She nods seriously.

"How long do you have to stay before moving on?" she asks. "Wormholes can go through wormholes; can gates go through gates? So you cast a gate and the second gate is already opening through it when it lands?"

Another question pops up on her HUD.

"Also: what would make you stronger? We can feed you, maybe."

:The plane where you cast Gate is what matters, not where it goes after. Move through the first gate, then open the second.:

:I do not use Gates Myself, I just go places. Like plane shift. You should try gating! Maybe you can go somewhere new!: She makes a little portal appear between her palms in illustration, so Cherry can see the spell-form.

:Milliways is fun! It is a plane that become adjacent to where the door opens. Right now we can plane shift to your world, Cherry! It is so rare to see both ends of a plane shift!: Desna plane-shifts herself to just outside the door, and flies back in happily.

"Gods are made of - godstuff. It was made as part of Creation, no more can be made, so everyone's careful not to destroy any. That's one reason gods rarely go to war directly with each other."

"Nothing can affect godstuff except other godstuff. Which is why you can't see it, when you look at us! But we can affect the world, using magic. We can look at lots of things in different places all at once, we have as much attention as we have godstuff, and all our - shards still talk to each other. When we gather more of ourselves together we can think much better, and do more magic, but it leaves less attention for noticing other things."

"So you can't make us bigger, exactly, or at least I'd be very surprised if you could. But you can make more magic for us to use! If the most powerful gods like Desna or Sarenrae put all their attention to using magic, they'd run out pretty quickly. And for our Lawful allies who keep to their intervention budgets, you can make intervention cheaper by helping mortals do more magic."

She starts to get distracted by trying to figure out how exactly Gate works, before shaking her head and returning her attention to the conversation at hand.

"If godstuff decays into other things, I might be able to make some by forcing the decay to work 'backwards'," she says, finding her voice. "That's how we've been synthesizing magic. But if it doesn't decay, then I agree that we probably can't synthesize it."

Some testing gates pop open in Milliway's rafters, and her self-tree starts experimenting with things like dropping someone in the process of casting a teleport through a gate. One of her taps Desna on the shoulder, and starts asking questions about getting Gate or Plane Shift to stabilize without the 'targeting' component, so that it always sends you somewhere new.

"So we can provide a bunch of raw magic. That's helpful, especially for long-term, after our initial rescue attempt. But I bet that using the same amount of raw magic to effect whatever plan we settle on directly will be more efficient than needing one of you to spend attention on allocating and shaping it," she continues.

"I'm having trouble thinking about the best way to go about this," she admits. "And if other people have ideas, I'm all ears. But my initial bad idea is -- open a bunch of simultaneous gates to Avernus. Fixity fields spread through gates just fine in our testing, so use those to pull all the inhabitants out into a holding area, shred all the infrastructure, and put people with their own prepared gate spells all over the place. They open gates to the next layer in, and so on. In testing, the gate spells usually take a whole 6 seconds to unfold, though, which means Asmodeus gets a whole 54 seconds to react before we could get to the last layer. Which is just -- a lot of time for him to come up with some way to prevent this."

Desna will absolutely help her stabilize Plane Shift and Teleport without the targeting component! That's already a failure mode if you cast the spell poorly, they can just make it always do that.

Doing the same thing with Gate would require more research, but it's probably possible?

"And that," Cayden says grandly, "is why the mortal wizards have invented Time Stop." He looks at Desna expectantly.

:???:

"...you don't know Time Stop, either?"

:It is not a cleric spell! And I don't need it to go anywhere. We should have brought Nethys.:

"Milani said Nethys knew what He was doing, but He couldn't explain to Us what He was doing, so We couldn't explain Our plan was better." 

Cayden turns back to the mortal side of the table. "We'll have to get Time Stop after we open the door again, along with Wish and other odds and ends. It's one of the few ninth-circle arcane spells not copied from a cleric template, and it's pretty crazy. Maybe it's cribbing from a very specific intervention Someone did once."

"It speeds you up in time, about ten million fold, for thirty subjective hours. It changes the air and light around you so you can move and see, and lets you cast spells and do almost anything. It even duplicates the effects of nearby spells so you can still trigger symbols of death or of healing. But! Nothing you do can affect other people, or anything with a soul. A lot of things behave weirdly in time stops because of that."

The discussion has turned to matters of magic, but Gord is still thinking about what Cayden said.

He'd known already Lawful Evil was the worst. He didn't know how much, but what would it have mattered? This should be validation, that he'd been fighting for the right side, the right things. 

