- ah huh. We're in business.

Iomedae will fly for the edges of the lake of fire, looking for things to smite until she develops the ability to Plane Shift, which will probably happen eventually if she's gotten into enough fights.

Sometimes a human, or a demon, gets to the edge of the lake and tries to climb out, or more commonly just tries to cling instinctively to a rock. There are more demons on the edge with long metal tridents, indiscriminately shoving them back into the current. When nobody is trying to get out, they pass the time poking random people, trying to push them under, or occasionally trying to steal their fellows' pitchforks and push them in.

She'll try diplomacy. (She doesn't expect it to work, but she'll try it.)

"Hello! I'm making a new rule here that no one is allowed to shove anyone into the lake! I'll kill the next person to shove anyone into the lake! If there are problems with this rule, you should tell me now!"

This turns out to work fantastically as a demon intelligence test. About half the ones that can hear her run away and the other half try to shove her into the lake.

She will kill the second half! Without smites, actually, she should probably conserve those for deadlier enemies.

Yeah, these demons die like flies even without the smite. Now she has all the pitchforks she could want unless she wants a whole lot of pitchforks for something.

Equipping the petitioners, conceivably, if they seem to be in any shape for that once they get out of the lake of fire?

Once a couple successfully crawl out it becomes clear that their bodies gradually and continuously regenerate. Out of the lake, the regeneration is able to get ahead of the damage, but even once they look physically fine they don't do anything but lie in the fetal position for at least a couple of minutes.

She cannot promise them that things will be better for them. She can wait, a little while, to make sure the lakeside isn't immediately repopulated by devils (they do look more like demons, but she thinks they might definitionally be devils? Or maybe things are different in a different tyrant's pocket universe), but - she shouldn't expect to change Hell by much fighting on this specific shore. 

Do any directions look more promising.

The corpses strewn around her make the intelligence test easier; the general diffusion of demons along the lakeshore gives her a wide berth. After a couple minutes one of the humans looks up at her and blinks uncomprehendingly. 

Both directions along the edge of the lake look basically the same; directly away from the shore is a field of jagged rocks which turns into a putrid swamp.

She probably cannot turn traumatized petitioners into an organized force capable of defending themselves in Hell. Or discount Hell; real Hell reacts faster than this to paladin incursions.

She can try, though. And she wants to try, for a little while, before she abandons them here.

She sits down next to them, and sings the Arodenite hymn of human progress towards a better world. The wings have worn off, again; they won't be able to understand her.

They stare at her like her music is the only beautiful thing they can remember experiencing. One of them rises hesitantly into a crouch and creeps closer to listen.

Iomedae wishes in a sense that she were a different sort of person, who felt love and recognition and joy at this instead of murderous rage at the responsible parties and a stubborn distance from the victims because shortly they will probably be put to use to hurt her. 

(It's not that she wants to be that person; she could just do that, if it were. It's that she wishes the world were one in which that would have been the route to achieve good things, instead of a life spent entirely at war.)

She can sing, not even particularly well, for hours, unless the forces of Evil decide to stop her.

Occasionally a demon or two will charge at her, shrieking hideously, but none that she'd be meaningfully impeded in killing by singing while she does it.

Is anyone - recovering any. Iomedae is repeating her fairly limited repertoire of Arodenite hymns, by now.

They seem to be in much more shape to do things and mostly impaired in having any ideas for things they could do! The one who became mobile first has picked up a rock and is turning it over and over in her hands.

....Iomedae, again, wishes that many things about the world were different that would cause her to be a person such that this filled her with an emotion other than murderous rage. 

She's not going to be able to train them to defend themselves. And the longer she waits, the more time her enemies have to learn from their last fight, and send ten archangels. She's not sure she could take ten archangels.

She'll head off around the edge of the lake, at a jog.

It's more of the same for quite a long way. If she wants to kill the smarter demons as well as the stupider ones, they can only outrun her probabilistically by scattering in several directions.

Iomedae does not kill fleeing Evil entities without a specific mechanism in mind by which this will make the world better for everyone, them included, and so she does not go after demons that don't go after her.

There are no shortage of those, if she keeps moving to new bits of lakeshore.

Is there anything here that isn't lakeshore and demons. 

There's also putrid swamp and giant tornado! Both of them also contain people. Space is doing something kind of weird here that it's hard to identify exactly because long-distance visibility is still terrible, but both the putrid swamp and the giant tornado are reachable on foot.

Sure, she'll head in that direction, murdering only things that oblige her to do so.

Putrid swamp is closer. It has fewer demons, but they're more powerful. It also has much worse terrain, varying unpredictably on a spectrum from "ankle-deep squelch" to "enjoy swimming in full plate".

It's mithril, and she's very very strong, but that is still pushing it. ...she wants her angel wings to last forever. Will they do that, if she thinks about how they ought to?

(Iomedae does not, fully, understand how she develops new magical abilities. Paladins have a spell list, and she is a fourth circle paladin, and so she can ask for paladin spells up to fourth circle from Aroden, and get them, and she has a standard set she always asks for. Separately from that, some of the spells she can cast in a manner no one else can, not the precise and careful woven-magic that mortals use but the stubborn, flexible, intentional magic Arazni could always call to her service. Iomedae's Divine Favor is better than anyone else's. Iomedae's Sacred Bond has better range and she can lay on hands through it. Iomedae's Break Enchantment works every time except on things Tar-Baphon did personally. Others have watched her do it, and it's not that she's found a different stable spellform they could ask Aroden for themselves; it's just that the magic knows what Iomedae wants, and will depart from the stable spellform to give it to her.

And then separately from that she has a few more spells for which she doesn't have even a passing explanation. One of them is Telepathic Bond. The first time she got Telepathic Bond she thought she'd become a fifth circle paladin - no one has heard of that, but that's hardly prohibitive- and that since she hadn't known to ask for anything she'd gotten something practically at random. The next day she'd asked for Plane Shift or Breath of Life or Miracle or Holy Aura or Winds of Vengeance, please, powerful cleric magics that seemed like the kind of thing a fifth circle paladin might get, and after a few days of trying it became clear that, no, she can only have Telepathic Bond. They eventually concluded that it's like she picked up Aroden's community domain, as a cleric of fifth circle, but they don't know how she did that, or whether only she can do that.) 

So at this point Iomedae figures that Aroden sponsored her to the point where there are not defined agreements, about what beings like her ought to be able to do, and it's at least sometimes worth just checking whether she, herself, is the main entity providing input into that question for the universe. And she'd like a Plane Shift, or permanent Greater Angelic Aspect, if either of those are forthcoming, and if they aren't, fine. She'll swim to demons and fight them.