Not unless the crusaders happen to look like a panorama of exploding stars.

There's a tall red hat with a pompom taped to the glass such that if you were somewhat shorter it might look like one of the exploding stars was wearing it.

Life on the Worldwound borders is full of surprises! They're almost always nasty ones, though. Maybe this isn't the best place to stage his valiant last stand after all.

Who'd make an illusion of exploding stars? A cultist of a demon lord with a grudge against Desna? There's that nursery tale about all the demon lords uniting in a war against the gods...

Focus. He needs eyes on the crusaders. Maybe there's a normal window on the second floor?

As he turns to go up the stairs, he might notice that the room is empty, apart from himself and the furniture. A long polished wooden bar runs the length of the far side of the room. Someone has placed a red hat on it as well, and put up garlands of mistletoe around the border of the room.

There are two doors labeled "Security" and "Infirmary" flanking the open stairwell.

The stairs seem to go much further up than the building he saw from the outside would suggest. And when he steps out into the carpeted hallway of the second floor, it stretches ahead of him for at least half a kilometer before turning a corner. There are no visible windows.

What an obvious illusion! There can't actually be a third of a mile of corridor here, so if he goes forward he'll eventually reach a wall, and that will let him break it.

Or he'll hit the trap he expects twenty feet in, that would also do it. He's not going to mess with the local wizard (cleric? demon?) who disguised his tower as a bar, left the front door unlocked, and taught the locals not to wander in.

He's going to go back down and try slip away. If the crusaders are already at the door he'll make them chase him into the house until they spring a trap or summon an angry wizard, and then he'll run away in the confusion.

This feels like a better plan already. He moves the table a little bit away from the door and cautiously opens it a crack.

Everyone is exactly where they were before he closed the door. The locals stop to stare at him, presumably because he went into the forbidden wizard's bar and came out alive.

The crusaders are just coming into view. They are exactly where he saw them five minutes ago. Gord knows he doesn't understand what's going on, but he has no choice: they've seen him now, and are shouting and pointing and urging their horses to a gallop.

Plan B it is, then. He'll draw them into the spooky house and when the time is right he'll cast invisibility and run.

Gord closes the door again, leaving a narrow space for them to file into by the table-barricade, and stands with his sword at the ready.

The door opens to reveal a tall, slender woman with dark brown hair wearing a long silver dress and carrying a cube of light.

"Pine, I ..." she starts to say, before frowning in confusion.

(In the background, half of her self-tree is pulled out of whatever they were doing to pore over the sensor returns from Milliways)

She blinks the notifications out of her HUD and focuses on Gord.

"Hello, I don't think we've met."

She sees a very well-built man. This fact stands out about him, because he is wearing the pants half of a chainmail suit, but no shirt. 

It probably won't distract her from noticing that he's also swinging a sword towards her with deadly intent.

He stops the swing at the last moment, though, holding the sword threateningly against her throat. (Ingrained reaction: not-visibly-armed, not-hostile, maybe-civilian.)

Then he realizes this must be the local magic-user. Split-second decision: he won't kill her unprovoked and if he keeps threatening her he'll turn her against him. He lowers his sword.

"No, I don't believe we have," he says apologetically, "I'm terribly sorry for intruding on you like this and I promise my only purpose is to leave here unharmed. There are three riders right behind you who are after me and I thought to take shelter in your tower. I'll pay you in coin or service if you help me fend them off."

She blinks.

"I have no idea what you're talking about. I think something very strange has happened. This door normally leads to my girlfriend's bedroom, but it appears as though this time it leads to ..." she makes a show of squinting past him. "A bar in a pocket dimension of some kind?"

She leans to the side, gesturing out at the large sunlit living room behind her, furnished with silver clothing to match her dress and decorated with purple and gold highlights.

"And as you can see, there are no riders in my living room."

As she stands there, four microscopic wormholes connected to her fixity device drift into the room and spread themselves out around the bar area. She doesn't manifest anyone to talk to the two people in the rooms off the main bar area, or to talk to the bar itself yet, because everyone watching through her eyes right now is still very confused.

In the background, prediction markets spin up trying to infer what has happened here and who this man is. The physicists are very excited by the various exotic things around his person. There's a bag with a very small pocket dimension anchored inside it using a novel technique, and a sword that has some kind of very intricate braid of exotic particles wrapped around it.

Thaaaat's a more powerful spellcaster than he assumed! Or more illusions. Or both, why not both? Gord will be polite to this clearly magically powerful person.

"My name is Gord. I entered what I thought was an ordinary house in a village about fourteen miles south of Kenabres along the Sellen, and found myself here. The riders I mentioned are also there. Is that somewhere your door opens to?"

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Gord!" she says, apparently sincerely. "My name is Weeping Cherry. I have never heard of Kenabres or the Sellen, and this door has never opened anywhere other than the bedroom since I had this house built."

Her eyes saccade, reading some text off of her HUD.

"If I'm not mistaken, though, that bar is alive. If they live in this pocket dimension, they might know more about what's going on here."

Gord expects to encounter pocket dimensions and people who have never heard of Kenabres about equally often, which is to say never. Illusions and lies are a much simpler explanation, and almost always the correct one. The room he sees behind her could also be an illusion.

But he's being polite, and cautious, and he doesn't want to antagonize an unknown spellcaster when he's pretty sure the riders are still out there looking for him, so he'll humor her for now.

"Kenabres is a city in Mendev on the eastern border of the Worldwound."

"I have never been in a pocket dimension or met a living bar. You don't seem to be very surprised; is it a more ordinary occurrence, where you live?"

Well, he hasn't exactly moved to unblock the door. The fixity devices are reading several light-seconds of corridor up that stairwell, with no end in sight, but only four life-signs in the whole place. So talking to the others, while important, is not necessarily urgent enough that she should force the door or teleport past him.

(In the background, some physicists start looking at the cosmic microwave background inside the bar and making excited noises at each other. Other physicists are examining the exotic particles that look like they're twisted up in complex patterns inside his brain.)

"Not at all! This is probably the strangest thing that has ever happened to me," she reassures him. "It's just that being calm and polite is usually a good default strategy when you are incredibly confused. I did start sharing my eyes with the rest of my self-tree as soon as something strange happened -- it's their job to figure out what's going on, and my job to be the point-person dedicated to finding out more and managing interactions with aliens."

She dismisses her cube of light and replaces it with a not-to-scale model of the solar system.

"I've never heard of Mendev or the Worldwound either. I'm from Earth -- the third planet around our sun," she says, pointing to it. "Although right now my house is actually on a planetoid in orbit around Jupiter." She points again.

He belatedly moves back to let her come in. An overturned table is unlikely to stop a wizard and it's impolite (and may come across as unfriendly) to keep her out at this point.

"I don't know what you mean by a self-tree." And now that he's focusing on her face, he can see her lips aren't moving in sync with her voice. "Your translation spell rendered it as - you being a big woody plant?"

"We call the planet Golarion, in the language I'm speaking, which is Hallit. Third from the sun sounds right. I'm not sure about the other planets, I'm not a Desnan." He's heard you can get anywhere with a couple of plane shifts and a teleport. A summer house on another planets sounds wild but who knows what really powerful spellcasters do with their time?

"The Worldwound is the big planar tear into the Abyss that opened about a century ago in Sarkoris-that-was, and demons come through it." That should get through no matter what language she really speaks beneath the Tongues.

That gives her so many additional questions.

She moves past him to take a seat at the bar.

"I don't know what you mean by translation spell," she asserts. "I noticed your lips moving in discordance with what I was hearing, but just thought that was more pocket dimension strangeness to investigate."

A note appears on a bar napkin at her elbow.

What can I get you? First drink's free.

"Oh, the bar is a person!" she exclaims. "I thought they looked too complex not too be. They say the first drink is free," she relays.

"I want to ask more about the planar rift, though. That sounds bad. Here, let me ..."

She closes her eyes for a moment and then there are two of her, one seated facing the bar and starting up a silent napkin-based conversation and the other one facing him.

"As for what a self-tree is -- it's that. Everybody who was me before I split myself in two," she explains. "It's called that because if you draw it out, it makes a tree shape. I am happy to answer more questions, but it sounds like plausibly the demon situation is urgent? Can you say more about that?"

