One or the other is already assured! I am steering for both.

A man in chainmail is unhurriedly picking his way towards the door to Milliways. He weaves and ducks through the organized chaos of Cherry clones and fake invisible demons and dead horses. No-one pays him any mind as he ducks through the door.

And into a bar. It's, you know, a bar. It's a place where people let their guard down, and laugh too loudly. A place with a roaring fire, where adventurers from far off lands congregate and swap increasingly improbable stories.

It's a place where people go to put down their cares, and where people pick up the bravery necessary to do something about them.

Cayden is more attuned to the true nature of this place than anyone else from Golarion who has seen it, and so he sees the truth of Milliway's nature most clearly: a place where people get drunk.

"Welcome," the bar says, and it's like coming home. "What can I get you?"

"Oh, you know me," he says, smiling as he pulls up a chair. "Just the usual." And he puts his rapier down, and his worldly cares, and leans back to bask in the hubbub.

It is fitting - almost inevitable, really - that the world will be saved not by the gods, but by earnest adventurers meeting for the first time in a tavern.

Irabeth falls away, away from her body, far far away from all awareness and into a luminous white space where she stands, her strength restored and her sword in hand once more, stands on nothing with white clouds far below her and the sun overhead. It feels like the opposite of a dream: everything is surer, truer, more real.

There is a human woman standing opposite, wearing plate with Iomedae's shining sword on her breast and in her hand. She is smiling, strong, confident, inspiring, commander of a thousand armies and of Irabeth's heart. She is a stranger and she is impossible to mistake.

Irabeth wants to fall down on her knees, but suddenly the woman is there, holding her arm in a soldier's grasp. 

"I am your superior, and your ally," She says. "An example to admire and learn from, an inspiration to surpass. Do not abase yourself before Me."

"It is expensive for Me to keep you here, and to communicate."

"Weeping Cherry is truthful, to the limits of My sight. She is Lawful Good and knows almost nothing of Golarion. Tell her that none who come to Me in good faith can expect to be worse off for it, and that I will not use her against her purposes; this I swear."

"The Good gods have heard Cherry. Advise her to recall her teams; We will tell who needs to know, and soon enable Cherry to contact anyone she wishes magically." She will not instruct Cherry to recall her teams; it is reasonable of her to explore the world for herself, and it is Iomedae's job to convince her to trust Her instead.

"I will empower you to summon an archon. Send it to My cleric Tavorae Falsebane in the Seventh Church in Absalom, and he will come to advise and help her. He can Commune with me for further instructions."

She smiles.

"I trust you. Trust in yourself. Go with My blessing."

"Desna asks you to tell Cherry, 'Thank you. See you soon.'"

The world falls away like a kaleidoscope and the room around her reassembles -

Irabeth stands before Cherry glowing with the Goddess' blessing, no longer cursed, new magic whispering in the corner of her mind. 

"I think", she says after a moment, "this counts as proof that could not be faked by illusions or shapeshifting."

Wow! That sure looks like a God's intervention. She twitches and hovers her hand over the button on her wristband that will send a 'go' signal.

"Was that Iomedae? Has she agreed to confidentiality?"

"It was." And Irabeth repeats everything she was told. Including the part about trusting her; it felt personal, but the Goddess said communication was expensive, and so it might hold meaning beyond the obvious.

She hasn't been afraid in a long, long time. Now she feels that doubt and uncertainty are also - not gone forever, not entirely, just put aside until she picks them up again. She has been given her orders and she will carry them out and nothing else matters.

"I am going to summon an archon now. Do you have any objections?"

"No, please do so right away," she agrees. "Time is of the essence."

She has not done the necessary work, to check that Iomedae is really aligned with her interests. But she didn't exactly have a way to check Sarenrae, Desna, or Milani before she reached out to them for help.

If you want to be the kind of person who has allies, sometimes you need to take a leap and let them help you.

There are certainly people still tracking the possibility that Iomedae is lying, or that this isn't really Iomedae. People ready to push the button if it looks like this was a distraction.

But what she says here and now is "Also, in light of this communication from Iomedae, I am no longer considering you my prisoner. You don't look cursed, but if you still need Remove Curse spells, I will supply them as soon as I can. As your tentative ally, I would like to request that you still don't leave the area without letting me know, so that we can try to minimize information leaks."

"I will treat you as an ally in the causes of Lawful Good, and endeavor to build more specific alliances than that. I don't intend to leave but I've been instructed to send the archon to Tavorae Falsebane, with a message from Iomedae which I trust She chose to prevent unwanted information leaks." And she casts the new spell-form sitting in the corner of her mind, the one smelling of Conjuration and sunlight.

A creature appears. It looks like a human with a dog's head, in armor and holding a greatsword, with a shining disk of light floating behind its upper back.

"Paladin," it says, inclining its head respectfully to Irabeth. "I have been instructed to follow your orders."

"Greetings", it adds to Cherry, in unaccented English.

"To you as well," she replies. She has a lot of questions for an actual outsider, but they can wait. She stands quietly, and does her best to accept the changing plan with equanimity.

She does also start an internal list of questions to ask the archon when possible.

"I am instructed to tell you to pass this message to Tavorae Falsebane, Iomedae's cleric in the Seventh Church in Absalom. He is meant to come here, to advise and help Cherry, and is authorized to Commune for further instructions."

"I believe he would best serve the Goddess by coming immediately, via teleport, and presumably with another teleport to go back. I do not know how long he will remain here. I believe he may bring others who would be of help, if their confidentiality and loyalty can be utterly trusted." 

