She wants to protest that of course she doesn't let her fear lead her to make a mistake, but that would be a lie. She has definitely made mistakes in the course of trying to impress people. She winces internally at the reminder, before pushing those thoughts aside.

"Yes, that makes sense," she agrees. "It might be that a persistent anti-fear effect is actually really useful to making high-stress decisions. But I would want to understand what it does and how that affects people before I came to rely on it."

She shakes her head.

"In any case, there will be time for experimentation later. For now, I think we've done as much as we can to prepare before consulting the gods who stayed in Golarion. Shall we head back to Milliways to catch up with Cayden?"

"Yes." She is glad they did this, and now they can get back to the actually important work of fighting Hell.

"Let's go!" This is going to be epic, which isn't the important part but he's still allowed to feel about it. They're going to fight Hell. And win.

And so, after a reunion, and a round of drinks on Cayden, and going over all their plans until they're reasonably sure they're as ready as they're going to be -

- Gord opens the door from Milliways, to a little village of no real importance a few miles south of Kenabres whose name will go down in history.

Whether that name will be commonly prefixed by "The Site Of" or "The Battle Of" or, perhaps, "The Epicenter" remains to be seen.

Everyone! We have found so much that is new and Good!

Gods can share information very quickly with each other, when they're not really bothering to save on energy.

Nethys! Get Yourself in here and teach this girl some of the arcane magic You're always going on about.

Magic isn't for sharing, it's for discovering!

Be Good and we'll explode Hell with it.

That happens even when You're bad with magic!

...Alright, deal.

I have already shared with My allies My resources and plans for fighting Hell, to enable them to better plan without me in unforeseen circumstances, as is My best strategy regardless of specific unforeseen events.

Here is an update on their state, as of the last milliround, and a copy of My decision procedure.

Of course the first aliens we meet from outside Creation immediately help us stop Hell! Evil is a cosmic aberration! She is so happy about this.

As the resident meeter-of-aliens-from-outside-Creation, Desna will refrain from pointing out the unfortunate case of Dou-Bral.

It is a very encouraging precedent!

Gord closes the door again after the agreed-on round has passed.

"Nethys is here! He doesn't like to incarnate, even though He's ex-mortal, His ascension was - disruptive. But He can make illusions of everything He wants to show or say, including spellforms."

Nethys sees everything, and everything now includes Milliways.

He can also see - a narrow pinhole, leading to another world. He finds that He doesn't want to go there and see all of it, too. 

Nethys is tired. Even this fragment of a fragment that has been observing a fairly average bit of settled ground in northern Avistan. He cannot stop seeing everything, not without stopping being Him. Some days He wishes the things He sees stop existing, instead.

"Be careful what you wish for", He tells the room, via auditory illusion. 

And a spellform hangs in the air, wanting only the raw power to bring it to life. 

It is extremely complex, barely stabilizing at ninth circle. And it is inelegant, the kind of ugly that a Good or a Lawful god of magic would never condone. An agglomeration of bits and triggers and encasements, added over the millenia by archwizard after archwizard, all trying to guide and constrain and prod and cajole -

A tiny shining piece in the middle. Unbearably simple; impossible to forget once you've seen it; the essence of godly magic, and the despair of mortals.

It is not, after all, a reverse-engineered Miracle.

A Miracle calls down a god's attention, and permits that god to act. It burns an allotted measure of wealth and power, to satisfy the godtreaties, and gives over a portion of it to the god. It is granted at ninth circle, not because it is complex, but because the godtreaties and the gods who wrote them did not wish to grant this ability to any but the greatest of Their clerics.

Replicating a Miracle with arcane magic is absurdly simple, and does nothing at all. You call out to the god whose Miracle you copied, and They do not answer, because They do not wish to, and because the godtreaties do not permit it.

So the wizards who invented Wish replicated the magical structure that a god uses to answer a Miracle, enacting Their will upon the world.

It is a structure simpler than any spell, more obvious than any cantrip. It has no instructions, no rules, no purpose. It is a conduit for magic power, meant to be driven by a mind both greater and more alien than any mortal.

The simplest spell, the first cantrip many learn, is Light. Fiat Lux.

The little shining bit at the center of the Wish spellform is simply -

Fiat.

Ooooh!

Weeping Cherry finds her attention completely captivated by the spellform. Annotations start growing on it like vines as her self tree takes components apart to see what they do.

She makes her own exploded copy, unwinding the tangled geometries of the spell to peer at the inner attachment points. She plays a video of the spell's simulated unfolding, watching how information flows through the network of the spell, reprogramming the dense ball of possibility around which it is built.

When she saw Gord's magic, she compared it to nanotech, and this spell justifies that comparison. It is infinitely adaptable and reconfigurable, able to contort itself into any lesser spellform, even ones specially adapted for the specific circumstance of casting.

It is also incredibly badly constructed, not in the sense that the creators lacked skill, but in the sense that they lacked sanity.

"Ack! Who made this?" she exclaims. "I would understand if there were no safety interlocks, but some of these are working at cross purposes, which is worse. And this natural language processing is such a hack! Did this ever work?"

After a moment, she shakes her head, pulling back. The rest of her can study the spell, and figure out how to use it safely. Probably they will limit themselves to just figuring out safe wordings to feed into the spell, since she doesn't think they have enough understanding of magic to rewrite the user interface portions.

"Thank you," she says. "That will be very useful. Could you also share the formula for time stop, please?"

And if Nethys does not look through the wormholes, then He will not see the several pocket dimensions reserved for experimentation that explode in increasingly esoteric ways as the rest of her self tree pokes at the new magic.

"It almost always worked! Sometimes it even did what the caster intended!"

