Gord is pretty sure that, once they go back to Golarion, someone else will manage to die where Cherry can see them before Gordy has to risk his eternity about it! If they have the time, Gord's happy to die and be raised and restored by a Golarion cleric to show her how it's done.

"I just thought of something else: alignment detection spells might work on souls."

"Some people think alignment is a fundamental property of the universe. Others think it's just Pharasma's judgement," he pronounces the word with all due scorn, "at least for non-Outsider souls, and the spells predict how the trial is likely to go. In which case they might not work on someone without a soul, who couldn't go to judgement."

"There's a separate spell for each alignment - detect good, detect chaos, and so on - and they're all first circle but I don't have them prepared."

"Interesting! I'll definitely have to keep an eye out for those," she says. "Do you have any other questions or concerns about being duplicated? I'm willing to clone you more in the future, but it's probably best to wait and see how well you adjust first. If not, I have some questions about Golarion logistics, which we could feasibly parallelize."

"I won't know what questions to ask until we know what happens to Golarion. One way or another, we won't be going back to our old lives."

"What did you want to know about logistics?"

"How long is the best possible non-fixity-crystal travel time to powerful priests of each of the Good gods? Or to Morgethai?" she asks. "And what does that journey look like in detail? Ride fast horses to somewhere that sells teleports, and then teleport? I ask, because I think the travel time is maybe the main cost to trying to alert the Good gods before bringing a fixity field into Golarion -- it both gives gods a chance to notice us before we act, and requires people to endure more bad conditions before we can rescue them. On the other hand, it may be the only thing we can do to increase the chance of a struggle between the gods coming down in our favor, which is worth a lot."

Gord is going to dump a lot of information about transportation logistics and trust Cherry's superior attention to filter out the chaff!

"Teleports are instantaneous. So the question is, how long to get to someone who can teleport, convince them to do it, and to get to our target on the other end. We can't teleport directly to whichever room Morgethai is in right now, because we don't know where she is, we'd be going to her home or work. And she might turn out to be away, somewhere unknown, or refuse to be disturbed."

"We can also pay to send someone a message with sending, which takes ten minutes to cast but works whereever they are, even on other planes. We'd have to convince them to meet, using twenty-five words per message, another twenty-five for the reply. The downside is that whoever casts the sending will know the contents."

"The closest place that has a teleport for sale is Kenabres. Actually there's a chance it won't have any for sale, if someone happened to buy up all the scrolls this morning, but that's unlikely because people always keep some in reserve, for emergencies. Rathimus is the cleric of Abadar in Kenabres, and will sell us a scroll of teleport if he has one as long as we pay him enough. Other churches and powerful people will have their own stocks but won't want to sell their emergency reserves, and if you offer enough money to change their minds it might make them suspicious."

"Or you could try to duplicate a spell scroll without buying it," Gordy jumps in. "Since you don't want to use your powers in Golarion, that means going to Kenabres, paying to look at a scroll they're not willing to sell you - and I don't know how to explain wanting to do that - then going back here to duplicate it. There's a kind of magic boots that let the wearer teleport three times a day, and it's easy to look at someone's boots, but I don't know who has them in Kenabres. We could ask around."

"Normally, if a city runs out of teleports and someone has an emergency, they can message someone in another city with sending to come pick them up. That means paying for two teleports, going both ways, and the sending itself, but it would be much less conspicuous if we can pretend to be rich adventurers with some private emergency. Sending is a cleric spell, fourth circle, so there are definitely people who can cast it. And there are lots of wizards for hire around the world who'll teleport in and out again for enough money, and Rathimus will know who to call about it."

"Did we mention we can't actually cast a teleport? It's a wizard spell, so only wizards can cast it, even if you find a scroll. And it has a range limit of five hundred miles, so to go far away you need to cast it several times. And the wizard who casts it has to come with you, so you need to pay them for the trip back, and some wizards may not want to teleport to the other side of the continent without notice if they can't come back right away." Wizard spells are so ridiculously limited sometimes. "And they need enough fifth-circle slots to cast teleport enough times to make it there and back, and most fifth circle mages only have one or two slots at that level... casting from scrolls doesn't use slots so it's better in an emergency."

