In the days of the shining crusade, most of a millenia ago, the whispering tyrant ruled over nearly all the undead in Ustulav with an iron fist. There was, of course, still plenty of infighting among his lieutenants, and varying inneficiencies from delegated command, but for the duration of the war it was nearly impossible for major operations to go without a response in force in minutes. With smaller and highly mobile units under mind blank this response timer could be stretched somewhat, particularly when Tar-Baphon was otherwise busy, but to expect to go around achieving strategic objectives for even double digit minutes without response would require deeply unreasonable fortune, in addition to the obvious prerequisite of flawless planning.

The whispering way can make no such promises. The enormous egos common to the greater undead, only barely leashed via orders from the top, were allowed to run rampant and the resulting rivalries permitted to metastasize centuries ago, and any newcomers to the organization joined this tradition with great enthusiasm. External pressures from the churches of Iomedae and Pharasma, and the corresponding additions to their shared interests, has mitigated this slightly, but most members are loath to share their own weakness and indeed their primary response to setbacks is typically to pretend nothing is wrong. There is no sharing of information to let their fellows learn this attack is affecting everyone.

Unfortunately for everyone else, that is not actually sufficient. If there's one thing the whispering way likes more than feuding with each other, it's spying on each other, and they go about it with great verve. As each emergency report filters in, sent via hidden scrolls of sending and telepathic bonds and yet more creative means, there begins to emerge common knowledge of the straits the organization is in. Within half an hour, most of the more powerful and better informed necromancers are aware of the attack and schedule an emergency meeting for that night between their dominated servants; within 45 minutes, they have dismissed this as insufficient due to the attack showing no signs of slowing down and schedule with it for right then and there. They are not, at this point, especially weakened for this conflict; most of the confiscated undead are too weak for them to have every featured in an emergency response situation.

Not everyone shows up, of course. Some of them can't; mid level necromancers for whom every teleport and dominate person is precious in a crisis, a 6th circle lich who dropped off the map completely to brood after Lastwall foiled his last plan to break into gallowspire and steal Tar-Baphon's secrets, Iselin Odranti who currently has insufficient control to even hear of the invitation, and of course Oana Rusu who completely lacks any ability to respond from inside Lastwall's antimagic prison cells. A few more refuse the offer, paranoid of it being part of a trap by their rivals or unwilling to allow themselves any distraction while under attack. But many more do heed the call, even on this short notice, and among them are several of the oldest and nastiest of the bunch - the Mirrorgrave, Luvick Siervage, Remek Csezar, and a dozen more monsters besides. Only Malyas is notable in his abscence, and they weren't expecting him; if this were capable of breaking him from his apathy, he would have stirred long ago.

None of them trust each other further than they can throw them, and as a group largely consisting of casters with incredibly wimpy strength scores that's no great distance. But they do know how to work together in theory, and common interests can go a long way. In this case, this means the meeting is as usual not held in person, but instead between disposable minions and victims (the difference here is often rather academic). Dominate Person offers sufficient control and sensory fidelity that it's almost like carrying on a normal conversation, without the bit where one or more of the participants gets jumped by their rival's forces waiting in the wings.

After the traditional greetings (half insincere flattery and half disguised insults, of course) are given and received, the vampire who called the meeting opens up the discussion. It's not that they expect to have some particular insight on the matter so much as there exists a largely unspoken agreement that that's how it works in emergency meetings, since otherwise the old monsters would waste valuable time bickering over who got priority.

"As I'm sure most of you are or would shortly become aware, a concerted attack began this morning on our interests. Someone or someones have been systematically destroying every low to mid level undead they can find. This is no halfhearted effort, either; thousands have already been targeted, and they've taken out a 6th circle already so they're not limited to weaklings or the undead. It doesn't seem impossible that they'd limit themselves to the weak left to their own devices, but I for one have little interest in leaving my survival to hang upon hoping for another's apathy, and even if they did, without the lesser undead to distract the paladins and pharasmins they would have far more attention to turn to us and our own positions would be far weaker without our armies. I am prepared to give my support-" though how much, he fails to specify - "to the best proposal for a collective effort, or to create one myself if none exist." The last is little more than an empty promise, of course - even were they not personally threatened, those necromancers seeking leadership of the whispering way would hardly pass up such a chance to establish and strengthen their authority over their peers.