He didn't trust paladins to tell him what was right, and again he has been vindicated. They were supposed to be the enemies of Hell, to tell everyone how terrible it was and how important it was to help them fight it, convince people to make common cause with Lawful Good. Instead they allied with Chelish Hellknights to fight demons, because they didn't know the truth, they put their trust in a goddess whose foolish Lawful commitments wouldn't let her tell them and then they blindly followed her orders without thinking for themselves, when her own holy book said she ascended to fight Hell, the last thing she wrote when she was mortal and free -

He should be happy to find out that he was right (and he had doubted, oh how he doubted) but instead he feels furious and bitter and betrayed - by the paladins, by all of Chaotic Good, none of whom sacrificed themselves to tell Golarion the stakes, intervention budget be damned -

He's not owned anyone's sacrifice. They must have thought it wouldn't help, that people would keep lying and believing lies, that the grip of Law couldn't be broken by a few words said in the right ears. The world he lives in is already the best possible world that Desna and Cayden and Sarenrae and Milani and Gorum managed to make.

He wants to rage and cry and smash and cut and bleed, until the world has been beaten down into a better shape, and he can't have that anymore but he still has to find a way to make everything better. 

Cherry thinks he might have some special insight, about the mortals of Golarion, the demons, all the people who will still needs saving despite not being in Hell. He'll tell them everything he can possibly think of, but it can never be enough. He wants to know, to feel that he has fought to the limits of his magic and his body, and he can't get there by reaching the limits of his wits. Saying he has no more ideas feels like surrender, like laying down his sword while the enemy yet fights.

How do other people stand it?

He glances at Irabeth.

Irabeth has always known that Iomedae does what is best, in expectation. 

No-one could have foreseen Milliways. No-one had foreseen it. Therefore, She had been doing what was best, without Weeping Cherry's help. Iomedae was Lawful Good, and told her followers to be the same; so Lawful Good was better for Good overall - at least on the margin - despite any godtreaties She was bound by. Irabeth has not, actually, heard anything that would put Iomedae's judgement in doubt.

Until Cherry appeared, men like Gord were - wrong. Not only in opposing Lawful Good, but all of Good; she does not think his Evil aura is unearned. Perhaps they were tremendously lucky that it was Gord who Cherry met and not a demon or a cultist of Baphomet, or even a random villager; perhaps it would have gone better still, if a paladin of Iomedae had opened the door. But winning at the dice does not make gambling wise, and winning at the multiversal lottery of Milliways does not make it a good idea to help demons murder soldiers because some other soldiers want to desert.

What kind of person would claim they wanted to do Good, and yet do such plain Evil? How could they trust his advice sincerely given, if it led him to such twisted ways?

How could he - how would he live with himself, having heard from the mouth of a god the full horror of the Hells, and realizing he had spent his life in opposition to the one church whose founding mission was to cast Asmodeus down?

Should she offer to comfort him? How? She doesn't trust him, and doesn't understand him, and yet a god who is wiser than her by far has said they can all help and so if an ally needs her help -

She glances at Gord.

Weeping Cherry is oblivious to their internal turmoil.

"Speeds up time? How does that work? Like, at the interface between the sped up person and the rest of the world. And does it cover inanimate objects or equipment too? Because if it does, that would, uh, drop our manufacturing base's doubling time to about 1/14th of a second. Which would be huge."

"I have absolutely no idea how it works! Wizard magic is even more bullshit than god magic. Otolmens runs Herself ragged stopping them from blowing up the universe instead of just themselves. We'll have to open the door and get the spellform, and hopefully some actual experts on arcane magic, to know any better."

Someone in her self-tree helpfully puts a count of pocket dimensions ripped to shreds by testing in the corner of her HUD. It ticks up from 37 to 38 as she watches.

"I see your point," she says. "I really don't want to re-open the door, though. Even a few more milliseconds for the people trapped in Hell ..."

She shakes her head.

"I think we should work out as much as we can, before opening the door, so that we minimize the amount of time it needs to be open before we can act. And maybe that means there's nothing more to say about the actual rescue operation itself, until we know exactly how fixity fields, gates, and time-stops interact. But getting people out is just the first step -- we also need to be prepared to receive them, and help them adjust to the change in their environment in a way that won't be traumatizing."

"I have some environments set up using my best guess at what a pleasant receiving/temporary housing environment looks like, but I really expect that they could be made better with some input from you all, since you have a better idea what people from Golarion or the afterlives are going to be expecting. Maybe we could tour them, and you can point out where I've made grievous errors?"

Absolutely they should do their best to prepare before going back to Golarion to ask for the help of the Goddess the other gods!

