"It's okay," she says. Then she scowls, glancing at Dazarel. "Get off of there, I didn't say you were allowed." She yanks him off of her shoulders, holding him by the neck.

Yemma sighs. "Much as I'd like to keep that monster here to toss him downstairs, I can't. He's still alive." He slumps. "And, so are you. I'm sorry, but I need you to go now."

"Wait," Kakara says, raising her head. "King Yemma, I understand that I can't stay, but...can I at least make one more visit? Just to see my Grandp- Grandfather, Gohan? I...I'd like to see him again. Even just for a few minutes."

And King Yemma's eyes...

...shift to the side for a moment. "...well..." he says, not meeting her gaze.

"What?" she asks.

"Well, I was going to surprise you both with this, but..." He makes a twisting motion with his fingers.

"YEMMA-SAMA, LET ME THROUGH THIS DOOR RIGHT! NOW!"

"He's been asking for you," says Yemma. "Have at 'im, kiddo."

The door opens, and Son Gohan practically teleports to her side, sweeping her up in a hug.

"You're alright," murmurs Gohan. "You're alright."

"I- I saw me," Kakara says.

"In a vision. When I was out. I saw me, but all grown up, and- and she was miserable, you could see it, I don't know what happened. But she was Queen, and when I asked she just snapped and transformed and said that I just didn't want to get it the way she did, and everything about her was..."

She starts crying.

"I'm scared," she whispers. "I know that this can work because she said it could, but that means she went through with it, and that means that in some way it leads to her. She helped me and she was trying to do what was best for me, but I'm so scared that maybe I'm just going to turn into her because this is what makes that happen."

Gohan smooths down her hair.

"That's not going to happen," he tells her. "You know better, now."

"But I don't, she didn't say," Kakara replies, burying her face in his chest. "She didn't tell me how to avoid it. She just told me that I'd find another way."

"Then you will. You wouldn't lie to yourself. Not for something that important. If she was telling you to avoid it, she meant what she said. When the time comes, you'll know how to get away from that. Because I know you. You're a perfectionist, Kakara. You'll do whatever you need to, to get things right. If she was confident that you would know -- you'll know."

He leans away from Kakara's face for a moment, looking her over.

"You don't look bad," he says. "Just see-through."

"I'm so weak. I don't know how she expected me to do this."

"There are ways. Shades happen, sometimes. People have figured out ways to anchor them to things. You'd need to lock yourself down to a host."

"You want me to possess people?"

"To live in somebody. I don't even know if you can possess somebody. But without it, you're just a shade. At least a body gives you camouflage. I'm pretty sure it'd even be automatic, once you landed in somebody."

And I'm going to need it. I...he's out there."

"...I'm scared," she whispers.

"...I know. I was, too, before the worst fights in my life. We're all scared, at least a little bit. Even Dad was scared; he just loved it, too. But we don't let it rule us. When we need to, we pick ourselves up and push on. You will succeed, Kakara. I know you will. It's just a matter of not giving up. You'll find the other side of this. And he doesn't know about you."

Gohan pulls her in for another hug.

"But what about everybody at home?"

"They'll manage. You've given them as good of a chance as you could. Now you need to focus on getting stronger, better, and coming home to save them all. This is your time, Kakara. And you will see it through. There are people out there who can help."

There's a familiar tug now, on her, and she burrows further into his arms.

"I'm about to leave."

The sense of pressure starts to recede, even as he grips her more tightly.

"I know," he admits. "I'm losing my grip on what lets me keep you here. Stay safe, Kakara. You're going to do great things."

Then he releases her, steps back, and turns to Dazarel.

"And, dragon." His eyes narrow. "You will be one of the people who helps her. If you don't, I will know, and no power in the universe will be enough to keep you safe from me."

Dazarel cringes, but bows his head as best as he can around Kakara's fist.

"As you command, Most Divine."

He's avoiding eye contact.

"I'll see you the next time you pass this way."

He smiles at Kakara.

"See you."

Her hold on this place finally snaps, and a wall of divine will forces her back and out to streak through the spaces between the real.

"What was all that business about, 'Most Divine.'"

At his pleading look, she finally loosens her grip and allows him to scamper up her arm to her shoulders.

"You realize that your ancestor is a god, yes? No half-measures, nothing so prosaic as a mere mortal with access to divine ki -- he's a god, in truth."

"Not really. We don't have a great theory of divinity on Garenhuld. I mean, I buy it, what with that thing he was doing while we were leaving, but I don't know what it means."

As she speaks, she's considering her destination. Not Hell, just yet; she turned that route down for a reason. It would be dangerous enough for her with her proper body, with the full power of a spirit bomb supporting her, but as is, with no intelligence on what awaits her beyond the tales of the Z Fighters and with no aid? It would be an elaborate way to throw her life away. And sure, she'd make it to heaven then, but not in a way that would allow her to return and help her people after training there. But it doesn't have to stay that way; heaven may have been on lockdown for several centuries, but Hell was not, and there are plenty of species out there in the wider galaxy with a lifespan that measures in centuries anyway.

Take me to someone who can help me learn what I need, to fight my way through hell, and help me in my endeavor.

The Sight shudders a bit under her grasp, as though confused or unwilling, but acquiesces, and her path through unreality becomes purposeful.

"It means that there's more to his power than mere ki," he snorts. "More than magic, more even than my psychic abilities. Something unique to gods. As for the address... If I respect something, it is strength. And what could be more threatening to a dragon than the God of Heroes?"

(Here begins wholly original content)

Aniol Olivero, 4th circle Wizard and lay paladin of the Knights of Ozem in service to Iomedae (not to be confused with a Paladin of Iomedae, which would require notably more Charisma, Strength, and Constitution than he in fact possesses) is having a bad day. There are a lot of those at the worldwound, seeing as fighting against swarms of demons out to consume the earth in the bitter cold is not the most enjoyable task even if you don't have to cooperate with Asmodeans about it. This one is particularly bad, though; there are rather a lot of demons here, even for the worldwound, and they're lead by some kind of wolf-headed demon with wings that's currently in the process of killing the 3rd circle Paladin (also of the knights of Ozem) assigned to hold the line at this fortress. He's not too worried about the whole dying bit, since even if Lastwall doesn't recover his corpse intact enough for a raise dead he was heaven bound before he was 2 years into a worldwound deployment, but the part before that happens is liable to be unpleasant and his comrades will have an unenviable task in the next few months trying to get this leak under control. Some of the other people deployed here have more questionable alignments as well, and while "dying fighting off a demonic incursion alongside the forces of heaven" tends to help with that kind of thing it's not totally reliable. Oh, and he's starting to run low on spells too.

Some help would be, frankly, appreciated. He'd even take the Asmodeans at this point.

No Asmodeans here! While one of them is extremely evil, he's not exactly the lawful sort. She's in a masque, for however little that should matter with one of the more infamous evil dragons riding on her shoulder; it's one thing to grab attention, which she would probably have difficulty avoiding, and another to go advertise that she's a saiyan.

She's also not exactly visible at the moment. True seeing is in short supply at the worldwound, and while the sorcerers she's familiar with have some ability to detect shades these ones need a spell for it.

This looks pretty bad, actually! She doesn't want to just assume based on looks - there are a lot of species of aliens out there and most of them are, by and large, completely lovely people - but the whole "torturing fallen enemies" a handful of them seem to have going on is not exactly encouraging. Just to be sure, though, she's going to look a bit into the future to see where this goes absent her intervention.

She super cannot do that, actually! It's slightly painful to try.

Well, that's never happened before. The closest thing to it she's ever experienced is when the Enemy cut off her vision when she tried to look under his hood, and even then there are important differences. This seems less dangerous, for one. And it's definitely not like the wards Dandeer put up on the night before the sealing to keep off prying eyes, either, especially since this doesn't seem like something she could break if she just applied the right force. She's sure her teacher would have an explanation, (and she cuts out an involuntary wince of pain before it surfaces, she will save him) but her training with the Sight was rather condensed to get to the point where she could safely project herself into someone else's mindscape safely as quickly as possible and wasn't complete in any case, so she doesn't know it.

...

Dazarel might know, though. He's not a seer, but he is a powerful psychic and both significantly older and more traveled than she is. She doesn't exactly want his help, per se, but he's there and she might as well get some use out of him.

"My precognition is blocked. It's like there's a wall of static keeping me out, and pressing feels painful. I think I might still be able to get a couple of seconds if I went at it from the right angle, but nothing beyond that, and it doesn't feel like the sorcerous blocks I've encountered before. Do you have any idea what's going on?"

He seems faintly alarmed, though he suppresses it well. 

"Kanassan sight is a greedy gift, but a powerful one. There aren't many forces capable of warding it off, and even diminished like this your own power should make it extremely hard for a psychic to block you. If it's not some fantastically powerful magical concert work... it's probably a god."

"Normally, this is where I would advise we leave, but the gods like you enough to bend the rules around letting you into heaven, and even the exceptions will think twice before pissing off your grandfather if you introduce yourself. As long as you don't press it, we should be fine; just stick to present and past sight, if you can."

Past-sight it is, then! If she follows the strange aliens backwards along their path to this point, she sees a lot of infighting, even considering how terrified they seem of their leader. For most of them, this leads back to the entrance to some evil-looking spacial rift full of even more varieties of aliens that are steadily pouring through onto this planet, but for a handful of the stronger looking ones, she sees them attacking other groups of humans and either being defeated and driven off or succeeding and brutally killing as many of them as they possibly can. It's not impossible there's a reason for it, but it doesn't look good at all, and standing by while this happens is the same as condoning it. Fortunately, even at this level of strength she is very fast; it's only been about 20 seconds since she arrived, if that.

Decision made, she stops resisting the guiding force, and arrives in someone's head. Fortunately, she's good enough at telepathy to not need to deal with things like a language barrier.

"Hello, I'm Karen Marsden. You look like you could use a little help here?"

He startles at that, though not enough to put him at any risk.

"Yes, I could," he thinks back; the reflex is aimed at a different sort of telepathy than her kind and doesn't actually make use of the ki channel to communicate, but inside his head it's not an issue. "Are you an adventuring party? Unless you're at least 7th circle, you're unlikely to be able to turn the tide here, but we could use some covering fire to help evacuate who we can, or as many teleports if you can supply to transport them."

As he says this, he prepares to cast his last fireball at the densest crowd of demons. The Paladin is dead, so there's no need to worry about friendly fire, and while the main demon has some obscene spell resistance and probably wouldn't take damage anyway, he can at least pick off a handful of its entourage and maybe buy a little time by distracting it and blocking its vision.

Normally, this would be where Kakara blurs in far faster than anyone can see and disables the entire army before they could react. It probably wouldn't be that hard. Unfortunately, she kind of lacks a body at the moment, and her beams go right through most things. She could try ripping out their soul, but that's both morally rather fraught and also not something she really knows how to do on command. What she does have is some kind of magic user in who's head she's currently squatting, their soon to be ex-group of allies, a frankly completely inadequate fortress, and whatever tricks she can do with ki as a shade.

That's not a lot in the way of options, and the only one she that has a good chance of actually stopping them is something she doesn't have a lot of control over. And without that kind of control... there's only so much she can do to, to thread the needle between strong enough to save them and weak enough not to turn all the aliens into so many smears on the ground. Kakara hates being powerless like this, almost as much as she hates the exact details of the choice she's about to have to make. But if there's one thing that's true about her, more than anything, it's that Kakara is at her core a protector, and these people need her protection. She pours her ki into the still-unfurling spell matrix. It's complicated, more complicated by far than when she empowered the seal holding Dazarel, but Kakara is good at math, and the spellform is designed to be modified by outside forces.

The sorcerers of Garenhuld, having long had access to obscenely powerful Saiyan fighters and even Super Saiyans to use as batteries, developed a technique they call supercharging. In it, Ki is used as a power source to support the structure of a magical spell, thereby unleashing vastly more energy than a mage can channel on their own. Golarion spells are not so designed. Without this source of obscene power, Golarion's spells are both designed to be efficiently strengthened - such as by a metamagic rod or the caster in question - but pay for this efficiency by having hard caps on just how much power the structure can support. With the additional thousands of years put into spell development, a small part of this difference has been made up, but the difference in scale is still incredible. Typically speaking, the most you can get out of external empowerment on fireball is CL 10 maximized intensified fireball, which does a cool 90 damage to everything inside a 20 foot radius, reflex save for half. Useful, especially when compared to the piddling 7d6 it would otherwise have to offer, but hardly a gamechanger on its own.

Kakara is not so limited. Her Ki Control is exceptional, at the very pinnacle of what her people can manage; she can raise herself to maximum power in a heartbeat and drop it down as quickly if she ever need to avoid notice, and it does precisely what she wishes it to do at all times. Her Ki Sensing is likewise nearly unmatched, allowing her to perform skills considered essentially impossible like sensing machines, culminating in her usage of the legendary spirit bomb - only the fourth person to do so in history. On top of this, the sight allows her to actually see the spellforms in their entirety, and give her a sense of exactly where the limits can be stretched. Oh, and she's a full power super saiyan, which would probably matter more if even in her weakened state her issues were less about being very careful not to put more into the spell structure than it can hold and have it detonate in her host's hand. She's... pretty sure the target can take it, unless they turn out to be extremely weak to fire.

Who here can make a DC 25 reflex save?

I can. If, that is, you beat spell resistance 30.

Yeah that's super not going to stop it. Take 155 fire damage, bypassing fire resistance, please.

Everyone else in a 40 foot radius will take double that, of course, and be lit on fire as well if they survive.

310 fire damage that bypasses resistance kills pretty much all the demons it hits, actually, and a 40 foot radius is fairly enormous. The fireball bead, when it hits the target, erupts into a burst of golden flames that dispel the arctic chill and outshine the setting sun. Outside of the sphere, many of the demons pause; they were not exactly expecting to deal with that today, or really ever. The only thing that keeps it from being the end of the fight right then and there is that most of them were keeping a very healthy berth around the high level combatants who could easily kill them if they got in the way, and that is not in fact enough for all of them.

155 damage, even accounting for the injuries it took fighting the Paladin, is not nearly enough to put it down. It has over 300 HP and fast healing 10, after all; one blast like that isn't even going to stop it from murdering everyone in the fortress.

But it didn't sign up to take on a legendary archmage today, much less do so without an army, and isn't interested in finding out how much the followup shot is going to hurt. It greater teleports itself away, abandoning its remaining troops.

With that, the demons' morale breaks, and what was once a vicious assault turns into a total rout. The defenders move to pick off the stragglers, but they still aren't exactly in a position to defeat the main force without taking significant casualties; if their rescuer want to pick them off with a few more spells like that, they'd be grateful, but they're mostly going to try not to get in the way.

"What was that?"

He's never seen a Meteor Swarm, even from a scroll, but he has seen a Delayed Blast Fireball, and it wasn't even a quarter that impressive. There aren't that many 9th circle casters in Avistan, and he's never even heard of one of them being able to do that to someone else's spell. It's hard to say that anything is really impossible for a 9th circle wizard, but he's definitely considering the hypothesis that it was an illusion to cover their own spell and a modified meteor swarm to do the damage. Nefreti could do that, probably, so it kind of makes sense she's not the only one.

"Not that I'm complaining - I'm very grateful for your help, actually."

Oh. She hadn't been expecting that, somehow; some part of her had expected if it would kill anyone, it would just be the leader. These aliens might be bad news, practically oozing evil under her sight and with a history and plan of torture, but that doesn't make them less dead, by her will and power even if she doesn't have the magic to do that herself. If she had a body she'd be throwing up right now.

"I supercharged your spell; filled it up as full as it could go before you could let it loose, essentially. Normally I would interfere more directly, but I'm a bit bodily impaired at the moment. If we need me to do it again I'm not limited to just doing that once, but you don't seem to have it... hung? Some other kinds of spells will also work fine, as long as you actually want them stronger-" but I'd strongly prefer not to kill anyone else "-but it seems unnecessary now that they're in flight."

Is that what they're going with? Okay, no, don't challenge the Archmage's story, either it's somehow true and you look stupid or it's not but they're telling you for a reason. He's out of 4th and 3rd level combat spells, but he's got 2 Scorching Rays and a Magic Missile, if those work?

Oh, that one's just force. Okay, she can judge kinetic energy, even magical kinetic energy, no problem. Maximized Empowered Intensified Enlarged Toppling Magic Missile it is, then. It's not clear if anyone has ever cast a 9th circle magic missile like this before, but if they did, they would find it very disappointing. From the perspective of someone using a first level spell, though, dealing 27 force damage to 5 different enemies and knocking them prone with no save is significantly more satisfying. It doesn't kill them, since Kakara made sure to aim them at 5 of the strongest power levels in the retreating force, but it does make them put in a valiant effort at running faster, and those of them capable of teleporting at all under the influence of the wardstones immediately find it in their interests to do so.

The Scorching Rays don't take down their targets either, though they do come a little closer even spread across 6 enemies. Would he like to try Ray of Frost?

He didn't actually prep that one, seeing as it's basically useless. Even with this absurd amount of metamagic being thrown into it, really, the range and 1d3 base damage are severely limiting.

"I'm out of spells, sorry. At least one of the other wizards almost certainly has a fireball left, though, if you wanted to do that."

She thinks about it for a bit. She definitely could, and she's already made the decision to help; in the absence of evidence to distrust these people, it would be hypocritical to decide this intervention was worth killing however many aliens dropped to that fireball but not worth revealing she exists to other people. On the other hand... she really doesn't want to kill them, not even indirectly like when they got caught in the splash zone. If they were pressing the attack... she thinks she would anyway, even as she hated every minute of it, but they aren't. At the very least, it seems likely she probably ought to actually orient on the situation first, and find out to what degree she ought to be helping here, and why her sight guided her to this place. If no one else is in imminent danger -

She checks, with present-sight, to ensure there are no other fortresses or encampments in the path of their flight, or near enough that they could plausibly divert to them - there aren't -

-then she's not going to jump straight into more murder. She regrets the ones she's already done, actually, or at least that she didn't have any better option she could see. Even before, when she had to fight while disguised and suppressing her power level, she was still an incredibly skilled martial artist and  always had the option to escalate by powering up, and in her fight against Dazarel, the moment she had obtained sufficient strength to make defeating him even an option, it turned out to be enough strength to safely seal him away without having to choose to resort to lethal force. Killing people... isn't worse than letting more innocents die, but it's still really bad, and the fact that all of the ones she actually killed directly were less targets and more unexpected collateral damage doesn't really help, actually.

"That doesn't seem to be necessary, unless there's some tactical information I'm missing like that winged alien from earlier being about to return with a second army. If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to orient on the current situation before jumping into anything bigger; I'm from another world, and the main thing I have to go on here is that you or your organization apparently have some knowledge about the inhabitants of Hell I might find useful."

From another world. Well. 9th circle wizards are supposed to get interplanetary teleport, it's how Aroden famously explored the cosmos. Presumably whatever she is if she's not that does too, he thinks it's also a cleric spell. Aniol hasn't heard about that happening in this direction outside of stories but there's no reason it shouldn't be possible, and it's not like some completely unknown 9th circle caster from elsewhere on Golarion is spectacularly more likely either. As for the business with Hell...

Iomedae's church is not just about destroying Hell. She's the goddess of defeating evil, and there's rather a lot of it to go around, exhibit A being the worldwound they're busy fighting against right now. But it remains the case that they do most of the organizing of the various forces of good to oppose Hell and its puppet Cheliax, much as Iomedae herself does among the gods. This is indeed a task they are well equipped to help with.