Gord has no idea what spells or senses she's using to decide the bar is a person; even he can probably make a napkin appear, and he's only three circles of a cleric.

She can clone herself and he has no idea what circle that is but it must be pretty damn high. Unless it's another illusion? But if it is, and he walks out her illusioned door, he'll be facing those slavers with an angry wizard at his back, so he'd best keep humoring her.

There's an old Sarkorian saying that goes, questions anger wizards, so you won't like their answers, and there's probably a kernel of truth inside the good old prejudice. So he'll tell her more things everyone already knows, and not ask too many questions, and see how she reacts. 

"The demon situation isn't very urgent. It's been there for a century, the borders have been stable for most of that time, and there's no crusade at the moment. Local propaganda aside, it's far from the biggest problem in the world, I just happen to live there. And even I find greater evils to fight than the demons." He flashes a grin. "I mentioned it as a landmark. If you show me an illusion of the continents of the third planet, I can pick mine out."

"The translation spell is whatever magic is letting us understand each other despite speaking in different languages! It's very strange that pocket dimension translated correctly but translation spell didn't."

"Perhaps we should check for other translation mistakes? The Abyss is the ontologically Chaotic Evil afterlife plane. Chaos is freely doing what you want, and Law is binding yourself" (and others) "to definitely do something. Evil is benefitting yourself at the expense of others, and its opposite Good is helping others at your own expense. Did all that sound right?"

She is momentarily taken aback. Idly, she conjures a globe of Earth and sets it floating to the side of their conversation.

"So there are several things about what you just said that I find confusing," she begins. "For one, I have never before today encountered anything that I would call 'magic' -- the concept is entirely fictional -- so that makes me suspect that when you say magic either it means something else, one of us has been tricked in some way, or the translation spell is failing. Likewise, I have never heard of The Abyss, and have never seen anything I would call an afterlife per se. I think good and evil came through right, although the words 'law' and 'chaos' in my language don't quite mean what you said Law and Chaos do."

She takes a moment to consult with her self-tree.

"My best guess right now is that we're from different worlds -- that is, no matter how far you traveled from your planet, you would never reach mine, no matter what direction you went in, unless you detoured through a pocket dimension like this one. And that probably our worlds run on different rules -- you have something coiled up inside your brain that is made out of a kind of matter that isn't present in my world, for example."

She brings the globe over and holds it out to him.

"I would expect to know about a planar tear anywhere on Earth -- can you indicate where you think your continent is?"

"This looks a little different from the maps I've seen, but not entirely different. If this is Golarion, then this continent is definitely Avistan, north of the Inner Sea, and the Worldwound is close to its northern edge."

"Why do you know the word magic if you think it's fictional? Why does the translation spell, which is clearly working, translate as something fictional? Maybe the translation magic is more broken than I thought." He considers. "I can ask Gorum - my god - for a minor translation spell of my own. It would let you speak my language without translation, if you're willing to let me cast a spell on you."

"The rest of what you said seems simpler. We call places which can't be reached by moving far enough different planes - did that translate? - and we know some of them operate on different rules. The Abyss is a plane. There are more than ten known planes, maybe many more." Nine afterlives, and uh... fire, earth, probably some other elements? 

"An afterlife is anywhere your soul goes after you die. It's commonly said there are nine of them, for the nine permutations of Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, with a Neutral position on each. Not all planes are afterlives." 

If gods are the source of magic, that gives her a few hypotheses about what is happening in his world, although it's too soon to jump to conclusions. She sets aside the afterlives comment to be examined in a moment, when she stops being so surprised by everything he says.

"To take that a little bit out of order -- planes also translated, but it came through as using a word that usually has fictional connotations when used in this way. I think my new guess is that the translation spell is just finding the closest literal mapping between our languages, without caring about aligning connotation, and that probably I should just ignore the 'sounds fictional' parts of what you're saying and assume that I'll eventually figure out the right words. Does that sound reasonable?"

"That aside, I would be very interested in seeing you cast a spell, because then I can look at it and see what its made of and possibly figure out if it corresponds to something I already know about. Do you know how your spell would let me speak your language? Does it modify the way my senses work, the way that the existing spell seems to, or does it modify me directly to understand your language? Would you be willing to cast a spell that doesn't affect me, so that I can watch it and see what it does?"

"This particular spell would let you understand and speak my language, for a short amount of time. It doesn't affect your senses, in the sense that someone who shares your senses wouldn't be affected, and you would hear the sounds I'm really making."

"Here's a very simple spell: create water." He waves his hand and water rains down. "I can make a lot more, if there's somewhere to put it."

Oh, that is amazingly cool! She watches the sensor replay in slow motion, and then absently makes the visualization visible to him too. His brain does something that she's not looking at for privacy reasons, and then a tight coil of strange particles uncoils down his arm and then does ... something, and water precipitates out of the air. The spell folds back up and returns to whence it came.

(In the background, someone decides that staying here is too risky, and transparently pulls Weeping Cherry's brain out of her skull and into simulation in a computer buried under the crust of Pluto)

"That is wonderful!" she exclaims, clapping her hands in delight. "Wow. I've never seen anything which works like that. I use specialized crystals to do things like that, but they're made of the same baryons as everything else, and don't operate on such small scales."

Maybe this is what it looks like when a society figures out femptoscale engineering?

She starts trying to figure out how to synthesize some of the components of that 'spell' before reminding herself that other people will be working on that and that she should focus on diplomacy.

"I think if I see a few more of those I can probably reverse engineer them," she tells him. He mentioned using money earlier, so he probably comes from a context where she should offer to pay him for the information. There's some gold in his pouch, so he probably would be willing to trade for that? "I would be willing to pay you to demonstrate any other spells you can use, although I don't have whatever currency you use. I can pay you in refined gold instead?"

If this is a charade, he has no idea what the point could possibly be. She's either an extraplanar being... unfamiliar with the simplest most common bit of magic... or she's pretending to be one. While carrying a cube of light that very much looks magical (but he can't detect magic today) and knowing about planes and pocket dimensions. She's certainly selling the alien bit... While looking perfectly human.

"I will gladly take payment in gold, but these minor spells are usually free, because I can cast them as often as I want and they only take a few seconds. I have four like that, another being to create some light" - he demonstrates - "one that repairs broken objects, but takes ten minutes to cast. And one that makes rotten or poisoned food safe to eat, which I can demonstrate if you find me some spoiled milk or the like."

"Other spells can only be used a few times a day, and those are the ones that normally cost money."

"I don't mind showing you magic, but first I would like to understand whether I'm now stuck on your plane," and have to kill people until Gorum grants me plane shift, but he'd better not say that out loud, "or whether I can go home, and how?"

She glances at the summary that pops up in her HUD.

"Bar -- that's the bar's name -- says that if you open the door, it should return you to your home plane," she says.

Her selftree holds a brief poll on whether to go through the door if he opens it. On the one hand, there is an entire planet of people that she has the chance to reach out and help. On the other hand, time will be stopped there until they get a wormhole through to synchronize the worlds, so it's not as much of a screaming moral emergency as it would normally be. And they have 'afterlives', so plausibly whoever designed the femptomachines already has mortality fixed. On the gripping hand, she has no access to his world without his help -- so she should try to treat him like the valuable trading partner that he is, because that's how she would want someone to treat her in the analogous circumstance.

"Bar also says that time is paused in your world so long as the door is closed and nothing else is forcing the worlds to be synchronized, so if you have urgent tasks waiting at home, you don't need to rush back," she continues. "That said, I would quite like to visit your world -- both so that I can see an alien world, and because if there are still things that are scarce, like those spells you mentioned, I can probably help give people more resources."

On the one hand, this is a ridiculous setup that he has no reason to believe in, and he's politely playing along hoping the point of it all will become clear eventually. And if she (or the supposed intelligent bar) is saying he can have some gold and go home, he should just take it and go.

On the other hand, if he's pretending to take her at her word, then he shouldn't give her access to Golarion without knowing what she (and potentially the rest of her world!) will do with it. It's probably irresponsible to import aliens without even checking if they're Evil or Lawful or anything.

Not that he has a way to check. He can wait for tomorrow morning and prepare a lot of detect spells and hope she doesn't beat them and doesn't take offense and has a detectable alignment which is at all predictive of everyone else from her world who she might bring over or who might follow her, up to and including whole new gods she might pray to... yeah, no.

