Hearing that lawful gods can bind themselves like that is ... interesting. It definitely implies that even the ascended gods think very differently from humans, but it also raises the question of why they haven't undergone a values handshake and consolidated into one entity. Maybe they have, and they merely present different faces for different purposes?

"I think being able to make unbreakable promises is possibly useful, but if the first promise you make isn't 'I will never knowingly betray my allies', you're not really doing it right," she remarks. "Being knowably trustworthy is actually really valuable. If we could somehow get a list of what promises she's made, that might give us a better idea of how to trust her -- does her country publish an up-to-date list of her promises? If it doesn't, that's a bad sign, because it implies that she makes promises she doesn't want people to know about."

She drums her fingers on the bar for a moment, thinking about the other things he's said.

"When you say that Sarenrae has trouble understanding mortals -- does that include ascended gods like Milani? I'm just trying to get an idea of what the problems are with communicating better with Sarenrae, because 'get the most powerful Good god to support your plan' sounds like a great idea."

"I'm not sure if Iomeadae would betray her allies, but either way her existing oaths might prevent us from becoming her allies, and she might tell someone else about our attempt at contacting her."

"Lastwall publishes some promises she's made, I don't remember all of them offhand, but I'm sure she sometimes promises someone something in confidence and then it's not published, or she just has - secret plans that involve promises that she doesn't want her enemies to know about. I guess she could promise that she hasn't made a certain promise, but that would require asking her if she's made a certain promise, and that would give away information."

"And I'm not speaking from personal knowledge, but my best guess is that Milani is better at talking to Sarenrae than we would be because Milani is smarter than us and knows what it's like to be a god and has a lot of practice at talking to other gods, not because Sarenrae is better at understanding Milani. Although she might be better at it too because she's been talking to her for a while."

"Oh, I see what you mean!" she says. "That makes sense. If we can do it cheaply, we probably want to pick up a copy of that list, just in case she's done the sensible thing and promised that anyone who comes to her under a flag of parley won't be worse off for having done so."

She shakes her head.

"If Milani is already working on 'explaining people to Sarenrae' and hasn't made noticeable progress, I'm not sure if we have an angle on speeding that up. Maybe we can try contacting her and asking if there's anything which would speed that work up, but either way it probably will be too slow to help with whatever our initial action is."

"Oh, unless! You mentioned possibly being able to pray to Gorum to get his attention. Is there any downside to trying to pray to the non-Lawful Good gods?" she asks. "Except, I suppose, the possibility of betrayal, so we should probably choose wisely. I don't really expect it to work, but if we can potentially get feedback or help from them without needing to open the door at all, that might be worth trying even if it's a long shot."

"Praying to a god is the traditional way of contacting them! But there's some disagreement on how it works."

"Some people say it only works if you understand the god well enough - what they care about and want from mortals and how they see the world if they're the kind who doesn't understand mortals very well. Some say you have to be, yourself, aligned with the god, the same way that clerics are always close in alignment to their god and share some of their ideals. Clerics are often first chosen when they pray. Some say that gods can actually hear all the prayers but those are the conditions for them responding, so maybe they'd respond anyway if the prayer was really interesting or important. Maybe you have to be all of those things at once."

"Churches usually have instructions for the faithful or for clerics for praying correctly, as part of teaching about their god. Maybe different gods are just - different. I've never seriously prayed to anyone but Gorum."

"Powerful clerics have a spell that lets them talk directly to their god, and others that let them ask their god to send an outsider as a messenger, so you can talk to them and have them carry a message back. I'm not strong enough to have those spells yet, I'm only third circle."

"Anyway, I don't see how praying would work if time is stopped for the gods while the door is closed."

"Yes, that's why I think it's a long shot," she agrees. "If it did work, I think that would actually be really concerning and we'd have to move fast because it would imply that the promised time-stop was not actually absolute. But it's also something that we can try quickly before opening the door, just in case."

She conjures a floating whiteboard on which to diagram.

"My other selves have been keeping notes, but our plan is getting complex enough that I want to write it down so we have something to refer to," she explains. She writes "Examine Gord's Magic" at the top, "Try to contact gods (which ones)?" below it, followed by "Open door", and then by two different options with a line drawn to each: "Kidnap likely allies (who?)", and "Kidnap everyone". Below this she writes "What if teleport doesn't work?" and "Try to contact gods again?"

She looks at that for a moment, and then adds "Copy books -- Iomedae list/other references" under "Kidnap likely allies".

"Does that all make sense?" she asks. "Or should I note it in a different way? Here," she adds, adding a selection of differently colored whiteboard markers to the bottom of the whiteboard.