"I don't handle that personally; I'm on the worldwound deployment, and have been focusing my attention on that. But if you need information on opposing the denizens of Hell, then there are scarcely better options; if we can't help you with it personally, we will likely know who can if anyone. We're a bit busy with the clean-up, but if you're in a hurry I can arrange a sending to Lastwall for them to send some Wizards to Teleport you over."

Presumably if she can cast interplanetary teleport to travel between worlds she can also use a measly greater teleport to go to Lastwall off a description but she's more than earned the right not to be grilled by him over it. Even if it is pointless spending a few unneeded teleports in exchange for driving off a demon army of this scale is cheap at the price, to say nothing of an archmage's potential goodwill. Besides, there are some among the wounded who need more healing than channeling can provide, and between that and the corpses to raise it won't go to waste.

If he had mentioned this fact to her, she would have replied that performing an instant transmission off dead reckoning is quite hard when you need to be precise, actually, and that everyone on this planet is so weak there's nobody running around with large enough unsuppressed power levels for her to have an easy time anchoring on them without knowing them ahead of time. If she needed to get there under her own power, she would fly; it would only barely be slower anyway.

As things stand, she is in fact refraining from mind reading him in any real depth and is blissfully unaware of the thoughts he's not projecting to her, and thus is content to wait the 10-15 minutes it will take to get off a sending and arrange for a teleport.

And in about 11 and a half minutes a wizard can arrive from Lastwall with a spare teleport. In the intervening minutes, they have collected the bodies into bags of holding, including the charred bones of that one Paladin for a resurrection, and arrayed the three most promptly needed regeneration targets to go with. Ordinarily, they are in fact not that fast, but "probable 9th circle claiming to be from another world" is enough to make time of the essence, even before considering they just wiped out a demon army and claim to have some business with fighting Hell.

Aniol, in the mean time, has taken the time to establish that she doesn't need to ride along with him specifically to bow out, both due to the fact that he does not, in fact, need healing more powerful than the fortress can provide and that he does not actually want to have anything more to do with this than he has to. If he had to he'd do it anyway, with the stakes this high, but he's mostly just glad he can leave it to someone good at it. 

She'll go along with it, hanging out in the mind of one of the injured who consented to that. Kakara misses the exact moment of arrival, even with her reflexes, but she does catch the second the spell transports them and the spellform is fascinating. She can see the similarities to the instant transmission calculations, but also where it lets you skip over most of the hard work from doing it manually in exchange for a few limitations. There's nothing she can use from it as is, seeing as she's not a sorcerer, but something to keep in mind for if she ever takes a crack at designing her own improvement to the Ki technique.

This about Lastwall - it is, surprisingly for a knight order bereft its chief sponsor and situated in a relatively unprosperous part of the continent, extremely wealthy. It is Lastwall, of all the forces on the continent, that receives the donation of every country unwilling or unable to commit to directly fight at the worldwound but that still desires not to be eaten by demons. It is Lastwall that receives the questionably gained gold of a thousand adventurers, magnates, and warlords concerned about their alignment and desperate to evade the pit. It is Lastwall that, during the glory days of the Chelish empire in the lead up to Aroden's folly, received a fortune in magical items, and it is Lastwall that inherited most of the assets of the Shining Crusade.

This also about Lastwall - they spend a lot of money, too. They are a small country that has taken on five different tasks, each of which individually by all rights ought to be too much for it to handle, and cannot set them down without great cost. They are perpetually short in manpower, martial might, diplomatic weight, and a dozen other necessities to which they must pour the vast majority of this river of gold they receive to stem. This habit is indeed why donating to the church of Iomedae is the most reliable way to turn gold into good at any scale. Their mission does not permit them to waste it on frivolities or monuments to ego.

This is not to say Lastwall is ugly, or in ill repair. They are well aware of the positive effect that beauty has upon people, and the ability to hire Shelynite followers at bargain prices is no small aid here. Likewise they are constantly aware of how their image does, indeed, reflect on how seriously other nations take their mission and correspondingly how likely they are to go along with it. In search of this as much as efficiency, the capital of Lastwall has styled itself in the style of military practicality, with defenses that serve double weight to both dissuade attack by the forces of evil and to show that that is what it does, allowing them to at least lose less without having to sink a sizable chunk of their fortune into monuments, cathedrals, and other standard architectural great works. They're very aware of the incentives this can create, but they're careful about it and sometimes the appearance of the thing really is as important as the function.

For someone who lives in an information-era civilization and who spends much of their time in the space-age civilization hidden within it, it's not exactly impressive. Even the Senzu Clan base of Heramere keep, itself a military relic of a time where technology was even less advanced that Golarion's present, is more imposing. (Of course, that base was constructed with both technology and strength well beyond those publicly admitted to, but let's not sweat the details).

It's got a quaint charm to it, though, and she knows enough about that era's military situation to at least understand the purpose of most of it.

She can stick around while they do some regenerations and a letter from the garrison is handed off to give context to whatever the sending said, and shortly afterword she'll be introduced to Eulalia Serven, the 6th circle cleric of Iomedae who happened to have the most diplomatic experience of those in the city. They'd have picked someone with a high ranking as well if they could, since some high level casters tend to get offended if you try to have them meet with someone sufficiently "beneath them," but those are mostly uncorrelated from spells outside of the obvious exception of Queen Galfrey and the spell part tends to be more important than any noble ranks with wizards. Queen Galfrey also represents Mendev regardless, not Lastwall, but that wouldn't stop them from getting her aid if it was in fact needed; neither branch of Iomedaens is in the business of losing for no good reason, or indeed any reason at all if they can possibly help it.

"Hello! I'm told you're a powerful caster from another world, here to ask us some questions about Hell, and that you currently need to possess someone to communicate?"

(She's got Tongues active, of course; Karen seemed to understand them just fine earlier but it would be, in fact, incredibly silly to rely on that for no reason and have it fail on them in some regard. The marginal cost of a tongues cast in Lastwall is essentially a rounding error for this meeting.)

Oh good, they're competent. Kakara is not in fact certain that an alien visitor could reliably can a meeting with their government inside an hour even if they tried, and that's with them not needing to sleep and employing hundreds of seers.

"The ride-along is not strictly necessary, especially for short periods, but it's very advantageous at the moment with my own body unavailable. I could leave and keep talking with you, particularly if it's for a short conversation, but I'm not visible to most people so it's not entirely clear how much that would help. And yes, I am from another world, I'm not exactly a caster as you seem to think about them but that gets most of the idea across, and I have some questions on the subject I would like answered, if you could."

She'll leave figuring out the exact details to Lastwall's wizards and researchers then, in that case, plus its strategists if that becomes relevant. Pretty much any information Karen could ask for would be covered already anyway; the price for getting a team of adventurers to fight off a Gallu is incredibly high even when it's not short notice or at the head of an army, and Lastwall is not in the business of shortchanging people who helped them for the sin of not haggling before helping in a time critical situation.

"For this conversation, it would be appreciated, but going forward it shouldn't be an issue and we won't insist on in this case even if it might effect what we're willing or permitted to share."

With her she has a set of goggles of True Seeing, one of several owned by Lastwall; the effect within is, in the cases it proves necessary, astoundingly useful, and the cost of 6th level spells to imitate the effect starts at exorbitant and moves up from there. This particular model is Chelish, from about 300 years ago, but that's not terribly relevant in this case.

She'll step out, then; a show of good faith could go a long ways, and she's not, in fact, very nervous about this. It never pays to be too sure with magic users but between their power levels and the displays of magic she saw earlier she's not too worried about it even if her read of their opinion is totally wrong in every regard, and she's basically certain it's not. If her sight weren't blocked or she was willing to read minds, she could be more certain, but that kind of gilding the lily is unneccesary.

They sure do show up in True Seeing! Aura sight says overwhelmingly powerful neutral good, which yup, tracks with the 9th circle caster ghost hypothesis and is the second best result you could hope for.

The neutral evil ghost? dragon on her shoulder might be a bit less encouraging. The aura is rather faint, especially against the background good, but still detectable. If they've got Arcane Sight up they'll also see a transmutation/abjuration effect on it, and Greater Arcane Sight will reveal both that it seals away the dragon's power and (with sufficient skill) a very faint conjuration/transmutation effect on her.

They've got Arcane Sight, but not Greater Arcane Sight; as far as they can see, Kakara has no spell effects or magic items on her, which means Greater Magic Aura and some paranoia. Not mind blank though, or they wouldn't get the alignment out of aura sight.

The Dragon rates an assessing glance and a hint of a frown. That's not what a baby dragon looks like, even size aside, but what it does look for all the world like is a very tiny version of a very old dragon.

Kakara cringes; she might not be aware that alignment even exists, but she remembers keenly how the petitioners in line for judgment reacted when they saw her together with Dazarel's spirit and thought she'd died killing him.

"Yes, that's Dazarel, yes, I'm aware of what he did. But I have him very thoroughly subdued and he knows what will come of it if he tries anything, even if something happened to me first. He's not a risk, and in this form he's still somewhat useful to keep around."

Wizards.

The name Dazarel isn't ringing a bell, although she does make sure to remember it to ask their archivists and historians to look into later, since Karen seems to expect him to be recognizable on sight. They'll probably need to talk to angels as well in order to get anywhere on it, but it's at least worth trying to save Heaven's intervention budget. What is pretty clear is that this Dazarel is or was an powerful evil dragon that did a lot of harm before being captured, and is the kind of person where keeping their company is very much not a good sign for your character. That being said, turning an evil dragon into a familiar isn't even the stupidest thing in that category done by a wizard she's personally met, and in fairness 'within arms reach of the wizard that defeated him in the first place' is not the worst place to put a defeated evil dragon she can think of.

"We will trust your judgment on that for now," she responds, rather more diplomatically. "The church of Iomedae is of course happy to learn anything you wish to share about other worlds to add to our archives, but if you would prefer to skip straight to your questions that won't be an issue."

Ah, a church. Kakara somehow hadn’t expected the Knights of Ozem to also be a church, even though in retrospect she’d been ignoring quite a bit of religious iconography. She knew it happened at least sometimes back on Earth, but Garenhuld didn’t tend to go for that kind of thing and what records they have of Vegeta suggested the same was true there, even accounting for the fact that any Saiyans who worshipped a god would be a martial order essentially by default. Hopefully this will be less awkward than interacting with the ancestor cult, and given that she is not currently being quasi-worshiped as a demigod she’ll choose to remain optimistic.

“I’ve been considering a plan that involves me traversing Hell, for reasons I’d rather not get into. I am aware of how, even with my present level of strength, this is not exactly advisable, but I have good reason for it and no easy alternatives. I’m hoping to rectify the specific flaw where I have an incomplete understanding of the dangers involved and who I will encounter there, but if you have additional advice on weaknesses or on ways to avoid detection those would also be of some value to me.”

Well, that's certainly ambitious, particularly given the fact that she seems to plan to do it in person. Eulalia did not in fact swear an oath not to speculate on the goal thereof, or even imply they wouldn't do so, but she's still a cleric of Iomedae. When a potential ally reaches out to you in good faith for mutual benefit, you don't take actions that would predictably cause them to regret reaching out to you even if they aren't very powerful in their own right. She'll consider the matter only insofar as it it necessary to answer the questions asked, and not share any of what she does realize, until such a time as Karen informs her or otherwise indicates that it is no longer something she would rather not get into. She is in fact curious about it, just not the kind of curious that would make her take leave of her senses.

As such, she can can start outlining the 9 planes of Hell, starting with Avernus, a desolate land of volcanoes and endless desert where damned souls first arrive after judgment and largely inhabited by lesser devils of one sort or another, the most common of which are bearded devils. All devils are immune to fire and poison, and resist both acid and cold, but are of course vulnerable to good-aligned attacks. They have some maps of Avernus, or at least the parts reachable by from Golarion, and some intelligence as to who reigns where, though these records are rather incomplete and dated. Probably much of the more basic information is already known to Karen, but it doesn't pay to assume.

This was super not known to Kakara, actually. She didn't even know Hell had 9 layers, as it happens, nor the population to support them, and she's much more glad she didn't decide to go dive right in. On Garenhuld, their main attestations on the afterlife come from the Z fighters, and while Vegeta did in fact die twice while hellbound he didn't actually make it past judgment either time before coming back. And sure, most people either make it to the otherworld or have their souls cleansed to try again, but the universe is a big place; when you're dealing with a population of trillions, even a small portion adds up to hell probably having a lot of people. It does make her kind of sick to her stomach to think of. The details on the devils within are also appreciated; she does know of any examples, but "the demons and makai encountered by at least one Z fighter" is hardly likely to offer a representative example.

She had kind of thought there would be more in the way of extremely powerful former evil mortals mucking around too? Sure, Frieza is back in the world of the living these days, but there's people like Cell where she would expect even the Makaioshin to have some difficulty keeping under control.

"When they arrive in Hell, petitioners largely largely lack all of the abilities they had in life, and depending on the time will have some difficulty regaining them; unlike, say, Heaven, Asmodeus is largely uninterested in letting them regain them except insofar as he can bend them to his service. Most such souls either fall in line and are transformed into devils or are kept imprisoned."

Her use of the term Makaioshin doesn't really register as something worthy of notice; it smoothly translates as meaning "chief evil god / king of the evil gods" and applies perfectly as an epithet for the entity they know as the Prince of hell.

"Various Devils and cults of Asmodeus might imply that especially capable lawful evil souls can expect to earn a high place in hell, but unless they make specific arrangements beforehand the most common fate for them is the same as any other soul so damned, and they're just tortured forever if they aren't lucky enough to have some devil find a use for them."

What.

Kakara knew she didn't have the details on Hell. She expected to learn she was wrong in her assumptions about its geography, the disposition of its inhabitants, its dangers. But she does not in fact know nothing about Hell, and this doesn't fit. Either these people don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about - which isn't impossible, Kakara is good at noticing when people lie but less good when they don't even know they're lying, even if the sight did lead her here - or essentially everything she knows about the afterlives are wrong, which is rather unlikely given that she's been there, both to heaven itself and recently to meet King Yenma, and she's pretty sure it would have rated a mention. Even if it was normally some kind of secret, he wouldn't have then offered to let her go through it, if keeping it from her was that important, and regardless of if she had died doing it or not she would have ended up in Son Gohan's divine realm afterward to talk about it.

Which means as unlikely as it seems, it probably has to be the former, except...

There's been this wiggling note of confusion that's been with her through this whole conversation. She activates the Sight, to determine how to she could get to Garenhuld from here if she so chose.

Oh.

"I'm not in universe 7 anymore, am I."

As nonsequitors go, that's a pretty baffling one, especially since it's not exactly clear what triggered it. It's the kind of confusion that's so far from what you're expecting to anchor on that you can't, actually, sincerely try to dispel it, because it's not exactly clear what kind of schema you would get such that you both number universes and that one of the ones where people live on would be number 7. You could argue for the classification of the planes as universes in their own right, but that still doesn't get you anything mistakable for the material as number 7, and it's not just a mistranslation of worlds since her being from another one was the first thing she introduced herself with.

But what Lastwall does not have, in the context of important strategic conversations or payment to those who have done them a great service, is much in the way refraining from asking useful questions because it might make you look silly or foolish. They're aware of this human instinct, but it is one they have worked to thoroughly train out, because some things are just more important than your pride.

"I'll confess, I'm not sure where or what universe 7 is such that you could be in it or not. But if it's the kind of place where you would expect everyone within to know that, it is not. By our own reckoning, Lastwall is a country on the continent of Avistan of planet Golarion, which is located within the prime material plane of Pharasma's creation."

"It is not; there are many people within what we call universe 7 which would not know themselves to be such. In our understanding of our cosmology, there are twelve universes, each assigned a number, and the universes whose sum add up to 13 are paired; our universe 7 is matched with universe 6, for instance. Within each universe there is a Kaioshin, who creates worlds, kais, and so forth while acting as its chief god, and a Hakaioshin, who largely destroys worlds according to their own whims or desires."

She does not, in fact, actually hate Beerus, but she's hardly in the business of endorsing his decisions.

"Each of these universes has their own living world where mortals reside, and their own unique afterlife system. I know some things about my own world's system and could thereby also make educated guesses about that of Universe 6, but I know next to nothing about any of the others. What struck me, and caused me to attempt to discern the location of the planet I came from relative to here, was the bit about eternal torture. We don't do that to anyone, as far as I am aware, much less most people sent to Hell. Hell is not exactly pleasant or safe, but this... doesn't fit. My search parameters that brought me here were an attempt to learn more of my own universe's hell so I could cross through it safely and get training in Heaven, but this seems like it might actually be much more important."

If she does get involved here, she's going to have to be so careful. In another universe, however she ended up here, her Grandfather's protection means a lot less, and dying here might mean she never gets to see anyone she knows ever again, not to mention potentially leaving her home in the hands of that bitch indefinitely if the Sensu clan and Maya don't manage to do something about it without her. But while she won't deny her own willingness to prioritize those close to her... she's not in fact the kind of person who can abandon people, even shitty people, to be tortured forever. Kakara will make sure this is true. She'll try to negotiate, if the slightest opportunity emerges. But like a shooting star blazing through the sky, this isn't a path she can turn aside from; Kakara is not the kind of person to look away from this kind of injustice, not even if it means burning herself up in the process.

(And besides, a darker part of her notes, even the gods fear the Enemy. If she was ever to overturn her people's doom, she would require this kind of strength regardless).

Out of all the places in Golarion, inside Her temple in Her country speaking with one of Her strongest clerics is one of the places where Iomedae's vision is clearest and Her observation cheapest. A fragment of Her was watching this conversation, though not in communication with the greater whole, and while Neutral Good is not the clearest to Her, She could in time expect to understand most of what went on here. (This isn't, in the usual sense, a violation of the implied secrecy. If specifically requested, She would keep it in confidence even from all of her, but She's just not the kind of shape that can adversely utilize an offer reached out in good faith.)

In the face of what is suddenly one of the brightest stars in the constellation of Golarion, this is wholly unnecessary. Unless She were to turn away from the world at least as thoroughly as Shiziru, she could not help but notice it. Normally this would be where She dropped a few Paladin levels, but She can also see clearly enough to know that it would be basically pointless. Kakara's energy is more boundless than the sea, qualitatively a mere half step away from becoming that of a demigod and quantitatively even greater than Her own. Instead, She weaves that energy and intervention budget-

:Hello, Kakara:

-and across cross from her in the vision is a woman in armor, with the same insignia used as several of the people she met at the fortress and in Lastwall. Chelish, not that Kakara has enough knowledge of Golarion ethnicities to tell beyond that it looks similar to some of the people in the knights of Ozem. The feeling from her is notably lesser than her grandfather's, even while he suppressed it, but clearly to her senses the same kind of power.

Dazarel isn't with her.

"I take it you're Iomedae?"

:Yes. I am Iomedae, the goddess of destroying evil, and one of the many gods that operate on Golarion:

Her Grandfather taught her the proper formalities for speaking with members of the divine bureaucracy, but she's genuinely not sure the same rules apply wherever she is now and she's really not in the mood anyway.

"What's with the whole eternal torture deal, then? Is that something they're just making up?"

:No. I swear to you that to the best of my knowledge what they represented to you is accurate, and that I would expect to know if it were false. The nine afterlives of this universe were laid out by Pharasma when She created it, and the conditions in Hell are maintained through the efforts of Asmodeus, one of the most powerful gods, neither of whom I yet possess the power to defeat:

"And if I do something about it, will we have a problem?"

