"Yeah. Can Evil gods make paladins? If Goddess Iomedae makes you a paladin again, would that mean she's real and not Asmodeus being tricky?"

"I don't know," says Iomedae thoughtfully. "...I would bet that Evil gods cannot make paladins, because paladins fall if they ever do Evil things, and serving an Evil god is an Evil thing."

Iomedae only under extraordinary circumstances makes a paladin of someone who does not know Her and does not trust Her. For most people, it is a healthier journey, to satisfy oneself about a god and then enter their service, to know what they think a paladin is before you become one.

On top of that, a soul like the teenage girl Iomedae is one that you would definitely want to make a paladin of but with some caution about the surrounding situation so that the baby paladin does not hare off in a wildly unproductive direction, as baby paladins who are obsessed with personally solving all the problems in the world often do.

But 'I'd like to be a paladin so I can get credible communication about whether I'm giving extremely powerful weapons to the right people' is not, in the end, not an Iomedaen prayer.

All of Aroden's former servants are cheap to take up; it's reaching out with the part of Her that is shaped like a part of Him, and holding it up to one of the trillion cracks Aroden's death left in the world.

Iomedae startles and makes a face. "Well, She did do that so now I guess we have to decide if it's good enough," she says to Alfirin in English.

"...Well I was about to say that maybe Evil gods make Evil paladins who are allowed to do Evil things…but…not Good ones? If they're symmetric? So you should…do something nice. For science."

Iomedae hugs her tightly. For science.

Aww, that's nice. "...Still empowered?"

"I seem to be." - she turns apologetically back to the fancy knight. "Okay, sorry, we decided we believe you."

"I'm glad - I'm sure you'll want to check more, later, or before you teach us about weapons, historical Iomedae spent a long time checking if Aroden was what He said He was. Do you want to go to Vigil now or not yet?"

"How far is it?" It's absolutely not worth inventing airplanes so they can arrive in Vigil by airplane but Iomedae 1) knows how and 2) wants to.

"I don't know exactly. Two teleports, so - more than a thousand miles, less than two thousand?"

Aroden could teleport, but from Iomedae's knowledge of the world it is one of those things Aroden can do, not one of those things normal people can do. "You can teleport?"

"I can't. We have wizards who can, one of them brought me here. And I have boots that can take us back."

Iomedae nods seriously. ...they really know almost nothing, don't they. She assumed they'd be waking up in Oppara and she at least had vague ideas about Oppara and instead they are - important out of all proportion to their ability to figure out what's going on, and Teleports can be ordered for them in the blink of an eye.

She is terrified and she is not going to let that get in the way of making the world rich and fixing all its problems. "Well, if Vigil is the place to fix everything then I guess we should go there right away." And she takes Alfirin's hand.

Cansellarion pays Nefreti for her spellcasting and the magic robes and takes the girls' hands and teleports them all to Vigil.

Iomedae is not very impressed by Vigil, at a first glance. America is good at big impressive cities, and she is on the whole not even all that impressed with America. She would've been impressed if she'd come here before America; the streets are paved and clean and the buildings well-maintained and the walls in the distance are thick and tall. It is the biggest Golarion city she has ever seen, and it was supposedly founded by her.

But that was a version of her that did not know how to build skyscrapers and may only have possessed a shaky grasp on sewers. She clings to Alfirin's hand and thinks about how they were right they did the right thing it worked, but it feels kind of hollow since - she did it out of trust in Aroden, and Aroden is dead.

Alfirin is still kind of processing the thing where instead of going back to the Golarion that they left they went to a Golarion that's had another thousand years pass and also where Iomedae at least never left and instead became a god. Maybe that means they never left and they're just copies that got made and put on Earth? That doesn't really explain the thing where Iomedae's a god, though. Iomedae is very impressive as a person and has an intensity to her that very few people do but - very few isn't none, and most of them don't become gods. (It's not at all weird that the original Alfirin isn't a god, she probably got eaten by a bear or something. Most people don't become gods.)

As for how it's been a thousand years here - Well, maybe it's been a thousand years on Earth too, and they just weren't conscious for it - maybe it took them a thousand years to get here, if their souls were traveling at light-speed or slower. Or, speaking of light-speed, maybe Golarion is moving very fast? Or next to a black hole? She doesn't know if that's the direction that works because relativity isn't very useful for industrializing a planet and is complicated besides.

This city is definitely smaller than American cities, and worse, and also, she notices, much colder than the city in which they were revived. She makes her shirt into a sweater because it is admittedly very cool that it can do that, and clings to Iomedae.

Iomedae is clinging right back. The onlookers (there are quite a few, in uniforms) look a bit confused, she thinks. Probably the important paladin of Iomedae does not usually tow around teenage girls by Teleport. "You know," she says in English, "I might have expected if I'd known a thousand years would pass that there wouldn't be anything for us to do. The Industrial Revolution didn't take a thousand years on Earth."

"Depends when you're counting from, doesn't it? It took a thousand years starting from 800. I don't really know why it happened on Earth when it did, but it wasn't anything as simple as 'one thousand years after the fall of Rome'."

"I guess. And even if Aroden was trying to make it happen faster, He's - dead. So." Does the paladin of Iomedae seem to want them to do anything? Iomedae is honestly fairly intimidated by the paladin of Iomedae. He is the second real paladin she's met not counting herself and he's armored and taller than her and watching her like - like she became a god in this world, only she's not actually sure she is qualified. 

He mostly seems to want them to follow him through the city's citadel to a room with tables and chairs and maps - He kicks out the people who were using it already, apologetically. They don't question it. "Is there anything you need? Should I send for the other people you should meet now, or do you have more questions for me or other things you want to address first?"

Iomedae has seen satellite imagery and cannot be intimidated by a room full of maps. She feels a little better. She can't think of more questions but looks inquiringly at Alfirin.

"We're going to need a lot of paper and - probably someone to take dictation." Alfirin's handwriting is not great and it's going to be worse without ballpoints. "But I can't think of anything else right now. Except a round map but that's less important."

They did a practice of this two weeks ago. It isn't easy to know if it'll work the same for real - they could hardly bring in someone who'd pretend to be from Golarion and relevantly ignorant - but they know the first two days of what they want to say, at least. "I can't think of anything else either."

"So send for the people now. And paper."