This is less creepy than the Clone deal, probably due to the lack of intubation and not having just seen it be someone else's corpse 30 seconds earlier. From this angle, it could just be one of her multiforms out cold, at least until you noticed it wasn't breathing.

With somewhat more practiced ease, she'll make the transition.

Once in the other body, she has the unfortunate realization that she is once more without all her magical items, as they stayed with the other body. Fortunately, this is a mostly just a problem for people who can't accelerate to speeds hundreds of times faster than the human eye without giving up detail work or damaging things. She honed this trick on her friends so she could get ready for school in between their blinks, and they were themselves fast enough to do the same for an ordinary human. From all appearances, it's as though the two bodies simply switch places, except the one now on the ground gets up in time (at more human speeds, if still incredibly fast) to catch the other.

"So, er, can we use this other body for its original purpose still?"

"If you mean its role as a Clone, yes, all they need to do is dispel the Polymorph and then use another 8th circle slot to reconnect it. Much faster than growing a new one from scratch, so I imagine they'll appreciate the care. Your other spells will be a bit, though, so please bear with me."

Since she didn't think to bring a book and this probably isn't the place to ask more questions on the parts of Golarion that still confuse her, Kakara can do some stretches and then move into some light exercise.

From the looks on their faces, you would be forgiven for assuming Golarion didn't consider this light exercise.

It actually only takes Felandriel Morgethai just over 8 minutes before she's done planning the lesser wish wording, at which point she can wave Kakara over to get the spells cast.

It's moderately dissapointing that she can't see the spell as it's getting cast, but watching it take effect on her and then abruptly stabilize into a permanant structure on her is still quite impressive. It's almost enough to make Kakara wish she had any magical abilities whatsoever, but she wouldn't actually trade and has legitimately no idea where she would ever get the time to train them. Her sight is fairly amateur as it is.

If that's all the spells they have for her today, she can instant transmission them back to Lastwall?

Yep, they're good to go!

So, now that she's not one lucky dispel away from her combat abilities sinking like a stone, what are the most tractable problems to sudden overwhelming force? She'd heard suggestions that put Nidal and Cheliax pretty high on the list of global problems, but that a large part of the issue would be humanitarian and thus she should wait a bit on dealing with them to give time to arrange relief convoys and so forth?

They're a bit concerned about the extent to which she seems to be treating "conquering Cheliax and Nidal" as problems she can easily defeat in the field, but it is indeed true that an additional legendary hero would plausibly prove decisive in either even before considering the edge her instant transmission offers in any conventional military conflict. It's true that all else equal the nation with the larger army and economy will win a war, but that doesn't apply when one side can teleport entire regiments and battalions behind enemy lines to crush any forces that don't maintain sufficient force concentration. They haven't had time to update potential war plans, but the news out of the staff office is very encouraging, so they are in fact currently making the arrangements necessary so that conquering one or both would result in something other than an immense humanitarian disaster. This is an immense task that includes everything from reaching out to the church of Erastil to be ready to salvage crop yields to finding out what clerics every Good and Neutral church can spare on a temporary or permanent basis if they provide compensation and transportation to stepping up their recruitment of administrators, but it's also a nice change from their usual desperate efforts.

They'd prefer she stay away from anything that could plausibly actually kill her until Felandriel can wish up an accelerated Clone tomorrow, but there are a lot of places in Ustulav that are pretty much safe for high level martials of any kind if they have cleric support that would nevertheless hugely improve quality of life for a lot of people?

That sounds probably doable. What do the problems there look like? She thinks she recalled something about undead being one of the issues there, but it's been hundreds of years since any of her people had to deal with undead, unless you count petitioners in line to be sorted, which means most of her knowledge comes from half remembered stories and some fantasy novels. Not the most reliable sources even before you consider that things might work entirely differently across universes.