:Not from Me. Asmodeus and His archdevils are likely to object, as might some of the other evil gods or Pharasma depending on how you go about doing it. For this reason, I advise you do whatever you can of your preparation on Golarion, where Prophecy does not work and the gods are limited to more mundane methods of observation. This property extends to demiplanes created from there, should you need more security, but it is unlikely He will respond in sufficient force to matter as long as you do not visibly surpass the strength ordinarily wielded by 9th Circle mortals by too large a fraction:

:The other main concern is that Asmodeus, if He feels Himself in true danger of defeat, may elect to release Rovagug from its cage. Rovagug is a tremendously powerful god of evil and destruction that the other gods have kept imprisoned within Golarion; He is stronger yet than Asmodeus and left to His own devices would seek to eat this and other worlds, though in such a fight you would have more committed allies amongst the gods than against Asmodeus Himself:

That could be a Hakaoishin description, in which case she ought to be really nervous about fighting both it and any gods strong enough to meaningfully participate in fighting it, or more of a Maijin Buu description where in principle it wouldn't be impossible for her to win with a strong enough spirit bomb even if the odds were against her in doing so. Once you get to the point of wrecking planets, it gets pretty hard to determine the finer gradients of who can beat who in head to head conflict without actually doing it, unfortunately.

"What is causing the foresight block, which of the other evil gods should I keep an eye out for, and how can I best confirm your claims?"

:The proximal cause of the block is the death of Aroden, a god who was slain in a war a century ago, but there was already significant interference owing from the fact that Rovagug is imprisoned there; He interferes with almost all modes of extrasensory perception to some extent, and the events around Aroden's death were simply the final straw for Foresight. Of the other evil gods, Zon Kuthon, Urgathoa, and Lamashtu are the three most dangerous to you. As for confirming the claims, the most direct way would be to scry Hell; parts of it are shielded against it, but not most. Aside from that, essentially every other church will also confirm this state of affairs, including the Church of Asmodeus; they do not deny the torment that awaits the damned at the hands of their god:

Kakara can feel the vision starting to come apart around her now. Her Grandfather could keep it together for a while longer anyway, but she can't, and she suspects the same is true for Iomedae. Probably enough time for one more question, then.

"Do you have knowledge of the entity we call the enemy? They're humanoid, as near as you can tell under a black cloak that covers everything, and are an incredibly powerful void mage. Can travel quickly between star systems and destroy planets, although not instantaneously. Would have popped up some time in the last 250 years or so, assuming the timeline matches, but if you had records of them from before that it would also be incredibly valuable."

:I know of no such entity, but I will make inquiries among the other gods as are good enough or lawful enough to be trustworthy with it, and will send a message to you through my clerics if there is anything I can share:

And the vision comes apart.

She's back in Lastwall, still in the same room as she was before the vision. She doesn't have a good sense for how long that just took in real time, but probably not that long, since it was pretty quick subjectively and Eulalia is still looking at her with some astonishment.

"Was... was that the inheritor? Iomedae, I mean."

"In the vision? Yes, unless the local gods are good at false flagging that kind of thing. We talked, she answered a few of my questions... I'm going to need to verify some of it, but if true it's pretty decisive in terms of realigning my priorities. The short of it from your perspective is that I'm not whatever kind of magic user you have around here, or indeed any kind of magic user, I'm a much weirder thing that we've got way more of where I'm from. I primarily use something we call Ki, which is related to but not the same as life force, and I can use it either to enhance my body when I have one or for direct energy manipulation, which includes supercharging magic. In terms of combat ability, Iomedae suggested I'm actually stronger than a local 9th circle or equivalent, but I haven't had a chance to test that one out myself."

Which is, of course, an understatement by so much it's bordering on a lie, but Kakara's not going to be broken up about under-representing her strength to some people she just met; taken broadly, she's been living basically her entire life doing just that.

"When it's convenient, I'd like a chance to talk to some priests of other gods and ideally some research organizations not aligned with any of them, plus do some scrying of my own, but if that all turns out like I'm expecting I'll be able to give you guys some assistance."

That's really good news. Not quite the best possible news, but not too far off either.

"There are treaties against that kind of impersonation, and it definitely wouldn't be doable here at the heart of her power at all much less without her noticing and send us a vision about it. Which gods would you want to speak to, and how senior a priest? As for research organizations, most of them are aligned with a god, but there are exceptions and we can send out some requests; it would be easier if we had an idea of what kind of an expert you wanted to speak to from there as well."

"I'm not familiar with what gods here, but I'd want a decent spread; they don't have to be leaders, but I would appreciate it if they were senior enough to be able to speak authoritatively on interfaith dynamics and their own theology. Likewise, for the researchers I'd want to talk to experts on your local planar system, theology, politics, and on the afterlives, if those are all separate categories."

And while they're arranging for that, she can go do some independent research of her own.

Find me Asmodean priests talking about Hell.

And her eyes go white as she Sees.

And she finds herself in what is recognizably a church, if a lot more evil than the ones she's used to. The priest, clad in very ornate robes in red and black, speaks to a church full of people that look similar to most of those she's met so far about how they will all burn in Hell when they die, so they had better make themselves into a useful, obedient shape now so there will be something left of them to salvage once Asmodeus turns them into something more pleasing to Him. He talks about how they're all already damned, and that even if they weren't Asmodeus will conquer all the other planes and His victory will be complete and in that moment they'll be even worse off, for foolishly thinking they could deny Him what was rightfully His.

Well, that's unpleasant. She'll try for someone more senior, next.

Here's a 6th circle priest of Asmodeus, talking to what looks to be a stereotypical wizard of lower social station. The priest tells the man that now that he's reached 4th circle, he has two choices; one, retire to a relatively comfortable-but-monitored retirement, where he can labor under the Chelish security state cast spells or crafting items or scribing scrolls but never allowed into conflict, or he can sell his soul, for whatever he can get for it, and be permitted to be a real wizard. And the young wizard takes the second option, the priest smiling at him in what her own skills allow her to recognize as practiced false warmth, and they call up a devil that oozes the same evil feeling she got earlier off the demon army, and she can see the moment the sale concludes (for a pittance the value he would take, the wizard unable to see through the devil's persona) and the darkness sinks straight into his soul like an anchor.

Oh no. She knew it was going to be bad, but this is viscerally unsettling. She steels herself, though, and tries once more.

Show me Avernus.

The air is sickening, here, even in a vision, and the heat unpleasant. It cannot harm her, not with her strength nor through the protection of the vision, but it does not like her. There's a feeling about her that just yesterday she would not be able to place, a grimy unsettling quality that casts a pallor over her perceptions. It cannot block her sight or impede her senses though, not this diffusely, so it does not prevent her from seeing where she has arrived. It's a fortress, built in a style she can now see the church of Asmodeus was only a pale imitation of, and within it dwell devils. None so strong as the creatures she fought when she first arrived on Golarion, nor even the contract devil she saw earlier, but the same kind of creature all the same. And as she watches, a group of them drag in a new arrival, and drag him across the cobblestones towards implements of torture, an iron already heating up in one of the fires. She cannot bear to watch, and yet feels guilty for looking away as the screams start, and as she tries to block them out her eyes focus and she realizes the cobblestones are people, already experiencing agony beyond what she can comprehend, and across the plains of Avernus in incalculable number more-

Kakara cuts short the vision, wrenching herself back more swiftly than she every has before. Her stomach roils and she retches; had she her body, Kakara is certain she would have thrown up on the spot. Even as the heaves subside, she shivers uncontrollably, her composure broken.

"What did you see-"

The rage wells up through her now, and the Masque falls away. She doesn't even notice herself go Super Saiyan. Her power, normally stable even at the transformation's maximum, begins to spike wildly, and her face advertises her mood for all to see. Lightning starts to crackle around her, her rage forcing past her ingrained instinct not to power up further, and wind starts to pick up around her despite her current limitations as she lets out a scream. The floor cracks, sturdy stone unable to bear the forces she's subjecting it to, and Dazarel leaves her shoulders to flee the room. Her hair, already floating, spikes further, and the golden aura around her intensifies as her power doubles.

"I AM GOING TO BREAK HIM!"

Almost without waiting for her consent, her mind casts out for the location of her visions, her familiarity with the subject allowing her senses to cross the planar divide. She works her way through the revised equations for the instant transmission, her fingers rising to her forehead-

And another vision overtakes her, her mind too focused to ward it off. Prophecy is shattered on Golarion, even hers, but in Hell it is not, and as her intent crystalized the lines in which she remained outside its grasp fell away and the future opened up before her.

She sees herself in hell, brilliant light scouring away the shadows that never once have known the sun since history began. She sees the fortresses shattered in her wake, their sturdy construction like so much paper mache in a hurricane. All the buildings in the great city of Dis shattered, the treasuries of Erebus burnt to cinders, the terrible forges of Phlegethon finally silenced. And then she sees Asmodeus, roused to war, and understands. Understands why Iomedae has not marched on Hell, why the tormented souls cannot liberate themselves, why anyone suffers this injustice to exist.

She can make him pay a terrible price for it, the plane of Stygia itself shattered beyond all repair, and Hell itself relegated to 8 layers for the rest of time. But there's no path that leads to her victory here, not as she is now against him in the heart of his power, and with her defeat there will be nothing to stop the suffering from continuing.

It's the hardest thing she's ever done. Harder than controlling the rampaging energies of a planetary spirit bomb, harder than treating peaceably with Dandeer, harder even than turning against her beloved father when her principles told her what he was doing was not right. And not only is Kakara not in a rational mood, she is a Saiyan; nobody knows better than her that with the proper challenge arrayed against her, very little is actually impossible. But some things are more important than how she feels about them.

The transformation dies down, and Kakara sobs uncontrollably. The future shatters again into a million pieces.

What the fuck was that?

Once Dazarel went for the hills, Eulalia was not far behind. She's a 6th circle cleric, with pretty good magic items and although she's not a Paladin Eulalia has no shortage of courage, but when an adventurer double her level starts screaming and her Dragon - who is incidentally the only one in the room to have known about her for more than an hour - books it, just standing around while the floor shatters under you is not a great life decision. She casts break enchantment first, just in case that helps, but then she's out the door and frantically relaying details through a telepathic bond. When the wind dies down and the evacuation slows and hasty divinations confirm a lack of imminent danger, then, she's not the first one to return. Neither is Dazarel; that honor falls to a first circle Paladin named Louisa Hoffman.

(It is not in fact neccesary that the volunteer be without fear for them to be enthusiastic about entering the room; this is Lastwall. Even there, however, it does help).

When she enters with the true seeing spell cast upon her active, she'll find a girl curled up on the floor, seemingly uncaring of how uncomfortable the rubble has to be, crying.

(The sobs have subsided a bit now, but she's clearly still miserable)

Like this, she looks a lot younger. She still has the same neutral Good aura around her, though, and doesn't seem to be about to start up again.

... Is that a tail? Probably it is in fact not the most salient part about this situation, though she relays it anyway. Asking if she is alright is kind of a stupid question here, but she does need a better understanding of what's going on; she can't really assist in making plans or in being reassuring without something more to orient on.

She'll put on her best calming voice, though, and let Karen know she's in Lastwall, and that while there may be dangers there will always be those here who will fight them off.

It'll take a bit, but once she hears Louisa start talking Kakara will slowly pull herself back together and sit up. Not standing, just yet, but when she wipes her eyes they're just red and shiny and her telepathic voice is only a little shaky.

"You're... not in any current danger, I don't think. I Saw something awful and I almost did something ill advised about it."

At this point she seems to notice the damage to her surroundings, and her cheeks take on a somewhat stronger red tint.

"Sorry about the damage. I didn't mean to lose control like that."

"We obviously don't prefer our rooms be damaged, but nobody was injured, and compared to the cost of what would have happened at the worldwound had you not shown up we will happily repair it and consider it cheap at the price. If I may, what is it that you... Saw? Is it likely to be an issue going forward? We can make accommodations, but it would be easier with advance warning it might be needed."

Somehow this is even more embarrassing than the alternative, and if she had essentially any emotional capacity left after grappling with what she saw of Hell she's sure she'd hate it. As is, it mostly just combines to make her feel more tired and wrung out.

"I was attempting to verify some of the things I was told about Golarion. Started with - the church of Asmodeus, and then looked into Avernus. All the people there... I could feel them, and it overwhelmed me, to the point I almost got myself killed charging into Hell to make it stop. The lightshow was from me going up to full power to do that. I don't expect it to happen again off of that, but if there are any similarly upsetting things I might see and get angry about it might be a good idea to tell me now, so I can make sure not to go searching for them unprepared."

That's such a reasonable perspective!

(Outside of the followers of Iomedae, this would be a bit more noteworthy, but one doesn't spend much time in her church without running into someone who's immediate reaction to learning about Hell was to start planning out how to kill Asmodeus. They attract that mindset rather strongly.)

"I would advise you avoid the other evil afterlives - the Abyss and Abbadon - as well as Cheliax, Nidal, and Zon Kuthon. They're mostly not as bad as Hell, but it can still get... pretty bad. We try not our new Paladins too many of them on scry in close succession for that reason. There's no other trigger you can think of that would cause something like this?"

"I might spark a bit at something particularly bad, but typically powering up doesn't do that with my level of control unless I'm seriously pushing past my limits; it's been almost 5 years since I last did something like this, and that was when I thought someone had just killed my father in front of me."

"Normally this would be where I offer you a warm drink and something to eat, but I'm not sure how much good it would do you without a body. I don't suppose this is the kind of situation where you can ride along on someone else's senses for it?"

"No, I don't seem to get that deep of impressions from someone when I'm just riding along and I'm... nervous, about diving in deeper even to someone willing."

Kakara shakers her head, and refocuses.

"What I really need to do now is do something, to feel like I can still help people and not like I'm just abandoning them."

This is also an intensely recognizable phenomenon.

"If you want, you could talk to one of our leaders about your capabilities, and see where you can do some good in the next couple of days?"

"I'd like that, yes. Thank you."

Then with the reassurances made they can cancel the rest of the evacuation and go to another, less destroyed meeting room, this one with more permanent and powerful security measures than the last. The current Precentor Martial for scouting, Keyron Saiville, has cleared time from his schedule to speak with her.

En route, Dazarel will rejoin them, his attitude a mixture of grumpy and embarrassed.

They don't actually like evil people getting their forbiddance passwords, especially if they aren't lawful enough to give oaths about not sharing it that Lastwall can trust, but it'll obviously kill him if they don't give it and it involves most of the same class of tail risks as giving it to Karen in the first place. (Theoretically speaking they could just not give Karen the password and heal her after, she's only off by one step of alignment and has obviously more than enough hp even in a worst case scenario where she doesn't make the save and takes the full 36 possible damage, but that's not the kind of thing you do to allies without pressing need). The forbiddance in question is one that they hold relatively less secure for that reason, so as to concentrate all the "enemy bypasses the forbiddance password" downsides in one location where they can manage the risks instead of running a smaller but unknown risk on a dozen different ones.

"So, I've heard that you're roughly a 9th circle combatant with an entirely different combat paradigm than we're used to. What does that come out to in practice?"

There are a lot of truthful answers she can give to that, some of which are even not completely misleading!

"Most of my abilities involve Ki in one sense or another, which is essentially a pool of energy I can use to accomplish tasks. Theoretically, it's supposed to be able to anything magic can do and then some, but the downside is that you have to actually know what you're doing and have good enough control to accomplish it. In practice, this primarily boils down to physical enhancement, flying, and energy blasts for most practitioners, but I've got an array of other skills. I can sense other people's energy to get a guess at their strength and track their location, communicate telepathically, create bursts of light, defend my mind against intrusion, move things somewhat clumsily with telekinesis, overcharge other people spells, and teleport anywhere I can sense. Outside of my Ki, I am also a seer, which is a primarily divinitory psychic power that allows me to see faraway and past events as though I was there and project myself out of my body as a shade like I am right now. I also don't need to sleep, but that is a magical effect cast on me by someone else and not a native trait or something I can do to anyone else."

Notably left out is her ability to turn into an Oozaru; it's bad enough that she revealed her tail, but if she doesn't make too big a deal about it it shouldn't be that notable. There's no shortage of near human species out there, but the ability to make yourself into an enormous monkey is uniquely identifying. Kakara is also quite glad she's a natural blond on that score, since it makes the hair much less noteworthy when she transforms. Also not included is her ability to use the multiform; she's pretty sure she can work with Lastwall, but being able to do research while seemingly otherwise occupied would be a good way to notice if that's not the case, and what they don't know can be a surprise for her enemies in the case of a leak.

"When I have my body, I'm also an exceptionally skilled martial artist and passable with a sword, gun, or staff, but while it usually makes up a significant portion of my combat ability it's of limited utility at the moment since my limbs just phase through things."

(Passable by the standards of the exiles, that is. What's considered a dilettante approach not worthy of particular regard by a group of Saiyans with a martial tradition centuries old that draws upon the legacy of Earth is perhaps not how Golarion tends to measure ability).

That's better than he was expecting. Not as versatile as a sorcerer, much less a wizard, but that's hardly atypical for casters that also carry at least partial martial progression; Lastwall's Paladins are, in fact, a central example of this phenomenon. It sounds like she has the equivalent of a full suite of divinatory and information gathering spells, plus a decent spread of evocation, transportation, and utility.

"What do the limitations on your teleportation look like in practice? You said anywhere you can sense, but I'm not sure what kind of an area we're talking about. Can you transport people other than yourself?"

He's guessing from the dragon that the answer to that last one is yes, but it might end up being "only myself plus a limited weight allowance" like outsiders tend to get stuck with, which would still be useful but notably less so.

"The primary issue is targeting. If you have another person's energy signature to navigate by, you can use instant transmission to appear next to them easily, but without that you have to use dead reckoning which is a lot harder to aim at long distance. Theoretically speaking it doesn't really have a range limit but in practice without someone really strong acting as a beacon it would be hard to navigate with it outside of your inner solar system unless I was going to one of the other planets directly. And... I can take people with me, as long as I'm touching them and it's not too many - 3 is fine, 4 a bit of a struggle, 5 requires concentration and it past that it's usually faster to take multiple trips. But again, touching them is a concern at the moment. I might be able to swing it to someone I was doing a ride along in with some research, but I don't think I could chain it past that."

Like Teleport, but with Greater Teleport's range.

"About how many can you do a day? And similar to before, what do the limitations on the telepathy work out to?"

"How many can I do a day? Er, depends on the difficulty of the jump, but it doesn't take more than a couple seconds per, so call it 20 a minute, maybe about a thousand an hour? It'd get pretty mind numbing though, so I'm not sure I could keep focused long enough to get up to 20,000 in one day. It's never really come up."

"Telepathy works best for relatively short distances, under a few hundred miles or so. Beyond that, the connection starts fraying, and people nearby can pick up what you're saying if they're close enough; how close is close enough depends on how much it frays which is a function of distance and skill, but the message also starts to become harder and harder to understand as well, just more slowly. As for the number of targets, I've also never run into a hard limit there, but from experience it's at least," three billion souls, lending her their energy and trusting her to defeat the danger that threatened them all "in the thousands. It's not exactly possible to have that many conversations running simultaneously though, and you can't have mass communication without compromising security."