"I've heard there's a more powerful kind of teleport some wizards have that can go all around the planet, but it must be at least seventh circle, because I met a sixth circle once and they didn't have it. Also, wizards will swear every spell has a stronger version at some higher circle, it might just be a tall tale."

"For completeness' sake, clerics can cast plane shift - also at fifth circle - which takes you anywhere on another plane, so if you cast it twice you can come back somewhere else on Golarion. But the precision is only up to five hundred miles,  you still need a teleport at the end." The wizards probably cribbed off teleport from the second half of plane shift.

"There's a regular teleport to Kenabres with supplies every few days but I don't know when it is. If we're very lucky we'll catch it and outbid whoever's going on the return leg. I don't know where the next stops are nowadays but probably in a bigger city with more teleports to buy."

"Summing up: if we're lucky we can buy several scrolls of teleport and also find a wizard able and willing to cast them; or find boots of teleport to buy or loan or for you to copy; or we can pay for a sending to some random wizards who make a living selling teleports and get them to move us."

"Kenabres is about twenty miles away by road. We can ride there - I assume you can clone us some horses - that would take a couple of hours. Or you can figure out a way to fly faster and make us invisible and we'd land outside the city. If we can't find what we want in Kenabres, the next closest city is Nerosyan, the capital of Mendev, a hundred eighty four miles from Kenabres by road."

"Felandriel Morgethai lives in Almas, the capital of Andoran. I think she's at a wizard university there? Andoran is the only country on the continent, maybe in the whole world, that abolished slavery - one kind of slavery, they still have conscription and sometimes debt bondage, but at least they made a start - and they abolished kings and the nobility and they all vote for their rulers every few years. I was going to say 'you're going to like them' but maybe a place that still forces men to fight and die isn't very likable by Cherryworld standards. I don't know anything about Morgethai, not really, but Andoran's one of the few governments that are at all trying to help their people instead of treating them as a resource, and she's their archwizard, which makes her the best archwizard I've heard of." Maybe there are other Chaotic Good archwizards off in Kelesh or Xian Tia, but their adventurers who joined the Crusade didn't enthuse over their archwizards every night at the campfire, so.

"There's a cleric of Desna in Kenabres called Ramien. Stronger than me, definitely not the strongest Desnan on the continent. He'd know how to find the others. Desnans travel a lot, so I'd much rather rely on him than any rumors I've heard."

"There are also temples to Sarenrae and Shelyn in Kenabres. (And Iomedae, of course, and Abadar and Torag.) Their head clerics weren't particularly powerful at the end of the war, but that was over a year ago, I don't know what circle they're now. I think the strongest cleric of Sarenrae is in Absalom? At least this side of the world. Absalom's the biggest city that I've heard of, on an island in the Middle Sea, and it's said to have the biggest market for magic items and spells and the biggest temples for half the faiths there are. But I'd be worthless as a guide there, and it might be hard to avoid attention, unless we go directly to the temple we want."

"Milani's church I actually don't know where to find, I only ever spoke to a cleric adventurer. He was from Galt, so we could try there? Maybe Rathimus or Ramien would know."

It turns out that twice the Gord means twice the words! He is suddenly distracted by wondering what it would be like to preach as a team.

"I should probably warn you that if we go to Kenabres, the rulers there don't like me." And they haven't even received a report about those slaves he just helped!

"If they recognize me they'll try to arrest or possibly kill me on sight. This won't be a problem talking to someone like Ramien or most other people, but I'd disguise myself for the gate check - magically and mundanely - and normally I'd be prepared to run like hell but with you around you can probably draw all the attention. Or maybe you can disguise both of us better than I can."

"...if I have to stay here holding the door, and we're not sure if Gordy can do it because he wasn't made in Golarion, does that mean Gordy needs to go with you to Kenabres while I stay here?" Assuming Cherry will, in fact, need a local guide.

"Can you actually speak Hallit or Taldane? If the translation effect comes from Milliways, won't you need a translation spell in Golarion? I can still pray to Gorum for one. It lasts an hour but that would get us into the city where we can buy more spells, hopefully."

She nods through all of that, sketching some notes in the air in front of her.

"Okay, good. That's all very helpful," she says. "Hallit and Taldane -- no, I can't speak them. Some of me have been reading your lips and comparing that to what I hear through the translation effect to get data on Hallit, but it would be helpful to have you teach some basics of the language to speed that effort up. A translation spell would also be fine, although we weren't sure if praying would work from in here -- can you pray on the road as we ride if it doesn't, perhaps?"

