pans coming from the city to the village, and so the gates are open except when an invading army threatens, which no invading army currently does. Very polite watchmen- and women who see adventurers several times a week nonetheless boggle at the sight of a Colossal flying crab made of diamonds, and the gentleman adventurer and the wolf are frankly lost in the people staring in awe and/or horror.

(Most of them (a) do not assume she's Evil, most powerful outsiders or aberrations or whatever flying to Lastwall are Good, and (b) take cover anyway.)

Well, in that case, she'll put the gentleman adventurer and the wolf down on the ground, and shrink down to human size, pulling on her dress before turning from crystal back to skin. 

And the gentleman adventurer will walk up to the guards and say, "Two adventurers to speak with the Lord Watcher, please."

"Is he expecting you?"

"Probably not, but tell him Count Ristomaur Tiriac is here outside his gates and he will be."

And Tiriac will back off to stand next to Lucy and let the machinery of communication go.

"D'you know the guy personally, or has he just heard of you?"

"I do not, but since that damnable Kindler woman - I'm sorry, she was doing the Good thing - since Ailson Kindler published Captives In The Laboratory Of The Deathless Count, my status as a vampire has been a matter of general knowledge among the governments of the world, even if I did win the libel case eventually." There is still a fairly strong sense in which he looks forwards to collecting damage payments from her in person one day, which is not Good of him but is nonetheless a desire he in fact possesses quite strongly.

"So it is general knowledge that a powerful vampire is outside his door in dawn, and this means a very implausible thing occurred which will need investigating. A way to make it to the top quickly."

"--Oh no," she says, covering her mouth with a hand, "I'm sorry, that's not funny, it's just--people have written the most ridiculous stories about me, too--"

He'll smile at that for the second time since he came back from the dead, very briefly! "Oh, she is quite justified; vampires need to consume sentient living beings to survive. But the story was libelous and I enjoyed swearing to that under Abadar's Truthtelling."

"--Consume like--I was assuming from the translation that it involved drinking blood in some capacity, but--I don't know how it works here but where I'm from eating the flesh of sentient beings is a much bigger deal--metaphysically speaking--than drinking their blood--"

"They don't usually survive."

"...Right, this place isn't like the surface of my planet but it's not like the Neath either--back home just being completely exsanguinated mostly wouldn't keep someone down for too long, because there's enough of Father's ambient life-light around." 

"There's afterlives, but people - don't really like giving up their lives and everyone they know, even aside from the Evil ones. And you only get one mortal life."

Pause. "And the pain."

"The pain?" 

"People dislike dying because it hurts."

"Oh. Yeah, though I would expect that to be less of a consideration than the other. Like, life-light doesn't make pain not, and there are people who participate in consensual games of Murder Tag for fun, where I'm from. Are you sure you don't want a hug?"

"Sure."

He'll accept a hug now. And pet his wolf.

HUG. 

She is really good at hugs. 

And also really glad Sarenrae pointed her at this man. 

And then Lastwall will bring someone who can cast spells, a fresh-faced halfling cleric of Iomedae who looks completely useless in a fight under any and all circumstances, much good that does those people who have to fight her...

Aura Sight sees a wolf with more life energy than usual, a CHAOTIC GOOD!!! person, and a lawful evil person. Detect Undead suggests a lingering aura of undead no longer present clinging to the lawful evil person. Detect Magic says the lawful evil person has a legendary adventurer's magic items and the CHAOTIC GOOD!!! person has a magic dress that might be a minor artifact. Augury thinks inviting them inside is a great idea.

"Hello! I'm Lieutenant Elma of the Ninth Tower. I'm here to take you to the right person to talk to?"

(They are still hugging. She is only mildly surprised.)

"Hi! I'm Lucy Whitman, the Light-Hearted Wastelander, and this is Count Ristomaur Tiriac." 

Tiriac will stop hugging her to bow. "We have urgent news for the Lord Watcher, of the highest priority."

