"It'd be a single Commune with space for three other pending questions the Church has, I can give you an intent-tree for it though it seems entirely plausible that 900 years in the future there are people who are better at that than I."

" - right. My understanding is that they do those in Lastwall, no one I command seems to think they have authorization for one. But I'm sure they'll give you one if they, you know, believe that you're Iomedae, not that I entirely know how to accomplish that."

"- there is no one travelling with the Crusade who has authorization for Communes? And they don't have - instantaneous communications with ....Lastwall, which I take it is liberated Encarthan?"

Iomedae is SO EMBARRASSED, now, though very few people would be able to tell.

????????

"I think we have access to communes for other people, I'm just occasionally reminded that the only people who can give authorization for a commune with Iomedae are in Lastwall. Which is probably liberated Encarthan? It's on Lake Encarthan, anyway."

...Korva is now also pretty embarrassed. Not having this resource is probably a sign of her obvious incompetence. Also maybe good military commander would be using more communes? Korva doesn't really use communes.

"I will wait to apologize on behalf of My church until I have more context but that sounds like a really egregious operational failure. I nonetheless bet I can write a letter which, conveyed to Lastwall, gets them to run the Commune immediately."

"Well, you're certainly welcome to try, and we'll deliver it if we can." It's hardly her job to safeguard Iomedae's communes.

"It would seem that even Iomedae herself takes issue with the priorities of her church. You really must arrange for me to see the looks on their faces when they find out."

Daeran, seriously, shut up.

"It sounds like it might be useful to, if transport permits, send some advisors and a thousand paladins of no extraordinary power through; they can at least help with your troop training situation, and will be glad and not disappointed if I have them marching in two campaigns on opposite halves of the year. But I'd want someone with more context on both crusades to make the ultimate decision. I don't, in fact, have full confidence in your world's Iomedae, but She is the obvious first person to ask, if Aroden's dead."

It is very like Iomedae to want to check whether this other universe's ascended Iomedae is in fact a god worth listening to. Of course, they know so little about this other universe's Iomedae, and one of the things they do know is that She's sharing holy order with Asmodeus, so one might hope that anyone with even slightly above-average Wisdom would think to do the same.

They know three things about her - that She's sharing holy order with Asmodeus, that Her crusade isn't allowed to use Communes to talk to Her, and that Aroden's dead. It seems like Her church is almost definitely corrupted or compromised or under some truly unfathomable set of constraints; the question is if the god Herself is any good. (One uncomfortably salient guess is that Geryon has taken over Her church or something, actually, and somehow successfully convinced all Her priests that Communes need to go through the hierarchy.) 

If that's it Marit's going to be - well, appallled, they'll all be appalled, but also so smug. He wouldn't obey an order that all Communes go through a command that also authorized the holy order of Iomedae-and-Asmodeus. She is...less totally sure of most other people.

(Alfirin also wouldn't. But Alfirin's not going to be inclined to Commune with Her; she knows it in her bones.)

A thousand well-trained paladins would be huge.

"Well, we're not exactly personally acquainted. You can talk to Seelah, if we can regain contact, she's - probably the person trying to hold the crusade together in our absence, and the paladin of yours who knows the most about my immediate situation. Or Queen Galfrey, I suppose Queen Galfrey is one of the people you'll obviously want to talk to."

"...I guess of the people we have with us there's, uh, Regill, but it seems like you'd probably want to also talk to some people who are not Hellknights."

"I'm in fact quite curious about the Hellknights," she says dryly. "I conceive of myself as opposed to Asmodeus and am very curious when and why that changed."

"The Churches of Iomedae and Asmodeus continue to be opposed. They are simply capable of working together to achieve a narrow set of common goals, such as the continued existence of Golarion. Most Hellknight orders, however, are entirely secular institutions. The Order of the Godclaw, historically tasked with the containment of the Worldwound, is unusual in incorporating the philosophies of a set of patron deities."

"Ah, all right, that's less confusing." Some confusion remains, about why any order devoted to Law would admire the Asmodean perversion of it, but it's a bit confrontational to bring that up. "What is your understanding of the philosophy of the Church of Iomedae?"

"I understand Iomedae to be a goddess of justice, heroism, wars fought for a worthy cause, and of securing victory without betraying a greater ideal. I can think of few things that speak better of a mortal than to have become the god She now is."