She takes a moment to collect her thoughts.

"I think the good news is that most of this can be parallelized -- we can send separate parties to each of these places, if we need to. At the same time as praying to the gods directly, and buying sendings locally. And, yes, money and horses are both no object. I can copy your bag, give everyone we send out one of those full of gold and gems, and one of our best horses."

"The bad news is that just looking at a teleport scroll won't be sufficient -- my ability to see magic depends on having a fixity crystal present. And I think just carrying a fixity crystal into Golarion is possibly nearly as noticeable as using it to do something, because they have a very unique internal structure and radius of effect. I would notice instantly if someone brought a fixity crystal that I didn't make anywhere within my radius, even if I weren't always on the lookout for unexpected things."

"I also can't make people invisible without a fixity crystal. Well, there are some adaptive camouflage systems that make you harder to spot, but they're not nearly as good as your invisibility spell. I do have various non-crystal non-magic ways to fly, I'm just not sure how noticeable they would be."

She shows an image of a fighter jet with one of her for scale.

"These can fly about 1,500 miles in an hour. I'm not sure how well they would fit through the door, though. Bar says that the Door can expand as necessary to accommodate patrons of different sizes, but I don't know if one of us riding in a fighter jet relevantly counts as a patron. I can check in a minute."

"There are also smaller land-based vehicles that can easily outpace a horse, although going too fast on rough roads is a good way to end up crashing, and they take some practice to use," she continues, showing pictures of an ATV. "The question there is how noticeable those will be to the gods -- I'm pretty sure that horses will not get anyone's attention, because they're already widely used. These are probably less attention-getting than fixity crystals, because metal, fire, and so on are already known to Golarion, but they might be more attention-getting than horses."

"I feel like it's time to talk about a concrete proposal so that people can poke holes in it again," she says.

She summons another whiteboard and starts diagramming.

"First, we try praying from inside Milliways -- to each of the Good gods we want to contact, and then to Gorum for the translation spell. I'm not expecting that to work, but if it does we can proceed as advised by them," she starts, writing this at the top of the board.

"Let's start by considering the plan where we can use any non-fixity-crystal technology we'd like. In that case, when we try sending people into Golarion I can equip everyone with radios. Non-magical devices that allow people to communicate instantly across great distances," she continues. "One team can make for Kenabres, and one for Nerosyan. Each team equipped with ATVs, bags of gold and gems, good armor, and copies of your spells. We can also talk about weapons -- probably the best personal-defense weapon to send people with would be a gun."

She conjures a picture of a few different kinds of guns.

"They're only instantly fatal if you hit someone in the head or heart, but they can pretty reliably kill people. Think self-winding repeating crossbow with better range that hits about three times as hard as a longbow. We can also pack some less lethal weaponry so we have more options. I don't know if carrying swords is a good idea or not -- it makes us legibly armed, but most people from my world (myself included) do not actually know how to fight with a sword."

"While the Kenabres and Nerosyan teams are on the road, another team can remain here and try to buy any locally available sendings, and try praying to the Good gods from outside Milliways. The Kenabres and Nerosyan teams negotiate for sendings and teleports, and go to Almas, Absalom, and wherever the Desnans are. Once any communication goes through, the teams can alert the others by radio."

"As soon as we get through by one of these means, we roll out the fixity field. As soon as that has happened, we shut the door again and go through seeing what spells exist, learning all the world's languages, etc., with time stopped. Then we open the door again and go from there."

She steps back from the completed diagram.

"The main danger is one of the gods noticing and doing something before we can react. We can set all the teams up with health monitors, such that we'll know immediately if they run into trouble, even if they can't report it themselves. I'm not sure what else we can do to mitigate the risk there."

She turns to face the others again.

"Okay -- what problems do you see with this plan, or what questions do you have about details?"

"I can't be distracted by anything else while I'm praying for spells. I could maybe do it in a cart or carriage, if the road was very very smooth. I can't do it while walking or riding a horse."

    "You can buy books from Bar," Gordy jumps in, "and dictionaries, if that would help you learn before we open the door."

"I was thinking you could duplicate the invisibility spell a bunch in Milliways, and then we'd have enough castings for the trip... that doesn't work if you can't give me more copies of a spell, just refresh the one I have already."