"Cherry, are there other things he should bring, which would be of immediate help and which would not delay him greatly in departing?"

"Any immediately available spell scrolls or trusted people with additional spells prepared -- any spells. Priority given to Wish or Resurrection, if possible," she replies immediately. After a moment to think, she continues with "or other powerful spells that I don't know to ask for, but that would be useful to have more of. I can duplicate spells having seen an example. In that same vein, any magic items that it would be useful to have more of. If no translation magic is available, foreign language dictionaries and encyclopedias would be useful. Possibly any holy books would also be useful to read, but are not very important compared to the other things."

She thinks for a moment longer, and then shakes her head.

"I think that's everything."

"Does that mean you only need one of each kind spell, scroll and magic item?" she confirms. "To copy, like a wizard does?"

"Tongues lets you understand and speak any language, and Share Language lets you read one language per casting. They will almost certainly be available, and so will the Iomedaean holy books and probably some others too."

The archon salutes, fist to chest, and disappears. (If Cherry could detect magic right now, she would see an abbreviated Greater Teleport cast as a spell-like ability.)

"Yes, correct. I need to see a spell once, in an area covered by our technology. I'm fairly certain that scrolls will work as well, but haven't actually verified that. I think at this point I should probably bring you into our command center and actually brief you on the plan," she replies, walking towards the door and gesturing for Irabeth to follow her.

"I want to stress that the man who you were chasing has been trying to do Good under very tough circumstances, and has been immensely helpful so far. Without his advice, we would not have tried contacting the gods before going with our initial plan, which based on Iomedae's reaction would have been suboptimal. I consider him an ally. I would appreciate it if you could set aside any personal enmity and let me know about any obligations that would prevent you from working with him. We'll have time to deal with getting both sides of the story around what brought you both here later."

She steps out into the street, and walks over towards where Gord is holding the door.

"I don't know him, personally. I heard a report that he participated this morning in a demon attack on an army camp that left one man dead, several wounded, and two more gone and assumed captured or worse. I saw him detect as Evil."

"I have an obligation to uphold the law, which in this case means apprehending and delivering him to Kenabres to stand trial. Under the circumstances, he can stay in your custody or another ally's if you prefer. I have no wish to disrupt your relations with him."

She hesitates. "I admit I do not understand why you trust him. And without understanding, I cannot trust him myself, though I will of course treat with him in good faith and cooperate as far as I can. Evil people - Chaotic Evil people, which I strongly suspect he is - fundamentally cannot be trusted. No matter what they say or do today, they could betray their word or betray you tomorrow. That's what being Chaotic Evil is. A step closer to the demons."

"There is a powerful and expensive spell, called Atonement, which changes a person's alignment to match who they are today. It only works if someone truly repents of their past deeds. If he is Evil only because of some past misdeed which he truly regrets, and successfully repents to Good, or even Neutral, that would resolve the problem - this is not a requirement, of course, for me to come to trust him or to work with him, just a suggestion."

"But if the accusations against him are true, and he has no very surprising explanation, then he was doing Evil this morning." 

Gord sees them approach as he stands there holding the door (he prefers to think of it as standing guard at the Door out of the World). That the paladin is walking peacefully means she surrendered without Cherry even needing to curse her; that is good. He relaxes.

Then they get close enough for him to overhear the paladin earnestly try to convince Cherry to ask Gord to atone.

It's an offensive idea, but he's not in the mood to be offended. This is what paladins are like when they're trying to be nice - magnanimous forgiveness, if only he would see the error of his ways and cry pardon.

"What's going on?" he asks Cherry.

"I didn't successfully prevent Irabeth -- Oh, this is Irabeth," she introduces. "I haven't told her your name because you were on the run from her and she still intends to attempt to bring you in. I have more things to say to her on that topic, but we can deal with that afterwards, everything else going on is more important. If you want to introduce yourself that's your choice."

"I didn't successfully prevent her from praying to Iomedae -- I think I might have misunderstood what prayer requiring concentration means -- but that turned out to be ... okay," she continues, eliding over her complicated feelings about that, since she doesn't know what Irabeth's state of information was. "Iomedae swore that no one who comes to her in good faith should expect to be worse off for it, and that she wouldn't use me specifically against my purposes. She also said that the other Good gods have been notified, and passed on a message of thanks from Desna specifically that said 'see you soon'. From that, I infer that we're going to get some form of Desnan showing up, and Iomedae also gave us the means to summon one of her priests from Absalom, who should be on his way with useful spell scrolls to copy."

"I think our priorities at this point should look like getting Irabeth up to speed on what the rollout plan looks like, so that she can point out potential flaws, and figuring out a set of questions for Desna and Iomedae to narrow down what other preparations or changes they want us to make that were worth delaying things."

Iomedae swore that - is she saying Iomedae talked to them?

Then the rest of it catches up with him and - he doesn't even know what to say to that, but he's got to say something and it turns out to be -

"And you believed her?!"

"Trust a Lawful god to mislead with the truth when she cannot lie!"

"Those who come to her, in person, will at least be no worse off! The rest of us poor mortals have to make do with her servants, who make no such promise! They tell us of her good faith, secondhand, and disclaim their own in the same breath! You trust her promise but you're talking to the church, not the god!"

"Her church - we obey Her! We would never knowingly betray someone She named an ally! And we strive to emulate Her in all things, and yes, She teaches us to leave people better off for having met us! This isn't some new promise she made up on the spot! This is what being Good is!!"

"Then you fail," Gord says very deliberately, "or you lie."