"My opinion of Her church is somewhat less enthusiastic. They are, sensibly, a military faith, with far more paladins than clerics. My most common quarrel with Her paladins concerns their tendency to nobly risk themselves without considering the effects on the rest of a unit, and at times their willful refusal to consider any circumstances under which a perfect victory cannot be achieved. As allies go, however, one could do far worse."

That sounds like - rather a lot of paladins, unfortunately. Not very much like Iomedae, though, and not like what she's tried to build into the traditions of the Knights of Ozem -

If all of this is true it does not speak well for a god's ability to control her own church, or it suggests that Iomedae's ascension - loses a lot - of what makes Iomedae different from Karlenius -

If this is all a lie, well, maybe this is the trap.

"Thank you. I - think that's helpful. It's not what I would have expected or hoped for, but" well most obviously she might disagree with his interpretation of many things about her Church, and more diplomatically "if Aroden's dead it is unsurprising that the Church is in some disarray.

I think my next most important question is what we can offer you to help you replicate the method by which you arrived here."

"An excellent question." She feels like she's been saying that a lot. "But I have to admit that I really don't know. I was doing something intuitive in an emergency situation, and obviously didn't do what I intended. I could - share the memory with someone, I guess, and see if other observers have any guesses or can notice things I didn't notice when it was happening, that might be useful? But I've never done anything quite like it before."

(She really feels like she ought to have been more prepared for this completely unprecedented and impossible to prepare for situation.)

"I will probably leave the proposing magical experiments to other people who know more than I about proposing magical experiments. I have an artifact headband you can borrow for some of that preparatory work, though I'll have to ask you not to borrow it while actually doing any Teleporting; it was loaned to me, and I'm obliged not to be too careless with it." She nonetheless takes it off as she speaks, and offers it to Korva. 

         I wish you wouldn't do that sort of thing, Marit grumbles through the Telepathic Bond. 

If she Plane Shifts off with it - and I've never heard of a song-sorcerer of seventh circle, or an arcane Plane Shift at sixth - then I will, obviously, have misjudged the situation in a very costly way, but I consider that exceedingly unlikely. 

Korva can, actually, plane shift. Korva can cast just about every spell she's ever seen anyone cast at fifth circle or below.

She doesn't do that, obviously. She spends half a second getting over the absolute implausibility of Iomedae taking off an artifact headband and handing it to her. Then she accepts it, because she's obviously supposed to do that, but she doesn't immediately put it on.

"Thank you for your generosity."

She'll presumably want to look it over closely first, if she still thinks Iomedae might be a demon. 

"I intend to return to other duties. There are some things I want to say first, none of which I expect to be surprising, but it's often hard to guess what'll be surprising, across nine hundred years' unshared context. The Shining Crusade possesses, by the authorization of the Emperor of Taldor, responsibility for enforcing the rule of law and jurisdiction over crimes committed in Molthune Province, Fangwood, and Encarthan, and under some circumstances in contested territory in Belkzen and Ustalav, as well as in extradimensional spaces created by our spellcasters, allied outsiders, etcetera. Those courts use the Taldane legal framework with arbitration by the Church of Abadar. I possess ultimate authority over those courts.

You have made no commitments to the Shining Crusade, beyond that you won't depart with that headband, and you may depart unannounced, travel as you like within or outside the territory over which the Shining Crusade exercises jurisdiction, and operate on your own authority in any context not prohibited by law.

If you contact Tar-Baphon or his lieutenants, we reserve the right to and probably will treat you as an enemy force.

I may restrict your permissions to explore within the Crusader camp, and I ask that you not spy on us, though I understand it would be helpful for determining whether I am a demon; some of our precautions against espionage are dangerous to the spying party, and I have not disabled them or excepted you from them, and don't anticipate doing so. 

It is my intent at this time to keep the fact of your arrival here and claimed origin secret from most people, but not from Aroden, and I do not understand myself to be obliged to secrecy; if you want something different you need to clarify that immediately."

Does she want something different? Well, she hasn't thought of any specific different thing she wants. Secrecy matters in the case of a single timeline, but not in the case of another world or in the case where these people are a demon trick (though Korva doesn't, really, think that they're a demon trick), and if she were trying not to disrupt the timeline then she really shouldn't have talked to Iomedae in the first place. 

"That seems reasonable," says Korva, because - she doesn't know whether she'll regret this, but she also doesn't have an alternative that she knows she won't regret.

"Commander Marit will remain to answer any questions you have for the Crusade and convey any you have for me specifically."