"Yes, come with me if you don't mind -"

And she'll smile at Lucy as they hurry into the city and say "So I'm sure someone's told you you're very Chaotic Good -"

“The chaos part isn’t ideological, I’m just bad at keeping organized.”

"Yes, that's one of the trickier bits, isn't it," she says, doing her best to keep up a constant stream of chatter while Lastwall moves the two directly ideologically-opposed adventurers (and their animal companion) into somewhere with Private Sanctum wards up.

Lucy has plenty of things to chatter about.

She glances idly at the wards as they go through them, noting their existence without especial concern.

" - So I assume you know your companion is Lawful Evil?" she'll say once they're unscryable.

“Oh. Yeah, he used to be a vampire.”

"That was one of the things we wanted to talk to you about, as it happened."

"- We'd very much like to know how this happened," she says apologetically. "You can speak freely - my supervisor will be here in a moment but everything will be passed on anyway -"

Ristomaur will glance at Lucy to determine whether she wants him to translate for her or if she wants to try to explain in her own terms.

“He thinks it’s useful to model me as a demigoddess. I’m from really, really far away, and we don’t have entities that can give our cleric spells, but we do have beings who are really really powerful and my father is one. I’m a quarter star and I can give off light that’s, uh, more broadly life-giving than positive energy seems to be. Also my true form is made of diamond and my healing works on myself. I want to fight, like, all the necromancers in Ustalav, and also Asmodeus, but I also want to not permanently die of being an idiot.”

"- She can cause any undead to return to life instantly and says she can mass-produce diamonds."

"Do you mind if I get a specialist in to cast Greater Dispel Magic and then cast Zone of Truth on you before going further with this?"

“I can demonstrate the diamond thing right now if you want, but go ahead.”

She goes to get one!

The mage is going to try Arcane Sight (confirms they have magic items, confirms they are all very standard except Lucy's dress which is nonsense), try to dispel the false auras on them (fail to find), and then Zone of Truth (which they can resist, but are politely asked not to).

" - Sorry, can you repeat that?"

She repeats herself exactly, down to being able to demonstrate the diamonds thing right now. 

So does he!

"And I'd like an Atonement spell when practical, please. Neutral Good."

Right.

- "So the first priority," says Elma, "is probably to get you a Mind Blank spell but our only eighth circle wizard is with the army right now, it's probably worth it to get you a scroll, and a Cloak of Resistance, and -" she's rapidly scribbling coded notes "- broadly people who have lots of magic items are much harder to do things to, Polymorph spells do let them go with you when you change shape and they're often impossible to remove from you that way - actually demonstrating the diamonds thing probably ought to be the first priority - do you mind if I get you a Protection from Evil it'll make it harder to do magic on you and do you mind an Owl's Wisdom, that will help with that too -"

“I want an explanation of what all these spells do but you have my consent to cast them first.”

"Mind blank is complete immunity to all mind-affecting spells," she says, casting the two she has, "Protection from Evil makes you harder for Evil people to hurt you or affect you with spells, and Owl's Wisdom makes you more Wise and these both help with not being assassinated by Cheliax tomorrow - diamonds?"

She turns her hand clear and bites her thumb off with an unsettling crunch.

She hands over the thumb-shaped diamond as the stump glows and starts regrowing.

Erna does not go HOLY SHIT because she grew up in Cheliax, actually, but will take a thumb-shaped diamond as if it is the most valuable object she's ever touched and re-invite the wizard back in - 

"That's a lot of diamond," she will point out informatively.

(Count Tiriac goes not go HOLY SHIT because he was a vampire yesterday.)

“—What? No it’s not—I can do much bigger in my other form—“

" - The most powerful resurrection spell uses a diamond of this size," Tiriac says, opening his fingers a very small quantity.

“—But, but a diamond that size is barely worth enough to bother keeping—I guess bizarre diamond scarcity is less weird than not having Judgments—“

"Diamonds do not last, in Golarion?" he suggests. "I have seen the price rise over my existence."

“Wow, I guess over time that’d do it. Still. Wow.”