On the gripping hand, which is Gorum's, if she needs him to open the door for her, she can just force him to do it. He doesn't have a quick suicide prepared and he can't fight a whole world of people who ostensibly have no magic but can clone themselves. For all he knows, that cube of light she was carrying is a dangerous weapon.

Maybe the door can only be opened willingly and they have no magic to control minds, but he'd be taking her word for it, so - better not to test it.

Of course, she could just admit to being Evil and/or Lawful and intending to do something he'd rather die or be exiled to prevent. It's possible for her to say something like that, some Lawful people are very straightforward about their villainy, so he should at least ask.

"What kinds of things would you do in Golarion if you were there? What people or causes would you give resources to, and what would you ask in exchange? What resources would you bring with you? Are you speaking only for yourself, are there other people from your world who would come over?" 

"...are there things we could help you with, or that you want to buy, besides demonstrations of magic? I don't know what problems you have in your world but I imagine some places could be even worse off than we are." And benefit from a cleric of Gorum, if they really have no magic that means no healing and any society would care about that.

"I can tell you more about Golarion to help you answer that, and you can also tell me about your world. What is it called? Are you a particularly powerful or unusual person, or an average one who just happened to open this door?"

"You're right that knowing more about Golarion is probably necessary to figuring out exactly what I would do there, but my goals are generally to give every sentient being as good a life as I can. People are very different, though, so just imposing things on people doesn't actually work to make their lives better. Therefore, I focus on giving people the ability to get out of situations they don't want to be in, and giving them enough material wealth that they could re-start their life somewhere else if they didn't like any of the places they could go," she explains.

"As for your other questions -- maybe it would help explain them all if I told you a bit about my life story. When I was young, we hadn't yet invented the crystals that let us do things like duplicate ourselves, conjure materials, or bend space. And the world was fairly horrible. A lot of people were trapped in situations that hurt them, and people kept dying with no detectable afterlife. So I built the first fixity crystal," she continues.

She waves her hand and summons a picture of a fixity crystal to illustrate.

"Fixity crystals let you control the location of everything within their range. That may not sound very powerful, but it also lets you rearrange the fundamental building blocks that objects are made out of -- the tiny indivisible parts that link together to make larger objects. With a lot of work, that made it possible to conjure food and water, to stitch injuries back together, to freeze things in time, and to assemble more fixity crystals."

The picture changes to show a shining hexagonal castle rising from the sea.

"From there, I worked to assemble a fixity crystal large enough to cover the planet (called Earth), and then worked with the existing governments to provide food and water. I built an island in the sea and set up teleportation so that anyone could go there and use it as a stepping stone to found their own nation or to move on elsewhere."

"As far as I'm concerned, the fixity crystals are my gift to all sentient beings -- I think of everyone as being entitled to an equal share of what they can do. If you let me visit Golarion, I would install a crystal there, and it would permit people to teleport freely back and forth between Golarion and Earth, to create objects on demand, etc."

She dismisses the illusion.

"As for what I would want from Golarion in exchange -- I don't believe in charging for things that I would give away free anyway, but I would still be interested in buying all sorts of things. Magic -- both demonstrations and help learning and integrating it into what I can do already -- but also your knowledge of science and history, copies of your stories and great works of art, hiring people to work at various jobs, etc. From you specifically right now, I want to buy information about Golarion and transportation thereto. Being nervous about giving someone access to your world is very understandable, so I should also say that if you choose not to let me, I won't follow you through that door. When I say that people should be able to leave situations they don't want to be in, I mean it, although I would be very sad," she concludes.

She leans forward slightly.

"I'm happy to clarify any of that, or answer more questions, but I do have my own questions about Golarion -- Could you summarize your life, perhaps? What is a day like for an average person? What are the ongoing emergencies that should be addressed before anything else, and what are the major dangers that should be avoided or negotiated with? What does your god do, other than giving you magic?"

"That sounds very Chaotic Good, in our terms!" In fact it sounds perfectly tailored to what Gord, himself, might do with limitless power. Let everyone leave to make their own lives, away from the petty tyrants who force them to suffer "for their own good" (or sometimes "for the greater good", which is no better). Gift freedom to people, not nations or races or governments, guided by the fundamental truth that everyone has their own best interests at heart and that the Good is to help them pursue it no matter where it might lead.

He is instantly suspicious that she's reading his mind. He opened a magic door and found a genie who literally promises to fix the whole world, if only he'd set her free, and the promise hits so dead center of what he is. He's dealt with a succubus before and she's not like that - not only because the things she's promising are of a different nature - the succubus was easier to understand. To trust, even, because he'd known her wants and needs and you can, in fact, trust demons to follow their incentives. Weeping Cherry is coming across as really alien, not in the things she promises (any Desnan could say as much) but in the things she omits.

"I'm not clear on where these people go using the crystal - is there a lot of unsettled wilderness on Earth that people can move to, unclaimed by any nations? Are there other planets or planes you're linked to? How did you find them, if you don't have any magic?"

"If you let everyone use the crystal, what happens if they fight over it, or use it to make weapons for fighting one another, or to do something you'd hate? Does using the crystal require your permission? Would you need to approve everyone who teleports from Golarion to Earth? What would you do if you let through some people and came to regret it later, because they did something on Earth that you don't like?"

If she has this power, she uses it for her own goals: this is an axiom. Even gods who dedicate their lives to helping others don't help them do things those gods hate. Where does she put the fine line between setting others free, and enabling them to do things she disapproves of?

"I'm also concerned about the translation again. The word I'm hearing as fixity sounds like it means fixing things, making them better or whole, but it actually means fixing them in place, like pinned butterflies." A very sad, very Lawful image. "Is that what you meant?"

"Actually, wait a moment. Like you, I'm being calm and polite" - too polite and too uncommitted to taking any position. "Which, if I'm to take this seriously, is stupid."

Pretending not to care, carefully not leaning into the scenario being played out - that's not how you engage with someone who claims she wants to help people.

"Helping all sentient beings equally is an excellent aspiration. In my experience, most sentient beings use their resources to fight each other. You always end up having to choose sides, even if all you want is to be a perfectly Neutral Good dispenser of clean water and Teleports. If everyone in the world cooperated and shared resources equally, we wouldn't have any problems to begin with."

"All the suffering that exists, exists because someone wills it to."

He realizes he's getting emotional and might say something he'd regret, but he can't speak dispassionately about this. If she read his mind to find out what he cares about, well, she might as well see that he cares about it very very strongly.

"In my world, more than half the population are slaves. When enough peasants don't die of starvation or disease, they're conscripted and sent to kill people until they too die and are tortured in Evil afterlives for being soldiers. There are five theocracies owned by Lawful gods who make their people do unspeakable things to one another. One country serves the god of Hell; their neighbors serve the god of torture and pain. The self-proclaimed paragons of Lawful Good have allied with Hell to fight demons, ninety percent of who are miserable people just trying to escape something even worse at home."

"If you put your teleportation portal on an island in the middle of the ocean, you'll get the rich and powerful. You won't get the peasants who can't afford passage on a ship even if they sell all they have. You won't get the slaves fettered by laws and by Law and literal chains, whose tyrants would rather die than set them free. You will offer the governments of the world free food and water, and half of them will launch an invasion to stop you from feeding the other half."

"There are many gods and they fight each other as much as mortals do. They grant magic to people who they think will use it in ways the god likes. Gods don't do much on Golarion directly, but each of them wants something most of the other gods oppose, so they empower mortals to fight one another."

"My god is Gorum, the Lord in Iron, the God of War. He gives power to people who strive and want to grow stronger and who risk their lives for their goals. He doesn't care what those goals are. I find that a refreshing kind of honesty, a god who helps you fight but doesn't tell you to fight for him."

"Gorum does care about other things. He would disown me if I killed someone after accepting their surrender, or someone who never tried to fight back. But I fight other Gorumites sometimes, because he'd just as soon empower a jailer as a prison-breaker. He gave me power to do what I was doing already. My convictions are my own." Which is more than he can say for some other followers of gods.

"I'm fighting to help the people in front of me. To free slaves and rescue prisoners and save victims, and to convince people to be free, because the strongest chains are often in the mind. Those are the things I'm choosing to do with my life. Maybe you can do something much greater, because you're so much stronger than me. But no-one is stronger than everyone, and if you try to help everyone at once you'll fail. The best way to help most people is to fight someone else who's making them miserable, and force those people to stop."