Ustulav is cursed. Probably not just one curse, by the looks of things, but at least one big one across pretty much the entire thing. Lastwall didn't really believe it either at first, but over a thousand years of trying to keep the lid on the thing tends to give you a pretty good sense for it, and they're basically confident at this point. People within an area that roughly corresponds to Ustulav have statistically notable tendencies to get strings of luck, both bad and deeply weird. There are cults that worship dark entities, not just the traditional influence of the varying Evil gods and demigods but things far stranger, from qlippoth to dark tapestry entities to ancient horrors from before the dawn of civilization; perhaps even the hand of outer gods reaching in from beyond creation itself, although such claims are difficult to positively verify and in at least some cases have been conclusively disproven. It's not just a question of tradition, although it is the case that trying to stamp out even normal religions can result in pushback and underground followings - it will also, on occasion, end up picked up by entirely new groups of people immigrating from outside the country. They're not even universally Evil, at least as Pharasma judges it, but even the exceptions have a startling tendency to drive people mad and the more traditional examples have their fair share of human sacrifice and calling up monstrosities. They're pretty sure this isn't the source of all the horrific creatures residing there, but you know, not completely confident. Between the time elapsed and the hidden nature of these groups, it's hard to pin down an exact timeline, but consultation with the elves suggests it might predate organized human settlement in the area, though they had even less visibility within the society of gnolls, kellids, and orcs  that lived there than they do among humans; certainly, it was established by the early years of the age of enthronement.

This is not the problem. Ustulav was, as mentioned, always cursed, and yet nonetheless for most of recorded history was well within the distribution for countries in golarion. The monsters, while nightmarish, were hardly threats the forces (both armies and adventurers) of a functional state, the altered probability rare enough as to typically not be decisive in the course of events, and the cults by their very nature had strong tendencies to avoid open acts or greatly spread. Furthermore, simply by mundane means more prosperous and interconnected countries are harder recruitment targets for underground religious organizations of this type, and the golden age created by the line of Soividia Ustav corresponded with a decline in their influence. The actual issue with Ustulav comes from the undead.

This, inevitably, brings up the Whispering Tyrant Tar-Baphon. Ustulav had some issues with the undead prior to his rise, particularly from some groups of Vampires, but the majority of the necromantic activity in the area centered on the mysterious Cenotaph at the southern edge of the Tusk Mountains. The area had advantages where the undead were concerned, like many locations allowing easier channeling of negative energy than normal, but it was Tar-Baphon who made the location and undead synonymous. A necromancer and archmage, Tar-Baphon conquered most of central Avistan with his armies of orcs and undead soldiers, and ruled them from his fortress on the isle of terror. Although Aroden personally fought and slew him, breaking his base of power and putting Tar-Baphon's forces to flight, He did not slay all of them there that day or deal with the forces situated elsewhere, so unless slain by adventurers or defeated by the armies of neighboring nations in battle these immortal minions simply... stuck around. Their abilities at self replication were an issue in their own right, and compounding the problem was the fact that large scale necromantic activity gradually makes negative energy easier to make use of anywhere nearby, even by entirely other individuals; Ustulav had abnormally high proportions of spontaneously generated undead from those not buried in hallowed graves.This would prove a major headache for first the disorganized societies that inhabited the country for the next thousand years and for the actual nation of Ustulav that followed, but it was overall manageable by diligent effort.

And then, two and half millennia after his death at the hands of Aroden, the whispering tyrant returned with more power than ever. Now a uniquely powerful lich instead of a mortal necromancer, the man was far more cautious and crafty than he was before his first defeat and moved significantly more cautiously, building up forces and taking territory bit by bit rather than seeking large conquests in one go that would force his neighbors to unite against him. To make matters worse, he had discovered a way to surpass the usual limitation of necromancers and control a truly unlimited number of risen dead directly, without the need for regular spellcasting to support it, and had refined his methodology for creating greater varieties of undead. Now anyone who died opposing him, or many people with graves in territory he came to rule, found themselves slaves to his will and forced to serve in his armies. He toppled the king of Ustulav, forced the orcs of Belkzen to bend the knee, reclaimed his Isle of terror, and sought to conquer all of Avistan if not the world.