Her thumb has finished regenerating. She bites it off again.

Thaaaat is when a messenger will arrive to bring her into the room with all the Extremely Important People in it, as well as to give her and Tiriac passwords for the Forbiddance, that they should speak aloud before entering.

(The Extremely Important People ground a very little bit off the tip of the first thumb, cast Restoration, and then did sensible and appropriate amounts of panicking.)

Extremely Important People include! Lord Watcher of Lastwall, Ulthan II Vasile! The Precentor Martial for Cavalry (Not actually the job it sounds like), Julian-Raymond Theissen! High Priest of Iomedae in Lastwall (not, noticeably, Tribune of Faith for Lastwall), Ulrike Kahler! The Precentor Martial for Magic is out of Lastwall on military exercises, so her assistant in chief of necromancy, the Nidalese wizard Isierne Vaus, is handling it. Lastwall's new spymaster, Horgroth Halfhand is also present, if distracted by the sudden need to fill the boots of his legendary predecessor.

Ulthun is a young man who doesn't bother to change out of his armor, looking surprisingly - simultaneously rugged and like a golden retriever - for a national leader. His hair and beard are close-cropped to fit a helmet, and he has no crown but a Wisdom headband. Theissen is close to his age, but with the dark aura of someone who is used to having people killed and is quite good at it. Kahler is not quite the Voice of Iomedae in Golarion (that's queen Galfrey of Mendev, not in the room, who usually looks like a 30-year-old-human woman but is in fact a transformed bugbear) but would pass for Iomedae Herself in appearance. Vaus is a dark-haired, heavily-scarred woman who has the bizarrely cheerful expression of someone who, every second, is not in Nidal, and Horgroth looks like an exactly normal orc, which is of course the goal when doing espionage in the Hold of Belkzen.

(Unfortunately the wolf will have to wait outside, since wolves can't speak and aren't Lawful Good.)

(They are not expecting Lucy to remember all these names.)

"- So the fundamental difficulty," says Theissen, "is of course that Cheliax will try to kill our new guest," passing Lucy his Cloak of Resistance as she comes in - 

"- If she - oh, welcome," says Ulthun, bowing, "Thank you for fixing our planet -"

"What actually goes wrong if she glows over Ustalav," Horgroth says. "Remek Czaszar is not actually very good at assassinations -"

"I still think the priority is finding Lao Shu Po," says Vaus, "or at least having her glow at the moon, since that would fix the world if it worked --" 

"- Diamonds," says Kahler firmly, "We can do that in three minutes and they're three minutes that matter -"

(In spite of the disagreement, there's an air of enormous cheer in the room. Everyone seems wholly relaxed in everyone else's presence, and everyone is tremendously energized by Lucy and Tiriac's presence.)

"Hi!" To Ulthun: "You're welcome!" 

She does not immediately launch into the half-a-dozen questions she would have begun asking before the Owl's Wisdom to the face. These people a) are better-organized than her, and b) know their world better than she does; she came here specifically to seek their council, it would be silly not to trust their prioritization. 

She does pay attention to what each one is saying; she draws up a word of Correspondence for each of them, containing (among other things) everything she knows about them so far. 

"So the first question for you," says the Lord Watcher of Lastwall eagerly, "is mostly about unknown unknowns; what is there that's very important you haven't already covered?"

"We'd like to cast a lot more protective spells," says Vaus, "If you don't mind."

"Iomedae has received very good news which is almost certainly you," said Kahler - "You can tell when preparing spells. We haven't got off a Commune yet, though."