The fighting flying vehicle, though. With a plume of fire behind it, like a dragon in reverse, doing a lap around the Worldwound every hour. If they can use that, they won't need any teleports... but even if the gods don't notice, everyone else definitely will, if they can't even be invisible. He reluctantly discards the idea. Next time, he promises himself.

"I think if the gods notice us just for the tools we bring, they'll act quicker than we can do anything except praying. If we can afford to take a few minutes to get anywhere, we might as well take a few hours or days, as long as we're not alarming any locals. Horses are slower but may be better than your other vehicles, because they won't attract any attention."

    "I don't understand why you wouldn't want to be, uh, legibly armed? I'm going to be armed. Everyone is armed around here, by spell or sword or claw, unless they're a slave or a prisoner or something. Maybe cities off the Wound aren't like that, but around here you only ever disarm if you're meeting someone who doesn't trust you and negotiates for it, not - on the way to their city." Also his sword is his holy symbol.

"Of course you shouldn't carry weapons you don't know how to use. I was thinking your people would pose as clerics, with copies of my spells, and you can't disarm clerics. And weapons are also useful for threatening people, so they need to recognize them as weapons."

    "To pose as clerics they need to pick a god matching their alignments. We don't know their alignments but the city guards will check."

"Oh yeah. Clerics detect to alignment spells as their gods' alignment, not their own. At least, on any axis the god is aligned on. Being a Gorum cleric would make you detect Chaotic, and if someone looks and you're actually Neutral on that axis, there goes the disguise. And you'd need to act right for the god. You could imply you're some other kind of mage? People treat obviously powerful rich adventurers differently from rich but weak merchants, or poor and weak ordinary people."

    "People come to the Kenabres from all over the world to fight the demons. Much fewer now the crusade's over, but if you say you've come from someplace far away nobody knows about they'll probably believe you, as long as you have a - consistent persona to sell it. You should choose that in advance, and practice, if you're not used to pretending to be someone else."

    "It would also explain why you don't know any local languages, and I could be your local guide. You'd need another me for every team, but I think you need that anyway, if you can't speak any local language you can't even get into the city to buy a translation spell."

"I'm not sure what makes you think there are any sendings to buy here, where the door to Milliways is? It's a village in the middle of nowhere that almost certainly has no mages in it and definitely no spells or scrolls for sale. There's the crusaders who chased me but if they were rich or important enough to have scrolls of sending my day would probably have gone differently."

"Great! Those are all good points. I think you misunderstood me about the swords, though -- I agree that being visibly armed is probably a good thing. The problem is that all of the weapons that are in common use in my world don't look like obvious weapons the way swords do. If I hadn't shown you what a gun looks like, you probably would not be very threatened by me pointing one at you. Of course, there are people who can use swords, but being able to use a sword is rare enough that not everyone who would be good at the job will know how. Using guns is a lot more common, although still not everyone can use them with any skill."

"If people can dress like mages or clerics and therefore still be able to look threatening when required without having to carry weapons they can't use, that's great. I'm not sure how we can handle alignments, though. If people from my world don't have souls, which seems pretty likely, and the alignment-detecting spells interact with them, it's possible the spells wouldn't work on us. And if they're all of the form 'detect Good' or 'detect Law', then maybe that means that we would all show up as completely neutral. Is there a completely neutral god that we could plausibly claim to be clerics of?"

"As for dictionaries from Bar -- you're completely right. I bet someone already has, because I saw books getting bought earlier. Let me check."

She dispatches a message to the linguists.

"As for invisibility -- it lasts about five minutes, and we can cast it as many times as we like inside Milliways, so it might make sense to start out being invisible? To slip past the people chasing you, if nothing else. We also have some pretty good nonmagical disguises you can use if you'd like."

"The sending spells I think I misunderstood what you said about them being generally available. You meant that they'll almost certainly be available in the cities, even if the teleports aren't?"

"You could all claim to be Pharasmins. Worshippers of Pharasma, the Judge, and one of the most Evil deities after Asmodeus. If there was any justice she'd be Lawful Evil, but she doesn't judge herself, so she gets to call herself True Neutral." 

