"If I want to actually make things better, I'm going to need all the advice I can get--yours, theirs, and everyone else's. It feels like every problem I can imagine solving is just a corner of a much bigger problem, and if I'm not careful I'll fix one thing and make another thing worse."

"Maybe that sometimes happens, but I think it's the wrong way to look at it. It's not that every problem is a part of a big problem, it's that every big problem is made up of little problems that you can deal with now. I don't think helping people will just make things worse."

"Yeah. I do think pushing the Worldwound line back will be net good, and closing it would probably be better."

That won't get any disagreement from her. 

"Do you know what your next step will be?"

"Broadly speaking, 'get the army moving toward Drezen and see what attacks us'. Or did you mean on a smaller scale than that?"

"I was wondering if there was anything I could tell you that would still be true by the time it was relevant. I'd been doing a lot of spying in Drezen, though, and most of it was pretty recent - from just before I got captured."

"Ooh, yes actually, I'd love to know roughly how many demons are there, and who the most dangerous ones are, and, how to put this, how dug in they are? How hard are they likely to fight to keep it if they have the opportunity to run away? And have they been preparing for a siege or making the buildings more defensible or anything organized like that?"

"Not much organized in terms of defenses - the gates are at least sometimes repaired, but most of the wall is crumbling. It's not a recent enough victory to be fun to lord it over the humans and it's not a good staging ground for raiding, so it doesn't get many... demonic tourists. It had a fairly experienced force under Aponivicus, but when Derrazand took over that left with him, so last I had heard there weren't many capable commanders. He does have connections of his own, though, so what he lacks in officers he makes up for with individual combatants - in addition to Minagho and the Minotaurs running the prison, I know there's at least one vampire that helped do architecture on the prison, and I'd heard Janeamine had left for the attack on Kenabres but she might have returned if she survived."

"I suspect that in war everything is harder than it sounds, but that sounds less bad than I was worried about. Though I've heard vampires are really bad news."

Arueshalae looks slightly troubled.

"You're right. I didn't consider it, since they can't affect me with their mind control, but they're a much bigger concern for mortals. It might make sense to try and do the attack during daytime if you can, then."

And she'll have to see if she can work out by process of elimination where he kept his coffin. 

"If their main thing is mind control I should try to fight this one personally. Or both of us if you think it makes tactical sense for you to be there. I don't suppose anyone knows why vampires are vulnerable to sunlight?" Because she could absolutely deck herself out in blacklights, but she can't match the frequency mix of the local star and if it's something more conceptual then it wouldn't matter even if she could. Maybe she could make a sort of sunlight grenade by making a sphere with a mirrored inner surface except for a small patch, holding it in the sun, capping that patch, and then reversing the process, but there are so many ways that could go wrong that it's better to just stab the vampire like a normal superhumanly strong person.

"I've heard it attributed to Sarenrae, but I don't know if that's true... lots of undead are hurt by sunlight, not just vampires, and there are light based spells that hurt them too."

"Good to know. Are vampires one of the ones that come back unless you kill them in a very specific way or do they die from being stabbed a lot?" She's going to need to be careful to separate her actual knowledge of vampires from all the cruft of earth popular culture. Also, she is a lot more similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than she used to be and this is amusing.

“Yes. Whenever they die, they go back to their coffin, but if they’re too far away to reach it they can die for good. Sunlight also takes them out permanently if they can’t escape very quickly, and staking them through the heart puts them down until someone removes the stake.”

"Okay, so stabbing and taking somewhere else in whatever order. Is 'too far' more like a mile or more like a continent or what? And do they have any other nasty tricks besides the mind control?"

"More than a mile, less than a hundred? I'm not sure if it varies between vampires, but I haven't made a habit of fighting many of them. As for what they can do... they're extremely strong, fast, and tough, they can turn into animals or clouds of mist, they can steal people's life force with a touch, and they usually have a few other magical abilities."

"Thanks. It's going to be really helpful to be going in prepared."

Arueshalae is glad she can help at least a little.

...If Brenda is going to go talk with the crusade leadership next she should probably stay behind, her disguise is far from flawless.

It would probably be useful to have her there if the crusade leadership were going to be sensible about her, but Brenda doesn't predict that they will be sensible, so, yeah. Sorry. 

The baroness is busy enough that it looks for a minute like she's going to have to wait on that, but the guards recognize her and she's waved through instead. From the looks of things she was in the middle of something when Brenda arrived, but at least she doesn't look annoyed at the interruption?

"It's not scale-of minutes urgent, if you want me to come back later? I think I have a way to let the army move many days' march every day."

"That might not be minutes urgent, but that changes things enough that it might make everything else I do in the meantime irrelevant so we might as well go over it. How secret is the method?"

Tippy-hand gesture. "The details are secret, but the whole army is going to see the general idea--but if the demons don't find out about it until we do it it'll be harder to interfere with. If we want to do it multiple times we'll have to learn to do it without the element of surprise, and I think we'll be able to, but it might be worth having it the first time."

She'll cast silent table from a scroll, then. 

"What are the plan-relevant details on it, then? Does it have a limited number of targets? Are we limited on what kind of mass we can transport? And how many days are we talking?"

She gestures to a map.

"There's only one really good ford ahead of us that we'll have to take en route to Drezen, at least if we want somewhere we can maintain lines of supply to it from Mendev and from it to our siege camps near Drezen, but there are fortifications there to hamper any crossings and the demons are likely to try and make us pay to get there. If we spend the first few weeks marching normally, though, and can hit them with the main force while they think we're still several days off... that would be a worthy place to spend our element of surprise, if we can maintain it until then, since there's not another chokehold that good for them until we're nearly there."

"It's actually both better and more complicated than that. I can cast Gate as many times as I want, and I think by alternating between two gates we can get the army from anywhere to anywhere via Elysium. The risk is that we'll be bottlenecked coming out at the far end, and depending on how good of a staging ground I can find we may have to have part of the army come out at the far end before everyone's gone into Elysium at the near end, and they'll have to hang on until the rest of them show up. So at a minimum I'll want to do some scouting to make sure they don't come out right on top of a bunch of demons. But if we do it right we can come out on the far side of the fortifications and hit them from a direction they're not expecting on a day they're not expecting."