Once he hears the first part, Keyron Saiville can't keep the smile off his face. Greater teleport, at will, can transport objects. The issues of teleportation capacity might not be the most pressing need Lastwall has, but it has long been one of the most frustrating ones. There are no shortage of outsiders, from the lowliest fiends to the mightest archons, who possess the ability to freely transport themselves within Golarion; whenever a new type of outsider is identified and catalogued, it is almost considered more likely than not that they possess that capability. But nearly to a soul, they cannot be used to solve logistics. Aside from what is needed to transport their own person, outsider teleportation loses out to human in almost every regard. In the unluckiest cases, this takes the form of an outsider only being able to transport themself, and even for the luckier occasions the best you can typically hope for is a mere handful of additional pounds and which cannot include spacial items. In principle, of course, there's no magical reason it would have to work that way, but judging by what heaven has told them there's a great treaty among the outer planes that they all limit themselves correspondingly. Only a handful of neutral and chaotic evil outsiders dare to defy this decree, and the likes of the soul-stealing Thanadaemons are far from being reliable trade partners even if summoning them for that purpose *wasn't* harmful to the Law and Good of the wizards in question and their commanding officers. Short of summoning a demigod, the only way to solve the problem of mass transportation of goods to the worldwound was with corresponding armies of mortal mages - a state of affairs, that is, that held until today. Keyron knows the other Preceptors Martial will be just as excited, particularly his comrade in Garrisons and Logistics, and the fact that they apparently need to find a way to get her a body first will only put a very slight damper on things.

This also, of course, correspondingly also means they need to prioritize keeping her safe from Cheliax, Hell, and the other forces of evil even more than they already were planning to. The former two at least should be incapable of interfering if she was supplying the world-wound, yes, but with the potential gains this large even Cheliax could not be trusted to stick to law. With all this going on in his mind, it's perhaps unsurprising that the bit about telepathy didn't really register. Sure, the range was impressive, but the necessity to coordinate forces the size of the shining crusade was not especially common, and most of the use case for faster sendings is already covered by "as many teleports as you can find a use for." Until they can shake loose enough force to conquer Cheliax, at least, and another part of him notes that he's already at the point where he means until instead of unless. It's a good feeling.

"It sounds like we ought to get you back a body, then. Were you able to bring any bits of your corpse with you? If you did we could bring you back to life with just a Resurrection,  but if not it'll need to be a True Resurrection and the materials for that will take a bit longer to source."

Lastwall doesn't really keep a stock of true resurrection diamonds, on the grounds that there are actually an awful lot of high level people who have died without bodies in the last two centuries and plenty of them would be willing to work for Lastwall if they were to raise them. Keeping the diamonds in storage for a True Resurrection asap would be just giving up value, and their margins are tight enough to make that trade painful. Their reputation (and, admittedly, income) is good enough that they can typically get one as an advance for an only moderately enormous sum in bond with the promise of full repayment later in any case, even if it's still not nearly as quick as already owning one.

"Er, do those just generically grow and regrow bodies, or are they specifically for reviving the dead? Because if it's the latter there might be an issue, I'm not dead and neither is my body. I just... don't have access to it for the foreseeable future."

"Ah, that might indeed complicate things. If I may, what happened with it specifically?"

"An extremely powerful sorcerer named Dandeer launched a coup on our government, and she's really fond of her mind control. Half our leadership turned out to be sleeper agents for her and... I had a shot at her, but I didn't want to kill her and subduing her without it ended up taking long enough for some of the other fights to resolve so I got jumped before I got her secured. I was a bit overconfident about it, honestly, so I fought without prep instead of bailing then and there, and, well. It was a four on one at the end there against some of our best fighters, and I'm not that good; I only managed to escape because she didn't know I could jump out of my body and only warded against it escaping. Now it's under who knows what protections from the strongest sorcerer on the planet who happens to specialize in sealing, plus whatever she managed to mind control other people into supplementing her work with."

Keyron is cognizant of the ways that even the best intentioned people can distort their own memories, especially when it involves something they feel is a betrayal or involves people they hate, or makes them look better to themselves. It's not even deliberate, most of the time, and a coup is in fact prime territory for that kind of thing. But even accounting for that and just dealing with the concrete relayed facts, that's not a pretty picture - especially the mind control, that tends to be a pretty glaring red flag. Unfortunately it is also not really something that Lastwall can help with, at the moment; taking on a a 9th circle caster in the heart of their power is hard enough if they don't have a country under them and the target an entire universe away, especially since from the sound of it they also have a number of other highly skilled individuals under their thumb. Perhaps the entire force of Lastwall and the church of Iomedae, mustered to the task, would be enough - but then again perhaps not, and to even make the attempt would be to abandon burdens they cannot put down. A wish might be able to to fetch the body out anyway, if they supplied Felandriel with the diamond, but then again it also might not, and it would be an extremely expensive failure if it did not work.

"That doesn't seem immediately tractable, no. I'll let Charles Rochefort - my colleague, the Precentor Martial for Magic - know the details, and see what he can come up with with the help of those allies trustworthy not to leak the information. I'm not thinking of any easy solutions, but I didn't specialize in wizardry for a reason. Aside from that, I think I have a good idea of how you can best help out, both right now and in the medium to long term. Do you have preferences for what kind of job you'd want to do to take into account?"

"I'd prefer something where I don't have to kill people, even people who deserve it. I know sometimes there aren't other good choices, but I've killed too many people today. And... I guess something not to reminiscent of Hell, even to dismantle it, please."

"That won't be an issue. And you have my word that we won't we won't use the people you free up today to take actions that in expectation will end up killing more people than would have died had you not shone up."

Keyron thinks he has a decent grasp on what makes her tick by now, and that she would have agreed without that assurance but she would have felt awful about it, and part of the advantage of getting new advantages is that you can make that kind of compromise to help for the long term.

How does Karen feel about going with some of their people to deal with a Bandersnatch that's been causing problems in Nirmithas near the nation's border with Lastwall?

"What is a Bandersnatch?

"They're a particularly rare and dangerous monster, originally from the Fey world. Absolutely deadly, to the point that for this specific one we were going to have to either hire foreign adventurers to deal with or somehow free up half a battallion, which would mean weeks of it killing off the locals and potentially going to ground before we got to it. They're clever, but just a moderately intelligent animal, not a person."

That's absolutely something she can help them with then.

Great! They've got a 6th circle wizard who volunteered to host her; in this regard, Lastwall is extremely lucky for their culture of service, since their requirements were pretty specific which drained their potential recruitment pool. They needed an arcane caster who it wouldn't be a disaster to reassign temporarily, at least 5th circle so they could provide transportation and have the saves to keep Karen reasonably safe, ideally female in case dysphoria was a going concern, and willing to have a ridealong (even a friendly one) inside their skull. These desiderata, when combined, made a list about 4 people long, and Keyron is quite relieved that their first choice didn't have any issue agreeing to it. (The risk to their life was, on the other hand, not really a going concern; Lastwall has no shortage of people willing to go up against powerful monsters, especially not if there's supposed to be some supermage backing them up and they've been given a medium size fortune in new magical items.

"Hello, Karen! My name is Lucia, and you'll be tagging along with me today!"

The voice is incredibly cheerful, and from the bubbling enthusiasm of their Ki Kakara can be pretty confident they're honest about it. Standing next to them are the other 3 people in this temporary part; a 5th circle cleric, a mid level fighter, and a ranger of indeterminate but likely considerable skill.

Kakara grins. It's a bit of a weak smile, but real.

She steps into Lucia's mind, and immediately the difference is stark. A pressure that she didn't even realize she was feeling suddenly vanishes, and just existing is much less effortful on her part.

And they're off!

Meanwhile...

The Precentors Martial rarely all meet up at once. It's dangerous enough to have all of your command staff in one place for a normal government, much less one where class levels are disconnected enough from leadership that half your members don't even have double digit hit die. Even now, that technically isn't happening; the Precentor Martial for Cavalry is off dealing with an incursion from Belkzen, and withdrawing him to have this conversation was both deemed sufficiently risky to the campaign as to be not worth the risk and to give their enemies an undesirably large chance of noticing the meeting is in fact occurring, so her deputy is attending in her stead. The room in question is a well kept secret even within Lastwall, with a Neutral-Good password forbiddance cast by a 9th circle cleric of Sarenrae to maximize the damage taken by the forces of the Abyss and Hell should they somehow penetrate the other forbiddances and evade the numerous other defenses installed by a 9th circle wizard who worked with the Shining Crusade. Short of holding the meeting in Lastwall's permanent demiplane or heaven, this is about as close as it gets to actual security in Golarion, and even then they'd have to choose between the prohibitive costs of multiple plane shifts each meeting or the members meeting up somewhere less secure than this to plane shift together.

"I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this changes everything and we need to reevaluate our entire focus now, not just as we finally start checking problems off the list for good."

"That will come with notable costs from problems we already currently have handled; we're already dealing with pretty much all of the worse crises, doing a worse job on them is not worth getting to lesser priorities slightly faster. We can make sure to prioritize the problems that is not true for first as we start redeploying. Presuming we can in fact clear it, what does the prospects for closing the worldwound look like?"

"Theoretically possible with a few wishes; Felandriel mentioned she had a few ideas. If we can get to that point, probably even Cheliax will be willing to cough up part of the price on the diamonds. Taldor too, if we frame it right."

"Experimental wishes is the leading cause of permanent death amongst 9th circle wizards, and even if she can be raised after that's still looking at a true resurrection. Once we have it to that point, do we really want to spend the full price on closing it when the wardstones will largely suffice at a sufficiently close radius? If we get it tight enough, we could make a proper ring of fortresses a mile or so out with no real weaknesses in the line, and with teleport-at-will the logistical strain won't even increase from the added distance from staging areas. Plus, not to be too gung ho about the permanent destruction of souls but life kinda sucks even for the relatively strong demons in the abyss and the constant stream of combat experience to good adventurers does a lot to help maintain a favorable balance of power, and that'll be more true once we no longer need Cheliax's assistance in holding the line."

"If the main problem is Wish wording, is this the time we should be looking to see if we can get Razmir on board with it? He has some source of knowledge from ancient Thassilon, including potentially relevant knowledge of how they made their Wishes, and now that we finally have a proper mythic hero on our side we won't have to lean on Felandriel Morgethai as much during negotiations. Plus it might be the kind of problem that's easier to solve with 2 wishes at once rather than having to do it in sequence."

"For a so-called lawful god, he's too difficult to deal with; for my money, it won't go anywhere. If we really need that kind of spellcasting support we'd be better off going to Nefreti Clepati instead."

"Speaking of Wishes, do we think her powering magic spells works for Limited Wish?"

There's a pause at that, as they digest what that would mean.

"In the sense that you could have a 7th level wizard cast it, or that you only need a Limited Wish diamond for the full spell? Either one would be unprecedented."

"So is making a 4th circle wizard's Fireball stronger than a Meteor Swarm. Comparatively speaking, this is a much smaller level jump."

"Let's table that question; obviously, if she can, we throw whatever we need to behind her, and it makes a lot of those questions easier; are we willing to spend a wish on X would be an easy yes if it took a much smaller diamond, but it's not really actionable until we test it. Assume she can't, and only part of our wishlist comes through; if it comes down to it, under what circumstances would it be worth fronting a wish, presuming we have to pay the full price for them and there's no cheaper spell to do the trick?"

"We can set a lower bound with some basic math. We don't supply all our forces with teleport like Cheliax does, since we both have actual land routes via EG Mendev and because we frankly don't have the wizards they do, but that's still hundreds of gold a day in losses. More, if you listen to the Abadarans about opportunity cost, though that's harder to translate into money since we would mostly be redirecting them to other problem areas instead of economic benefits if they were freed up. If she could take all that over, we could pay for it inside half a year easily, and that's without the potential for converting all of our shipping or abyss, being able to drop an army detachment anywhere in Avistan inside an hour. Even without interfering personally, that would give us enough power projection to rival Cheliax, and that's before you consider she singlehandedly drove off a major demonic incursion without even her full strength available."

"So the question isn't whether it's worth it to do, it's if we can come up with that much money at once, full stop? Because all of our easy credit options have long since been tapped, for basically as long as Lastwall has existed, and we ran through most of the fair ones a century ago. All the credit lines we haven't opened yet aren't open for a reason."

"We could probably get the Abadarans to open us another one of this magnitude, if we swore to them that in expectation and in a large enough majority of worlds it would worth the price. But their transactions are only so secret on this scale, Cheliax would know we need a lot of liquid cash and there's only so many possibilities."

"She wasn't going to stay secret forever, not if we want to actually have her do remotely the Good she is capable of. And if she has a body, she'll have her saves back, plus the best magic items we can supply and around the clock mind blank. If mythic heroes were easy targets for even Hell, we wouldn't have a Felandriel Morgethai to cast the wish for us, and once we have her wished up once, we can make a clone and use of ressurection in most extremities."

"Speaking of clone, is there a reason we can't just borrow one of those that someone has already grown and polymorph any object it into her body?"

...

"I feel like that shouldn't work, but I can't say for certain why it wouldn't. It's enough cheaper that it's almost certainly worth a shot, though the reliance on the spell would be adding some vulnerabilities."

"Even if we will end up needing to Wish later, if it's enough for her to take over on Teleports it would make gathering the necessary monetary resources much easier with the added slack."

Of all the magical beasts that can be found in Golarion, a Bandersnatch is one of the most deadly. Even an ordinary Bandersnatch, as much of an oxymoron as that is, is a dangerous killing machine, equally capable in melee combat and at range, and ferociously powerful. To make matters worse, they're far more stealthy than any 50 foot long, 12,000 pound abomination has any right to be. A juvenile bandersnatch, which most adventurers who recognize it associate the name with, is of course significantly less dangerous, but even at just a handful of years old they can still be a match for an experienced team of adventurers. Their fully grown relatives, though they can live for centuries, are far less common a sighting, and are the kind of target where killing just one is enough to supply those who accomplish the task significant fame among their peers. Of the various variants, almost nothing is known; there just aren't enough Bandersnatches encountered in any kind of reasonable timeframe to make those comparisons feasible.

Thus it was that when Lastwall dispatched their people, it was not, in fact, calculated to be able to escape a Frumious Bandersnatch on its own. How could they have accurately prepared them for a danger that they didn't know existed?

"So, what exactly is it that we're looking for?"

Oh, right.

"Tracks, ideally," says the ranger. He doesn't bother to look at her, but that of course means a lot less when she doesn't even have a body and is communicating solely by Telepathy. "Any kind of marking, so we can confirm the sightings actually correspond to something that exists and then follow it back to a den or other location it regularly returns to. If we're unlucky, this instead results in us wandering around through its territory blindly for long enough that it ambushes us, instead."

"Well, I'm not seeing any tracks, but I am sensing a fairly strong power level a little under three miles to our north-northeast. It's moving, but not very quickly at the moment."

"Well, that sounds promising. In that case, let's try skipping straight to the end of the search; we'll move to cut it off somewhere advantageous for us to fight. Let me know if you sense it changing directions such that you notice, though we'll have to make sure not to completely rely on it."

It turns out with live updates on location, tracking down a Bandersnatch is not especially difficult. It's easy to get visual confirmation of what she's sensing a good way off, and from there settle into a location at behind some foilage at the top of a moderate rise nearby its path. The traditional adventurer spell for dealing damage to far-off opponents is, of course, fireball, but setting off a majorly enhanced fireball in the territory of an allied nation and more specifically in a forest that also crosses into your territory is a bit ill advised. Likewise Chain Lightning, which also serves a similar purpose in higher level adventuring parties, is unpopular on the basis that demons are immune to Electricity and you might suddenly need to reinforce the worldwound. That's fine, though; they can wait, hidden and buffed, until it passes near enough to them to drop it from ambush.

Little known fact about Bandersnatches; they have blindsense for anything within 120 feet of them. That's only enough to get past full cover half the time, but for a party of four the odds of all of them avoiding detection is only one in 16. They are as it happens spotted further out than they would appreciate, and the Bandersnatch is perfectly happy to launch a volley of its poisoned quills at them, one each, and bound forward shockingly quickly to close into melee range to thereby slaughter them.

Normally, avoiding that kind of of attack would be beyond them, but they are buffed and behind full cover; two lodge their way several inches into the trees they are hiding behind, one misses entirely, and the last is blocked by the fighter. He's not exactly thrilled with it, especially if he needs to then somehow also block the giant monster charging them while sickened, but it's hardly enough to put him down.

Fortunately, that doesn't prove necessary. Just as the Bandersnatch gets almost close enough to try for a swipe from its claws, it gets the heat ripped from its body and its flesh encased in solid ice. In response to the damage, the creature's body attempts to burst into flames - only to find the rage-given heat entirely inadequate to the task. It'll melt its way out eventually, given that it can maintain the fire long enough, but it is not exactly in a position to move right now and would have issues fighting even if it did until its healing had time to work.

This is significantly more in line with their abilities! Lucia and Kakara remain on overwatch, since it breaking free and attacking them is about the only way they could still lose this, while the rest set in to wailing on it while trying not to help it get free too much. They don't quite manage to defeat it before the ice melts enough that it starts to break loose, but it's nothing a barrage or two of magic missiles can't fix by bludgeoning it until it starts dying, and once it it's out for the count the three of them have an easy enough time keeping ahead of the regeneration until it gives up the ghost.

Neither her Ki sense nor a quick sweep with the sight reveal any more Bandersnatches.

Then they can return to Lastwall, a few spellslots lighter and some harvested magical monster parts heavier, secure in the knowledge that they have just saved some villages from an ongoing issue.

By the time they finished carving up the useful parts of the Bandersnatch corpse and burned the rest - it's flesh too toxic for safe consumption as food without careful preparation essentially nobody knows how to do - it's getting rather late in the evening. With the harvesting, the trip took about as long as expected, but while a secretary informs Kakara that they have another meeting with her scheduled for later that night, apparently the time in questioned is not right now. Vigil is not a saiyan city, populated solely by those who only need rest for pleasure, nor even a modern Garenhulder city where the differing work schedules and businesses that support them allow it to claim to never sleep, but that doesn't mean its quiescent after dark. Guards still man the walls and patrol the streets, to provide warning and defense should one of Lastwall's many foes strike during the hours of darkness, while higher-ups make use of their rings of sustenance to keep long hours and the everyday work in a capital city fails to come to a complete halt just because the sun has set. Her companions on this quest offer for her to come with them to one of the nearby taverns they drink at, for the company even if she can't herself imbibe.

That doesn't exactly sound interesting, sorry. (Left unsaid is that the same would hold even had she her body; she has essentially no interest in the subject and is too young by her own standards regardless).

Instead, she'll beg off to explore the streets of Vigil, invisible to almost everyone, and get a sense for what Lastwall is like when they aren't just trying to give her a good impression as a powerful visitor.

Her impression will mostly track with what she already knew, although there's certainly a sense in which the people she met were more focused and driven, and beyond that Vigil is less monolithically Iomedaean. Iomedae's influence can be seen almost everywhere, of course, but there are temples to Milani and Sarenrae and Shelyn and Erastil and Abadar, as well smaller alcoves and altars dedicated to a dizzying array of gods but especially Desna, Torag, Irori, and Cayden Cailean make appearances. There are merchants with signage proclaiming wares from faraway lands with names like Taldor, Absalom, and Andoran nestled in alongside more local businesses. Vigil doesn't have slums or indeed a noticable homeless population, but there are definitely areas where the architecture tends towards cheaper, sturdier construction supporting dense housing and relatively wealthier areas. The richest of the latter, outside of the city center itself where the administrative functions are based and the nobility resides, seems to be an adventurer's quarter, and while it's not the only place in Vigil with stores selling magic items they certainly have the most variety and number visible to her sight, and are still open at this hour. Would she like to take a look?