"--Well, I was already plotting against things mightier than I before I ever left home; the celestial status quo is being actively enforced and involves a lot of unnecessary death. There my plan was figuring out a way to scale apotheosis but apparently you guys have an apotheosis rock which is usually lethal. Since these are very different definitions of god I'm not too worried about what that means for my original plan, but it does suggest that it doesn't import well. In addition to my life-light I can also switch over to, and emit, law-light which is the mechanism for the enforcement of the celestial status quo, and typically acts to suppress or destroy magical effects and also kill people who are more than zero but less than one hundred percent alive. I speak Correspondence the burning language of the stars, which may or may not already be known here--I tried praying to Iomedae, got Sarenrae instead, she directed me to him," she gestures to Tiriac, "and she spoke to me in Correspondence. Skilled use of Correspondence produces a wider array of magical effects than either form of light can effect; the written form is what I used for my dress. I'm used to working with Evil people; there are a lot of powerful ones back home, and while I have convinced a non-zero number of them to cut it out we don't have Atonement. My father is commensurately more powerful than me but much less agentic on a human scale; the divinities of my world tend to think in terms of geological timeframes. My father invented the life-light and I've been tinkering with trying to iterate off of that to create something even better, or at least more scalable, but I haven't got there yet. With the right symbiote I could go faster than light. I'm really enjoying the effects of Owl's Wisdom, it makes it much easier to organize my thoughts." 

"Oh good," says Vaus, reading off a scroll of Mind Blank before starting in on more tricky buffs - "We don't have Correspondence," she says, "unless the gods did before and haven't told us, so if you can teach people that's important if less so than the more immediate things."

"The status quo here," says Theissen, "is that Pharasma made a universe where between three in four and one in twenty - depending on the society - people in the population gets tortured forever, and about the same fraction gets turned into monsters then has their souls destroyed, so we're trying to fix this. The top priority cosmically is conquering the parts of Hell and the Abyss where new mortals show up, but that's a long-range issue and right now we're mostly just trying to stop the demons of the Worldwound from killing everything and Cheliax, the nation ruled by Hell, from conquering the world, but we also have the Ustalav difficulty where some extremely powerful liches raised massive armies of the undead, and they're at risk of freeing the Whispering Tyrant who wants to destroy all life in the universe and raise it all as his undead slaves."

"If you used first Law-light and then Life-light, would the bodies be too destroyed or could you de-magic Ustalav and then raise everyone?" Vaus would also like to know.

"Prrrrrrrobably I could de-magic Ustalav and then raise everyone? But if I were using law-light intense enough to get every undead in Ustalav, including ones that were, like, indoors, or underground, I would end up hitting, um, a lot more surface area than just Ustalav, less brightly. I could also just use a more reasonable intensity of light but that would I'm sure leave some stragglers--not that that isn't still a much better situation, tactically, but I don't want you to think it's quite as simple a win button as it could be--"

"Do you know what effect Law-light would have on bound outsiders?" Vaus asks.

"My main worry," says Kahler, "is that it might hit the Whispering Tyrant's seal but not the Tyrant - things were quite a lot better geopolitically when we sealed him," she'll explain to Lucy, "and that was a very close fight."

"I honestly have no idea how my law-light will interact with Outsiders, people have been saying I'm one but it doesn't seem to me that it's likely that they'll be any more similar to me than your gods are to the Judgments. --The seals thing is an incredibly valid concern." 

"I'll ask someone to schedule time with a lantern archon to test," says Vaus, casting Message, "if it sends Called outsiders home it might do the same for the Worldwound demons."

"Could Law-light close the Worldwound?" Ulthun asks. "It's a rift to another plane, the Chaotic Evil Abyss."

"First things first," says Kehler firmly. "Mind Blank is up?"

"Mind blank is up," says Vaus.

"Can I ask you for about a ton of diamonds?" Kehler says.

"For an actual ton in any reasonable amount of time, I'm going to need somewhere big enough to turn into my other shape."

" - Storage caverns," Kehler says, "It'll take about two minutes' walk and you won't leave scrying-warded areas, how long would that take?"

"Less than a minute if I hurry." 

"Do it," says Ulthan, "Please," and, if she says yes, "Thank you."

(As she's lead out the door, she hears him turning to Tiriac - "So you're aiming at Neutral Good?")

They reach the storage area. 

Lucy strips efficiently out of her dress, and surges upward and outward into her greater shape. 

