Iomedae looks - however She chooses to look, of course. Irabeth understands that now, with more experience and also more presence of mind, which Iomedae Herself had granted her. She is a human woman and a paladin in shining armor and these are not falsehoods about her, simply a very minor part of what and who She is. It says more about Irabeth than it does about Her that this is the most effective way in which She could appear to her mortal paladin.

Today, Iomedae is choosing to appear - happier. More satisfied, a little less tense, than She had been before. That too, Irabeth knows, cannot be false, even if it is a poor representation of a god. Iomedae does not lie, not to Her own paladin and not to any others.

"You've done well."

"I didn't do anything special," Irabeth says. She thinks Iomedae, more than anyone else, will understand what she's feeling. "I'm no-one special. Any good paladin would have done the same. Any competent Lawful Good person could have done it. I shouldn't be praised or thanked or remembered or - become famous. I shouldn't be given gifts by the gods. I just did my job."

"That's right," Iomedae agrees. "Few people can become paladins, and fewer choose to, and not all paladins are equal. You are a paladin, and a good one. That is the result of many years of hard work. You are not more extraordinary today than you were yesterday morning."

"What you accomplished wasn't a legendary feat or a heroic deed. It was trained competence, persevering dedication, and one paladin out of many thousands who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and did her job."

"Look down."

Irabeth looks down at the world, and she sees -

She is no longer floating unsupported in midair. She is held up by the hands of others, the tip of a vast pyramid of people, each layer holding, supporting, thrusting up those above them until it reaches the very heavens.

Some of them are grim while others smile; some raise their voices in song while others weep, some hold up others on their shoulders while others only lend a steadying hand to another's back. But they are all doing their part, supporting, reinforcing, helping each other, in a great interlocked structure that is joined by ever more people, adding and adding to it until many are raised up to the sky alongside herself, many thousands held up under the shining sun, and she is neither more nor less than any other among them.

All the paladins she has ever served with are there, all the clerics and priests, all the Lawful Good people she has met and many others as well. And Anevia is there, half-steadying, half-hugging Irabeth to herself as she smiles her special, private smile.

Iomedae is down there too, at the center of the structure. She is a large part, and a load-bearing one. The pyramid might collapse without Her help. But She is small, next to the great mass of people that She built around Herself to reach the sky.

"You're not more special than you knew, and you didn't need to be," She tells Irabeth. "This thing that we built, you and I and everyone who ever joined us, wasn't made out of outstanding courage and great moral clarity that the average paladin couldn't aspire to. There aren't enough legendary heroes to hold up the world."

"We built an organization that many people could join. We made laws that many could follow, and a cause of Good that many could help. And then we worked at it, each doing their part, for many lifetimes, until it was enough. We'll keep working together, for as long as we are needed."

"You chose Good, and you chose cooperation, and service, and you kept choosing them every day. You've done the right thing, over and over again. I'm proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself too. Not because you're better than others, or better than expected, or better than you were yesterday. Because you are, and always have been, very competent, and very good, and that is more than good enough."

"Magic is cheap now, and Evil beaten back, but there is still work that needs paladins. To talk to people and to promise them - credibly, with all the trust that we have built up over the centuries - that the new age, the new powers, are trustworthy, and are Good. To stand guard and guarantor to keep it so. To mediate negotiations in good faith, to make and to keep promises. To teach people how to work together, and rely on each other, and build Lawful Good organizations that can outlast them. To be there for desperate people to turn to, when they are afraid that others will leave them worse off for trying."

"We don't know what the future will look like. It is for all of us to build, together. There will be much more cooperation, if only because of much easier communications, between mortals and between the mortals and the gods. New magic and technology will probably be invented very quickly. All our plans may be obviated tomorrow, or next year, but only because they might be replaced by something better."

"So go on, and keep doing what seems right to you." She smiles at Irabeth. "You're good at it."

Irabeth salutes, fist to chest, and holds the pose as the vision breaks apart around her. She feels - more grounded, now. And happy, elated even, which surely makes sense after everything that happened.

Did she think on some level that she needed permission to be happy? Surely not. ...Very likely not. She'll ask for Anevia's opinion, later. But for now, she thinks she wanted it to be - not permitted, but explained. To understand how she fit into the world. How she affected what happened today, through her actions and through being the person she is, the sum total of all her actions until today. 

She didn't doubt herself before. Didn't regret her career, her life's choices. She still feels happy, and proud, and validated in what she has made of herself. Not some hero out of legend who talks to gods and affects the course of history. Just a good woman, with a home and a loving wife and a career that she spends helping people, and she can think of nothing in Creation she wants for herself more than that.

With a smile on her face, Irabeth asks the fixity field to teleport her to Anevia's side.

When Irabeth steps outside, Weeping Cherry takes a moment to check in on how the rest of her self tree is doing. She was plugged in to updates on their overall activities, but it's good to take the time to check in on yourself.

The first thing she notices, when she drills past the high level summary, is a note about names. Having forks is wonderful, but it does make distinguishing who you're talking about a bit complicated. She totally put off picking a new name because she was busy with first contact, and then with Hell, but at this point she really should.

Their alphebetized tree names scheme was already somewhat breaking down, and the population explosion to deal with Creation has not really helped. Especially not because it looks like a sizable fraction of new forks who were already near the end of the alphabet went for "Yew".