"I'm afraid we would have no such luck in any case. Oana Rusu is not dead, but rather trapped in an antimagic prison in Vigil. Unsurprisingly, whatever our attacker's identity they are working with the paladins; we should not expect that the lesser undead represent the limits of their ambitions in Ustulav. If we want to not suffer a similar fate, we will need to take rather more... drastic action."

The speaker in question is a 7th circle wizard, one of the few such to claim membership in the whispering way; though they are not themselves a veteran of the fight against the shining crusade, their power is sufficient to allow them to overshadow most who did.

"I propose we make use of our considerable necromantic abilities to raise a disposable swarm at the location of our choosing, then make use of a teleport trap and a volley of dimensional anchors to keep them in the area while we kill them. They haven't been exercising any caution thus far and it's past time we made them regret that approach."

This plan has the obvious advantage of being extremely simple in concept and execution, which appeals to the more sensible members of the way. Plenty of them would prefer a more elegant solution, of course, but it's genuinely hard to invent those on the fly and it's not like the fight is personal for anyone here. Ironing out the details takes significantly longer, like balancing out the competing urges of necromancers to commit heavily and show off their strength against their desires to have their rivals pay all the price for them so they benefit for free so that it results in something actually dangerous or deciding where the ambush will be set, but a foreigner working with Lastwall on a crusade against the undead in Ustulav is not exactly a controversial target for the whispering way. Over three quarters of those attending the emergency meeting commit to participating at least nominally, and a sizable portion of them agree to show up in person or send some of their best subordinates to participate. The result is a concentration of necromantic force not seen in nearly a millenia set into an ambush that even an archmage would have difficulty escaping if they were foolish enough to walk into it.

Huh, these undead are all clustered up. She thought she'd grabbed all the groups this densely spaced already, but she's hardly going to turn down making her job here easier. The excitement of dealing with genuine ghosts and zombies has long since worn off and been replaced with the tedium of having to carefully measure her strength to refrain from hurting anyone while still making good time and making sure they're unable to react.

pop

Greater Dispel Magic, echoes half a dozen voices, followed by thrice that number of dimensional anchors and a flurry of enervations and wracking rays.

It is commonly understood on Golarion that Dispel Magic is undodgeable, especially with a teleport trap in place to prevent any contingent teleportion or readied actions from allowing an escape. What this theory is not is rigorously tested, particularly against people who can relocate hundreds of feet as an immediate action without needing to warp space in the slightest. The spells slam into an afterimage, their fury wasted on a thoroughly nonmagical and nonliving target.

Well, that's not how it usually works at all. Still, these are almost all of them experienced spellcasters, and they understand exactly what it means that their enemy was paranoid and capable enough to send in illusion to scout out a location before showing up themselves, and what them falling for it means. The wisest and most cowardly among their number flee immediately, while the rest prepare for their ambush to turn into a real fight. The air crackles with magic from a small army of spellcasters upset about their fiefdoms coming under attack, and anyone in the area outside their gathering is about to have a bad time.

That sounds like a really good reason to put herself right in the middle of them, now, doesn't it. How many of these 'experienced spellcasters' are capable melee combatants? Judging by her experiences on Garenhuld, she's going to guess the answer is "not many."

... That's illegal. Impossibly skilled conjurers aren't supposed to also be good at fighting hand to hand. Who does she think she is, Aroden?

She thinks she's not any kind of wizard at all, actually.

Mistakes may have been made.

Lastwall is a little nonplussed to find itself suddenly responsible for holding more high level evil wizards than they have antimagic cells for, but nobody can really bring themselves to disagree that this sort of problem is a much better one to have than the alternative. In the meantime, they make due with doubling up the lower risk options and increasing the number of guards, which isn't really adequate as a solution but will hopefully last until they can solve it more permanently one way or another. Some of them at least will probably take the offers to become statues in heaven, which is still not exactly cheap for them or heaven but at least trades off less against other spellcasting concerns now that they have enormously less demand for teleports.