What follows is--gory. 

First she snaps off many of her spires, squeezing them mercilessly with her powerful crab-claws until they shatter and fall. Then, lowering herself to the ground, she snaps off each of her long, slender rear legs. Finally, she raises the claws to her mouth, and bites through the wrists. 

It takes less than forty seconds, in total; the spires have begun to regenerate, but not yet finished. The legs are regrowing faster. 

(She bleeds, in this form, a clear and sparkling ichor composed of water, diamond dust, and organic compounds not found in Golarion.)

HOLY SHIT HOLY

(This does in fact freak her Lastwall escorts out a GREAT DEAL.)

She shrinks back down to her human form, which has a lot less biomass to regenerate (and also blood a more traditional color, but her bones are still diamond, which her escort will be able to see, if they're paying attention to the details of her replenishing body, which, valid to not). 

"Should I do it again?" 

"No, that will do," says the person personally escorting, who is now aware that this is the most valuable room on the face of the planet. "Thank you very much."

(The diamonds will be broken up and put in various very secure storage locations by very trusted people.)

"You're welcome!" 

She shoos the blood with a word of Correspondence and re-dresses. 

And then they're hoping to pull her back to the room, where a bunch of paladins and Technically Not Paladins On A Bare Technicality are -

"Welcome back," says Ulthun. "Do you have priorities other than the flourishing of all sentient beings, or things you want to spend money on, since this is really yours?"

(There's a stack of magic items with little notes on them for her.)

"Also," says Theissen, "do you need to eat, sleep, drink, or shit? There's a ring that can fix that."

"--Well, I get uncomfortable if I don't do any of those things, but not very, since the healing keeps up--it can be distracting, though. Uh, I...do have personal interests, but the flourishing of all sapient beings is more important? I do tend to get attached to specific people really easily, so if it's more convenient for me to pay for Count Tiriac's Atonement, I can do that? I like doing science, especially science for promoting the flourishing of all sapient beings...I like trashy novels, especially but not exclusively romance novels...I embroider, mostly Correspondence-sigils, that's what's up with my dress..." 

"Right, but I thought I should ask," says Ulthun with a grin.

"Then I'll send for a Ring of Delayed Doom if you don't need the Sustenance," says Theissen.

(The note on the Sustenance says that it takes a week to charge, cuts you to needing two hours of sleep a day, and makes all bodily functions unnecessary.)

"What does that do?" 

"Delayed Doom lets you push almost any harmful effect - including spells and poison - a minute into the future," says Vaus, "but it will still affect you then. It's a charge per garnet on the ring and they need to be made individually, though, so don't use it too casually."

(The other rings on the table are her choice of a Ring of the Godless, which makes you better capable of resisting divine magic and magic of divinely created or summoned creatures and stacks with her new Cloak of Resistance, and a Ring of Protection, which makes her much harder to hurt with weapons.)

Godless, definitely, she is approximately unconcerned with physical damage. 

"Oh--one thing I forgot to bring up earlier, when I was comparing paradigms--back home, I have a vault, with tissue samples from people, so that if they die such that their body goes missing I can still bring them back." 

" - Sounds good," Ulthun says, "What size does it have to be and can you heal it afterwards?"

"Large enough to keep track of, and yes absolutely."

"Then we'll do that as soon as the Commune goes through," says Theissen.

(Yep yep. General Lastwall agreement.)

"We'll also want to collect everyone who died recently," says Ulthun - "Do you know if you can work from Clones?"

"I do not but if you explain what Clones are I might be able to guess?" 

"Eighth-circle wizardry which creates a magical duplicate of the body to which the soul flees on death," says Vaus, who is The Expert On This in Lastwall. "Our former spymaster, Jean Riudaure, created one before his death, but he had been forced to sell his soul before defecting to our side and needed to contest his new owner in a contest of wills to remain alive, which he failed. He is now in Hell."

"Well. I can't guarantee that it'll work. But it sounds like the worst-case scenario is at least informative." 