"There are many good people on Golarion," including most of the Good ones. "You can ally with them to fight evils, and you'll never run out of evils to fight. But it is folly to think you can help people without fighting anyone about it."

"Well, fuck," she opines.

"That is substantially worse off than I expected a world where people have magic like you showed me to end up being."

She takes a deep breath. It also says really bad things about the state of the world if things powerful enough to get translated as 'gods' are fighting.

"So I absolutely understand people fighting each other. Usually, though, people fight each other over resources. You can stop a surprisingly large number of conflicts just by making both sides so rich that they don't have to deal with each other. I was downplaying what fixity fields can do a little, in order to not spook you. You asked where we get the land to let people found their own countries -- the answer is that we manufacture entire new planets and stars and pocket dimensions. A planet is still expensive enough that a single person mostly can't afford one right now, but a group of a hundred people going in on one together could," she states.

"The way that I would handle your world by default -- although hopefully we can improve this plan to make everything smoother, since time is stopped there for the moment -- is to take a peek, stop time long enough to learn all the worlds languages, and then send a message to every individual person telling them that they could speak a certain word or make a certain handsign to call upon the crystal to teleport them elsewhere. If they do, the crystal would present them with an interface," she continues. She puts an example of a purple-edged box showing a variety of different scenes to illustrate -- a waiting room, a forest, a market, a lake, a library, and a picture of her sitting behind a desk. "And let them pick where to go, and then take them there. Then I would send emissaries to the various governments of the world to inform them of what I had just done, distribute a more detailed explanation to people, and ask the governments whether they wanted their land to be a valid teleport destination."

"I would expect the majority of slaves to flee. Some right away, and the others who are initially distrusting after I have the time to explain everything to them, or after their fled brethren send them messages assuring them that it is safe."

She adopts an intent expression.

"If I did that, what would you expect to go wrong? Who would try and fight me about it, and how?"

"You're naive. Magic is just power, like any tool. If people are fighting, giving them more power enables them to fight more. People do fight over resources, but many fights are over outcomes, ideals, the future of the world. Resources are just the things that get you there. If your power was only useful for helping free people and moving them to new planets where no-one would ever find them, that would be incredibly good. But I think your power can be used to many ends, because that is the nature of most power, and so everyone is going to fight over it."

"I want to be clear that the ability you're describing is unprecedented. I've never heard of anyone, even gods, claiming to have created whole planets. Sometimes catastrophes happen, and a lot of people die. If a Good god could evacuate them to a new planet, or even to another plane, they would. They can't even stop famines!"

"I've heard an Iomedaean say this is because the gods oppose each other, and if a Good god tried to help, an Evil one would stop them. This doesn't make sense to me, because the gods can't be that precisely balanced by each other, and a lot of big changes do happen that favor some of them over others. And some people say Evil gods cause the famines in the first place, when the Good gods are too weak to stop them."

"But the gods don't talk to me. Only the most powerful clerics say their gods talk to them, and most of them can't be trusted." Neither the gods nor the clerics.

Deep breath.

"If you send everyone that message, with no explanation or proof of your intent, only the desperate and the stupid would pick it." And half the Desnans, probably, and many many demons. "That may be much better than doing nothing. But the average slave, who is not about to die or to be tortured, would not choose an unknown fate backed by empty words, and many more would think it a trick, or a test of loyalty."

"And then the governments and churches will become aware of you, and so will the gods. I have no idea who could stop you from unexpectedly teleporting people. But once you do, everyone will be very motivated to find you and make you either their ally or their slave. And if you think you can take on everyone, you wouldn't start with freeing a few slaves, you'd start by freeing Hell, because they own the country of Cheliax, which has a lot of desperate slaves in it, and so they will be among your enemies."

"As to how they might fight you: the most powerful spells can locate anyone, anywhere. They can teleport anyone to your location, or teleport you somewhere else, even to another plane. At shorter range they can take over your mind and control everything you do, or read your thoughts or affect your behavior without your even noticing. They can predict the future. They can ask the gods for knowledge, and some of the gods are gods of knowlege and they know a lot."

"There are hundreds, maybe thousands of spells, and no-one knows them all. The most powerful wizards keep what they can do secret, because they're afraid of their rivals. The only things I can be sure a spell can't do are the things that no-one has ever done."

"And if a god intervenes directly, which they can, they can do literally anything. They're not limited to a selection of spells, they can create miracles that solve whatever problem their highest cleric is bothering them about. There must be some limits to what they can do, but they're certainly not public knowledge. The last time the gods fought each other on Golarion directly was a century ago, and it killed a god, opened the Worldwound, sunk a country into the sea, and killed half the population of some other countries. And two more countries became Lawful theocracies. So no-one is very eager to have the gods intervene again."

"So instead, I suggest you learn a lot more about the world, reach out in secret to a few trustworthy people or even gods, and prepare a much bigger surprise attack than setting free the slaves who'd pick a complete unknown over their present life."

She nods gravely.

"Initial plans are usually pretty bad, but it's important to have them, so that you know what you're comparing to. I deeply appreciate your help in telling me all the obvious ways that the initial plan is going to fail," she agrees.

She conjures herself a lemonade and takes a thoughtful sip.

"I usually think that it is best to give people the time to make their own decisions, but it sounds like the best strategy might be speed? If reaching out to trustworthy people without the gods noticing is possible, that implies that even if the gods know a lot, they don't know everything all the time. Which suggests that if we can grab people fast enough, we might be able to get everyone out before they notice," she muses. "Although I would actually put some stock in the idea that gods balance each other in some way -- creating a planet isn't easy, but the kind of being that can grant spells to let someone else create water from nothing presumably would just need to scale the same thing up to conjure planets."

"If Golarion is about the same size as Earth, I can get everyone out within about 150 milliseconds. Although that doesn't help anyone on another plane. That time won't meaningfully go down unless I spend a lot of resources on it, in which case I can technically get it down to just over 50 milliseconds. Does that sound like the kind of plan that might be an improvement, or would you still recommend stealth instead?" she asks. "Also, would you like some lemonade while we plan?"

Gord is long past the point where he'd be worried about accepting a drink from a mysterious creature. Maybe it's just that he wants to believe. Well, any fey that good at reading his mind deserves to have their lemonade drunk.

Also, this is a bar, and he has just run for three hours expecting a fight at the end of it, and he didn't even get to have his fight.

He accepts the lemonade. It tastes like sweet and sour had a love child that sidles up to you with big eyes and a sign saying Drink Me.

Somehow this is what makes it feel real. A bar with exploding stars out the windows, a woman promising she'll fight the gods themselves to fix the world, and a taste that the best prestidigitation couldn't match, because it isn't magic.

It's the taste of freedom.

Gord has a war to help plan and he is very happy!

"The gods definitely don't know everything, or even most things. Sometimes clerics need to tell their gods about something. I think the gods probably don't care about most things, or it costs them something to track everything. That doesn't mean a god can't know everything about someone, once they know and care about them."

"If someone is prepared to counter a spell, they can do it no matter how fast the spell is. Or a magic trap or item could be triggered and disrupt the spell. So some people might stop themselves, or others who are right next to them, from being teleported. Or they might just resist your teleport, depending on how it works. There could be magical barriers or prisons that prevent some people from being teleported. But I would expect the vast majority of people to get out."

"Except I don't know about everything, and I definitely don't know all the powers of the gods or demigods or even the world's greatest wizards. And some magic can foresee the future, which means the gods can, too."

"If you do succeed, you must prepare for what comes next. If you rescue everyone, and in the next round Asmodeus traces you back to your world and leads a coalition of gods to kill you and take them back, and you don't have god allies and haven't prepared a counter, you will lose. Or maybe you won't lose at home, but you wouldn't be able to help others in Golarion."

"Maybe the Good and Chaotic gods and archwizards and so on would oppose the Evil and Lawful ones and protect you, but that's a risky bet to take, if you don't talk to any of them in advance."

She smiles back at him.

"That makes sense. Gods telling the future sounds especially hard to deal with -- I don't think I can rescue everyone and not make it look like they were rescued, especially if gods have exotic senses, which they must," she agrees.