"It makes sense. We could also talk to prospective allies without kidnapping them, if we can keep the door open without drawing attention."

"I think the biggest question is - what actions would be noticed by gods? Keeping the door open for long enough? Taking your fixity field into Golarion? Copying something, teleporting something? Only the absence of something important that was teleported? We need to figure that out to know what risks to take."

"You can try closing the door and seeing if time stops completely in your world until you open it again. And I can show you the rest of my spells in case you learn something useful."

She adds "talk to allies w/ sneaky door" to the diagram.

"Yes, I think you're quite right that our main goal is to act before all the gods notice. I'm not really sure how to guess what will get a god's attention, other than the supposition that normal things that happen all the time in your world probably don't," she agrees.

"Playing around with the timestop effect on my world makes perfect sense. We should definitely do that," she continues. "That might mean I have to disconnect from my connection to the rest of my selves, though, because they would be stopped. And I really don't know what it would do to one of my wormholes to have one end frozen in time and the other one not. I guess we should find out."

She summons a beach-ball sized pale golden crystal that she sets to hovering near her, just in case, and then walks over to the door and closes it. Her self-tree remains connected.

"So that didn't stop time in my world, but I bet that's because I'm still connected to the rest of my other selves," she explains, opening the door again. She lets her wormholes float back through, and closes it again. This time, the fixity field from the far side cuts off as soon as the door closes, and she loses the connection.

She waits a count of five, and then opens the door again. Her selftree reports that the door seemed to close and then open instantaneously.

"But the timestop effect seems to work fine when I'm disconnected."

She tries a few more variations -- unraveling a wormhole, dropping it into a tiny black hole, trying to measure the time between the door closing and opening more closely -- before returning to the bar.

"It looks like the timestop effect only works when there's no connection from one side of the door to the other," she concludes. "Which is good to know, because it means I definitely shouldn't put a permanent connection between Earth and Golarion until we're sure we don't need the timestop anymore. But it also means that a god who notices the door might be able to figure this out and get a connection of their own through to stop us being able to pause again."

She gets a notification from the particle physicists that they have a working temporary sword spell. It takes a small brain modification and some weird supporting femptomachinery to attach, but it seems to work fine.

"It looks like the versions of me who are working on understanding magic are ready for the next piece," she remarks. "Can we try your invisibility spell next?"

Gord becomes invisible, along with his sword! Any small objects he picks up and puts in his pocket also become invisible, as if the invisible material is obscuring them, until he takes them out again.

"If you're careful, you can make objects partially invisible, the part that's inside the pocket or bag. I heard a story once where a man used this to look into a closed box without opening it."

She blinks repeatedly.

"Wait, what? Like, he got inside an invisible container, and then held the box partly through the opening of the container such that the lid became invisible, but the contents didn't?" she clarifies.

She doesn't let her confusion stop her from trying various different wavelengths and angles of light on him. What happens if she drops a little flour on him? What happens if she looks for a difference in refractive index, etc.?

"Actually, could you put your hand in this bucket for a moment, so I can see how the spell handles the transition between water and air?"

The flour settles on him, creating an outline of his body. (This is in fact a standard anti-invisibility security measure.) After a few seconds it turns invisible, unless she dumps a whole bag. His footprints leave visible impressions in the flour on the floor.

His hand remains invisible inside the water, but the invisibility is still mimicking air; it looks as if the water is mysteriously avoiding a hand-shaped volume.

"He was wearing a backpack, which became invisible with him. And then he put a locked box into the backpack. Half the box was sticking out of the backpack and remained visible, so he could look into that half through the exposed cross-section."

"I think if you do that, the inside of the visible half-box might stay dark, but it could work if you have darkvision and the box wasn't perfectly sealed against light to begin with."

"That is really clever and also slightly bizarre," she states. She conjures up a small sealed wooden box with a remote-controlled LED in it. "Here, slip this part-way into your pocket and we can see whether the interior remains dark."

She toggles on a visualization of the magic, and watches how it catches light and warps it in just the right way to simulate air. She tries introducing some heat shimmers by selectively heating the air in a very small plane that intersects him, and various other manipulations of small bits of atmosphere.

"I'm not sure whether it is mimicking generic 'air', or whether it calibrated itself to the air you were standing in when you cast the spell," she explains.

The LED inside the box illuminates the half of it that can be seen, even if the LED is itself in the invisible portion of the box.

"If you're swimming when you cast the spell, it still mimics air, even if you're wholly underwater."

"Oh, cool! That answers that question."

She stops with the atmospheric distortions, and starts examining the structure of the spell.