"I'm sorry about that, I didn't think about how I this might also be overwhelming your prison system even though we did just talk about how you would need more space for the ghouls I captured. I think in my head there just weren't that many of them so it wouldn't be a problem, even though I know that different kinds of prisoners need different kinds of accommodations. Is there another country I should be sending some of these too rather than just dumping them on you?"

Not as such, no, which is the entire problem. Just - keep at it, and we'll figure out how to make it work somehow.

She'll get back to it then, once she grabs another extended death ward. It's really such a convenient spell; for all that it would take an immense number of them to run her dry, she doesn't really fancy having to experience the feeling of shadows and wraiths draining her vitality while she transports them. Unfortunately there aren't any more groups willing to cluster themselves for her convenience after that big one, but she does catch a few more greater undead and necromancers that don't get the memo or fail to flee in time.

All told it's not until late that evening that she's willing to call the job finished, and by that point she'd run the well nearly dry on death wards and had to resort to ignoring shadows until she'd found enough to be worth grabbing all at once inside the few minutes duration still available to her. Judging by the sheer variety of undead she's now catalogued and the extent to which Ustulav's ever-present cursed miasma fogs her Sight, it seems decently likely there are still some left in the country she couldn't find, but few enough that they can almost certainly be dealt with via more ordinary means as they emerge. The closest thing to a complication came in the form of a vampire named Ristomaur Tiriac, who was apparently a legitimate count and barely doing anything illegal by the standards of nobility; killing him for being undead would be one thing, but when she slipped out again Lastwall was still debating if they actually had the legal authority to hold him prisoner without him having committed a crime in their jurisdiction or them having declared war. Presumably they answered the question one way or another, because nobody says anything about it to her before Kakara decides to hunt down a bath and finally get all the dust off her.

It's only once she gets started soaking that Kakara remembers putting the undead on the moon is only a temporary solution and she really ought to find someplace less violating of the rights of prisoners to store them in the next few days. Ugh. She's still glad she didn't kill them all but it would be nice if following her principles was less inconvenient.

It's a fairly nice bath as long as you remember to grade on a curve for the fact that they haven't had an industrial revolution yet; they put her up in the high security diplomatic suites, so it's not as fancy as the setup for trying not to needlessly offend the ambassadors from Oppara and Katheer, but it's private, clean, and has heated water.

About half an hour later, Kakara is feeling a lot better about things. Sure it might not be a perfect solution, but even so it'll still help a lot of people, and she does have time to think of something better before it becomes a real problem. Her not having a good way to deal with sentient undead is also a pretty clear sign that she should really hold off and wait for help before trying to tackle the Nidal or Cheliax problem, and she should probably try and get a better handle on this planet before she assumes that they're wrong and she can totally handle dealing with Arazni and Geb, which leaves her for a bit without anything obvious to do.

She could train now that she approximately has her body back, but she doesn't really have anywhere secret that could stand up to her full power, so she'd be broadcasting what she was doing to anyone who can sense that kind of thing. Which isn't as bad as it could be since she doesn't need to maintain the masquerade here, but still, call that a backup plan. She could see if they need anything instant transmitted, but her understanding is that they actually have a fair amount of teleportation of their own and she freed up most of it with what she did earlier. Alright, if she can't help much and probably shouldn't train, what does that leave?

Hmm. She should work on getting more situated with what this planet's deal is, because just the bits she saw earlier made it obvious that Golarion has a lot going on. In addition to the fact that that means there are probably some problems she could solve fairly trivially if she knew about them, it also suggests there are dangers or roadblocks she ought to be aware of, and ideally also avoid getting into another situation where she starts transporting undead to the moon because she assumes it's uninhabited and then runs into a dozen kinds of people there she has to avoid. If she hadn't checked, she might have accidentally "solved" Ustulav by making it a problem for an entirely new group of people unprepared for it, which is pretty much the opposite of what she wants here. That means tracking down their library, and maybe talking with some historians and theologians and so forth for all the stuff she doesn't have context for.

Plenty of wizards keep incredibly erratic sleep schedules, for all that you'd think them needing eight hours a night would put a stop to that. The library is still open and accepting visitors, at least if they happen to be authorized.