    "Having a single clear purpose doesn't make you Lawful! Sarenrae is all about healing and helping and redeeming people and that doesn't make her Lawful! Pharasma is clearly Neutral Evil. Sending every ninth person to Hell would leave anyone else Evil, no questions asked."

"...there are many Pharasmins, it's a very popular faith for some reason. But it'd be hard to coach you on the dogma. Nothing they say makes any sense. Death is as important as birth! All alignments are equally valid!" (This sounds like some extremely Lawful person's idea of what being Chaotic is like.) "Undead are bad, but not because they go crazy and attack everyone, it's because they're not dying like they should be!"

    "We're getting sidetracked. What other True Neutral gods are there?"

"Gozreh? I don't really know anything about Gozreh. I think they care about weather?"

    "Oh right, Nethys! The god of magic. You'd have to be ready to answer questions about magic if you meet a fellow worshipper, they always want to learn more and share their knowledge with each other. If you tell them about magic particles they will either worship you or think you're a charlatan." Gordy has no idea which will happen, since he does not worship Nethys.

"We should remember that pretending to be any god's clerics might make some people think poorly of us once we tell them it was a lie to get an audience. I can coach you to play a cleric for some gate guards or unempowered inquisitors, but I don't want to try to pass it off in front of Ramien. Maybe it'd be better to look like low-circle wizards and try not to draw attention. You don't actually have any spells useful for a fight, unless you want to curse people." Admittedly a valid tactic if you have a lot of curses, but it requires them to touch their target and they're not trained with swords, so that's out.

"We can get past the crusaders with invisibility, but they'll find the Milliways door and - try talking to you, I guess? The locals have all seen the door anyway. So you'll need to keep them here and not - going off somewhere or praying about it? I'd rather not make it look like something that needs praying about. Random prayers don't normally get heard, but it could make a god look our way." Although now that he things about it... "What happened to the other side of the door? I mean, I was going to walk into a house but walked into Milliways instead. What about the people in that house on Golarion? What if they try to come out? What if someone outside it panics because they can't get into the house to their family, or because they think you've taken over their house?"

"I don't think we can definitely prevent them from praying unless we just knock out everyone in the village. And I can't actually do that safely for a hundred plus people for hours on end, if I need to make sure none of them wake up for a few minutes. Well, I guess I could heal them all the time, but it's still chancy."

    "They'll wake up if you heal them."

"Yeah. So we either need a good story to sell, or be ready to kill them all, unless you have a way to keep people unconscious reliably and safely. Or we could force them into Milliways and maybe into your world, if you want to risk people maybe praying from there?" This is one of those cases where it's really hard to come up with a better plan than killing everyone, isn't it. Gord hates those.

"Sendings are cleric spells, and there are more clerics than wizards and more of them sell their spells." (Because they're Abadarans, but still.) "This also means there are more scrolls, because more people can cast them. And teleports are more valuable, people pay more to transport goods than to get a message, so that's another reason they cost more. So I think it's more likely there will be Sending scrolls in stock, although we can't be certain. Also, we'd only need one scroll to call a teleporting wizard, and we might need several scrolls to teleport somewhere far away."

    "And if we call in a teleporting wizard we can ask them to bring another scroll of sending to replace the one we used, so people might be less worried about selling us the next-to-last scroll of sending if we use it for that."

"Oh, I see. Okay."

She taps her chin thoughtfully.

"As it happens, I do have access to a way to put large groups of people to sleep. Unfortunately, sleeping gas is not perfectly safe or consistent. Large doses are sometimes fatal, small doses are ineffective, and distribution depends on air circulation. There are also tranquilizer darts -- which can still be dangerous, but are safer than sleeping gas because you can calculate the dose more exactly."

"If we try praying from inside Milliways and it doesn't work, that would make me a little less worried about herding people in here and then letting them pray from in here? But I agree that ideally we shouldn't rely on that. We could do something to keep everyone busy with some kind of distraction? When you first came in here, you thought I was a wizard in a tower -- would it be plausible to pretend to be a wizard relocating their tower here for reasons of their own? And with the city teams being invisible, there would be less to notice."

"Oh, and it might be helpful to talk through what the crusaders are most likely to ask about, so that we can put together a framing that is least likely to be noticed?" she adds.