"I don't know whether my teleport would beat people's existing protections, but I expect it probably would," she continues. "If all the protections are the same kind of magic you showed me, it should be fine. I can just move the magic along with them. If they do something more exotic than that, then I don't know for sure."

She leans back and looks up at the garlanded rafters.

"Do you know what gods are? As in, what they're made of or how they came to exist? 'God' is another one of those words that we have that sounds fictional, so I can't really compare it to anything we have, and it sounds like that might be a pretty important question for figuring out either how to ally with some of them or how to prevent them from interfering."

"I showed you two of the simplest spells there are, from two out of at least eight schools of magic, neither of which would be useful for preventing or reacting to a teleport! I can't show you wizard spells, or those of sorcerers, witches, demons, and a hundred other rare kinds of spellcaster! I don't know if any of them are relevantly different but seeing light and thinking you know what wish can do is like - seeing a dandelion, and deducing a lion. Or a dragon. Which probably translates as another fictional thing, but if you go around thinking dragons are fictional the one over in Kenabres will soon set you straight." Or maybe dandelions are fictional to her? What is with this stupid translation effect, he still wants to try speak local language and see if it does any better.

"The Worldwound is surrounded by a ring of artifacts called the Wardstones that block anyone from teleporting into or out of the area. I have no idea if your ability beats that and I also have no idea how you'd tell from looking at create water and light." And there could be ten or a hundred equally relevant things around the world without him knowing.

"I don't know what gods are made of. I've never seen one and they can presumably look however they want anyway. Maybe they can make their bodies out of whatever they want, too. Maybe they can be disembodied spirits made out of souls and magic and energy."

"I don't even know what the difference is between gods and demon lords and archdevils and everyone else. They're all powerful immortal beings from other planes who grant power to clerics. Some priests insist that demon lords aren't really gods but I don't know what the difference is, except that gods are more powerful than demon lords. Maybe it's just a stupid fight over names."

"What's certain is that some gods are much more powerful than others. They have more and more powerful clerics and rule their own domains or whole planes and own countries on Golarion and so on. Chaotic gods don't conquer countries but some intervene much more often and powerfully than others."

"The weakest gods were mortal before they ascended. Or at least so they claim and all the other gods agree about it so it's probably true. The most recent was Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of trying to defeat Evil." Gord has taken to heart the sermon he heard once, about Iomedae not being the goddess of fighting Evil. Some things you want Iomedae for, and some you want Gorum, and it's important to know which is which.

"Iomedae and some other gods ascended using an artifact called the Starstone. A man called Aroden created it thousands of years ago, and used it to ascend himself. He raised an island out of the sea, just like you did, and left it there. He had a big cult in Cheliax who thought he'd come back and fix everything and make them a heaven on earth. And then he died in the godwar a century ago." He didn't mean this as a cautionary tale, but if the shoe fits...

"Some other gods were also mortal once but their stories of how they ascended sound like fairytales and I don't know what to make of them. The only half-plausible one says she ate the corpse of another god, but if that were possible other gods would have sent someone they liked better to eat it. And no-one new ascended after Aroden died."

"The other gods - which is by far the most of them - are generally called ancient gods. Some claim to have been around since Creation. Recorded history goes back less than ten thousand years, and some legends millenia before that, but I have no idea if this is most of the span of Creation or just a tiny part."

"Asking if you knew what gods are made out of was a bit of a long shot -- I didn't really expect you to know, it's just that if you did have a simple answer that would have been really surprising and informative," she explains.

"As for looking at create water and light and thinking that I can extrapolate about teleport protections ..." She pauses to figure out how to explain this. "Dandelions and lions -- assuming these are the plant and the large cat we're talking about -- are very different, but they're made of the same stuff. If I had a pile of dandelions here and a template for how to make a lion, I could rearrange all the smallest pieces of the dandelions to make a lion."

"And your spells are made out of a kind of stuff that I'd never seen before -- that as far as I can tell, doesn't exist in my universe at all. But my fixity crystal was still able to see where it was, which is the same mechanism it uses to manipulate locations. If you'd like to do a test, you can cast create water again and I can try to pull the spell away from you and use it myself. I can try grabbing it without you casting, but I wouldn't want to accidentally grab your other magic at the same time."

"So it's entirely possible that different forms of magic are made out of something that fixity crystals can't manipulate, or that the teleportation shielding works in a way that prevents the fixity field from even reaching the things its protecting in the first place, but it would be ... positing extra complexity that isn't necessary to explain things. Every kind of magic being made out of the same flexible little components would be consistent with everything you've told me so far. That doesn't mean it's true, it just means that I'm more confident betting that my teleportation would work than not."

She takes another sip of her lemonade.

"I can see why you're recommending getting allies, though. It sounds like Golarion has a lot of unknowns where we're not sure how my crystal will stack up. One thing we might try -- although I don't actually want to do this until we've spent a while exhausting our options, because it would potentially reveal us to the gods -- is opening the door just long enough to grab a few likely allies with different magic and expertise before closing it to pause time again. If we did, who would you want to grab and why?"

"Maybe you're relying on the weird translation effect too much. Just because we call a lot of different things magic doesn't mean they're all fundamentally the same, language doesn't work like that - mine doesn't, anyway. Maybe a wizard would know, they study magic. Clerics just use it, so I can't tell you how it works."

"To me it sounds like you're saying everything you haven't seen or even heard of must all be one kind of thing. Like there can only be one thing in Creation that you don't know about. To me it seems obvious that there are lots of things I don't know about and they don't all have to be related to each other."

"I really want to try my own translation spell and see if it does any better. But I didn't ask for it this morning, because I didn't know I'd need it. So I'd have to pray to Gorum for it, and that might him notice us, and we don't want that."

"When you say grab some allies, do you mean going out to convince them to come here, or do you mean very quickly teleporting them with your power and hoping no-one notices?"

"It's not that everything ..." she begins, before cutting herself off and summoning a diagram of the standard model.

"Everything in my entire universe is composed of these twelve types of particles held together by these twelve types of binding. The spell you demonstrated contained many of these, but also an additional four types of particle that I hadn't seen before," she explains. "In my universe, that would imply the existence of a few more particles that I didn't see due to a deep tendency in nature called 'symmetry', but they would have related predictable properties."

"It is entirely possible that your universe isn't so clean -- clearly, things are a lot more complicated than I was expecting, given that apparently a multiverse exists, and the way that I thought things worked is wrong. You're absolutely right that we don't actually know for certain how things will work until we try. But those 4 extra particles in your magic and the others they imply look very flexible. I think -- although I haven't actually reverse engineered it yet -- that they probably suffice to build very wildly different spells, in the same way that the twelve basic particles of matter are enough to build cats, dandelions, boats, and stars. So in some sense, those few particles existing is sufficient to explain very different kinds of magic."

She gropes for a metaphor suited to his apparent tech level and life experience.

"It's like finding a house full of bodies with stab wounds, and a bandit standing outside shouting about how he stabbed the mother. Yes, it's entirely possible that the bandit only stabbed some of them, and that the others were stabbed by a secret group of cultists living in the basement, but if you had to put money on it you'd probably assume that the bandit was responsible for everything."

"So if we get the chance to figure out whether fixity crystals work through teleport barriers, we should. And probably we can figure that out in the first few milliseconds after the door opens, since you said we were near the Worldwound. But until we get more information, my guess is still that even very complicated magic will still be the same fundamental kind of thing as the magic you showed me."

She shakes her head to clear it.

"I understand if that doesn't really convince you. I've spent my life working to understand the smallest parts of the universe, and that's given me some intuitions, but this is a very strange situation. The responsible thing, because time is stopped, is probably to come up with a plan for both cases -- what to try if my teleport suffices, and what to fall back to if it doesn't."

"As for calling allies -- I meant trying to teleport them here very quickly so nobody notices, although we could also duplicate them so that we could have them here without anybody being able to see that they had gone. I don't like to do that without asking for permission, though, because it can be very upsetting for people. Does that change your answer, though? Are there people who would be useful to work with only if not teleported, or vice versa?"

"I hadn't realized you could clone other people! Maybe you should just clone some trustworthy allies a lot - if they agree, of course. Yesterday I would have said that an army of a million powerful azatas, or ten thousand Felandriel Morgethais, could handily conquer the world and do a lot of the good things we'd want done, and it wouldn't be obvious where they came from or what other powers you have."