"It looks a little bit as though it has ... fracture points? I'm not really sure how to describe them," she remarks. "Does the spell only work under certain conditions? Like, would it break if you were subject to enough blunt force?"

"No, it breaks if I hit someone else."

"Ooooh! Yes, I think I see. Here, hit me," she requests.

Gord will hit her. With his fist, not his sword; she's immortal but it might be rude, he's not actually sure.

Her dress declines to move for his fist, but it also absorbs the momentum behind his hit, so that his knuckles aren't damaged.

"Oh that's fascinating," she exclaims. "The energy builds up there, but then the pieces can't maintain coherence, so they detach instead of exploding, and the whole thing fizzles out."

She stops as a sudden thought interrupts her.

"How common is it for magic experiments to end in explosions? Or by creating areas with unnatural and dangerous properties?"

He may not be trained in fist-fighting but he wouldn't hurt his own knuckles when punching something, what kind of amateur does she take him for?

"Wizard experiments always explode in stories. I've never seen it myself but I assume it's a trope for a reason. Of course, many wizard spells explode on purpose, so maybe that counts as a successful experiment? If all the spells I've seen are the successful ones, then I don't know what the true experiments are like. Most wizards by far don't try to develop new spells."

"Also, the whole Worldwound is full of unnatural and dangerous properties. I have no idea if it was anyone's experiment, but this is the first permanent planar rift into the Abyss, so maybe you can count it as one."

"There's also the country of Alkenstar, where magic doesn't work at all. The story goes that long ago, two very powerful wizards fought each other with very powerful magic that caused it. On the other hand, maybe one of them did it deliberately."

"That sounds like it might be useful, the ability to disable magic in an area, I mean. If I could figure that out, we could position it in the area around the door to make it harder for magical effects to come back through when we open it," she suggests.

She looks at the recommended order to test the rest of his spells in.

"If I got some injured people in here, would you be willing to do one of your area-healings next? We don't really have many injured people, but some people refuse healing with fixity crystals and might accept magical healing from a god instead."

He's definitely willing to do a channel! You have to use them every day anyway, you can't save them up. She should bring as many people as will fit.

She will put out a quick news bulletin, and manage to get a mix of fundamentalist religious types and people willing to be injured in specific ways for testing purposes. Several more of her teleport in to help manage everyone. She marks out a large chalk circle with Gord in the center, and positions most people inside the circle, but a few just outside it at different distances, or with one limb held across the edge.

("Yes, other universes -- it's very exciting," she says. "Well, if he reveals himself to be a knowlessman, it's better to find out now," she says. "I really appreciate your help. If this works, we might be able to roll it out as an alternative to normal medical care, yes," she says.)

Eventually, everyone has been cajoled into place. The circle is packed a bit less tightly than some on Golarion, but they still manage to fill nearly the whole room. Some people are sipping on free drinks.

Gord holds his sword high so everyone can see it. It glows, briefly, a muted gray color.

3d6 HP is enough to restore any commoner to full health. Their bodies are healed of all physical injuries, as much as they were ever going to and sometimes more than that. Wounds vanish; the worst ones scar over. 

Missing body parts are not regrown. Disease is not cured or diminished, but the damage it did to the body is gone, giving people more time and a better fighting chance. (Cancer counts as a disease.) Tiredness is only slightly alleviated; this kind of healing can't replace sleep and rest.

"Do you want to see me convert a spell into healing energy? We can't test bestow curse anyway, it's permanent and I'd need to pray again to remove it. It would heal a little more than the channel, but just one target."

She tears her eyes away from the recording of him punching a tiny hole into another dimension in a way that somehow heals people, and agrees.

"Yes, please. Give me a moment to find the most gravely injured person willing to volunteer for it," she requests.

People start milling around. Some teleport out, and some walk back through the door, where Weeping Cherry's house has been remodeled into a small spaceport. A few sit down at the bar and have napkin-conversations that end in more drinks. Several waylay various iterations of her to talk.

"That group of folks over there are interested in talking with you," she tells Gord, indicating a group of people who have claimed a set of chairs by the fire. "You have no particular obligation to talk with them, and I told them that they shouldn't bother you unless you went to them, but if you want to talk to them, feel free."

A young man with a twisted leg and a sickly pallor is brought up for Gord to heal a few moments later.

Why is the leg twisted? If it's a broken bone that already started healing the wrong way, it needs to be re-broken and set properly, otherwise the cure spell will leave it healthy but crooked.

"A conversation could be relaxing, but only if I don't have to track what I should and shouldn't tell them. Are you OK with them knowing all about Golarion? Who are they? I thought the people who came in for healing were just whoever was injured, not - especially trusted and vetted."