Fortunately, in the intervening centuries Taldor had grown strong and the church of Aroden with it; they used their armies to fence him in with a ring of steel and fortifications to slow his conquests, and Iomedae - who was then merely the greatest of Aroden's mortal servants - turned the operation into what would become known as the shining crusade and attempted to end his threat for once and for all. It was a long, bitter, hard fought war, for the Tar-Baphon's armies were beyond number and he himself was a nearly unkillable combatant; the vast majority of spells used upon him failed outright, and he had a preternatural ability to shrug off the exceptions that was notably even by the standards of lich archmages, but Iomedae arrayed behind her almost all of the churches of Good gods and a great many Neutral churches, as well as the monetary support of the greatest nation in Golarion during that era and the aid of Aroden's own herald, the archmage Arazni. Combined with her own skills as a general and Paladin, as well as the martial feats of the many heroes forged in the crusade, they steadily gained ground and forced his troops back into Ustulav proper. Even the disastrous battle of Three Sorrows where the whispering tyrant drew deep into his reserves of greater undead and wish-diamonds to slay Arazni was insufficient to turn the tide, and Tar-Baphon was eventually defeated and sealed away in Gallowspire.

Unfortunately for their purposes, while Tar-Baphon's defeat in the field saved a great many lives and greatly aided Avistan in recovering from the grievous wounds that conflict inficted upon them, much of his 'defeated' army was left relatively intact to plague Ustulav, including several of his stronger lieutenants. The greatest of his vampires, Malyas, largely responded to the defeat of his master with an apathy for life and has refrained from taking many actions in the intervening years, averting the worst possibilities, but the same cannot be said for the rest of his surviving servants. They largely joined the periphery of the pan-undead organization the Whispering Way, where they cooperate with each other and other necromancers to a greater or lesser extent, but they and their servants have been an enormous issue for Lastwall's attempts to secure Gallowspire against intruders or improve the lives of those stuck within Ustulav; in raw strength they are scarcely weaker than the forces that Good can assemble to face them, and their secrecy makes it extremely difficult to force them into battle. Infighting within the organization has allowed the knights of Ozem and their... allies, in the church of Pharasma, to gain ground, but finishing the job would improve the lives of conservatively hundreds of thousands and likely millions even before considering the added freedom to act it would give Iomedae's church.

As for the question of what undead are, oh boy can they help her! They know a lot about undead, both in the sense that they can tell you everything relevant about every moderately common kind and that they have information about a truly dizzying number of other varieties. Luckily, they also have a lot of expertise on turning this into relatively short stretches of decision-relevant information such that you can relay it to allies without them zoning out. 

"'Undead' is a broad class of being animated by negative energy - that is, the same stuff that evil clerics channel and is used in the various inflict spells. Speaking as a class, they tend to be immune to an inconveniently large array of things - disease, death effects, poison, paralysis, stunning, most kinds of mind effecting spells, an inconveniently large fraction of spells in general - as well as many individual types having their own additional immunities. They're harmed by positive energy channeling - that is, healing - and healed by the same negative energy channeling that powers them. They're usually - but not always - something that was once alive, died, and then was brought back, and they can see in the dark.

"Your most common undead are your skeleton, which is immune to cold but otherwise typically less dangerous than whatever they were before dying, and zombies, who still have some of their flesh but aren't any stronger for it. Neither of them have any animating intelligence, but they can still react to stimuli. After that you run into a lot of ghouls - undead with bodies that retain some of their intelligence, the stronger ones can paralyze - and wights - rotting corpses who can make more of themselves when they kill something. Neither one is very dangerous to adventurers, but they'll mulch their way through normal people. Ghosts tend to be the strongest of the common undead types, especially since they're annoyingly hard to hit, but monks can do it with their Ki and even if you can't greater magic fang should let about half the attack through; they also have an annoying tendency to not stay down, but if you can clear out the rest of it we can have clerics go through and put them to rest.