Sure, why not? If anywhere she visited today could notice her, it would probably be here, but she is in fact allowed to be here. She'll go into the one that seems to have the most options on display, though of course she'll go back into her masque first.

Her crossing the threshold doesn't seem to set off an alarm or otherwise notify anyone, but if she doesn't take steps to conceal herself she will eventually be noticed by the youth manning the register, who has on a pair of glasses that to her sight appear to supply some kind of perception effect to the wearer.

There's a surprising number of magical items on display, from boots that have some kind of enhancement to movement to a rings imbued with protective magic to a handful neatly laid out rods which appear to be able to do something to magic cast nearby, although it's not apparent what just from a glance. Probably it would be easier to tell if she could read the descriptions next to the items, but unfortunately she cannot. There's nothing especially strong on display; the most powerful items are of course kept in the back under much more secure protection, only taken out under guard when finalizing the relevant purchase, and are stored in a stunning corona of magic visible even through the wall.

Not all the items are magical, either; there appears to be a few pouches of... carefully measured rock dust, of some kind? It won't show up as anything to her sight or ki sense, and her chemistry knowledge isn't giving any clues either.

She's not going to draw attention to herself by poking him telepathically, but not exactly going to hide either. From observation, her clothing looks odd but not especially remarkable, and her appearance is a bit unusual but definitely within the local distribution. Plausibly the biggest issue would be her age, and Lastwall seems to care less about that than Aramaia does, especially since she doesn't need to fully hide her abilities here. Looking at the items, Kakara wishes she'd taken the time to learn pretty much anything about magic sooner, so Dandelor had time to get her past the basics. More for how much it could have helped with Dandeer, admittedly, but being less lost about what she sees would be nice, and Dazarel isn't much better at magic than she.

The rock dust is frankly just baffling.

It takes him a bit to notice her, since he wasn't alerted by a chime when she arrived and he's half nodded off in a daydream, but since she's not taking any efforts to conceal her presence he'll see her eventually and startle awake. Inside his head, he does a few calculations; on the one hand, being invisible isn't exactly a good sign about her intentions, but there isn't actually a rule against it; some adventurers get paranoid about that kind of thing, and since they're also disproportionately the type to spend a fortune on protective magic items given the chance the store hardly wants to discourage them. On the other hand, being invisible while that young implies prodigous magical talent, enough paranoia and spell slots to alter self before going invisible, or enough wealth to purchase invisibility, all of which are good signs both for current purchases and for the potential to return in the future for more. Taken together, it adds up to...

"Welcome, esteemed customer! Is there anything I can assist you with?"

"I'm looking to browse some of your magical items, but it's a bit hampered by the fact that I can't read your local writing."

Huh, telepathy. Usually casters just use tongues, but maybe she's got a cheaper version; telepathy is 6th circle, but telepathic bond is 5th so a lower circle version is in principle possible. It could also be one of those not-technically-a-spell deals that sometimes show up or a magic item. Definitely sums up to "person he wants to make a sale to," and since the store is otherwise empty he has nothing better to do than assist her.

Oh good. 

Most of the magical items don't seem especially useful; metamagic rods, for magic she doesn't have, rings of sustenance, to allow her to get by on 2 hours of sleep when she doesn't need any, or a hideously expensive magic carpet to allow her to soar through the skies at a speedy 8 miles an hour. Others, a belt of giant's strength or the various kinds of magical armor, are less strictly useless and more incredibly marginal or outclassed by nonmagical alternatives available at home. Still, there are a few standout picks; a ring of delayed doom could give Dandeer a very unfortunate surprise should they have a rematch she doesn't trivially dominate, while sleeves of many garments would allow her to expand her wardrobe significantly without having to find more space in her closet or even go shopping. Figuring out what the rocks are for is a little harder, since he seems shocked she didn't already know, but apparently the locals make use of diamond dust as a material component in a handful of spells. Kakara still isn't totally sure whether this is a real thing or more of a placebo effect, but since she seems to recall them saying something about a diamond with regards to resurrection spells, she'll assume yes for a the moment. It's not like the Dragon Balls didn't spend much of the year as inert stones, after all.

Eventually, enough time will pass that the scheduled meeting point nearly arrives, at which point Kakara will beg off and fly back to the city center. If they'd had this shop back home, she absolutely would have bought a few things, but she doesn't strictly have money right now nor know what the local currency is.

She's a few minutes early, but she can be waved into the room, where Keyron and a man wearing a bizarre mixture of the most stereotypical fantasy wizarding outfit she can imagine and practical combat clothes that he introduces to her as Charles Rochefort are sitting. She might recognize the name from earlier as the Preceptor Martial for Magic, which by now she has likely picked up implies he's one of the top members of their government and head of their mages.

"Perfectly solving your issues is still going to be a while out, since the diamonds necessary for a wish are both extremely expensive and incredibly short supply, but we think we've found an adequate temporary solution that ought to work more cheaply and quickly."

"That's good to hear. What does it entail?"

"There is a particular spell in common use among high level wizards in Golarion known as Clone, which serves as an otherwise-identical empty vessel to which their soul can flee to at the death of their body and return to life. Normally, these only work for the person specified during the process its creation, but we think we can rework the the spell with some effort as long as you can handle the transportation into it yourself. From there, we would use another spell called Polymorph Any Object to turn the clone into a replica of your body, which should last a week and probably forever; the exact details depend on how similar the resulting object is to the original, but even the most pessimistic interpretation of it should last days before which the spell can be renewed if we haven't solved the main problem just yet."

"I'll... need to check, that it is and was soulless before, but I don't know any reason that won't work. What kind of information do you need to specify correctly what Polymorph Any Object turns the clone into?"

"Enough to uniquely and accurately disambiguate it to the degree of precision desired. Transforming a shrew into a pig requires less knowledge on the part of the caster than transforming it into a specific pig does, but even the latter is doable with some observation and a basic understanding of what pigs are."

Kakara hesitates.

"In that case, I'm going to need your word and the word of whoever casts the spell not to share what I'm about to tell you, for reasons I would like to glomarize."

"You have my word," Keyron begins, "That I will take this information in good faith, which includes but is not limited to not sharing the information you are about to speak to me without your explicit affirmative permission, except under specific circumstances. Namely, I will only do so with those neccesary to arrange for this task and to provide the security therein, and with the justified belief that they will not share it any further save under these conditions, until and unless such a time occurs that I learn of it through a source not causally downstream of you telling me or anyone reasonably construed to be an ally of mine and it is in my best model in expectation beneficial to the forces of good that I do so and I have reliably evidenced reason to believe that you have either betrayed our cooperation in acts of egregious bad faith bargaining or it that it is in your interest that it be shared, accounting for the fact that you have expressly stated a desire that it be so. And I furthermore swear that I will not take actions intended or expected to cause the information to spread, and to take reasonable precautions against it doing so against my will, such that it is my expectation that it will not happen. This I swear upon my honor, my law, and my goddess Iomedae."

"I swear the same," adds Charles Rochefor, "upon my own honor, my law, and upon my goddess Iomedae."

You get an awful lot of practice arranging oaths like these in the Knights of Ozem, to clearly disambiguate the promise on offer into a form legible to the recipient of the one and reliably followable by the one who swore it. For some of them, it's almost dissapointing that in practice this works out to them swearing to "take the oath under the ordinary conditions of the Knights of Ozem," but such is the power of the reputation they have constructed. Individual knights do ever break their word, but they are few and far between and the neither the church of Iomedae nor any of their allied organizations act to keep those occurrences that do happen secret.

It takes Kakara a few seconds to fully go over that oath, to make sure it's promising what it sounds like it's saying and that that is enough for her own purposes. As the people back home would track it, it shouldn't be; to share this information, even under these circumstances, is a grave violation of the masquerade. But as the sole unsuborned saiyan royal, she does indeed have astonishing lattitude to utilize her own judgment both by custom and by law, and "trustworthy allies in an entirely other universe from the enemy told in a way that can't lead them back" is about as good as it can get outside of Heaven.

"I am not fully human; biologically speaking, about 92% of my ancestry is, but the remaining 8% is of Saiyan descent. Pure Saiyans are a near-human species, of whom the most visually notable difference between them and humanity is the tails, and my true appearance as you see now is the result of a mixture between those two heritages."

A tail emerges from her Gi, the hair a darker blond than that on her head but with still notable yellow within it.

"I would prefer not to go too far into detail on the genetic and biological differences that entails, but if it's necessary we can discuss it."

That's not the revelation they were expecting out of that leadup, honestly, and they're not sure what to make of it without more information. Golarion has all kinds of partly human hybrids, but there's a large difference between, say, Tieflings and the child of a human and a halfling. Plausibly it's the kind of thing they would understand the urge to keep secret more with more context about either her home world or what a Saiyan is, but trying to learn that from means other than asking Kakara would contravene the promise not to make it more likely the information in question leaked, and she doesn't seem to enthusiastic about sharing more details. They'll keep track of the various broad probabilities, but try not to think about actual specifics so they don't significantly risk the information she is clearly trying to keep secret via this request being leaked through them.

"That should suffice, as long as there is only one species commonly referred to by that name. Is there any other similar revaluations that will be relevant before we go forward with this?"

Revelations, certainly, relevant for this, no.

Then Rochefur can lead her the other direction out the forbiddance, where they're joined by an Iomedaean cleric with a tuning fork and are Plane Shifted to a teleport trap in the landing zone of a private demiplane. Charles can then speak the password to temporarily disarm the entryway traps and a different password to go through the forbiddance down a hallway, where there is another wizard and cleric pair waiting by a glass container with an intubated body. Technologically speaking, it's still significantly less advanced than an exile healing pod, but it's certainly more so than anything else she's seen on Golarion so far.  At a word, the two clerics step outside the mage's private sanctum for him to relay a condensed version of the information Kakara passed on and extract a corresponding oath, but it's less than a minute before the new wizard gestures, a fantastically complex array of magic springing forth towards the tube-

And there's another her, floating in the tube with empty eyes. It's unsettling in a way that mere mirrors cannot adequately prepare someone for, but there definitely doesn't seem to be anything going on upstairs!

Her ki sense is fairly definitive about that, but she'll supplement it with the sight to both ensure there isn't presently a mind and to check pastsight to see if that's changed.

Mage's Private Sanctum!

Or... not, apparently.

"Something seems to be interfering with my ability to check to see if there is or ever was a soul inside of it."

While there are other methods of preventing this from coming to the notice of their enemies, and it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone would know to scry this demiplane at all much less do so this very minute with enough strength to bypass them, it's borrowing trouble to risk it even without considering the cost of reapplying a permanancy to it. On the other hand, that's not an entirely unreasonable concern to have (and neither are any of the possible related worries, like checking to make sure the clone doesn't have any magical traps, which she might not want to admit to), and on the whole they'd prefer their allies be at least this careful about not doing evil in the name of expediency to the alternative when they're this strong. They can work with people who that doesn't describe, and often do, but that's not to say they like it.

The mage's private sanctum can be dispelled, and less disruptive protections against scrying employed.

She still doesn't seem to be able to look back at when the sanctum was up, at least without taking a psychic sledghammer to a magical structure that doesn't even exist anymore, but she can look at how it is now, and it is super not the kind of thing that ever had a soul in it before, though it's equally visibly designed to hold one.

With that confirmed, she'll step into the place where its mindscape ought to be, and fall-

-right into it. The forbiddance prevents her from instant transmitting out of the tube, but it's designed to be opened from within by wimpy wizards who might not be in complete control of their emotions; it doesn't really present an obstacle to her to get out without damaging anything. A quick application of telekinisis gets the liquid off her body, and she moves into some stretches. The waterproof robes the body was inside aren't the most neatly fitting, but they won't have a problem staying on and she'd like to take a moment to luxuriate in the feeling of being corporeal again before finding a private place to change.

From the inside, the body is recognizably hers, but shockingly untrained. The tail still hurts to grasp, and while it's impressively fit by human standards she'll have issues if she wants to channel too much of her Ki through it without some training - training which, even via exile methods, will take her months to restore her to her full strength. It's still more than enough to burn the continents to ash, though, if for some reason she took total leave of her senses and thought that was a good idea. Kakara forms a glowing ball of Ki within her right hand, and then nods to herself. Her control is only lightly affected.

"It's not a perfect solution - I'm not as strong as I used to be, my ki is a little less responsive, and I don't think I could take nearly as many hits. I wouldn't want to fight anyone on my level like this if I could help it. But I'm pretty sure I can do instant transmission, and there are a lot of fights out there I can get into that aren't in my league. Relatively soon I'd like some time in an empty demiplane to get some training in, if a better solution isn't inbound, but I don't expect it to be urgent on the scale of days."

They'd like to cast a mind blank on her, and then see what she can do to help with teleportation logistics for them and other Good churches. There are a couple experiments worth trying with regards to her ability to power magic, but while the two of them are some of Lastwall's best mages neither one has a lot of experience with Limited Wish, so they're waiting on a specialist to be free.

"What, exactly, is a Mind Blank?"

"A sorcerer's answer to their own inadequacy. They cannot defeat a psychic in mental combat, so instead, they don't fight them at all; rather than blocking the powers by main force, they blind the psychic so that they cannot see what they're doing." He smirks, then. "Of course, just because you can't see in detail what you're messing with doesn't mean you can't effect it, just makes it harder to be more precise. Against a skilled enough opponent, all that a mind blank offers the sorcerer in question is a false sense of security in their own defenses against mind control. Your shields are already good enough to keep me out; their efforts are good for their own reassurance, and little else."

"That description is, essentially speaking, accurate, and it is indeed reassuring that the bonus to Will saves versus mind effecting spells is unneeded. But Mind Blank, or at least Golarion's formulation thereof, has one additional benefit - it also blocks out all manner of scrying, search spells, and other divinations, most notably including the method by which Wish determines which person is the one specified. Someone under the effect of a Mind Blank, therefore, cannot be kidnapped via wish at all, and most methods of information gathering fail outright in a way uninformative to the caster."

Dazarel actually looks somewhat impressed by that. It's definitely begrudging, but compared to the amount of disdain he usually holds for people in general and especially people other than Kakara, it's readily noticeable.

"Your 'wizards' are significantly more capable than our local counterparts on that score, then. Perhaps this isn't a total waste."

If Dazarel is willing to agree with Lastwall on this, that means it's either really bad news about Lastwall or good news about the spell, and she's pretty sure she has a good enough grasp on both of them to know if either was trying to deceive her and is basically certain about Dazarel. She'll agree to a Mind Blank.

A Mind Blank doesn't feel like anything, from the inside. It has no impact on sensing outwards, does not interfere with her telepathy, and does not block her own sight moving forward or backwards. It is also simultaneously exceedingly obvious to her senses, like viewing the world through non prescription glasses. It's unlikely to interfere with her accomplishing anything, but it does feel very weird.

Looking at herself with the sight is slightly more difficult for Kakara than looking at something else, but yup, that sure does seem to be a mental protection spell. She'll get used to it inside the hour, probably.

"If that's everything, I think the next priority was my assisting with some logistics?"

Yep! They just have to walk back outside the forbiddance, and then they can Plane Shift back to Golarion.

"If you'd like, I could handle that part. You seem to have a limit on how many Plane Shifts you get a day, but Instant Transmission doesn't have that kind of limitation."

They hadn't actually been expecting Instant Transmission to be able to do that, but yeah, if she can just bring them back to Vigil that'd be great.

Her fingers rise to her forehead.

Pop.

When Lastwall reached out to all of its alliance partners at the worldwound and offered to take over the hard part of their logistics, most of them were politely skeptical. It's not that they didn't believe Lastwall when they talked about good faith cooperation to ease the burden on the forces willing to sacrifice of themselves to keep the worldwound under control, or that they weren't Lawful enough to leave it in their hands once agreed, but a question of capabilities; the teleport equation is a harsh mistress, and even the longstanding agreements among the various Good churches to share their bags of holding and caches as efficient hadn't managed to do much to overcome it. Once the offer was given at just over half the going rate - with option to scale up their present orders at the new price - and a promise to glomarize any information they found out about how it was done, though, they got a lot more interested in accepting.

And so was is that rather than merely providing transportation for Lastwall and Mendev, Kakara was instead given a hastily assembled list of pictures, descriptions, and map markings for staging points, warehouses, and target fortresses for every church from Abadar to Milani.

She can't instant transmission off images or maps and can only partly fake it with the Sight, but that's much less of an issue when you can form a ki bubble around you to let you break the sound barrier over your knee without anything so crass as a sonic boom. It might have been a different matter if she'd had to slow down to carry the large crates of goods without breaking anything, but thankfully the local bags of holding and portable holes were as useful as capsules for that. If anything, the biggest delay was figuring out who in Vigil had a ring of invisibility they could most afford to spare, which ended up solving itself when Kakara pointed out she could just as easily drop by Nerosyan to pick one up there.

Playing glorified cargo plane for humans might be a bit beneath the dignity of the Scion of House Goku, but she had a hard time caring about that when she was actually on Garenhuld.

Most of the people she delivers to are grateful for it - or at least, grateful for the unlooked-for increase in supplies transported - but more towards Lastwall in general for arranging it rather than her in specific, who they didn't see and don't know exists except in the vague sense that someone or someones working with Lastwall had a breakthrough with supply logistics. Some people speculate they managed to find a way to fit Teleport into a 4th circle slot without giving up almost all the range like Dimensional Door does, while others seem to think the Church of Iomedae received an offer from some wizarding association whose members were at risk of ending up in Hell. Nobody seems to have hit upon the "actually just one really strong alien" hypothesis just yet.

That's fine, she wasn't doing it for the praise and agrees with the strategic logic of why it's not necessarily the best idea to be announcing her presence on Golarion openly to all and sundry just yet. She'll keep an eye out to make sure that Lastwall isn't using their new credit in ways she egregiously disapproves of, but she doesn't expect it of them at this point.

Between the (many) starting locations and destinations, the labor of bagging and unbagging the various supplies, and the handful of times she ended up needing to fly concentric circles around a landmark until she found the fortress they'd mislocated on a map, she's flown and instant transmitted a pretty astonishing distance even by her standards. At the power level she maintained so as to not stress the Mind Blank that protects her from lighting up like a moving beacon to anyone who can sense Ki, it took about an hour.

Wow, that was fast! You might think they would be used to this, what with Teleport being essentially instantaneous, but that just means most of the time sink takes the form of loading and unloading goods, people stopping to chat, mishaps landing you slightly off topic, and the like. An hour would have been moderately surprising even if it was just Teleportation, and once they learned she'd have to fly for a lot of it they'd been steadily incrementing up their estimates for how long it would take.

Is there any chance she feels up for delivering messages too?

Delivering messages sounds fine, actually, but unlike supplies she doesn't just deliver them to an obvious warehouse. As long as it's people who it's not a security risk to know she exists?

Ah, right, that does make it a bit more complicated. How about transporting couriers with messages and having them do the last mile handoff?

It ends up being a little more complicated than the supply runs, what with her needing to Instant Transmission someone else and then wait for them to finish, but not actually especially difficult. All of the mail can reach its intended city of receipt, even the bits not normally high priority enough to merit a Teleport.