"I don't think we could try to pretend to be mysterious wizards. It's not at all normal for wizards to take over other people's doors and not, like, build their own houses, the most powerful wizards even have spells for that. And why would a wizard want to put their door in a little village and then spend their time talking to the locals? Everyone is going to suspect us of being demons in disguise, because demons do stuff that makes no sense much more often than wizards, and some of them are going to be sure we're demons in disguise and will pray about it or try to run off."

"This is related to the reason the crusaders are here, which is that I freed some of their slaves - conscripts - and I worked with some demons to do it, so if they see me they'll assume I'm a cultist, because crusaders have no concept of  people cooperating with demons without worshipping some stupid demon lord. So they'll be primed to see demons everywhere, and they'll ask about me, and probably about their ex-slaves who they think were running away with me but actually hid just a few miles from where we started." If Cherry is going to react badly to Gord working with demons against crusaders for greater Good Freedom, best deal with it now. He's not not worried, but he's had this conversation with people of all creeds over the last year. In a way it's the most important conversation of his life, worn smooth by repeated practice.

    "The least surprising thing from their perspective would be if I came back out and faced them down. Which I can do, especially now that you've refreshed my spells. But some of the locals have seen through the door while it was open and noticed the inside of the building was different, so the crusaders will also notice that, unless I attack them right away. I don't think you can make them believe I'm not here and you're someone completely unrelated."

"You can present yourself as a bigger threat and get them to back down, and either go back for reinforcements or stay to protect the locals. And make it a threat that they wouldn't pray about, something normal that wouldn't merit a godly intervention and wouldn't make them pray in mortal fear." He grins. "It might be best for you to pretend to be a powerful demon, who's taken over this house with my help."

    "Not if we want to stay here for more than a few hours, or they will get reinforcements and also word to Kenabres," Gordy says regretfully.

"I had considered coming out of the house pretending to have captured you, and then getting into a debate with the crusaders about prisoner treatment and extradition agreements to buy time," she mentions. "But yeah, playing into their expectations by pretending to be a demon makes sense too. And I can shroud the doorway in an illusion to at least prevent the villagers from seeing any more. What exactly would they have been able to see before I got here?"

She's not blaming him for having worked with demons. Some of that is that she still hasn't been directly confronted with the horrors of the worldwound, but a larger part is that Golarion has barely invented democracy, slavery is a going concern, and most people probably live and die poor illiterate farmers. It would be absurd to judge him for doing the best he can to make the world a better place, just because he could maybe have worked out a more civilized way to do it, when he has none of the resources or support that she has. And she doesn't even know she could have done better.

Gord is doing his best. Which means that if she gives him more to work with -- more resources, but also more skills, and allies, and time to grow, and chances to talk with other people about the nature of Good -- he'll do better.

Or maybe he won't. Not everybody will grow and change for the better if given the opportunity, and she can't make him. But most people will. That's the whole point; that's what they're fighting for.

"And is there a kind of demon mundane enough that they wouldn't be especially surprised or pray about it, yet also powerful enough to hold the door for a few hours?" she questions.

It feels unfair to be maybe a little judged for working with demons when everything she knows about demons comes from him in the first place! He could have told her demons were unfairly maligned! He wouldn't, he's not trying to deceive her at all, but he feels - he teases it out - he feels bad to be possibly worse off because of his own honesty.

Trying to guess what the other person is thinking is a bad habit and he is going to stop, he's had more affordance to do it than usual because Gordy has been speaking half the time, leaving Gord with twice the time to think. Gord considers thinking to be usually less productive than talking.

"Who would you represent yourself as, to argue about prisoner treatment? A random adventurer who doesn't trust them?"

"I think the locals saw the room - Milliways. They may have noticed it's wrong, but we don't know what the real room looks like to make an illusion. If it was just that, we could probably still fool them, but if anyone's in the house, or if it's someone's house and they demand to come in, they'll figure out the door isn't leading inside. They could look in through a window, trying to go around you or to see who else is here, and realize they can't see your back. Or someone inside the real house could look out through a window and ask what's going on, because they can't open the door from the inside."

"There are definitely demons like that! You could also illusion or shapeshift into several demons instead of a single powerful one. I was working with two babaus earlier, they wouldn't be surprised to see more of them. But I can't show you what a babau looks like, they're not like humans at all and my disguise spell can't handle it. There are demons who can shapeshift or illusion themselves to look like humans, or at least humanoid, but then you'd need to convince everyone you're actually a demon."