"I think we want to do it simultaneously with you resurrecting all our dead who don't object and one round before you light up Ustalav, assuming we don't have a better plan by then," says Ulthun. "This still leaves the questions of whether your Law-light can dispel planar rifts - Vaus, is there any pre-Gate spell that creates a temporary one -"

"And it leaves Cheliax as an issue," says Theissen. "Resurrecting the undead and closing the Worldwound will be huge, but still leaves Hell causing problems."

"If she resurrects all the dead of Cheliax, how many of them will still be loyal to Cheliax?"

"Planar rifts very much sound like the kind of problem that law-light could solve, but I hesitate to give an authoritative answer just because we don't have them at home so I haven't checked."

Message from Kehler: A common problem for mortals is that they sometimes think they don't need good things to function at full capacity, and in fact they often do. This is not true for outsiders and it is worth investigating if it's true of you if you haven't.

And Vaus, "Let me consult with the Master of Conjuration to see if there are any test spells."

Ulthun shakes his head at Tiriac. "Loyal or no, they won't have organization. I think raising the dead of Imperial Cheliax to rise in rebellion is a great idea, but we'd need coordination and allies if we don't want milling mobs, and we don't have time for that."

...She whispers back, "I haven't tried depriving myself of good things for long enough that I would expect to be able to tell the difference, but also, like, resurrecting people is a good thing, for me."

Kehler nods.

Vaus, "He says Rope Trick and Create Pits are simple test but might not work and suggests Shadow Invasion, which we have scrolls of."

Ulthun, "The Law-light tests will be a problem, given that we're testing a lethal weapon's lethality. We should focus for a moment on how to do that without risking permanent sacrifices or leaking the secret to Cheliax."

Theissen, "Call a demon and see if the binding or the demon melts first?"

Ulthun, "Still a sacrifice either way."

Theissen, "Acknowledged, but." 

Ulthun, "Yes."

"--Can I get context on the demon thing--"

" - We need to test whether your law-light destroys outsiders," says Ulthun. "If you leave to seek out a dangerous outsider currently threatening people in Golarion, Cheliax has a significant chance of learning you can do this. If we summon an outsider with a temporary spell, the summoning spell will be cancelled first. So either we need to risk the life of one of Heaven's own people testing it, or we need to summon an Evil nondevil outsider, let it break its bindings and attack us, and then see if Law-light works. Either way we're trying to test if a very dangerous weapon is lethal and there's no way to do that without stabbing someone with it. That's the problem."

"That last one seems like the best idea to me but then I don't have as much context here--it's not that I like the idea of permanently killing anything, but, uh--based on the descriptions of--how outsiders work--for a demon it seems like it might almost be a mercy--"

"We'll want to start with a summoned one," says Vaus, "then move on to calling spells."

" - Demons often enjoy themselves," says Kehler, "especially the dangerous ones. They usually still live short and violent lives though, though, so it's less bad than killing something with a longer expected lifespan."

She makes a face. 

"--It occurs to me that one possible outcome is the demon turning back into a human soul. Human souls are--definitely not forbidden by the laws the light enforces."

"- If that would work that would be very good," says Kehler, to general nods. "We haven't found any way to help Evil outsiders yet without resurrecting them first."

"--Resurrecting them first is possible?"

"If they haven't been dead for long enough to change very much."

"But they still count, at that point...?"

" - Technically," says Vaus, "Anyone, as soon as they die, becomes a petitioner, which is a type of outsider. The afterlife begins shaping them - or giving them the opportunity to shape themselves, it's somewhat ambiguous - into the sort of thing that inhabits it, and this process continues the longer it goes on until they become hard to recognize as their past selves."