She rolls some dice and settles on "Enterprising Azalea".

Meanwhile, her other forks are doing a thousand different things.

Constant Elm trots up the wide steps of an Axis bank to negotiate currency exchange, bouncing a bit with each step. She carries a briefcase, mostly for the look of the thing. She didn't participate in the war directly, but she did help manage the fallout of the abrupt transition to true post-scarcity in the Sol-side markets.

Pensive Walnut sits in a quiet mountain glade, thinking about what she saw in Hell. There are going to be support groups, she knows. The support groups are somewhat inevitable, after seeing so many people locked in frozen torment. But for now, she just wants to sit and gaze up at the snow-capped peaks, and regain her center. When she's ready, she'll walk down the mountain and join some of the rest of her in the village below.

Libertine Lemon rocks a crying infant who had been abandoned in the woods. She isn't good with babies, but it has been a very hectic thirty seconds for everyone, and it's not this one's fault. She taps at the screen of a medical report with her other hand, correcting some of the babe's nutrient deficiencies.

Belligerent Poplar makes party arrangements in Elysium. She teleported in at random, and landed in a large event hall grown into the branches of a tree. She likes Elysium's style. She might move out into the wilderness here, since the bidding on all of her self-tree's properties just spiked along with their population. But living in a bubble that floats from tree to tree doesn't sound like a bad idea.

They are not all working. They are not all resting. They do not move as one, having diverged from each other. But there is one thing that they all have in common at the moment, and that is hope.

Hope that magic will patch the gaps in what fixity crystals can do. Hope that once they've reverse-engineered it enough it will be able to do anything. Hope that they'll figure out how to share memories, and become more of a singular person and less of a collective again. Hope that they will make new friends, and meet new people. Hope that someone new will open the door to Milliways soon, and let them repeat this in another world that needs some help.

She scrolls through some of the status updates from the rest of her, but it's just too much to keep up with. Too many new things happening faster than their curation and summarization systems can keep up with.

She turns her feed off, and turns back to the people standing near her.

"Hey Gord?" she calls, drawing his attention. "With so many of us forking, it would be a bit difficult for us all to keep going by Weeping Cherry, so we're taking new names. You can call me Enterprising Azalea, or Azalea for short."

...that reminds him. "Where are my clones? Gordy and, uh, the other one went by Squash but I'm not sure how serious he was."

"Oh! Uh, let me see. It looks like they got swept up with everyone else from Golarion," she replies. "Do you want to go visit them, or ask them if they want to come here?"

He turns to Cayden. "Is whatever you wanted to tell me also for them?"

"Yes. Azalea, if you would be so kind as to invite them to join us?"

"Sure!"

She dispatches a message asking them to teleport back to Milliways.

"Hey! You didn't even give us a running start before you went and fixed it all without us!" Gordy is grinning, but he clearly hasn't had enough time to process everything that happened yet. 

"I'm afraid I have more news for you to process. Whether it's good or bad is - " He wiggles the hand that isn't holding a mug. "Up to you, really! But it's not urgent, so you can talk and catch up first."

"So what did we miss? Other than the general updates that everyone on the team got."

"I argued with that paladin we fought a lot! I like her, she's a good person. And I understand Lawful Good better now. And I spent a lot of time talking to Cayden and Desna. I'm not sure if I understand gods any better, though. And we spent a day planning how to handle the people from Golarion, so some of the confusion from the half-minute everyone had before we brought them back is probably my fault. And we told our life stories to Cherry - sorry, this is Azalea now, that was Cherry then. Oh, and we talked to Nethys. And the gods gave all the magic to Cherry's world, and Cherry gave the fixity fields to the gods, and they planned the assault on Hell. While I was stuck here holding the door open. And we saw Rovagug eat Golarion and some other planets and go away, and we saw Golarion restored. The first bit was on a screen, Otolmens put us in a bubble, she's a Lawful Neutral goddess of putting dangerous things in bubbles. And we swapped life stories and talked about the philosophy of good and evil, and why Asmodeans don't think Hell is bad, and why half-orc paladins don't think prejudice is bad, and why paladins trust gods, and how we could have allied with them but I don't think it was mostly our fault that we didn't. Standing in a Time Stop can be really boring so I skipped some of that. I think those are the important bits."

Well at least Gord's enjoying himself enough to clown around - wait, does this mean Gord is like an older brother now, by a day or two? - no, no, perish the thought.

"So you talked a lot to the paladin?"

Well at least Gord's doesn't think any of that was serious enough not to joke about. Which is good, because Squash is sure he missed a lot.

"So you talked a lot to Cayden - wait."

He looks disbelievingly at the perfectly ordinary-looking man holding a mug of beer.

He fits in perfectly. The least surprising person you could meet, in a bar like this. But then he grins, and strikes a pose familiar from wall-art in all the other bars Gord has ever been in, a pose often traced around a bar's sign instead of an (illegal in Mendev) plaque saying Asmodeans not welcome.

Also, the bits of foaming beer frozen in mid-spill over the mug are a bit of a giveaway.

"The one and only!"

"It took me a few minutes, too."

"But now you're fine with it, right?"

"Only a few minutes. And that was over a day ago."

Squash takes another long look at Cayden.

"I trust myself," he decides. "So I'm going to skip the few minutes."

"What, just like that?"