And then it will transpire that enough time has passed that they'd like her to try her hand at empowering some magic for them.

"There's actually a lot of potential use cases for it, especially if you can do arbitrary metamagic rather than just strength ala empowering and maximizing," says the unfamiliar wizard standing next to Charles Rochefor, once they're safely ensconced withing a mage's private sanctum and forbiddance located within Lastwall's most secure demiplane, "but what we're really hoping for is you being able to help with Wish."

"I'm not sure how much I can do about that. Wishes... Wishes are hard. The only way I know to reliably do that is-"

"I will not be made a slave!"

"I wasn't going to suggest it! Slavery is an abomination, though that objection is a bit rich, coming from you of all people!"

"I... feel like I'm missing some key context here, sorry."

"The filthy slugs enslave-"

"We haven't forgotten everything from back then, thank you very much, which includes enough to know that's bullshit. But just because they consented to it doesn't mean I'd do it to you against your will!"

She then turns to the wizards still in the room with them.

"Back in universe 7, there are a set of artifacts known as the Dragon Balls. When you gather all 7, you can summon the corresponding Dragon to grant a wish - or three, if it's Porunga. One of the sets, the ones corresponding to the dragon Shenron, were destroyed in the Death of Earth a few centuries back, but as far as I'm aware the other set on New Namek is still around today. Dazarel was reacting to the idea that I might work with you to try and bind him to a corresponding set, which I won't. I'm ambitious, sure, but there are roads I'm not willing to take for the sake of power, and that's one of them."

What. Items of Wish, reusable. Suddenly he very much wants to meet whichever wizards from her home universe managed to make that one work, although from the sound of it there's decent odds they died centuries or millennia ago. If they didn't have any alternative... plausibly he would be willing to go down that path she isn't, although not in this specific case without her agreement. Enslaving people really is awful, but it's not like sometimes you don't have to kill really awful people who will end up in Hell afterwards if its to save enough people, and it's hard to say that this is really worse than that if there's some Dragons that consented to it. He's glad he doesn't live in that world, though, and that instead that's not the kind of compromise he has to choose to make one way or another.

"We're not talking about anything of the sort here. There's a spell that wizards can cast - a pair of them, actually, at 7th circle and 9th circle respectively, that are known as Limited Wish and Wish. Even for spells of their circle, they're extremely complicated to stabilize, and they're also some of the hardest spells to cast right period, because they do exactly what you say and if you don't know what you're trying to specify - or can't hold the concept clear enough in your head while you speak the wording - the results can be catastrophic. They're also incredibly costly, but for that they're some of the most powerful spells in existence and extremely valuable.

"Our hope is that with your enhancement, we can use Lesser Wish in place of Wish in at least some senses. Ideally, this would include the full effect of Wish with a Limited Wish diamond and spell slot, but even making a 7th circle wizard able to cast Wish with the appropriate diamond or partly scaling up the effects of Limited Wish - like imitating 6th circle divine spells - would be an enormous boon."

Normal sorcerers wizards who can make wishes. For a moment, Kakara is lost in thoughts of what the exiles could do if their sorcerers could pull that off, but she's pretty sure it's far enough off their sealing paradigm that they'd have to rebuild the entire thing. One part of the explanation does stand out to her, though.

"Apologies, but I think I'm misunderstanding something. You keep talking about diamonds; are you referring to carbon crystals? Extremely hard as far as minerals go, ordinarily clear but get colors from contaminants, extremely thermally conductive, rigid, rather pretty? What do those have to do with wishes? Do they soak up magic if they're on a leyline or something?"

"No, as far as we're aware any diamond of the proper size will do as a focus, but they're consumed in the doing. A lot of spells have diamonds as components, including almost all the ways to restore the dead, which means they're in very high demand and very short supply, and is in turn why being able to make use of a smaller one would be so valuable; the diamonds required by Wish are the largest of any spell, on par with that taken for a Miracle and just larger than those needed for True Resurrection."

"And... how big are the gemstones in question?"

He holds his fingers apart. It's not a very long distance.

"Is there something non obvious I'm missing about this situation? Because those are tiny and Diamonds aren't especially rare, even if your technology doesn't seem good enough that I would expect it to even be as good at mining diamonds as back home. If Golarion is similar geologically to Garenhuld, I could probably find you a couple dozen of those without much effort and tens of thousands if I put in the work. Although if it's very different it might end up being more efficient for me to drop by another planet - I think they might be pretty common on asteroids? - or put in the research to figure out the primitive methods for growing them in a lab."

"I get the feeling you might underestimate how many diamonds have been mined on Golarion. We don't mine for them by hand, the go to strategy back when there was more to be found was to bind a dozen huge earth elementals to go through the plot in question at 4 feet a second and pull out all the gemstones within, then sort them. Most diamond mining takes place on the elemental plane of Earth for that reason, though of course you do sometimes find diamonds in places with low enough concentration people didn't bother to strip mine it or they assumed someone else already had."

Then he blinks, and processes the rest of her statement.

"You can travel to other worlds just like that? That could be a real gamechanger, although I would caution you not to waste too much of your time trying to make them artificially. A great many wizards and alchemists have put in collectively millions of hours into the topic and to my knowledge nobody has ever gotten anywhere."

"As long as you wrap yourself in a bubble of Ki to keep in air, it's just like flying in atmosphere - how far you can fly is just a question of how much acceleration you can put out, and that's before taking instant transmission into account. I could go for longer with air tanks, but if it's just for dropping by the asteroid belt to pick up a couple promising rocks that shouldn't be necessary." She grins, then. "And I can dig a lot faster than 4 feet a second."

"As for the diamond synthesis... I'm not sure how it works myself, so maybe it requires more power output than I can feasibly bash together unless I power it myself, or something. But it's definitely possible to do, that's how we get most of our gems back home, especially ones that are harder to get your hands on than diamonds. It would just be a question of using pastsight to figure out how they did it, and then finding some workaround for the fact that I'm not really an engineer."

"Yesterday, before you arrived here, is someone had said that I would have said that if they could manage that, it would be the most important thing in the world. Today... it would still be incredibly important. Lastwall does not have any 9th circle wizards, nor does Lawful Good in general, and that's not something we expect to change in the near future unless something really surprising happens to one of our 8th circles or somehow your powers are enough to rescue Arazni - to be clear you should not try and do that. But there is Felandriel Morgethai and even if she's also chaotic she takes the Good part of that incredibly seriously. We can get wishes, if you can supply the diamonds."

It's just one surprise after another, with Karen, but they're good surprises of a kind he had never expected in anything short of his wildest dreams where Aroden turned out to have faked his death as part of a plot to unseat Asmodeus. Arguably he shouldn't have even mentioned Arazni but he's in the kind of excited mood where it's hard to take that kind of concern seriously. He still has some self control, though, and exercises it shortly after.

"I think it is probably still worth trying, to enhance a Limited Wish, but I would understand if you didn't want to. There is some risk to it, and if normal wishes we know work are on the line, a lot of the potential benefit we expected it to offer is obviated."

On the one hand, she does appreciate the warning and is very confident in her ability to work something out when it comes to diamonds. On the other hand... while she was appraised on the dangers of this work prior to starting it, it's not like it's going to do anything more to her than singe her clothes, and she's pretty confident she can keep him safe from all but the absolute worst catastrophes that they're essentially certain this methodology doesn't risk. Even a half second's notice from foresight is a lot, at a speed where high-velocity bullets hang in the air motionless.

She'll go ahead with it.

The structure of the spell, unfurled as slowly as he can without risking breaking it, is hard to describe. It's fractionally complex, each layer of the structure building upon the next and supporting the filigree-thin strings of magic that weave their way through it. At the center of it, she can see the exact slot where the diamond fits in, and suddenly its inclusion makes far more sense. While examining it at her maximum magnification, she gets a sense that a skilled enough magic user could simply do without, but any effort on her part to figure out the details on that run straight into the fact that the sole total of her own magical training consists of a handful of short sessions - from an archmage, yes, but one of an entirely different tradition and magical paradigm. It might not be totally impossible to accomplish something like this with sealing magic, but it would be an effort of contortion, creativity, and sheer brilliance to render Dandeer's achievements in the realm of mind control a child's jest.

It's beautiful.

Can she add more power, without totally shattering it?

The spell structure is complete, in a way that no other spell she's ever seen can claim, with no obvious method for expansion. She could maybe... thicken the scaffold? But it's not clear what good that would do, when it doesn't rely on those to complete its function - it might make it harder to counterspell, perhaps, or allow it to expand faster without breaking, but not affect the final result.

...

If you look at the way the patterns repeat, it's almost like you could imagine another, yet more complicated shell forming over it, creating a difference as much qualitative as quantitative. But it's not clear how you would actually make that from ki, even if you knew what it would have to look like somehow. Maybe if she instead helped him while he hung the scaffold in the first place, with enough trial and error, it might be possible to figure out?

...It might also require her to spend months actually learning some magical theory and study some more topology first.

She knew, going in, she probably wouldn't be able to manage it. Her ability to power up their spells only worked along the lines the spells are designed to be powered along, and the difference between Wish and Limited Wish is more than that. But even accounting for that, she's surprisingly dissapointed that she couldn't find a way to improve upon the fourth third most impressive spell she's ever seen on her first try. She breathes in, deeply, and then back out, centering herself, and then strengthens the scaffold just in case that does end up doing something valuable.

The Limited Wish triggers, consuming the diamond, and manifests the specified spell. There... might be more magical energy in it than there would have been otherwise, as a result of her strengthening the scaffold? It is really not clear.

Seeing the limited wish in action looks almost like casting another spell, but instead of controlling and bending the flow of energy from the caster, it instead manifests the effect directly, conjuring the complex structure from thin air. Before it finishes, however, the spell comes to a halt, and the structure starts to fall apart, half complete. There's a moment where it almost feels as though she could have finished it herself, if she knew what to do, but then the moment ends and it falls apart beyond repair.

The wizards are also watching the spellform, their eyes glowing blue with the visual effect of Greater Arcane Sight.

"That's unfortunate. I figured if there was any effect you could get from it, it would be being able to imitate 7th circle arcane spells, but it seems like it doesn't work that way. It might have gotten any further at constructing it, but you'd have to boost it by easily a hundred times that much power to span the gap and you'd blow it up a hundred times over doing it."

"I think if I wanted to make it any stronger, I would have to construct an entire new layer of the... structure, and I haven't the faintest idea where to start with that, or if it would even be enough."

"It was a bit of a long shot anyway."

Then with that completed, Kakara can go hunting for diamonds. It takes a bit, to make it clear to the sight what she's looking for, and then a bit more to sort by availability rather than number - the diamond rainstorms on Bretheda are undeniably breathtaking, but the flight out there would take hours. Also ruled out are pockets of diamonds in people's posessions, or buried underneath densely populated areas such that people might consider themselves to have property rights that encompass them. Instead, Kakara settles on a hitherto unmined collection of diamonds and surrounding rock located near a volcanic vent on the northern Arcadian sea floor and takes off.

The ocean depths of Golarion are no friend to mortals. Even if you can survive the bitter cold and crushing, lightless pressure, even if you were forewarned of the enormous wildlife that terrestrial oceans can support, you might still find yourself helpless in the face of the creatures that dwell beyond the gaze of the sun. Even the mighty Krakens and Deep Sea Serpents, so feared by those who sail upon the ocean's surface, cannot swim with impunity, and if the Alghollthus ever claimed total dominion over it such arrogance was thoroughly shattered during earthfall.

Nevertheless, it remains the case that Kakara does not encounter anything such creatures during their dive, nor can her senses detect any within a mile of her. The ocean is really big.

Well, that's convenient! She'll glow up a bit, so she can see where she's aiming, then melt her way through the rock to get her hands on the diamonds.

...probably melting the rock underwater won't do anything bad, right, there's a volcanic vent right over there? This is the kind of question that makes Kakara really wish she could just look up the answer.

After a brief check in over at the vent itself to see how quickly the ocean water bleeds off heat, Kakara melts her way through the rock as planned and starts telekinetically pulling out the diamonds. She doesn't have to - it's not like it would burn her hands, or anything - but the inefficiency isn't really a big deal with this little force being exerted and it's probably good practice. Doing so is a task that requires a lot of focus from her, though, so she'll be pretty distracted. Is anything going to try anything?

Absolutely not.

...Okay, maybe, if she spent more time at it. But in the context of Golarion's oceans, glowing tends to mean mating signalling, lures, or spell-like abilities, and everything in the immediate area is low enough on the food chain to be uncomfortable taking that kind of risk. If she sticks around for long enough some of them might try their luck? Not in the first minute, though.

No, by the time a minute passes she should be done digging up the diamonds and is just finishing up putting all the molten stone back. If that's the timeframe they're working on, she'll end up leaving uninterrupted. The rocks in her cupped hands prove no barrier to rocketing out of the ocean or the transcontinental flight, and she'll return safely, completely dry and with her cargo all accounted for.

"Delivery!"

Unfortunately, Lastwall lacks essentially all the context on that last bit.

Fortunately, they do have the context to appreciate the diamonds. They don't look like the classical Earth conception of diamonds, nor that of Golarion. Even among those gemstones intended from the start for sale only as magical components, unless you work with gemcutters or the organizations that mine the elemental plane of earth, it is astonishingly rare to see completely raw diamonds. The value of diamond dust makes sure of it; any gem seller that leaves diamond in excess of what is needed for a specific class of spell is leaving money on the table. In all but the most foolish cases, of course, that leaves a margin of error, but it tends to result in a certain few common shapes and dimensions. These don't look like that, but they are recognizably diamonds, and relatively large ones too.

One of the paladins is holding back tears, and a fair few are grappling with the fact that there's more money on the table than Lastwall tends to get in a year.

One of them does have a job to do now, though, so they'll force themself to stop staring.

"Thank you, so much; even if you had to leave now, just doing this will save thousands of lives. But between the Teleportation and us suddenly having a lot of excess diamonds, it won't be too long before Hell and Cheliax start hearing about you. We'll try to get you a wished up body before then so they can't just turn your body back with a dispel magic or antimagic field, but in the mean time we should get you loaded up with some magic items to make targeting you more expensive on their end."

Ooh, magic items! She saw some earlier in the store, but there's a difference between window shopping and things you might get to actually keep. Garenhuld doesn't really have much in the way of magic items, but they're a fairly common line in saiyan fantasy novels and in tales of Earth; there's not an exile alive who hasn't heard of Son Goku's Nyoibo or Kinto'un, to say nothing of the dragonballs.

They've got a shirt that makes you harder to cast spells on and a set of robes that make ki users stronger and harder to hit - the latter's magic apparently includes making sure flapping sleeves and the like don't get in the way of melee combat. There's goggles that let you see whether someone is good or evil ("Not completely reliable," one of them mentions, "particularly when it comes to false negatives, but should be useful until we can arrange a permanent Aura Sight and swap it out for keen vision") and some gloves that let the user make use of a variety of healing spells ("though only a limited number of charges"). There are boots that make you act faster for a minute each day and a cloak that aids in avoiding or mitigating most unusual attacks, including magical ones, hats and bracers ("we'll get to those in a minute, which one you want depends on your other choices"), and a belt that increases dexterity and endurance.

Woah.

She knew this planet had a lot of magic, and that most of the high ranking people she met with were incredibly blinged out in magical gear, but seeing them laid out for her is an entirely different experience. What about the decisions she apparently needs to make?

You can only have one of each kind of magical item; otherwise, the enchantments interfere with each other. Over the millenia since earthfall, crafters on Golarion have gotten really good at putting multiple bonuses on a given item and carefully getting different 'slots' to play nicely with other similar ones, like allowing both shirts and robes or use of a second ring without cancelling out the first, but there are still limits, and some bonuses only fit in a handful of specific slots at their modern level of skill, so if you want more than one of them you have to make tradeoffs. Specifically with her, that means Amulets, Rings, and Headbands.

"The headband choice is perhaps the simplest; you'll almost certainly be best served by a mental enhancement. The question is which one; cunning, wisdom, or splendor. Normally I would recommend wisdom for non-Paladin melee fighters, since it helps with avoiding bad decisions and making will saves, but it’s possible some of your spell like abilities or extraordinary skills scale off one of the others which might make them more valuable. There are also headbands that boost all three to a lesser extent, but typically they aren’t all equally valuable so it doesn’t make sense.”

There are four headbands on the table, each labeled with what Share Language: Taldane helpfully informs her is indeed those words.

She'll start with splendor, then, because while the other two seem pretty self explanatory she's not really sure what the connotations she's getting from the word mean. Something to due with social abilities, yes, but that's more a matter of skill and practice, and much of what isn't is things like knowing personal details about the person she's talking with. What does splendor do, that they seem to concider it one of the major components to mental ability? She ties the headband around her head, and-

It's like instinctively knowing how to walk confidently, to control your expressions, to read someone else's body language and just know what they're probably thinking. Or no, not exactly, because Kakara already knows how to do those things. She's good at communicating and understanding people and just social tasks in general, by dint of natural talent and painstaking effort. Moreover, she is aware of her own skills, both their extent and their limitations, which makes the difference obvious even before her expanded capacity to model people gets to work on self reflection. Just off the top of her head, she can think of a dozen occasions since arriving where gave an impression she didn't mean to and worsened their understanding of her, or failed to see across a cultural divide, or gave something away she didn't wish to, and sliding back into the past all the problems she had ignored, the signs of Yammar being controlled and of Maya keeping secrets and even Dandeer's insecurities. And with the same clarity towards how she appears to others comes awareness of her own emotions, of the negative feelings that have been with her since she fled Garenhuld that she's been suppressing and the fear she hasn't allowed herself to fear in its fullness or else risk stopping. It's not self reflection, exactly, but if she had to trigger the super saiyan transformation for the first time again, achieving the right mental state would be the easiest thing in the world.


Is this what it feels like for Papata Fren all the time?

She doesn't want to take it off. She never wants to take it off again, to blind herself all over again to all the ways she could resolve problems without conflict and change society for the better, to go back to flailing around in the dark after having seen at last what light looks like. But if cunning and wisdom are also strong enough to be spoken of in the same breath as splendor, she owes them all the souls suffering in hell and her people imprisoned and enslaved on Garenhuld and everyone in this universe now free but with the spectre of doom over their heads, to find out. With a hint of anguish she can't fully keep from showing, Kakara takes the headband off to try the other two.

That's more than a little concerning! But it's not that uncommon among wizards to describe taking off their headband as feeling like dying, and although it's a much rarer sentiment for splendor that is the primary casting stat of Paladins, so they have a pretty large sample size. It's not enough for them to interrupt her, not when they can't do anything to help.

Cunning is an entirely different animal. With her intelligence boosted, her thoughts come faster, almost as though she'd just powered up but with her energy staying completely quiescent. Only... that's not exactly right, it's not that she's going through the thoughts twice as quickly, it's just that her train of thought only needs to make half as many stops along the route to arrive at its destination. Like this, the instant transmission mathematics that have long since become her second nature seem trivial, as though her cached thoughts for speed of calculation are just vanity; if she wanted to jump anywhere on golarion off of a map, she's confident she could make it within a few hundred feet even accounting for the need to end up aboveground to account for elevation changes. The perfect multiform project, on which she has been stalled for months, suddenly supplies a half dozen new lines of possible investigation, and she's pretty sure if she got down to it she could figure out how to master Jaffur's and Tabe's tricks down as well as they did. The sight also answers her call more naturally than it ever did before, and it's immediately obvious how to turn that into combat precognition without getting bogged down in the static filling up the future.

