"Well, Tar-Baphon's prison is still there and various people with varyingly dumb reasons still try to spring him out, and it's possible your alien magic would make that possible to solve in a way it isn't otherwise. And, uh, Asmodeus is the Evil god of slavery and torment, and He runs a large and powerful country and tries to run it in such a way as to make everyone in it Evil so they all go to Hell which is His afterlife where you get eternally tortured."

"Wow, what the fuck." There's a reason Kevin doesn't usually do the talking, but like, come on.

Yeah no he was really just saying what everyone was thinking there, what the fuck.

What the fuck. "I don't have any immediate ideas for how to deal with either of those but I'll definitely think about it. Uh, our kind of wizard, I mean sorcerer, is pretty good at--bending space and hiding things, not all the way to demiplanes but sort of making paths from A to B through nowhere in particular. If there's a country people need to escape from it might be worth trying to reinvent some of that. Definitely a question that deserves more than thirty seconds of thought. We're accumulating kind of a lot of those."

All of that and also Yikes.

" - yeah, if you can help smuggle people out of Cheliax that'd be really cool. Also Nidal. Nidal is run by the god of torture. ...also Geb, which is run by another evil necromancer."

". . . I think your planet may actually have worse problems than ours. Also what's a necromancer, it's translating to basically 'death wizard' but not to our specific word for evil wizards who get magic from killing people."

"They can animate the dead and force them to serve them. It's sort of debated how conscious you are for the being a slave while your corpse slowly decays, but it's not 'not conscious at all' and your soul can't go on to an afterlife because it's trapped and enslaved like that."

Wow! That was not a kind of thing that needed to exist! 

"I'm really glad you trapped one of them. Does he have a bunch of dead people trapped in wherever he is with him or did you find a way to kill them for real. Also are there afterlives that aren't Hell." He mentioned angels earlier so maybe there's also a Heaven and maybe it even goes so far as to not suck.

"Yeah, you go to an afterlife based on the kind of person you were in life. - it's approximately accurate about the kind of person you were, which isn't to say that it's all right that some people go to the Evil afterlives. The Evil afterlives are all appalling. The Neutral and Good ones are mostly quite nice, tastes vary. Lawful Good people go to Heaven.

I...think some of Tar-Baphon's servants are probably trapped with him in Gallowspire. Hopefully not that many. I'm not really an expert."

"That's--probably a smaller problem than the entire countries being ruled by evil gods thing, aside from the part where he might get out."

"Most countries aren't ruled by necromancers or evil gods or full of demons, right? This is just the list of the worst ones? Not that any of that stuff is okay either way, just--getting a sense of scale."

It is cheapest for gods to select their priests from among those mortals whose shape mirrors their own, the way things mirror across the boundary between mortals and gods. This isn't exactly the same thing as the mortals understanding them (though it tends to help); someone can understand a god perfectly and still not innately reach for the world the way the god would.

Sometimes the lights that glint the brightest in a gods-eye view of the world are the ones who have never gotten an account of the god at all - especially if the god, themself, is a mortal who was themself in a world without any god of being that self. 

Iomedae anticipated this problem, obviously, and tried to teach her church how to be like Her, rather than how to follow Her; to be like Her is to check if She's got her priorities straight and then use Her as leverage to get things done, because that is what She does. 

That there? That is a very recognizable pattern. It'd be expensive, to look at it as closely as it probably warrants, but it's not expensive to gesture at a mind like that and say, yes, this one.

"Most countries are not ruled by evil gods or evil necromancers, most countries are just ruled by people with normal person strengths and failings," Marit confirms. "I listed the screaming moral emergencies, since you asked. There's also plenty of places with normal problems like civil wars and peasant revolts."

"We did ask. We're just not really used to dealing with multiple screaming moral emergencies at once. Thank you for helping us get oriented; I'm sure we'll be able to get leverage on one or another of--"

She trails off, train of thought disrupted by an unexpected sensation. It's a bit like the first time she pulled mana from a power sharer, a sense of leaning on something vast and strengthening. It's a bit like the silent but unquestionable companionship of having her squad behind her. It's a lot like something she's never experienced before. And then it almost entirely fades, leaving only a sense that isn't reporting anything, like the difference between being deaf and being somewhere silent.

"Did anyone else feel that?" she asks, not alarmed--it was the opposite of alarming--just wary and curious.

It's like getting a hug from her parents, warm and calming and proud of her. It's like the moments when the whole team is working together perfectly, one mind with Marcy's brilliance and Kevin's situational awareness and Franklin's diligence and her own empathy operating four bodies with a single plan. And then it fades almost entirely and she has a new sense that's almost like her spell for detecting mals but broader and subtler and not costing her anything.

"Yeah, I did. It gave me a new sense."

"I didn't feel anything."

"Me neither."

If this is a demon plot it's a pretty obvious move but if it's not a demon plot it's also a pretty obvious move. He doesn't have Aura Sight up anymore, so he can't check.

"A new sense?" he says neutrally.

"It's not picking anything up right now. It's a bit like being able to sense mals when there aren't any mals." She mutters something under her breath. "It's obviously magical in nature but it's not a sense for either our kind of magic or the local kind. I appear to be able to turn it off and back on again. It's directional like sight rather than omnidirectional like hearing."

Abigail is awesome.

"You kids are pretty impressive," he doesn't say, because it'd come across as condescending even though he really means the exact opposite. "See if it lights up when demons get within sixty feet. I guess that obliges us to let the next demon we see get within sixty feet but if you guys have plenty of spells left - plenty of magical energy left - it's probably safe enough."

"We had a store of it in the school and we took as much as we could carry when we wrecked it, and we're used to fighting in close quarters anyway; we should be okay unless it's a really nasty one. Is people getting spontaneous demon detection something that happens a lot around here?" And why only half of them, instead of either all of them at once or just the one with a relevant affinity?

"Paladins have it. If you have it, it is probably because Iomedae decided that She should empower you as paladins, and She'd have picked - the ones who would want it and could benefit from it and were cheap to give it to. It could in principle have been some other god, too, other gods also pick paladins, but we were talking about how to prioritize among the screaming moral emergencies, at the time - ah, shit." Because that's a flock of vrocks, their exact numbers hard to count what with their ability to each appear to be in half a dozen places to make them harder to target. And this is a group of spellcasters. "Don't let them get close, they'll stun you. We can check if you're paladins some other time. Or you can smite them, I think you can do that at a distance." He's casting Haste.

There are mals that do that and you learn the signs, especially if you're Abigail. The real ones are now glowing.