"I think if I help you make something up that just - looks demonic and similar to a known type - it would work. Demons vary endlessly, and no-one claims to be a demon who isn't. Not to crusaders, anyway. Even if they suspect you might be a - hostile mage pretending to be a demon - the outcome should be the same."

"The surprising part, for the locals anyway, would be finding demons here at all, since we're outside the Wardstone line. Only very powerful demons can cross it, and those might trigger a big emergency response if the news gets out. But the crusaders already know the babaus are here, and won't be surprised to find another kind or two as long as they're not wildly more powerful."

"A bit of background. There was a big war with the demons, called the Fourth Crusade. It lasted for most of my life; I think it started - sixteen, seventeen years ago? And ended just last year. I fought in it, for the last four years before it petered out. Towards the end, Mendev just kept throwing fresh levies into battle, trying to take the same ground they'd failed to take for ten years. The war ended when they ran out of people to throw away. It was the second worst thing I did with my life."

"The war started when Khorramzadeh, a powerful balor - the strongest kind of demon who's not a demon lord - led a big army to invade Mendev. He took Kenabres, just for a few days, but lots of demons got past the wardstone line. They've been cleaning them out of the countryside ever since, and the strong ones have gotten far away by now. So the only weak demons who are still around - like babaus - are the smart ones who can keep quiet and not murder random passersby."

"I've been helping these two for the last few weeks. Helping them help themselves, you could call it. They help me, they get some of the loot and get their kicks killing people I'm fighting anyway, they hopefully don't attack anyone else. Not where I can see them, anyway. They have nowhere better to go - can't go back into the Wound because they can't pass the wardstones - and no-one would accept a demon's surrender, because if they did next year they'd have a thousand surrenders and then ten thousand and they can't guard them forever. And the treaty says they can't do anything that looks like helping demons."

"I could stop them and it would probably save lives, on net. Maybe even counting the slaves I'm freeing. Maybe next year when I'm not here they'll go on a murder spree, or capture some random farmers to keep in their cellar. I've decided not to kill them. Pretty sure that's wrong, but."

"I can't - live my life following a rule that says which kinds of people I have to kill on sight."

She's not sure if a hug is an appropriate response to that.

"That sounds hard. It's ... I don't want to say I understand, because I don't think I have enough context on your life to say that and mean it," she says instead. "But. I know what it's like to do something good enough -- something that is within your mental and physical limits, even if it's not theoretically the best thing you could have done, because you know that if you push yourself further, you'll break. Which doesn't make doing so easy, or good. But. I know what it's like."

She presses a hand to her face.

"I told you that I strive to bring freedom of movement to people, and that's true," she continues. "But why that? Why not go farther and make things even better? Why not choose more defaults for people, or heal them without consent, or even just nudge coincidences in their environment such that they end up happier?"

"Part of it is that people value freedom, yes. But part of it is also that -- this is what I can be pretty sure I'm not messing up. Bringing freedom of movement to people has very good theoretical reasons to help, and good empirical evidence that it does. But it's also, relatively, simple. It's the thing I can do with phenomenal cosmic power that is clearly good, that I don't have to worry about messing up. Maybe that makes me a little bit like Serenrae. And sometimes I feel like focusing on just this one thing makes me a coward, flinching away from the hard work of imagining how the world could be even better and then doing that. But I think if I tried to make everyone's problems my problems even more than they already are, if I didn't say 'I have built a hundred paradises with my own hands, and given people the tools to build a thousand more, and I will tell you of them and take you there, but anything else is up to you' and leave it at that ... I don't know. I don't think I could do it. I would wear myself out. So this is all I ask of myself."

She looks up at the two of them, her face solemn.

"So I'm not going to say I understand what it feels like, to compromise with demons, because you feel like this is as much as you can do without breaking. To feel like you have to pick principles and stick to them, because you don't know what would happen if you tried to go farther. But. I think I know a little bit of what that's like. Our stories are a difference of degree, not of kind."

She blinks some moisture out of her eyes. "Do either of you want a hug?"

Gord remembers his first encounter with the practice of comforting hugs - casual ones, outside one's family and closest friends - when Sarenrites first came to minister to his company in the crusade. He was young and foolish, back then, and disdained them - he didn't need comforting!