"In terms of greater undead that might prove a threat to you, there are 3 main categories. Liches, which typically look like better preserved skeletons with very expensive gear and noticable magic, are powerful spellcasters who are immune to cold and lightning attacks, resistant to many kinds of physical damage, and revive at their phylactery whenever slain. Vampires cannot act in sunlight and don't have the same limitations on who can become them as liches do, so they span a wide array of different powers, but they can create and control minion vampires and have the ability to mind control people who get near them even if they don't have other spellcasting abilities, which they often do - your armor should make you immune to that, and with mind blank they're unlikely to be able to get you even without it. They're less dangerous overall than Liches, but similarly impossible to put down for good unless you find their grave and can be found in greater numbers, plus they can turn into a gasous form to make themself harder to injure. The last category is the incorporeal undead; there are a lot of specific kinds, from the Bhuta to Spectres to the powerful Dybbuk, but most of them are essentially souped up ghosts. Still immune to nonmagical damage, still bad to let them touch you on their terms, but details can vary. We'll go through a full list but the cleric with you should recognize most of them and if you hit them hard enough they go down.

"If your sight proves really successful in looking, it's possible you might encounter a Demilich, though we're not aware of any still around. They look similar to a lich but are extremely sessile, often with layers of dust on them and their belongings. They don't act unless provoked, so the best solution is usually just to ignore them until  you can come back with overwhelming force, but if you have to blast them from a distance; anything inside a few hundred feet from them is at risk of having their soul trapped."

That's honestly a lot more information than she was expecting, but most of it doesn't seem terribly relevant when her strategy will amount to "blast them with Ki attacks" as first resort in any case. The exceptions, like Liches and Demiliches, are going to be firmly memorized.

"What do you do with them once you've captured them? Is there a list of best practices for holding undead prisoners until they agree to reform?"

... Mostly you don't. There's one vampire they try to avoid butting heads with, count Ristomaur Tiriac, who really doesn't want to be a vampire and who they thus tolerate for reasons of "he's a lot better than the median Ustulavic count" and "he's actually really strong and would kill a lot of people putting him down?" When it comes to skeletons and zombies, they kill them with prejudice so the souls can be freed of the torment of being enslaved within their own bodies and move on to judgment, and some of the other kinds you can get with a resurrection if you catch them soon enough, but most of the rest it's impractical - the ethereal undead are especially bad by those standard, since they can just walk through prison bars, but vampires and liches aren't that much easier to maintain. Several kinds of undead also have to feed on humans to survive, and with regards to Liches in specific they need to murder a lot of people in the ritual to become one and it almost always only happens by choice.

"In that case, there might actually be a problem. Because I don't kill people if I can help it, and that was before I learned that people who die here might get tortured forever from it! Especially if undead really do lean Evil. If skeletons and zombies really are being tormented in their bodies against their will for their entire unlife I could make an exception for them, but I'm not going to do that for people who did choose it or make a more general exception for the undead."

Ah right, Neutral Good, they think but do not say. The mental tone is a bit exasperated, but not like, angry about it. She seems a little less likely to be persuaded than usual by arguments like 'Sarenrae advocates you destroy the undead too' and 'Shelyn makes exceptions if they refuse to surrender or are actively hurting people even while imprisoned, and these are both,' but not all the Neutral Good people they get making those kinds of remarks are persuaded by that either, especially not instantly. Really the biggest source of confusion is how she expected to beat Cheliax or Nidal without killing anyone evil, which they will voice alongside practical arguments for the issues in imprisoning many kinds of undead and moral arguments about how letting them live when their life requires hurting people is endorsing hurting people at a remove.

"Mostly I didn't plan to fight them? I do understand that mercy is the attribute of the strong and do my best not to judge people who can't afford to exercise it, but half the point of my becoming this strong was so I could. Even Dazarel wasn't really strong enough to force me to do that, once I got the - well, actually, I'd rather not get into that, but the point is that once I defeated him I was basically able to pin him down with my Ki while our sorcerers figured out how to deal with him and then just formed a line to make a combined seal. I think I could probably disarm all of them, pin them against the ground, and then if they didn't give up after that I could like... put them in cuffs, or instant transmit them into a cell, or something. I guess being able to raise the dead might mean that it makes sense to kill people if it's significantly more time efficient or a better tradeoff, and then bring them back later, but I kind of got the impression there were serious limits on how often you guys could do that? The same goes for the undead, I'm perfectly happy to put them on the moon, or - actually, wait, is your moon free? I know some of the other planets in this system are inhabited, but I don't see any signs of habitation on a cursory check."