"I'm not personally well acquainted with any of the most powerful and useful allies I can think of. I have no idea who might react well to nonconsensual cloning, even if they'd agree given the chance to consider it. I assume most people would prefer to be kidnapped rather than cloned and also kidnapped. If they disappear, and merely mortal allies search for them, and time will quickly be stopped again, then I don't think there's a significant risk in teleporting them. Not unless the teleportation effect itself is so novel and unusual that some god would notice it the first time it happens."

"If the people we fetch don't like it, we'd have to hold them prisoner here, and I'm willing to do it but I really hate it. I'm sorry to say that I can only offer guesses, about people I know moderately well who might have better advice, and about people who are very powerful and knowledgeable whom I have not met and don't know how to find."

"...Actually. Go back a step. Can you clone a god?" The mind boggles, but, well - "If that's possible, and you can just have a lot more Desnas and Sarenraes and Milanis running around - they could probably handle the other gods for us -"

She nods along. "It makes sense that you're not directly acquainted with all the right people, and I agree that cloning people instead of just teleporting them is worse. I could see it still being worth it, depending on what exactly gets gods attention, but I'd certainly rather just teleport them."

She adopts a considering look, staring out past his shoulder. "My ability to clone things depends on being able to observe the entirety of their form, to acquire the 'pattern' to make more, and then on being able to synthesize the materials that they are made out of, or to pull those materials from elsewhere. I can synthesize all of the basic materials from my universe, and I expect to work out how to synthesize the magic particles I've seen from yours, although I think I need to see a spell 'decay' instead of just folding back up inside you in order to figure out how."

She refocuses on him. "So whether I can clone a god I think mostly depends on whether I can get a fixity field to cover them. You said you don't know what gods are made of -- do you know where they are? Do they live among people, or hang out in the theocracies you mentioned, or on other planes? Or failing that, could we maybe arrange for an allied god to come to a particular location?" she questions.

"Oh!" she nearly interrupts herself. "You mentioned that some gods are stronger than other gods -- do you know what resources contribute to that? Even if gods aren't in easily accessible locations, if they are empowered by something, I could plausibly just dump a lot of that resource on some of them."

Behind her, her clone at the bar has started doing something that involves slips of green paper rapidly appearing and disappearing on one end of the bar, and books appearing and disappearing on the other.

("Just give me the first cubic lightyear of your recommendations," she told Bar)

"I have no idea what gods power draw power from. Maybe the same thing that powers all magic? I haven't heard of them fighting over things or places for power, but maybe that just means there aren't any on Golarion. I've heard stories that gods get power from people praying to them but I think that's just something people made up so they can pretend they actually matter to the gods."

"Most gods have homes on other planes. Some of those homes are meant to be easy to find, although you'd probably be seen going there, and I can't plane shift myself yet. They can certainly go other places, if we can talk to them and convince them to do it."

"There are two gods that I know of who live on Golarion in the nations they rule. Neither is someone you'd want to approach."

"Abadar rules Osirion. He's the Lawful Neutral god of banking and commerce and trade, which means he's happy to trade with Asmodeus as long as his coin's good. In his country women have no rights, they can't choose where to live or work or who to marry, they can't even leave their own homes without some man's permission. And some of the men are also slaves, of course. He tells everyone they must obey him to get to Axis, the Lawful Neutral afterlife, where they'll be happier for some reason, even though he also rules Axis."

"Razmir rules Razmiran, which he renamed after himself. He's a Lawful Evil god and he forces everyone to worship him, but he doesn't seem to care what they do other than that. He's a very new and weak god, compared to all the others, I don't think he's got anything but the country and most of the other churches won't acknowledge him."

"The really evil bastards like Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon don't personally rule their countries, thankfully. But every god who owns a country is a Lawful slaver. Some of them just happen to be the lesser evil."

"I can show you some spells and you can try to copy them, I was expecting a fight and now I probably don't need these. You can also try copying my magic sword or my bag of holding." He opens the bag to demonstrate how it's bigger on the inside.

"Getting more spells requires praying to Gorum and he might notice I'm somewhere strange and look more closely. Or it might not work because time is stopped for him. Usually I can pray to restore or replace all my spells once per day, and I can pray for one more spell anytime today because I left one slot free this morning in case I needed something later."

"Here are the spells I've got right now that I can show you, once each."

"I can make a shield around me that looks like a soap bubble, lasts for a few minutes, and deflects arrows and some hostile spells, about one time in five."

"I can create a copy of my sword that floats in the air next to me and very rarely helps to deflect swordblows, and then I can throw it at someone in a way I can't throw my real sword, after which it vanishes."

"I can illusion myself to look like any other humanoid creature I can imagine of roughly my own size, including clothes. It only affects sight, not touch or sound, and smart people can figure out it's an illusion; this lasts for almost an hour. I can also become invisible; that only lasts for a few minutes. And I can make an illusory double of myself so people don't know which of us to hit."

"I can curse someone to have much less of - one of the six classical attributes of people, this is probably going to translate as a stupid fictional idea again. We think people have six basic qualities that interact with magic and other things. Strength and dexterity are obvious. Resilience or constitution is how healthy you are and how much damage you can withstand. Intelligence and wisdom are - two ways of being good at thinking. And splendour is understanding or persuading other people." He wonders who sorcerers have to persuade when they cast their Splendid spells.

"And finally, I can make a person or item hard to magically find or divine information about, for a few hours. Not, to be clear, in a way that would stand up to gods."

"I can also use the energy of some of these spells to instead heal someone's wounds. This works for some spells but not others and I don't know why. Separately from that, I can heal everyone within thirty feet of me, no matter how many people are there, four more times today. Every cleric can do that, and evil clerics can harm people instead of healing them."

(Gord is still a little bit incredulous that all of magic could be fundamentally the same, when a random third circle cleric's list of spells for the day is as diverse and weirdly specific as this.)

"... huh. That is such a specific set of powers," she replies.

"I definitely think it's worth getting a demonstration of those, though. Would you be willing to start with the sword-spell, and let me take a few swings at you with a blunted training weapon? That sounds like a good way to see a spell reacting to other things happening in the environment, as well as a spell that creates something that acts like an object while still being temporary (unlike create water)."

A notification from the spell research team pops up on her HUD.

"Oh, and would it be okay if I looked at your brain in more detail while you were casting the spell? I usually avoid looking at people's brains because of privacy concerns -- many people find the idea upsetting, and it's totally okay if you won't permit that. But I am curious about how the brain interfaces with magic, including things like whether the sword reacts to what you think subconsciously."

"I'm not objecting for reasons of privacy exactly but I would like to know what else you could or would do that information. If you use it only to learn about magic and forget it afterwards or destroy the records or however that works, that would be best, but you can look either way." He has things in his head that he's ashamed of, and things he regrets, but he only hides them for strategic reasons and he expects her to follow through even if she suddenly turns out to hate him personally.

"You should try to swing at me a few times before I cast the spell to see how often you can hit me. The spell wouldn't do anything to protect me if I wasn't trying to dodge."

And once she's done that, he casts hedging weapons, and a greatsword-shaped shiny force field appears in the air. It will try to distract and parry her blows! It's very ineffective at doing that, though, because it's also trying to keep out of Gord's own field of vision, so as to not distract him.

"It will stay around for a few minutes. The real benefit is throwing it before it disappears, because most people don't expect me to throw a sword and cleanly decapitate someone across the room." 

"I would certainly be surprised by that!" she cheerfully agrees. She conjures a target at the other side of the room. "Go ahead and throw it at that."

"As for what I will do with the things seen inside your head: I promise to only keep notes long enough for the group of me currently working on reverse-engineering magic to figure out the interaction with your spells, and then promptly destroy them. The group of me that sees the notes will not communicate their specific contents to anyone else (although I intend to share the abstract summary of how magic connects to your brain), nor attempt to deliberately remember them once their work is done. I don't actually have a way to make myself forget things," she apologizes.

In a spacious physics lab in polar solar orbit, a group of Weeping Cherry's forks peer over the data. They trace the decay reactions as the spell comes unwound at the end of its duration. They examine the way that it reaches out to the environment to sense the other combatants, and the way that it imparts forces to the things that it touches. They look at how it attaches to his brain, a tiny specialized structure embedded there to permit his control.

