Wow, that's pretty fucked up! She wonders whether it's a consequence of the planar rift, the presence of lots of demons, the deliberate actions of those demons, or the amount of magical combat in the area. If there was a planar rift to Heaven or Elysium would it have similar consequences, or the opposite ones? She quietly shares her speculations with Nenio.

It’s almost certainly the abyssal influence, since it’s a better match for the closest abyssal regions on the other side of the wound. It’s harder to guess what an elysian or heavenly tear would look like though, since planar rifts of this kind are rare. There’s a portal to Abbadon in Thuvia, but the place was already a desert beforehand, and some smaller openings to the abyss in Tian Xia, but none to the upper planes so far.

This means they should totally figure out how to make one and find out! It might be more scientifically efficient to start with Elysium or Nirvana though, since Bachuan is supposed to have a plan in the works to make a permanent gate to heaven.

That's very cool of Bachuan, though she hopes they got permission from the heaven end first--she can easily imagine a society of all Lawful Good people building a bunch of their institutions with the assumption that everyone interacting with them would be Lawful Good such that unexpected immigrants would cause a lot of trouble. Making a portal to Elysium sounds like an awesome idea, again assuming they go to Elysium and find a place that's okay with hosting the other end.

“I’m confident Desna at least wouldn’t mind it as long as it wasn’t being used for an invasion; she’s strongly in favor of people being able to travel wherever they want. I don’t know if she’d be able to send as many Azatas as the worldwound has demons, though.”

"Just because Elysium is nice and the Azatas want to stay there whereas the Abyss is lousy and the demons want to leave, or some other reason?"

“There are limits to how the gods are allowed to interfere with the material plane, so they don’t destroy it with their fighting. Desna is not a lawful goddess bound to her word, but Asmodeus is and would be permitted to respond in kind, so she can only do it in places where both of them doing more still comes out to the benefit of the world. And also… all the stars in the sky are other suns, and many of them have other worlds. Desna acts to oppose evil on all of them, and while the gods are mighty their power and attention isn’t infinite. Deskari is said to have abandoned almost all of his other concerns in favor of the conquest of Golarion.”

"And Deskari doing things doesn't mean Desna gets to do more things, or Asmodeus or Iomedae for that matter, because he's not a proper god? Or it does mean that and Desna is just allocating it elsewhere? I'm not trying to second-guess any of the gods, to be clear, just trying to understand the constraints and how they interact with things mortals could theoretically do."

“Far be it from me to say how you should relate to the gods. As I understand it, the primary god opposing Deskari is Iomedae, who can do so most efficiently, with a coalition of other lawful gods and good gods supporting her, and that this is how she is able to afford to pick so many paladins in Mendev, supply the wardstones, and have cheliax cover the northern border. I don’t know the details of why this is the tradeoff she made though or if there are more gods intervening than have advertised to mortals.”

"Do you ever think it would be easier for humans and gods to work together if we and they could communicate better?"

“Yes. I think it would make the world better, too, because we mortals share more goals with the good and neutral gods than we do the evil ones. Asmodeus has to lie, threaten, and bribe to get even evil people to work for him, whereas if Desna wants me to help someone I only need to know where to find them.”

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Unfortunately, even if that's the sort of thing that Omniglot would help with, it's clearly not sufficient on its own. The Princess and the Dragon could do it though while the question of what it would mean to have sex with a god is a pretty cool question Brenda is pretty sure she doesn't feel that way about Desna or anyone else.

A few hours after they took off the city of Drezen comes into view. It was clearly impressive once, and equally clearly those days are long behind it. Drezen’s enormous grey walls are cracked and crumbling, and half the watchtowers that once overlooked them have collapsed. About the only part of the outer defenses that still look to be in good repair are the great front gates, and even there good is very clearly a relative term. The terrain surrounding the city is bleak and empty, but if there are alert sentries or demonic patrols they aren’t visible from the air.

It looks like the pictures of war zones in Earth's newspapers. 

Brenda looks for a place well outside the walls and ideally out of line of sight of any roads where they can land and do all the stealth spells. How inhabited does the city look from the air? Are there demons not on watch but going about their business?

There are a lot of demons, but not nearly as many as the a city of this size could hold; it's hard to get a precise survey of even just the ones outdoors, but there are look to be fewer than a hundred visible all told. Some of them are walking around, some of them are probably either talking or arguing, and there's one visible brawl ongoing. There are a number of places relatively close to the walls that could shelter them from view, such as the small hill off to the east of the main gate, but they might also just be able to use the walls themselves as cover.

The closer in they get, the more time they have on the stealth spells, and they don't need to do anything louder than mutter incantations. If nobody else indicates otherwise, she'll start heading for the shadow of a relatively intact bit of wall.

Nobody has any problem with this!

While they're preparing, Ramien will take the opportunity to cast Magic Circle against Evil on himself and Nenio, under the theory that aside from the probably immune Brenda their backup escape plan is probably the best person to make thoroughly immune to domination; Wenduag, Seelah, and Ember will have to settle for protection from evil.

Nenio isn't really big on defensive magic, but conjuring a forcefield for the less protected members of their party is at least involves enough conjuration to be worth learning.

Wenduag feels a little self conscious about not having any spells - even the crusader girl got some yesterday - but definitely isn't going to speak up about it. She'll just have to work twice as hard to prove she can still be useful.

Brenda is no party composition expert but she's pretty sure having someone who can sneak around and shoot people is important. She also does nothing to communicate this. Communal Chameleon Stride Communal Nondetection Invisibility Invisibility Invisibility Invisibility Invisibility Invisibility Heroism Heroism Heroism Heroism Heroism Heroism. Alpina is the coolest book ever and possibly also the coolest person ever.

It is, as it turns out, very hard to notice invisible people silently floating through the air. For a handful of demons invisibility is no shield, but such sight simply pierces through the illusion without interacting with it; there is nothing to draw attention to the wisps of slowly moving clouds, for those few Babau who catch a glimpse out of the corner of their eyes. When those invisible clouds drift above above the city prison, there are none among the demons who remark upon it.

Brenda DFEWs the Babaus as they pass, in case of invisible demons and for anything else they've got. The anything else turns out to be a spell-like ability she will test later.

The prison looks to be less run down than the walls by a significant margin, but whoever was doing the maintenance work was clearly doing it with an eye primarily to aesthetics. It looks impressively doomy even by the standards of prisons, with the grey stone of the walls dismissed in favor of some jet black rock and with a somewhat absurd number of spikes. Standing by the entrance are a pair of distracted cultists; if either of them have spotted the approaching infiltrators, they give no sign of it.

They whoosh around the roofline, looking for broken windows, air vents or the like. The door the cultists are guarding probably has a crack under it, but that can be a last resort.

The designers of this building remodel were not exactly fans of windows, particularly near the prisoners, but what ones they have are all accessible; the openings in the wall are simply barred and shuttered rather than waste glass or textiles to seal it.