"I think the experts on helping rescuees from Hell are in Nirvana. Neutral Good accepts and helps everyone of every alignment, and they have a lot of experience. Let's do the tour and make sure everyone gets a soft landing and a safe environment to rest and explore, and be ready to change things in the longer term."

Gord thinks getting everyone out of Hell and stopping the active torture will probably be so great that little differences like having a comfy bed or whatever won't even register. He'll focus on the people who are lucky enough to still be alive and yet unlucky enough to be alive in Golarion instead of over here.

:Yes! Let's travel!!:

"Alright!" she says, gesturing for everyone to stand. "So I couldn't arrange for everyone being rescued to get their own pocket dimension, because we just can't afford to produce one per person at that scale yet. Maybe if we got a time-stop working with the generators that would change. So instead I'm putting them in an unpopular orbit slightly inside the orbit of Mars."

Once everyone is standing, she teleports them to one of the constructed rescue environments, trusting that the gods can move their own godstuff as required. They land on a circle of clover, brightly lit by a slightly smaller than usual sun and a series of sunlight-spectrum lamps built into the joints of the geodesic dome that protects them from space. The fact that there aren't miles of atmosphere to smear the light out mean that the stars are visible despite the station being currently oriented towards the sun.

"It would be a little cold if a planet were orbiting here, but space stations usually run a little bit warm because they produce more heat per unit volume on average, so the station should remain comfortable a comfortable temperature for humans even if there weren't active heating and cooling," she explains. "The temperature is set to match the location that the person comes from, and then slowly get warmer if they are shivering or colder if they are sweating. But I'm not sure how to adjust our normal smart temperature settings to handle species with different comfortable internal temperatures, or who don't shiver or sweat. The temperature can be overridden if the person expresses a preference, but that's getting ahead of myself, I think."

She gestures at the center of the space, where a fountain is gently burbling. There is a large basin suitable for cooling down or washing off, and elevated streams suitable for drinking from. A bowl of fruit, bread, and cheese is set on the rim. A covered platter sits next to it.

"Food and water are automatically replenished. The visible foods are all things that are okay sitting out uncovered for a while -- the platter is rigged to create a bowl of rice and meat on demand, so that meat isn't sitting around waiting."

There is a large, fluffy-looking off-white outdoor couch sitting to one side of the fountain. Behind it is a small wooden enclosure with the door propped open. Inside is a nest of pillows and blankets. A scroll sits on the step up to the door.

"That scroll is a placeholder -- it's going to include an explanation of what happened and what they can do next, once we figure out how to either make a bit of text that automatically translates itself, and what we figure out what would be best to say."

She turns to see how the others are reacting.

"I have some specific questions about parts of this, and I want to talk about how to handle families and a few other things that I'm not quite sure of, but do you have any initial impressions or comments? Things that are obviously missing or suboptimal?"

:The view of stars is wonderful! And shows they are in a new place, because all the stars are different!: As far as Desna's concerned, making the sky blue and blotting out the stars in daytime was a Mistake.

"Um. I think a blue sky with clouds, like on a planet, might make people feel more at home? Even when they find out they're not really on a planet. It's the biggest dislocation in their lives, and a complete surprise. We should try to make things less unusual, so they can focus on the differences that matter and not be distracted by - a strange sky."

Aaaagh aaagh she is contradicting a goddess aaagh but she Promised to say what she thought was best and she'd going to Do It, because she knows no fear.

"I think this would be great for some people! But there are also whole races who live underground and would be blinded by the sun, and others who live in the sea and will need a bigger fountain. Or pressure tanks. And some people might like the exact kinds of food they have at home, to feel at ease, like Irabeth said."

"The best spell for translation is truespeak." In fact he's using it himself, now that they're outside of Milliways. "But it needs a caster, so we probably won't have it working for recordings in time. I can teach you a lot of languages, though!"

:The dwellers in darkness should see the stars without the sun!:

"I think there are two - sets of problems to solve. One, how do we convince everyone this is safe and meant to help them and not a kidnapping or a new prison or an illusion, and that the messages we leave them aren't lies? When you rescue people from, very bad places, they often don't believe you about it right away. Because they're used to being in bad places where everyone lies to them and hurts them."

"...Uh, I mean bad places on Golarion, not Hell. The people from Hell will probably care more about it not hurting anymore than about that maybe being a lie."

"And the second kind of problem is - what do you do with people who have powerful magic and will try to use it to escape or go back or even reach someone else and hurt them? Like all the demons and devils and regular clerics and wizards and - everyone else." Gord is having a bit of trouble explaining who or what Everyone Else is but the people from Golarion will actually understand him just fine.