There are weirder things in his brain. A different type of exotic particle, and other complicated structures that they infer are his other spells, plus some bits that they can't determine the precise function of.

As promised, they ignore the majority of his brain, and don't even try to decode his thoughts, beyond checking to see whether his visualization of the space around him affects the sword at all.

In Milliways, Weeping Cherry smiles at him again.

"That was very useful, thank you! I want to see your other spells, but let's give the rest of me a chance to pore over this one, since we have time."

She seats herself at the bar again.

"To change topic a bit -- what gods would you recommend approaching?"

Hitting a stationary dummy: easy! He could probably do that with his real sword if he practiced. The conjured sword cuts through it cleanly before disappearing.

"I haven't met any of the gods, so all my knowledge is secondhand. Even with Gorum, the first time he gave me spells saved my life, and he answers my prayers when I need something specific or new, but he doesn't talk back. Even the gods with the best reputations probably have a lot of motives and goals I wouldn't know about, and even good and honest clerics might mislead people about their gods. Maybe we can find someone trustworthy who knows a god better than that and will recommend them."

"But since we have to try someone, here's my best guess."

"Desna is the strongest Chaotic Good goddess. She's the patron of distant travel and the stars, so she will probably like your scheme and know things that could be relevant."

"Milani is the Chaotic Good goddess of rebellion and freedom and slave uprisings. She's one of the ascended gods, so she's very weak by comparison with someone like Desna and has very few clerics - I only ever met one. But because she was mortal once she understands people as well as we do and she can talk to us without problems."

"Sarenrae is the Neutral Good goddess of healing and redemption and forgiveness. Her clerics say, and I have seen nothing to dispute this, that she really wants to help everyone, but she doesn't really understand mortal people and can't easily talk to them. So she only does things she's really sure won't hurt anyone, like healing people, and not - more complex schemes. But if another god can persuade her she can help a lot because she's one of the strongest gods there are."

"There are other gods who might in fact be a better choice, but I don't know enough about them to say. Adventurers come to the Worldwound from all over. I've heard about gods in Tian Xia who aren't worshipped in Avistan, and there are probably more in other places. And there are many more - smaller gods, or really big angels, or some other kind of thing, who might be great allies but I don't know which ones to approach. Although I can think of a few people I'd ask, if I had the chance, without revealing why I'm asking."

"And there's Iomedae, because I know her name will come up somehow even if I don't recommend her. Her church is all over Mendev and she outright owns the country of Lastwall to the south. She is the ascended Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil, and she is the goddess of painful tradeoffs. I guess the best thing I can say about her is that - she will always pursue the greater good, and she's competent to do it. And I might even mostly agree with her about the Good, as an end goal. But her greater good requires a lot of lesser evils, and she pays for it with other people's lives, without their consent, and that's not something I could ever accept."

"The other reason I don't trust her is that she's Lawful, which means she makes promises that she literally cannot break. And I don't know what she might have promised Asmodeus or Abadar or some other god I never heard of that would require her to betray you to them because she didn't foresee you turning up."

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."

She briefly confers with the patient before re-breaking his leg and tearing some muscles getting it straightened out. He cries out a little, but manages to lie still.

"Yes, the people who came in for healing are not vetted," she clarifies. "In fact, they are some of the people most likely to disagree with me, because the only injured people available are the ones who don't trust fixity crystals to heal them, or who object to being healed for philosophical reasons. Of those, some fraction were okay with being healed by a miracle from a god, and that's who I asked to come."

She glances over at the people sitting by the fire.

"Just because they disagree with me is no reason not to let them know about other worlds, though," she continues. "I've already made a public announcement that we've made peaceful contact with other worlds and are currently planning how to approach them, although I left out the details of our plan. I also refrained from mentioning any details about gods other than that they are claimed to exist, just in case people thinking about them or praying to them would get their attention. If there's anything else like that in your world, where just knowing about it could potentially be dangerous, it would make sense to avoid that."

"But I'm not very worried about them disrupting anything. Nobody has access to Golarion without you, and I am perfectly capable of preventing them from lunging through the door if it comes to that. I mentioned them wanting to speak to you more because I don't think it's my place to say who you can or cannot talk to than because I think they're particularly trustworthy or knowledgeable people, though. If you want to talk with some people that I do vouch for, I can definitely fetch them. I haven't so far because it didn't seem urgent and I didn't want to overwhelm you with people. That's the same reason that I'm not letting more people teleport in right now, actually."

Spontaneous cure wounds for 3d8+5 HP! The leg heals nicely and the patient is no longer pale and wasted. "Go dance or run or something to make sure your balance is alright. Your mind probably got used to having a bad leg and you need to unlearn that."

"Golarion won't make any sense to them if I don't tell them about gods. I enjoy talking to people but only if I don't have to hold back, and it might be distracting anyway. If it's just that they want to talk to me, they can wait until we've rescued everyone."

"You can bring in people we don't need to keep secrets from, if you think they could help us plan. I get the sense that you've been talking with them remotely anyway, so if they want to come here in person they can do that."

"Yes -- I've been conferring with the rest of my self tree and some people who seem like relevant authorities," she replies. "Let me bring them in."

A moment later, a trio of individuals appears. "Gord, let me introduce you to Misha Verlins, a professional correct-guess-maker I've known for some time; Arthur Wong, a historian and anthropologist; and Checker Vice, a representative of SPTO, the largest pro-foreign-intervention alliance of nations from my world."

Misha, a short woman with bright pink hair and a t-shirt that says "I predict the future" over a diagram of a support vector machine, bounces up and down in excitement.

"It's so great to meet you! I was just saying that we should be asking you more questions about the historical actions of gods. You must have myths and legends," she says. "Which aren't going to be accurate, obviously, but they would definitely help narrow down more what kinds of events are more normal in Golarion, which is super important at this point."

The others nod and greet him more sedately.

Gord has myth and legends! So many legends! He was raised in the Kellid oral storytelling tradition; his mother's parents were the old tribe's skalds when they left Sarkoris-that-was for the eastern diaspora. Adventurers from the world over come to Mendev for a bit of crusading, and priests of all faiths, and he has talked to all of them and has heard (possibly garbled, definitely conflicting) versions of every culture's stories about the gods.

It would take days to actually recite them properly (and he's terribly out of practice and slightly ashamed of this), so how about a quick summary of some random stories he can recall on short notice. Ones about the gods actually doing things on Golarion, not the ones about Asmodeus being a fallen angel.

Rovagug, the Eater of Worlds, once threatened the whole universe with destruction. He ate several planes and planets before a coalition of the gods defeated him. They couldn't kill him, so they imprisoned him inside Golarion. (This was before recorded history.) Later, Sarenrae smote a city full of Rovagug cultists (she has said she's very sorry about this).

Earthfall was going to destroy the world but a moon goddess sacrificed herself by blocking it with the moon. It still destroyed civilization and ushered in a thousand-year Age of Darkness.

Aroden personally incarnated to kill the necromancer Tar-Baphon. (It didn't take.) He also fought some other threats, but Gord isn't sure which ones happened when he was a god and which when he was still an immortal human. He might have helped fight Treerazer, a demon lord who lives on Golarion.

Abadar incarnated as a pharaoh, or a series of pharaohs, to win Osirion's secession war from the Kelish Empire, and he has ruled it ever since. Gord isn't sure why he did this, exactly, but the Osirians are very proud of being ruled by a living god.

Nethys once sent a pharaoh dreams that drove him mad so he killed himself. (This was ancient Osirion, not to be confused with modern Abadaran Osirion.)

Desna killed a demon lord who had killed her high priestess. This was technically in the Abyss, but the priestess was killed on Golarion.

Gorum granted a mortal champion a boon: he would only die in battle. But the champion, being proud, declared he would never be defeated, and so thought he was immortal. (Gord thinks this might be a Gorumite heresy, actually.) This angered Pharasma, goddess of birth and death, so she sent her servants to fight and kill him. There are different versions of the story's end: sometimes the champion reigns undefeated; sometimes he is killed, but Gorum raises him as an undead, so that he may never be judged by Pharasma.

Milani supported the Galtan revolution. Gord isn't sure if she intervened in person, but she sent her herald.