"Wait, your instant transmission works on unwilling people? People have been trying to make a version of teleport that works without affirmative consent ever since wizards first reverse engineered it off of outsider spell like abilities, but even with Plane Shift as a proof of concept the only notable successes have been a wish wording and the deeply disappointing hostile juxtaposition. If you can, that would be huge, although I'm still not sure it's really enough to pull this off.

"The moon is probably mostly empty? There's some debate on the matter with regards to evidence observed from the southern bits, but at minimum most of the side facing us is uninhabited on the surface. Nobody really knows about the far side. Most of the other planets are worse, but I suppose there's an argument to be made for Eox or Apostae being a relatively safe place to stow them. In terms of interplanar locations, the negative energy plane has a sizable undead population that most of the lesser undead wouldn't make worse, and maybe something could be arranged in one of the outer planes? Heaven has treaties against acting as a general purpose prisoner storage for us, but we could store a limited number of them per day as statues like we offer soul-sold and evil people who don't regret enough for an atonement, and I don't know there isn't some place in Elysium far enough from anyone else to at least be a better place to have them than Ustulav. That doesn't really solve all of the logistical issues, though, like the fact that this plan would involve willingly making contact with creatures that drain life force on touch and others that need to feed on humans to survive. In the latter case especially, moving them means just delaying their deaths and leaving them means letting more people die to let them survive."

"Not... categorically? I'm not saying there's no way to stop me from dragging someone with me with instant transmission, if nothing else they can prevent me from touching them and I assume there's some magical solution like those dimensional anchoring armor enchantments I saw earlier that will do it. But if they question is "can I do it on enemies" then yeah absolutely and I've never failed at it.

"I was kind of assuming from the fact that you called it an Ustulav problem that they weren't exactly going to be incredibly mobile, so a few hundred miles of isolation would be enough? If not I could try and hollow one of the larger asteroids in this system, put it in near golarion orbit and bring them there? And, sorry, I think I need to know more about the ghost drainage deal to it, if there isn't some convenient spell to block it. I'm assuming they don't sap Ki directly, since you haven't mentioned your monks being resistant to it, but do they drain Stamina? Life Force? Mental Energy? Spiritual Energy?"

They're not exactly sure what the exact distinction she's drawing between the terms here, this is definitely one of those edge cases on translation magic, but thankfully 'life force' translated enough. "You can block it with death ward, but the duration on that is short. Single digit to low double digit minutes, unless you get a high circle cleric and have them extend it for maybe half an hour. It's a useful spell in combat, but it'll run out on you if you want to clear all of them."

"We could send a someone with a Bastion Banner, though the range limitation and needing to plant it would be pretty limiting."

Half an hour is, frankly, forever in combat. "I'm betting betting I could do a number on them with that kind of duration, especially if there's nothing preventing me from popping back every 15 minutes for a refresh. How about this; do you think if I destroy the skeletons and zombies to free the souls inside, evacuate the intelligent undead that don't need to eat people to the moon, and then bring you whatever fraction of the rest is currently most dangerous to human populations for you to temporarily hold on to while I figure out what's up with them and see if I can find a solution, something goes horribly wrong?"

That mostly depends on the fraction; there are a lot of Ghouls in Ustulav, and some of them are going to already be hungry and if deprived corpses will try eating each other. Plus if the fraction is large enough, what you end up with are essentially enormous open-air prisons since Lastwall and Mendev have material limits on their holding capacity in cells, which comes as both a security risk to the soldiers guarding it and doesn't tend to good outcomes at the best of times. But it would almost certainly be better then leaving them where they are.

"Great! In that case, I'm going to find some place on your moon that is definitely uninhabited and make a holding facility for some involuntary guests; I'd appreciate it if you could find me someone who can cast death ward and figure out if you need any help with mass construction or excavation."

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