It's not a matter of needing, the Sarenrites said, it's a good thing and you'll enjoy it, so why not do it?

Did you bring enough hugs for everyone, Gord said, aren't you supposed to help the weakest first? I don't need a hug more than the other the people in this room do. (Subtext: it's insulting to imply I'm weak and needy in front of my men.)

That was long before he found the clarity of Gorum's teachings: always fight for something. Fight to be stronger, if you need to be stronger; but fighting for nothing is just nothing in the end. Gorum is the fight, but he is not the goal.

Everyone can understand fighting, but wisdom is needed to guide it. That is why even Gorum clerics the wise, and not the merely strong.

So Gord picked a stupid fight, and he won it, and wasn't hugged that day. More fool him.

Gord spent most of his time in the crusade talking to people. (And fighting them, of course, but you can't fight people all day long, if you're not yet a cleric of Gorum.) He wanted to hear about their gods and creeds, their stories and societies and countries, all the different ways people lived their lives. Looking back - he didn't admit it to himself, at the time, but he was desperately searching for meaning. Something right to do with his life, something to be sure about and proud of.

He didn't find that blazing certainty, of course. Later he would realize that there could be no certainty, only one's choices in the endless struggle of life. Certainty means not having a choice. But he learned a lot along the way.

One thing he learned was that most Lawful people didn't like hugs. To be sure, they gave different reasons for it; paladins forbade fraternization in the ranks, the Hellknights disliked comforting regardless of the means; the Abadarans were simply against men hugging women. But Gord had already noticed the pattern, that Lawful Good and Lawful Evil agree more on practice than theory; just as the paladins said they fought Evil demons, while the Hellknights said they fought Chaotic ones, but in the end they were allies, and surely the results mattered more than the excuses.

So Gord concluded hugs were Chaotic, and sought out the Sarenrites again, and asked if they could hug him. (This was much later, of course, with different Sarenrites; but Sarenrites are always happy to hug people who ask for it.) And hugging turned out to be good fun and he got a lot of practice, but he wasn't comforted, because he didn't understand, or admit to himself, what he might need comforting about. 

Many paths to wisdom say you must understand yourself before you can understand others. Gord thinks he's made a lot of progress since those days. But eventually he realized you don't have to understand others in order to help them, you don't even always need to help yourself before helping others, and since then he'd been helping the people in front of him be free, one day at a time. He didn't usually hug them about it. Probably that was another mistake.

They step forward in unison, and hug with Cherry in the middle. "I think," Gord says over her shoulder, "that you've promoted freedom - Chaos - to achieve Good. I might be doing Good to promote Chaos. I'm not sure I can even separate them, anymore, to think of Good without any freedom in it. But if we meet in the middle - the Chaotic Good middle, not the Neutral middle - I couldn't be happier." There's a reason even Gorum prefers life in Elysium. It's not the hugs, because Gorum probably doesn't understand hugs. It's because the Gorumites who fight for him in the afterlife, once they're free, want the Good as well. Hugs are just - proof of having made it to the right place.

The hug is comforting. Gord doesn't want to carry hugs like a light into the darkness, like the Sarenrites do, to relieve people's pain when they are bound up by the chains of Law and the darkness of Evil. He wants to remove the people from the darkness. The hug is comforting, because it says to him that he can do it.

She lets the hug continue as long as they like.

When they pull back, she gives them a rueful smile.

"We'll figure out how to make it better," she promises. "For what it's worth, I'm glad that you're the one who found the Milliways door."

"As for how to disguise people -- with your permission, I might be able to get a pretty good picture of a babau out of your mind. That's how my design software works; it reads the images that I'm visualizing and then creates them. It wouldn't be perfect, and we still might not be able to disguise people as babaus if they aren't sufficiently humanoid, but it's something we could try," she says.

"But I think making up some kind of weak demon -- something that's not a real threat, but that is annoying and takes a long time to correctly deal with -- sounds like a great idea. I'm certain we can get some volunteers to get lightly shapeshifted and run around causing trouble. One thing I'm not sure if we can fake is alignment, though. I'm sure we can find people who would identify themselves as Chaotic Evil, although maybe fewer that would normally volunteer to save another world. But we still don't know if people without souls show up to alignment detecting spells. Are the crusaders going to be using any?"