It's still far easier to set down.

After having felt the effects of both the cunning and splendor headbands, the addition of wisdom is a far lesser shock. Her surroundings come more into focus, and her ki sensing - already without peer - seems to give yet more detail. If she thought splendor increased her knowledge of herself, then wisdom put the lie to that, tearing apart the rationalizations she gave herself for all the small hurts she dealt people without even thinking, all the times she lied to spare someone else's feelings when what she really did it for was herself, how she let her desire to for normalcy come at the cost of other people having to pay the price. It's obvious now, not just in hindsight but how she should have noticed ahead of time, that she should have entered the hall that day as a spirit saiyan.

"Are you sure there's no way to get all three of these?"

"It's not theoretically impossible, people have had headbands with a bonus of 6 to each stat before, but - custom items, each crafted manually by legendary archmages or obtained at great expense from the gods. Geb would have one, but he's impossible to deal with and trying to take him on always ends poorly. Nex, perhaps, if he yet lives, but nobody has seen hide or hair of him in over 4000 years, and not for lack of trying on the part of some of the most powerful wizards to inhabit Golarion since. Abrogail Thrune, if there was anyone else foolish enough to wear a major artifact crafted personally by Asmodeus. Perhaps a handful of less attested to legends like Baba Yaga and Old-mage Jatembe have one and yet live. But it's not common, even for mythic heroes - the Inheritor was supported by the treasury of Taldor at its height during the Shining Crusade, and her headband was only a 4/4/6 and not hers to keep besides. And outside of headbands, the only items that hold mental stat boosts reliably are Ioun stones which nobody has known how to make since Earthfall."

Yeah, she figured. With their reaction to the diamonds, she's pretty sure if they had one squirreled away they'd be willing to bring it out now. With only relatively minor reluctance, she removes the headband of wisdom again and puts back on splendor.

"And just to be clear, there's no way to change that even with a few hundred more diamonds or some other similarly impossible-to-get items?"

The idea of a few hundred more diamonds is still pretty boggling, both in general and especially as potential payment in a single transaction.

"It's not really the kind of thing you can buy for just money, not even in Aktun or Dis or the City of Brass. Abadar is the god of trade, so for enough money it might perhaps be possible to get him to make one, but neither His high priest nor the ruler of His country have one so the price must be absolutely enormous. Even Felandriel Morgethai only has an extra +2 to wisdom on her intelligence headband, and she's the second greatest archmage in Avistan."

"And the first is, who, Geb? And thus impossible to work with?

"No, Geb rules a country on the continent to the south of Avistan. The archmage in question is Razmir, but the problem is, well."

"There's not really a polite way to put this. He's using his unmatched arcane power to pretend to be a god and rule over a tiny backwater nation as a tinpot dictator. He banned all the churches that don't pretend he's a god from operating in Razmiran, which includes us, and he's a horrible trading partner. When he took over, he confiscated all the banks in his country, raised the taxes beyond what his citizens could bear, and spent the wealth of a country on his own luxury and whims. Even if propping his regime up wouldn't be doing his people a terrible disservice, he could hardly be trusted to follow through on a deal, Lawful Evil or no. Which is especially a shame since having a second 9th circle wizard could mean we can turn excess diamonds you supply into a notable abilitystat boost of their own, but enhancing them via wish requires the spells happen in immediate succession and Morgethai only has one 9th circle slot a day."

That's disappointing; she'll have to somehow content herself with this magic item that makes her better at diplomacy. A terrible fate, to be sure.

What about the other choices?

"That depends. Can you wear armor?"

Can she... wear armor? What?

"Are you asking if I'm like, physically strong enough to wear armor? Or if I'm willing to wear armor?"

"No, although judging by that the answer is probably yes. Some kinds of adventurers - Wizards, monks, and sorcerers mostly - can't wear armor without it interfering with their abilities."

"In that case, no, I've never heard of armor interfering except in the sense that some designs can limit your flexibility. I'm very hard to hurt, though, so I wouldn't expect it to be very valuable?"

She still has a set of saiyan royal armor lying around at home, totally unused, that was created to protect its wearer with technology far in advance of Golarion's and still wouldn't really matter in any fight she had to get serious in. If they offer utility boosts like the other magic items do, then that might change things.

Most of the listed effects aren't going to be terribly useful then! There's enchantments to help the wearer dodge attacks or make them immune to weak blows or automatically catch arrows that she probably wouldn't even notice in practice. A few of them seem slightly more useful, like offering a moderate resistance to poison (though looking closer, it's fully redundant with the cloak) or letting her calm down enemies in an unnatural rage that might be handy against a rampaging oozaru, but even absorbing spells seems to only work on weak casters.

The main one they seemed to have highlighted heals you when you're on the brink of death once a day, which she doesn't really expect to trigger but would probably be fantastically useful if it did, so fair enough. Then one other entry catches her eye.

They've only got a handful of mind-buttressing armors going spare, Paladins don't to have much need for them and other members of Lastwall's forces correspondingly specialize, so they're going to have to skip on the impervious in the short term unless-

"I know an adventurer from Andoran on the worldwound deployment with a +3 Impervious Mind Buttressing Mithral Agile Breastplate in about her size so it'd only need minor refitting, she'd probably give it if we told her it was important and couldn't say why but would be more enthusiastic if it was a swap for an upgrade-"

- it'll probably take them most of the rest of the day even if they hurry, but they can probably get it for her. Adding the comfortable or determined enchantment on top of that  would be possible but it would take time, it's probably not worth it in the short term.

If they can just add enchantments to armor she wants it on the best engineering Garenhuld can create so it'll won't break and she'll never be vulnerable to mind control again- no, not the time, she can't exactly go fetch any of it and has approximately negative idea how to reverse engineer any of it. This will do, she'll just have to make sure to be careful to shield the armor with her Ki. And with the armor sorted out?

Well, if she has actual armor then she'll want the bracers that make you luckier instead of the magic armor ones, and the mind-buttressing armor obviates the cap of the free thinker so for hats she just needs to choose between shapeshifting or being more persuasive, which after her reaction to the headbands they assume means the latter?

They're also leaning more towards her not needing bonus armor, which is the usual recommendation for high level adventurers. but that still leaves amulets and necklaces that boost unarmed attacks or aid in averting bad magical outcomes or offer immunity to disease ("That last one probably isn't the right choice, we can cure most diseases pretty easily here and even if Hell manages to kidnap you with wish it's unlikely you'd be facing Barbator personally, but we wanted to be clear it was on the table").

Oh yes, she absolutely wants that circlet. Shapeshifting does sound pretty cool, but she already has the important bits for disguise from her masque and being more persuasive would solve so many of her problems.

(Kakara is so happy about this, it feels like all her life she's been wanting to solve problems by talking and diplomacy and had to attempt it in a society hostile to the very idea that strength shouldn't be a key determining factor in running society, but now that she's on Golarion they're just going to help her get better at it!)

She's not super clear what "being luckier" boils down to in practice but she'll trust the experts. Boosting unarmed attacks... when she puts it on, she can feel the difference, but it's pretty subtle and she could blow any difference out of the water with even a minor willpower push, and none of the possible weapon enchantments that can apparently go on it catch her eye either besides phase locking, which frankly seems more of a thing to be concerned about happening to her than the other way around. She'll go with the avoiding bad magical outcomes, then, even being a Super Saiyan doesn't make you completely immune to that so every bit helps.

Then that just leaves rings! Since she doesn't have to sleep, that again means the Ring of Sustenance is much less needed, but there are a lot of really strong options competing for a ring slot. Since she uses Ki, they tracked down a Vudran ring of Ki Mastery, but there's also a few other standout picks like an intact ring of Delayed Doom that would let her push off a wide variety of harmful effects into the future, one that helps deflect attacks, one that heals its user, and a rare item out of Rahadoum that helps defend against gods and clerics.

Kakara puts on the Ki ring to be sure, but as she suspected exile Ki training is leagues ahead of the local kind at this; it doesn't let her do anything new or notably improve her abilities. The anti-divine ring is an obvious pick with how her vision of Asmodeus went, but both the healing and delayed doom seem like incredibly powerful affects. The regeneration isn't the fastest, especially when compared against just taking a sensu bean, but she doesn't exactly have a stockpile of those on hand and her Ki healing abilities are pretty basic. On the other hand, delaying an effect by even just a minute in combat is basically eternity, and being able to do so for nine minutes (or for 9 different effects) is overkill of the best kind.

...She's not completely sure she'll stick with it, but she'll take the Ring of Delayed Doom. Do they have any healing consumables besides the gloves she can take?

Healing also comes in wands, staves, potions, and scrolls! They can get her a miniature bag of holding for that and a few other miscellanea, like cash, no problem.

Looking at her reflection in a mirror, Kakara can't deny she looks kind of silly. This is a lot more layers and individual peices of clothing than she has ever worn at once in the past. But she's also thoroughly learned her lesson on the matter of looking foolish vs being foolish, and doesn't intend to make the same mistake again. Besides, it's not that bad to move around in at least.

"Right. I've gotten a mind blank, solved your logistics problems - at least for the moment - gotten some diamonds, and now have a full set of defensive items. Is there anything else that's urgent on the scales of hours or days?"

"We've scheduled a private meeting with Felandriel Morgethai this evening; under the circumstances, we could have gotten one sooner, but it was judged to leak less information if she didn't suddenly alter her schedule. Aside from that, no."

"In that case, I think it's past time I got oriented on what the deal is here with Golarion. History, Geopolitics, Magic, Gods, the works."

That's something they can arrange! History is not a major focus of Iomedae's church, not like it was for Aroden, but they did inherit a lot of his clergy and most importantly his libraries, so even a military order with a state like Lastwall is well equipped, and not just with copies of the History and Future of Humanity.

That's good, because holy book or no she was definitely giving that title some side eyes after noticing the planet had more than one species. Does it make sense to start at the beginning?

There's no consensus on what, exactly, Rovagug is, or if that even makes sense as a question to ask about the Qlippoth. Whatever his nature, however, his actions are usually best understood as, essentially, acting on mindless hunger. He was also within Pharasma's creation nearly from the bigginning, gnawing away at the abyss; though he occasionally travelled to other realms like Axis, he was content to be herded off in short order. He was too powerful to be slain, his very presence damaged prophecy, and he could not be dissuaded from wrecking what they had constructed in the long term, but he was, for the most part, a manageable problem. And then the gods created mortals.

It took some time for this problem to be clear, for Rovagug was at that point in the Abyss far from the prime material, but once he did, it seems he found he liked the taste of mortal souls and set about consuming planets. The normal methods of dissuading and diverting him proved ineffective in the face of something he genuinely wanted, and since he was significantly stronger than even the ancient gods there wasn't a lot of room for alternate methods. Despairing of the deaths, Sarenrae arranged a coalition of all who would listen to stop him. Asmodeus and Shelyn, Shiziru and Calistria, Abadar and Desna, Gorum and Dou-Bral and Gozreh and Apsu and Dahak and even Pharasma Herself arrayed themselves against him. Some of the gods most dissatisfied with the state of the universe fought alongside Rovagug in the hopes that the impossibility of foreseeing the battle's result meant they had a chance of success, but against the arrayed forces it proved insufficient. His erstwhile 'allies' slain, Rovagug was lure to a prepared trap and sealed away by the combined effort of the gods involved, where he has thrashed against his cage ever since.

The world in which he is trapped is Golarion.

"Er, he's not in danger of getting free soon, right? Unless one of the gods lets him out or something?"

"Not as far as we're aware. He's less imprisoned than he once was; some of the gods that contributed to his imprisonment are dead, and when Dou-Bral became Zon-Kuthon he ceased to give power to the star towers that prevented Rovagug from picking clerics or communicating outside. This was over 10,000 years ago, though, and as far as we know he hasn't managed to get especially close at any point since."

The oldest records known to modern day Golarion, as distinguished from the relayed claims of the gods, pick up about 10,000 years before the present. They begin, to the lament of many historians "in media res," and to make matters worse are woefully incomplete and rely heavily on Aroden's individual testimony and archeological evidence, though there's no any specific reason to doubt most of it happened as described.

The Aboleth were at this point already an ancient civilization, that had ruled the seas of Golarion from beneath their surface for unknown ages. At some point - a few centuries to a millenia before the surviving histories were written - they had begun sharing what they knew with the humans on the surface, and helped them build their civilization. It was, likely, not entirely benevolent, but the overall effects were positive and the shared knowledge of magic and technologies propelled Azlant and their splinter-state Thassilon to a level never achieved since on Golarion. Among the people they taught was Aroden, who was even in those days a talented mage. At some point, however, some combination of the Azlanti advances, actions, and diplomatic posture made the Alghollthu nervous or angry enough that they declared war. To their shock, however, once the war began they found themselves on the losing side, and in fear or desperation called down the starstone from space. They thought it would simply defeat Azlant, but they miscalculated; the meteor they called down had with it enough energy to wipe out all life on the planet and perhaps even endanger Rovagug's prison. Several gods intervened, sacrificing themselves to slow the attack and in doing so ensured that some life survived on the other side of the planet, but even weakened the strike was enough to largely destroy both Azlant and Thassilon. This event, known as Earthfall, took place in -5293 AR and was responsible for the paucity of earlier sources.

Aroden, by some means unknown even to his church, survived Earthfall and aided in the survival and recovery of humanity during the age of darkness, which had been made worse by the escape of Zon-Kuthon from his imprisonment, which bolstered the forces of evil and resulted in the founding of the horrific nation of Nidal. By about -3470 AR, Golarion had begun to restore something in the way of civilization, and thus began what historians typically refer to as "the age of destiny." Taldor was founded, the wizard Nethys ascended as the half-mad god of magic, Osirion flourished into its greatest golden age, and Aroden accomplished many legendary deeds before setting out to explore the stars in search of something. By -1000 AR, Osirion had begun to decline, and they ceded control of some of their provinces to the Archmage Geb, who's path of expansion put him into conflict with fellow Archmage and Monarch Nex, both of whose nations bore their name.The conflict lasted over a thousand years, and established both as two of the greatest wizards in the history of Golarion and lead Geb to invent much of modern Necromancy, before ending abruptly in 576 AR with the disappearance of Nex.

In 0 AR, Aroden raised the starstone from the sea, placed it within a cathedral in Absalom, wove defenses around it to prevent people from coming into contact with it, touched it, and ascended into godhood, beginning what came to be known as the age of enthronement. Since then, 3 others have passed the challenge successfully and become a god; Norgorber, the Neutral Evil god of thieves and assassins, Cayden Cailean, the Chaotic Good drunken god, and lastly their own patron Iomedae, the Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil. Of these, it is only believed that the third was truly planned; neither of the first two had prior to their ascension established a church, teachings, or holy book, and in the case of Cayden it was known he originally snuck into the temple on a drunken dare. Iomedae, however, was a Paladin of Aroden before she became a goddess and had made her legend by defeating the lich Archmage Tar-Baphon who sought to conquer Golarion in a tide of undead. Having had the ability to plan ahead, she founded her own Paladin orders and churches prior to ascending staffed with her fellow Arodenites, and upon ascending in 3832 AR took them over from Him as His Herald.

Ever since his ascension, it had been prophecized by the oracles of all the gods that Aroden would return in 4606 AR to usher in an age of glory in Golarion. Cheliax, the heart of his religion, had prepared for his return; the king had arranged to abdicate, and people thronged the streets to see him once more in the flesh. Instead, when the appointed day came, the world was wracked with storms as the gods went to war. There were weeks of torrential rain and hurricane gales, not just in Cheliax but around the entire globe, some of which have not ceased to this day. Cities were wrecked in earthquakes, a hole opened to the Abyss in Sarkoris and a flood of demons poured out, and... Aroden died. His clerics stopped getting spells, his return never materialized, and prophecy shattered irreparably. Millions died, from the destruction, loss of crops, and the sudden loss of Arodenite clerics meaning an end to clean drinking water and healing for thousands of communities. The century since has been known as the age of lost omens, and it is in this time that Cheliax came under the rule of Hell after a vicious civil war, Sarkoris fell to demonic hordes from what is now called the worldwound, and what peace there was in Avistan came to an end.

"What other gods are there that I absolutely should know about, what would you say are the most powerful / dangerous countries in modern golarion, and what would you describe as the 5 biggest problems with the current state of the world? Either consensus or your own personal opinion for the last is fine, as long as you let me know which is which."

"Probably the most relevant to you, outside the ancient gods, Nethys, and the starstone ascendant are Irori, Milani, and maybe Smiad. Irori, also known as the master of masters, is a Lawful Neutral Vudran god who supposedly ascended due to self perfection. His church is fairly notable even in the inner sea, and he's known to be a patron to many monks and other practitioners of Ki as he once was in life. Milani is the Chaotic Good goddess of hope and revolution; we work closely with her followers, both due to shared goals and a shared history that carried over from when both she and Iomedae followed Aroden. Smiad is an empyreal lord - that is, a demigod - rather than a full god, but He is known to favor fighting evil dragons, so might look highly upon you. Possibly not, though, since the dragon is still alive? I'm sorry, I'm only familiar with him in passing.

"In the inner sea and Avistan, the most powerful nations are generally agreed to be Cheliax, Taldor, and Galt. Nidal is particularly strong for its size, with essentially all the clerics for one of the ancient gods in one country, but it's small and poor which limits the danger. Absalom is likewise very difficult to conquer and has never been successfully invaded, in addition to being very wealthy, but has historically had a hard time transforming that into a influence abroad. Razmiran is a completely unremarkable nation that happens to have a 9th circle wizard as its god king, and unlike Felandriel Morgethai it's not impossible he would try something; Irissin likewise, although even if Baba Yaga doesn't interfere some of her descendants are still powerful spellcasters. Going beyond Avistan, the Padishah Empire of Kelesh, Vudra, and Minkai are all powerful nations in a traditional sense, with the former even possessing territories in Avistan, while Geb is an otherwise not especially powerful nation ruled by Geb, who is plausibly the most powerful person in Golarion and enslaved Arazni to run it for him.

"The Worldwound and Infernal Cheliax are widely considered both the biggest problems with Golarion and those most likely to get worse in the near future. Outside of that, it becomes less clear; Nidal and Geb are both horrific nations, but their evil has been largely stable and directed inwards, which means they are not especially likely to become more dangerous than they currently are. Also plausible candidates are the House of Oblivion, which is a permanent portal to Abbadon located in Thuvia that regularly spews Divs like the worldwound does demons. Ustulav is... perhaps halfway under control, but the undead infestation there is both an ongoing torment for both the enslaved souls and the living and if they ever managed to free Tar-Baphon would immediately become the biggest threat in Golarion, outstripping even the worldwound. Outside of specific countries, there's the fact that between a quarter and 35% of the population ends up in evil afterlives when they die."

Controlling for the fact that she's getting the 30 second summary, Irori doesn't sound exactly like her kind of thing. Not zero like it, but there are other saiyans she knows that kind of a focus would apply to way more. Milani, on the other hand, sounds like exactly her speed and plausibly a good source of advice for how to make her next revolution not fail. She'll have to make some time to talk with some clerics of Milani and get a better feel for her. As for Smiad... honestly, she's not sure how to respond to that. A demigod of slaying dragons? That's so specific, how could that possibly come up often enough to matter?