"But it's a continuous process...? Is there a hard cut-off point for where they no longer count enough for any resurrection spell to grab--the Pharasmin priest I spoke to said there were resurrection spells of varying power--do ones that have started to gain planar-dependent qualities lose those qualities when they're resurrected--"

"It is, and they do," says Vaus. "People in the Evil afterlives are sort of - traumatized? and people in Nirvana often pick up coping skills, and in Heaven they are somewhat surprised by the fact that not everyone else is Lawful Good, but it largely corrects. And the most powerful resurrection spell has a hard limit of two hundred years if cast by the most powerful clerics in the world, though possibly a cleric more powerful than any who have ever existed who could do more."

"If it's a soft limit and not a hard one then that suggests that I could de-demonify someone by glowing at their corpses hard enough--does Speak With Dead have a time limit?"

"The head still needs to be intact," says Vaus, "but that's the only known limitation."

"Still intact, or does intact again work?"

"Let me ask," says Vaus, casting Message. (The conversation on the other side of the table is about appropriate demon containment methods.)

"We don't know."

"Okay, we should test that on the head of someone we're definitely going to resurrect anyway." 

"Understood," says Kehler.

(Another stack of magic items has arrived for her by this point, along with a question of whether she knows if her dress is technically armor, in which case she can combine its magical powers with those of an enchanted shirt, or clothing, in which case she can combine its magical powers with enchanted armor? Also if she's proficient with any armor.)

"--It's--a dress? Dresses are clothing? But I'm not sure I understand what's meant here by technically clothing--like, I would expect to be able to wear multiple layers of armor, if I personally magicked them back home--also I'm not sure what's meant by 'proficient with' armor, the thing you do with armor is wear it--is wearing armor harder than wearing normal clothing--like, I would expect wearing a chain shirt to just be like wearing a shirt, admittedly I know less about plate--"

" - So," says Vaus, "for complicated magical reasons, different items worn in different places have magical overlap effects such that you cannot wear two headbands, or two amulets, or two pairs of boots, and get the magical effects from both. You can wear two rings but not three, and you can wear both regular clothes, and armor over them, magically speaking, without interference. Most wizards who are famous heroes have enchanted under-robes and over-robes, for instance." 

"Armor's just hard to move in if you aren't used to it," says Ulthun. "Trips you up if you aren't use to the weight."

"Huh. I might be an exception to the weight thing on account of how I am very very strong, but I don't have experience in it. --I might want to just forgo the dress altogether, the enchantments on it aren't actually, uh, that useful--it hangs right and stays clean, and it doesn't tear easily but that's not really the biggest concern I have right now." 

" - It looks like a minor artifact," says Kehler.

Vaus is just staring. 

"... You know," says Kehler, "all magical items stay clean and are very hard to damage. As a side effect of the main enchantments."

"This thing has so many pockets! Making it fall right took genuine magic. Plus I stitched my favorite word into it more times than necessary just to look nice--uh, my favorite word can be roughly summed up as 'the thing Sarenrae is about.' ...There wasn't much that could meaningfully threaten me, back home."

"There is probably not very much that can threaten you here," Kehler says, "but that happening anyway is one of the few failure points we have so it's worth tossing a lot of magic items on you just in case."

"Which is totally legitimate, it just wasn't a going concern when I was making this dress." 

They'll nod in general understanding! 

Their best idea for a magic shirt for her is a Vest of Pockets, but they can combine this with the +1 Devil Defying Fitting Mithril Chain Shirt, which will grow with her when she shapeshifts (something armor usually has trouble with), will be easy to move in and has at least some protection against the scariest things Cheliax can throw at her.

(Its previous user was a wizard who used a lot of polymorph spells and occasionally got into close-combat as an unintended result.)

--Oh, sweet! 

Lucy transfers all her stuff from the pockets of her dress to the vest of pockets. 

...Her dress doesn't contain zero petticoats, but it contains a lot less petticoats than it looked like before she started doing that. An incomplete inventory of objects on her person: 

-Several books

-Three jars of honey, with spoon

-A hand mirror

-Eight tallow candles. 

-Several random bars of oddly-warm brass. 