Here is the spellform for arcane Time Stop! It is much more pleasant to look at.

Nethys is abstractly aware that He's probably missing out on some explosions, out there in the new world, but the atmosphere of Milliways is unusually - relaxing. It makes Him want to stay and rest a while, next to the fire both real and metaphorical, with the beautiful art of exploding stars out the window.

"You can stay as long as you like," the bar tells Him. Not in words, but in impressions.

This is a bar -- a place where travelers, weary from the world, put their feet up by the fire and rest for a time. It's a place where people smooth the harsh edges of the world with drink, and let themselves dwell when they are tired of sleeping by the roadside. A place with the smell of wood smoke and the gentle clink of glasses to lull you into comfort.

But more than that, this is a place outside of time and space, where you never know who or what is about to step through the door. This is a place where people learn things, not in the academic way to be sure, but from seeing first-hand the amazing breadth of the multiverse. This is a magical place, where the humdrum expectations of mundane reality are worn away under a constant onslaught of the bizarre.

This is a place where you can watch exploding stars out of the windows.

"The first drink's free," the bar tells Him. Not because He doesn't know already, but because that's the shape of things. The words are what comes next, in the intricate dance of the future, as inevitable as gravity, yet infinitely more promising. "What can I get you?"

"Oh, this one is beautiful!" she remarks. "Wait, this is messing with inertial mass. How does that ..."

She trails off, trying to work through the mechanism of the spell. A moment later, she looks up, only to see that the people around her have frozen. The clock in the corner of her vision has split in two, the objective time frozen and the subjective time ticking along at the expected rate.

"You have 530 new messages," her HUD informs her.

Oh. It suddenly hits her -- she has time, now. Time to read through all of the magic research her other selves have completed, time to review how she's handled first contact, and to review the resulting policy changes. Time to sleep, after an exhausting day.

She walks slowly to an empty space and summons a comfy chair. She flops back into it, and lets herself relax for a moment before she summons another copy of the spell diagram to peruse. She has always been a scientist, first and foremost. And the things that this spell does in order to provide accelerated time look very interesting.

She doesn't know how long she spends, tracing the winding pathways of the spell. But it doesn't really matter, does it? She could spend a week at it, and everyone else would only see a blur. When she has gone as far as she thinks she can without collaboration, she writes up her notes and posts them to the magic research forum.

She scrolls through the other research that the rest of her self-tree has assembled, and then fails to hold back a yawn, and decides to take a nap. She puts up a privacy illusion, so that she'll be able to sleep, and falls asleep to the utter silence of nothing happening around her.

When she wakes, she clears away her things and teleports to Antichthon for a walk. The grass is frozen and dusted with unmoving morning dew, and she has to duck to avoid the occasional frozen insect. After a few minutes, the silence gets to her, and she puts on a recording of nature sounds.

She stares out over the frozen hills, and catches up on her messages. They're mostly chatter about magic, but there are some notifications about all of her pending support tickets being resolved. There's one announcement about what they expect the market to do, now that manufacturing costs are plummeting. The prices of, well, everything should hit rock bottom in another few seconds.

She could spend years waiting for that moment.

She clears out her inbox, and then catches up on some forum discussions, and then spends some time looking at space exploration plans. Greatest Teleport is pretty good, but the range does still have a limit. Combined with Time Stop, though, and they finally have good FTL. She made plans, back when there were only a handful of her, for what they would do if they ever got FTL working.

She switches her soundtrack to something orchestral and triumphant, and reads through the briefing materials for the upcoming assault. She pours over what Cayden and Desna have told her about the denizens of Hell, preparing herself.

She sighs, and stands up, the dew rolling off of her dress and hanging in midair like tiny diamonds. The grass bent by her passage has remained so, clearly showing the trail she took across the meadow. She gives the sun, hanging motionless in the sky, a salute, and returns to Milliways, where her comrades have not quite finished blinking.

The resumption of normal time hits her like a wall, the quiet sounds of the bar very noticeable after their long (short) absence.

"Thank you," she tells Nethys sincerely. "I think that's my new favorite spell."

She turns to survey the others. "Alright, I think I'm ready. Is there anything else we need to cover before we move?"

By the time she is done speaking, people throughout the solar system are just starting to react to the fact that every material object listed for purchase with stars has just started showing "Free". Some people think it's a glitch. Others, who were on the waiting list for something like a pocket dimension or a planet, are just happy that their wait is over.

Clumps of her self-tree, tired of spending months with the same small group of people, explode across the public areas of New Selenopolis. They work to rouse people for a party, both as an excuse to cut lose, and because by the time everyone has had a chance to grab a glass of champagne there will be something to celebrate.

Volunteers prepare themselves to fork, because they are going to need all the hands they can get, for what is to come. Carefully prepared habitats for each of Golarion's species tile themselves across the sky.

And in an empty pocket dimension, thousands of spare bodies are spun into existence, made of the most durable materials possible. Each one made with a fixity crystal large enough to sustain a time stop, a gate, and a wish. Each one designed to house an uploaded fork. Each one ready to be dropped into Hell.

On inspection of Iomedae's decision function, She prefers to know the decision functions of her non-divine allies, in case decisions have to be made (and perhaps negotiations with other gods) at a speed which only true gods can follow.

"She means She'd like to know at what price Cherry is willing to do various things. Like saving damned souls, or rescuing devils who can only ambiguously be helped. Or letting Asmodeus and His allied gods go free, at the end."

Yes! That's how Lawful Good works! By considering your allies' preferences, even when they haven't asked you to! By not harming people who have come to them, like Cherry has, even to the extent of doing something contrary to Cherry's values! Go, go, team Lawful Good!!