The overlap of powerful countries and biggest problems definitely is kind of unfortunate, but in a sense it probably shouldn't surprise her; if it were otherwise, the problems would probably be less intractable. She should probably also be expecting a lot of the countries which don't rank as problems to still be really bad in a lot of ways; it's true of Garenhuld now, and was more true at an equivalent technological level. She probably also ought to look into the problem of if there are any readily end-able wars, but that's probably not the priority in the next few days.

"What would need to be true - or need to stop being true - for those problems to be solved? Like, suppose someone decided to close the House of Oblivion, what would be the kinds of difficulties you would expect them to encounter?"

Probably for a lot of them she either won't want to solve it whatever way seems obvious to them or has capabilities they don't even have in their solution space, but it'll probably helpful to get an idea of how they would go about problem solving it.

"For Cheliax, the main problem is that prior to Hell taking over, they were unquestionably the strongest nation in the inner sea and the support from Hell is enough to make up for many of the downsides to their policies; Asmodeus and His Archdevils preferentially choose clerics there to make up for their limitations on the worship of other gods, Hell gives them funding to support a schooling system to keep up their wizard numbers after the economic collapse of the civil war, Soul Sales allow them to keep the loyalty of their wizards without Cheliax having to compromise with their interests, and so forth. To deal with them... if you could somehow force Hell to withdraw their backing, it would collapse in short order. Otherwise, it would probably require beating them in the field so their armies can't maintain order, wrecking enough of their security state that they can't keep up the oppression, or systematically tear off provinces in revolts like with Andoran. If there was a way to remove the current queen, Abrogail Thrune II, that Hell could not simply retrieve her from that would probably also help; she's unusually competent as Thrunes go, and they were losing territory notably more quickly before her ascension."

That Lastwall's plan is most likely the second via Galt, he thinks but does not say. He hasn't actually been informed that they're helping Galt at all, much less to that extent for that purpose; it's just a guess from them looking like they might be able to take a successful swing at Cheliax in the next decade.

"For Nidal... it's less clear. People have tried no few things in the thousands of years it's been around, and none of them have stuck. Historically, the main problem has always been Zon Kuthon putting His thumb on the scales; He has a lot of power and a lot of subordinate outsiders in reserve He can draw upon to defend His interests. Either something would need to be done by the gods to prevent Him from intervening, or a lot of overwhelming force such that you ran him up past the maximum he is permitted by treaty, and then you would still have to deal with an impoverished uneducated and very traumatized population creating a humanitarian nightmare, especially since if they died from a lack of help they'd most likely end up in Xovaikain or Hell anyway.

"The Worldwound - and the House of Oblivion to a lesser extent - would need either custom Wishes or Miracles to close the planar tear, at minimum, but that wouldn't be enough by itself; the high priestess of Sarenrae was escorted to Threshold with the assistance of a dozen of the strongest the strongest adventurers in the known world to fend off the demons. She then called upon her goddess for a miracle and it didn't work. The spell completed successfully, the tear shrunk a bit temporarily, and things got very bright, but there was some force holding it open that Sarenrae couldn't fit enough power through a miracle to overcome. Our best guess is that the Demon Lords Deskari and Baphomet are primarily responsible, but it's entirely possible they have more support than that. Designing custom Wishes is also one of the leading causes of death for 9th circle wizards, historically speaking, so I would expect any candidate to be reluctant to try. The House of Oblivion might prove more tractable since Ahriman doesn't appear to actually care about maintaining it personally, but it's also been less of a priority because of it being less dangerous.

"As for Geb, short of Nex making a surprise reappearance there's not much hope for it getting solved. We were previously planning to wait on Aroden's return and the Age of Glory to deal with it, but once that ended up not materializing the prospects ran dry. While most of its politics isn't unified enough to create an expansionist policy, it's got the most high level undead per capita of anywhere on Golarion and liches and vampires tend to be notably stronger than they were in life. A great deal of the undead in question also happened to be extremely strong before transforming, including several necromancers that got experience in the war on Nex and are at least 8th circle, and they would unite in the case of an external threat or an order from Geb. Last time we tried doing something about it, he killed the crusaders in our vanguard, raised them as undead slaves, and then teleported to Lastwall to raise our former patron demigod, Arazni, as a lich to run the day to day affairs of his country since he couldn't be bothered. We didn't think that kind of thing was possible even in theory, but 9th circle wizards as old as he is tend to treat rules of reality as more of a suggestion. In life and as Aroden's herald, she was already one of the most capable wizards in history; being a lich most likely made that even more true, though it's hard to verify. And even if someone managed to get past all of that, that would just mean that they had to face Geb himself. It's not clear if anyone could actually beat him short of a weight in numbers of 9th circles that hasn't existed in over 5000 years, and even then if he didn't get finished off beyond the ability of his contingencies to save him from in the first 12 seconds of so it would most likely not stick.

"Ustulav is a lot more tractable, comparatively speaking. We are currently making progress on solving the worst of the undead issues, although things have slowed down since the worldwound opened and we lost Cheliax's support; just any notable amount of assistance could end up tipping the scales and letting things get back under control more quickly. Once the undead are dealt with it would still be a deeply cursed country, of course, but it would be a great victory in itself and would leave both us and Ustulav better equipped to handle the myriad other issues."

It seems pretty clear they would want her to help with Ustulav first, which seems fair enough? If they're already working on the problem, it makes sense that it would be the one they think is both most solvable and have the best handle on how to solve. There's absolutely a part of her that wants to just fly into Geb right this minute and make them knock it off, but going unprepared into the territory of a magic user of unknown capabilities is exactly the mistake Yammar made that caused a good half of their problems with Dandeer, so she'll be responsible and refrain.

Well, refrain at least until she learns what it is that normal 9th circle wizards do besides, apparently, granting wishes. There's probably a sense in which her optimal course of action here would be to fetch a few hundred more diamonds for Lastwall, put on an intelligence headband, and then spend the next year training inside a secret demiplane, but such a regime of training alone would be punishing even for the most martial arts inclined of Saiyans. There's more than one reason even Goku brought his son with him into the room of spirit and time when training for Cell, and despite her name Kakara is quite unlike her ancestor in that regard. If she tried to spend all of her time training in isolation, she might get a month in of passable training, another 2 months of steadily falling results, and then spend the rest of the year going increasingly stir crazy due to lack of social contact and boredom. If the world was going to be destroyed in 3 months or some similar deadline, she'd probably try and give it a shot anyway, but it would massively suck and offer no guarantee of success.

Kakara thanks the historian for his time, and goes off to see if she can arrange a meeting with a cleric of Milani or some follower of Smiad, since it at least seems worth 20 minutes to check.

They don't currently have any paladins of Smiad in Lastwall or Mendev's records, which means most likely there aren't any in Avistan or the inner sea. It's not impossible there might be one in Tian Xia or Vudra or Arcadia at the moment, if there was a sufficiently bad Dragon problem to cause the need, but Smiad tends to have one strong paladin occasionally rather than a steady stream of mid strength ones; while both Demigods and Gods have limits to have many of their worshippers they can empower at once, the constraints on the former are notably tighter due to the relative power between them. If it's necessary, they could send an archon to deliver a message, but the gods of Good in general and Heaven in specific tend to share relevant information, so if he is inclined to assist he would almost certainly be forewarned enough to identify a prayer.

Compared to Iomedae, far fewer of Milani's empowered clerics come from within the ranks of Her official churches; she retains the majority of her empowerment to give aid and succor to those in most need. Still, Lastwall has a stronger presence of her faith acting openly than anywhere besides maybe Andoran, and Her temple in Vigil never closes its doors.

Praying is not really a natural mental motion for Kakara. Even at the ancestor cult meetings she attended, she did so as a mediator and secular leader (and, in uncomfortably large part, as an person of worship). Sure, there's a sense in which she has a closer relationship with the divine than any of the priests there, but that's her grandfather; worshiping him would just be weird. Still, she does her best to think back to the events that day - Dazarel, in his terrible strength and psychic might, and they super saiyans, glowing gold with the legacy of their Saiyan heritage. She thinks of people she was defending, the desire to keep them safe, and yes, the fear that their strength would not be enough. She thinks of the feel of the grass, the realization that in truth everything was one, and the moment everything clicked and she suddenly could construct the spirit bomb, its immense energies fueled by the willing donation of nearly everyone in Garenhuld, a collaborative effort to drive off he who would consume them all. And she thinks of the moment of victory where he was sealed away, struggling and raging but impotent before the sheer weight of her donated KI, secure in the knowledge he would never harm anyone again.

It's not really the kind of mortal He usually goes for. Good, yes, but not Lawful; renowned, certainly, but while she has honor her shape is one that would set it aside if the need were great enough. But it's not deniable that she did defeat a dragon far more powerful than the ones He usually has even his empowered paladins go for, and her willingness to sacrifice her own safety and well being to aid others is wholly sufficient. Even if he was not forwarned, this is a prayer Smiad would hear. Unfortunately, despite all that she has done in His domain there are limits on the assistance He can offer. She is not Lawful enough for Him to make a Paladin, and what levels He could offer would be, he thinks, almost wholly redundant in any case. His senses are less sharp than Iomedae's, but they are sufficient to tell that with the scale of the energy involved all a minor intervention would do is gild the lily, and even borrowing against His future budget and all Heaven can spare Him granting 17 Paladin levels to make her immune to compulsions is simply beyond His abilities.

It is also not in Smiad's nature to abandon those who have aided him (and she has aided him, undeniably so, both in the shared goal of Good for the flourishing of all sentient beings and by doing so within his own idiom-) when they need help in accomplishing Good deeds beyond their abilities just because it would come at a cost to Him.

:You are known to me, Kakara Goku, and held in high esteem. Should circumstances leave you with no choice but to assail the pit, I will do what I can to remove obstacles from your path:

And then He ends the connection at that. It's not, in fact, that expensive an intervention, but He's going to need to save up everything He has and more if He wants to survive keeping Dahak's attention off of her for long enough to matter should the day come.

That was... more abrupt, than with Iomedae, and she doesn't think it was just a matter of power? There wasn't any of the fraying she's come to associate with supporting a connection as long as it can go, but presumably Smiad has their reasons; she's not sure exactly what his offer of help entails, but she's pretty sure she's going to need all of it she can get if she wants to succeed.

...She also has something of a headache now, surprisingly. Talking to her grandfather was never like that, and neither was Iomedae. She's not entirely sure if it's a demigod thing or a Smiad thing or just a "some gods" thing but she's not exactly raring to go to the temple of Milani right this minute. Can they recommend her a dark place that's safe to relax and rest her eyes for an hour while she waits for the throbbing to die down a bit?

That's an easy set of desiderata to fulfill; most of their secure forbiddances and demiplanes can be made dark pretty easily. Since she can provide the transportation back, they're going to reccomend one of their smaller demiplanes as a solution; a forbiddance in Vigil is almost certainly safe but it's a good habit not to reliably leave bait worth trying for.

It actually takes a bit more than an hour for her to get back to 100%, but probably at least part of that was due to the whole... everything that happened in the last few days. Kakara might not, technically speaking, need to sleep, but that doesn't mean she can constantly run herself to the point of exhaustion with no consequences. The vision-headache was simply the bit that got her to call for the break she needed. By the time she instant transmissions back to Golarion with the cleric that brought her there, they've obtained and finished resizing the mind buttressing armor they obtained for her, so she can put it on with significantly more enthusiasm than you would expect armor of that technology level to warrant and crack open a few books while she waits for Felandriel Morgethai's schedule to be clear for her arrival.

It's a pretty good selection of books, especially when you consider it's in the secured base of a religious military order located way out in the boonies and under threat from at least three different exterior forces who would love to wipe it out!

Kakara will do her best not to compare it to the Exile or Aramaian library systems, then. It is quite nice that share language lets her read most of them directly rather than have to have them read to her or some other translation mechanism.

In that case, it probably won't be too long before they're ready with a teleport to take her to Almas University, Andoran. Obviously she could just instant transmission over, but it's unlikely that would naively get her to the school's teleportation landing zone without having been there before and ending up somewhere else could draw some attention.

Almas university is perhaps not the most representative example of Andoran you could imagine, but it's certainly still quite impressive. The rooms are lit by permanant mage light, everything is kept completely spotless (including at least one unseen servant to deal with any dirt residue left by shoes), the air is at a uniformly pleasant temperature, and the furnishings are perhaps not extravagant but certainly of fine quality and solid make. There's also a simply absurd number of magical defenses, though most of them appear to be inactive, the most impressive of which she can identify seems to be a massive permanent spell that forces any warping attempt into its boundaries to instead end up at specific endpoints. It does not, unfortunately, seem to cover the entire school, but the design seems to look modular enough that you could expand it if it became necessary without leaving gaps or injuring the extant structure. The majority of the students seem to be human, but there are no small number of dwarves, elves, halflings, and even a handful of half-orcs and gnomes in attendance. Her gear does seem to be notably more magical than that of most of the people she passes, but the difference is a question of degree rather than kind, and its appearance doesn't seem to stand out much.

As promised, they are indeed expected and are readily escorted past security checkpoints once the identity of her companions is confirmed.

They specifically made sure there wouldn't be any inconvenient checks for polymorph on Kakara such as via True Seeing; they didn't have to explain why, but they're sure Morgethai will have some uncomfortably accurate guess to relay when they meet. The rest of the security measures are more strict to compensate, but they are indeed who they say they are so there's no actual issue.

For the last stretch they'll go through a forbiddance, the password to which is apparently 'an archmage' because Cheliax "will never get it." The threshold is Neutral Good (Sarenrae's high priestess being easier to get ahold of on a schedule than Desna's) which means that Kakara technically doesn't have to say anything, but her companions will unless they want to get zapped. After they make it through that final hurdle, they'll arrive at the permanant gate to one of Felandriel Morgethai's publicly known demiplanes and the university security will stop on this side of the threshold.

She'll speak the words aloud anyway just to be safe, and then try to make sense of the folded space at the gateway. She can see some similarities to the underlying process of instant transmission, but for the most part it's incredibly alien and also very cool.

Then once inside she can encounter Felandriel Morgethai, who appears to her eyes to be a stunningly beautiful woman of indeterminate age bedecked in a mixture of fantastically expensive and shockingly ordinary items and to her sight and Ki sense as so much empty air.

"So this is the person you've found to solve your logistics problems? And here about by help in payment, I assume?"

ping

Huh. She's pretty sure it's not an illusion, she'd expect to be able to at least see the magic making it up via the sight. A hologram, then? Some specific warding spell, like the mind blank she was given earlier this morning?

ping

There's something of an odd echo, maybe, if she focuses on the result of her Ki sense; perhaps enough to tell that something was up now that she's aware of the discrepancy, but that she'd expect to dismiss as nothing without prompting. Probably trying to turn that impression into a method of determining her actual vector would be considered rude.

"Our interests turned out to be significantly more aligned than that implies, but that's mostly correct. We'd like to commission some wishes and a clone, including up to a wish to accelerate the latter process, under the usual secrecy requirements."

They remove three now-cut diamonds from a bag and place them upon the table.

Felandriel Morgethai's immediately gets much more serious.

"These aren't the only ones you now have, are they."

"No, they are not, and yes, we're willing to part with some not needed for the wishes we have in mind for the right price or a sufficiently good reason. Do you have one prepared today?"

"Not prepared, but I keep a 9th circle slot open most days. What are the wishes? Aside from the clone, that is, I do have a wording that can do that one."

"We'd like to wish up an actual copy of her body, so it isn't vulnerable to a Disjunction or Dispel like Polymorph Any Object is, the Clone, also for her but using your caster level instead of one of ours, and one for retrieving her if someone manages to trap her soul or Maledict her and it beats the clone or similar. We've also got the diamond dust and lesser wish diamonds for permanent greater magic fang, as well as any or all of Aura Sight, Enchantment Sight, and Tongues if you've got a way to make that work for someone else."

A dedicated Wish diamond for revival. Even Queen Galfrey doesn't have that through her, though they'd almost certainly come up with one relatively quickly if it became needed. That means either she's bringing more to the table than just Teleports, or the diamonds are originally hers - likely both, although the fact that she can't cast her own Wishes does limit the possibility space for what a jailbroken teleport could end up looking like. That plus the splendor headband suggests some variant of sorcerer, but she's missing far too much context to make a confident assertion of it.

"I can do the wishes, yes; I presume you want the body first, since you want those spells cast today? The Permanancies should be possible to manage, though I've never done it before; if I borrow parts from the Imbue with Spell Ability spellform and apply it to Permanancy, the result won't stabilize enough for preparation but the topology should be simple enough to make work with Limited Wish. It'll probably take me about 10 minutes to sketch it out properly so I can specify it without ambiguities, but not more than that. I've only got one Limited Wish prepared and one seventh circle spell slot free, though, so you'll have to prioritize."

"Tongues and Enchantment Sight first then, if we're limited on it. Aura Sight is half covered by items already and we can use a normal greater magic fang in the mean time, it's got enough duration for a temporary basis."

He then turns to Kakara.

"Felandriel is not categorically trustworthy when giving her word, like Paladins are. But she does take the 'Good' part of Chaotic Good incredibly seriously, and in the centuries since we first encountered her we've never known her to screw over someone for trusting her, or work with the forces of Evil save on pan-Good projects like the worldwound where her participation amounts to not walking out due to Evil sending assistance, or to spread secrets she was entrusted with. And she will almost certainly need to know if she's going to target a wish properly."

Right, showtime. She turns off her Masque, in what would probably be an incredibly impressive display in magical efficiency for Felandriel if it wasn't totally hidden from her by a mind blank, and introduces herself.

"I'm Kakara Goku. I'm mostly human, but I'm also part saiyan, which is why among other things I have this."

She uncurls her tail.

"It's actually quite important that whatever body I end up with is also part saiyan, since it makes some of my powers stronger, and my real one is beyond my ability to retrieve at the moment."

"That should suffice for targeting. But just to be clear, Wish can also move people from basically anywhere to basically anywhere, so if it's not currently under a forbiddance or whatever I should be able to just grab it and bring it here. If we do it that way, I can actually transport 17 people in total, so if you have a list of requests for either this or if that ends up being how I need to retrieve you with the third diamond I'll need to know that ahead of time.

(They do in fact have a list of candidates for her, people jailed in Cheliax or Nidal or prisoners or people gone missing in action months ago, but they kind of expect her Milanite and definitely-not-Milanite friends have their own lists that would get in expectation better outcomes for the forces of good from being freed).

"If we had a lot of wishes going spare, I'd be willing to give it a try; I don't exactly want to leave my body in her hands. But the person who has possession of it is an incredibly powerful sorcerer with a focus on sealing magic and I came here from really far away, so if we're stuck at a pace of one a day I think it would probably be better to go for the sure thing, and then anyone it's critical to rescue I can just pick up myself."

Felandriel doesn't comment or change her expression at the mention of the limit being wishes per day rather than diamonds, but she definitely notices it. It could be a slip of the tongue or other mistake, but it definitely lends credence to the idea that Lastwall just had a powerful conjurer-specialist sorcerer show up from another planet with a bag of diamonds. Her offering to pick up the rescues in person is hardly needed after the mysterious increase in logistics capabilities, frankly, but it doesn't hurt.  Whenever there's one explanation that covers all the surprising information you just got, that explanation should get a corresponding amount of credit for predicting it all.

Instead of commenting, she constructs the ninth circle scaffold for Wish off of her spellbook, picks up one of the diamonds, and requests the body of Kakara Goku.

It shows up on the ground in front of her with no issues!

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.