-An embroidery kit containing exclusively white floss

-About a yard of silk fabric

-A set of glasses with various lenses that can be flipped up and down

-An official-looking document reading "The Light-Hearted Wastelander is entitled to do whatever the hell she wants" and signed "Mr. Irons" "Mr. Wines" and "Mr. Pages" 

-Several tightly-sealed wax jars

-A collection of inks in colors that really oughtn't exist, which Lucy shuffles from one set of pockets to the other especially quickly to keep anyone from looking at them for too long.  

Ah, a high-level adventurer! How normal-looking.

Anyway, she'll have Lots Of Magic Items now!

After that, their first priority is to do simple tests, then have her shine on the moon just in case that counts as Tsukiyo's corpse, then collect and regenerate toes, then test her resurrection on someone two hundred years dead to make sure they're still all right (they can use Sending to get permission), then do the raise-everyone-in-Lastwall-who-doesn't-object-and-wipe-out-all-undead-in-Ustalav project, and all this will be as soon as the Commune finishes, since this is worth checking with Iomedae with that none of it will be disastrous. Then they start explaining to other countries they can mass-produce resurrections for everyone who wants it, which will probably trigger the next Great Avistani War but it will be a very fast war if they have infinite resurrections and Cheliax does not, and hopefully they can come to a very quick negotiated settlement.

Anything they're missing?

"Checking if Speak With Dead works on reassembled heads?"

Right! That! They'll do that.

(They were just going to use Sending to people in the afterlife, which you can also do. But Speak With Dead also works.)

Speak With Dead seems better than Sending for the use case where they have a corpse and no idea who it was? Unless she's misunderstanding how Sending works.

Nope, that's what Speak With Dead is for. But they mostly know who their corpses are.

“That’ll do to start with. —At some point after we go public I want to contact the caster who can do Wish, I’m really appreciating the effects of Owl’s Wisdom and would like to make that permanent.”

- Were headbands not covered? Shit. They thought they were on that.

Here's some headbands to try on! (only +2 so far). They do Owl's Wisdom and the other two spells that boost Intelligence and Charisma, she should pick the one that works best.

Over at the other end of the room there is currently lively debate on the Geb question, which they may have forgotten Lucy doesn't know about!

Lucy pauses in trying on headbands to look over at the other end of the room, and asks, "Who or what is Geb?"

Ulthun looks sheepish. "Both, actually. Geb is a mythically powerful necromancer and the country he founded based on enslaving everyone after they die to do manual labor. The last time we tried to do anything about it, eight hundred years ago, he - beat us completely, stole the corpse of one of our greatest heroes, the demigod Arazni, and animated her as his viceroy. The question is if we need to avoid them until after we've dealt with Cheliax or not - they're Evil, but very isolationist."

"If Arazni was back on our side..." Horgroth murmured.

"What exactly Life-Light would do with her I don't know," warns Kahler, "but she's not happy with Iomedae right now."

“Why’s she unhappy with Iomedae?”

"I haven't had a direct vision," Kahler says. "But whenever clerics of Iomedae ask Her questions with Commune about 'is it a good idea to' do anything at all involving Geb, the universal answer is 'no', and if we ask 'is it because of Arazni', or 'is Arazni opposed to us', or 'does Arazni dislike you', the answer is yes. She has us to blame for her reanimation - us trying to kill Geb - and she was fighting alongside us when she died the first time, against Tar-Baphon."

"Historical summary," says Ulthun, "Tell me if I'm making a mistake - Arazni was an archmage who became the herald of the god Aroden, one of the first mortals to ascend; He became god of progress, civilization, and humanity, and Iomedae was His paladin, and Arazni was - sort of barely a demigod; she had clerics but very few and very weak. In the Shining Crusade to seal Tar-Baphon Iomedae asked Aroden for her assistance, and Arazni came to support her, and Arazni was killed, destroyed as outsiders are destroyed, by the Whispering Tyrant. A hundred years later we got greedy, tried to go after Geb as well, and - we thought it wasn't possible to raise dead outsiders. It's still not possible for anyone else."

He pauses. "She's still a demigod. Of Despair."