Immonhiel is said to be always wandering Golarion in mortal form, helping and healing people, but no-one knows who she really is, so there are a lot of claims of sightings over the years.

Kurgess was an athlete and gladiator (Gord thinks exhibitional fighting is kinda gross if it doesn't lead to real fighting for a real goal, but whatever), and he impressed Cayden and Desna so much they made him a god. (Alternatively, some people say he was their son.) He enters tournaments under false names, invariably wins them, and then reveals his true nature and teaches the other competitors a new technique.

Achaekek kills people who try to become gods. There are actually fewer stories about him succeeding than about people ascending after he presumably failed. Maybe he's just a cautionary tale.

Of course, if you count tales about the gods' followers doing things that the gods empower them for, there's endless amount of them! The very strongest clerics can call down literal miracles from their gods and this has happened hundreds of times, at least. And lesser outsiders who are not gods often come to Golarion to do things, and some of them are definitely sent by gods as their agents, but of course it's hard to tell which.

(Also, the pro-intervention alliance sounds interesting. Are they pro-some-specific-kind-of-intervention, or do they just like intervening in things, the way Gorum likes people fighting for goals?)

Arthur and Misha chime in with clarifying questions about some of those stories, and then break off to talk about what the myths imply about non-mythologized attitudes and capabilities.

"Providing everyone with freedom of movement is in theory a very good way to make people's lives better without directly making conditions better somewhere, because it means that if things get bad enough compared to the alternatives, people can leave. The SPTO's stance is that this is not actually sufficient in practice," he explains. "No offense," he adds, turning momentarily to Weeping Cherry.

"For one thing, people often have ties to family or the community in a location that makes leaving a hard choice. For another, everybody fleeing somewhere for better opportunities elsewhere can result in the loss or fragmentation of the existing culture," he continues. "The SPTO -- oh, that stands for Solar Policy and Treaty Organization -- believes that establishing minimum standards for governance, and providing governments with resources, training, and incentives to reach that minimum standard, results in better outcomes than a purely hands-off policy."

His entire statement has a well-rehearsed quality that suggests he's given this explanation many times.

"I asked Checker to help with planning because we've known each other for several years, I trust his ability to help with planning, and his contacts in the SPTO will probably be useful for getting volunteers in to help governments and organizations in Golarion overcome the inevitable transitional instability," she explains.

"Of course it's good to help people without forcing them to move, or to help them if they move as a group. I'm sure there's a government somewhere that won't just break up with every official running off to do their own thing as soon as they can, and people who will want to keep living together, and they will welcome your help."

"But it only works if you also let people leave whenever they want, not instead of that. And if some people want to forget their culture and go be free, and you like their culture and want it to be preserved, you can go live in the culture yourselves and see how you like it from the inside, but they don't owe it to anyone to preserve it."

"Most cultures won't survive without the slaves and the poor and desperate whose blood, sweat and tears keep them running. The ones that will are the ones whose people don't want to leave in the first place. And that's a good thing."

Gord met a party of Osirian adventurers once, who thought Osirion's long history had created many beautiful things, and was worth fighting to preserve. That a country which consistently sent people to Axis instead of Hell wasn't something you should risk disturbing, even if you thought you could do better. By strange coincidence, none of them were women, or slaves, or poor farmers who couldn't afford weapons and armor and training and a trip to the Wound to keep them in the Neutral.

He doesn't have a lot of time for people who want to have nice things so long as others pay the cost.

"Oh, yes," Checker agrees. "Freedom of movement is definitely a very important principle, and I wouldn't restrict it, except maybe as punishment for severe crimes, even if I could. My point was just that it isn't enough. I got involved in what would become the SPTO in response to seeing how the first large lunar polity, Selenopolis, turned into a bunch of petty fiefdoms and fell apart because its laws weren't really robust enough to handle the large and diverse batch of refugees that decided to settle there."

Weeping Cherry winces a bit at that.

"People should absolutely have the freedom to leave, but that isn't a perfect panacea that cleanly fixes everything. Even when teleportation is too cheap to meter, there are still costs -- both to individual people, and to their community -- to moving. Weeping Cherry calls us pro-intervention, because the SPTO believes that conditions on the ground in another country are still our problem, even though the people on the ground there could theoretically leave."

Gord really shouldn't be surprised that people from Cherry's world aren't perfect like she is. Many people say they want to help others but they almost always add "but not the really bad people, they deserve to suffer, surely that is obvious?" And he really really needs to be nice and politic and not to alienate the people Cherry wants him to work with, and perfection is the enemy of the good, and yet. And yet.

"What crimes are you proposing to punish with imprisonment and who is going to write and adjudicate and enforce those laws?"

Aaaaagh.

"I don't want to start an argument unless this is actually going to end up mattering." People who idly fantasize about enforcing laws and punishments and judging who deserves some rights can fuck off to their own private planet, same as everybody else, how about that. "But the starting point has to be free exit rights, and lots of room for everyone to live by themselves. That means every set of laws will be consensual, and every punishment, except for exile."

He's not at all sure it can actually work that way. People will keep trying to murder and hurt, and chase each other across the worlds; that's human nature. And there will always be valuable things to fight over, including access to other people, that will keep drawing them together and setting them against each other. But fighting will be only for those who choose to fight and not to flee.

...it turns out Gord's more aligned with Gorum than he knew. Proving once more the foresight of the gods, he supposes.

"It sounds like the first time a bunch of your people decided to live together in a new place it didn't go well. This is reasonable! It's a completely new way of life and it will need a lot of experimentation, and even if some communities decide to have laws they will probably need to be different from all the laws people have tried before. Different people will try different things, some of them stupid, and they'll make mistakes and end up with very different solutions, and if a group comes up with good ideas they can convince others to try it. Helping people is a very good thing, both with advice and with resources, and I'm very glad you're doing it, as long as it's not forced on anyone."

He nods solemnly.

"It's ..." he begins. "So there are a lot of crimes that are more universally agreed to be bad than others. Child abuse, for example, almost always makes the list. And it's certainly much much rarer when the victim can teleport away with a thought. But children are uniquely vulnerable in a way that adults are not, and a charismatic adult can still sometimes talk a child into sitting through something that is genuinely very bad for them, which will leave them with permanent mental scars. The vast majority of places have laws against child abuse, and the SPTO maintains minimal model laws so that small settlements without the expertise to draft robust laws can have a template to work from."

"I think it would be better for society, on average, if convicted child abusers were not permitted to go free. The fact that child abusers can choose exile over any other punishment means for one thing that they might have the chance to do it again, but for another it causes a selection effect -- where it makes it more likely that people moving between countries are bad people, which causes diffuse distrust in immigrants, and leads to societies becoming more insular."

"Places have tried to address this by signing exile reciprocity treaties, which say that if you're exiled from one country for a serious crime, you're automatically exiled from the other treaty signatories. I can't give an exact percentage for how common this is, because counting exactly how many countries there are is difficult and subjective, and there are multiple competing treaties with different standards. International law is pretty much always a mess. But I do think that's a good start. It just intensifies the selection effect on the remaining communities that refuse to sign the treaties for philosophical or political reasons."

He takes a deep breath.

"I don't think mine is an unreasonable position -- Weeping Cherry and I have disagreed about it for years, and I'm still not convinced -- but I do think it's a small disagreement relative to all the things that we hopefully have in common. Child abuse it at an all time low, historically, and quality of life has skyrocketed. I'm very much focused on making sure that the people of Golarion get access to all of the good things that we can agree on first -- like removing lead exposure, providing clean drinking water and sufficient food, and enough space for everyone to live. Once we've made a good first pass, I will want to reach out to Golarion's various governments to try and convince them to sign on with the SPTO, but I'm not going to let that future ambition get in the way of contributing to planning, when there are still fundamentals to address."

"Many people do agree with Checker, and I think it's good that there are so many different people working on different visions of what the world could be like," Weeping Cherry interjects. "But I think my main problem with his position is just that you don't get to make exceptions to moral principles. You can either say 'everybody deserves the chance to be free and start a new life, yes, really, everybody' or that's not really your principle. And it's fine if it isn't, but you shouldn't go around claiming that it is. I think the SPTO does good work, it just doesn't have the right to decide things for everyone. Which is why something like 40% of people live somewhere that has not signed on to any SPTO treaties, and 80% of people live somewhere that isn't a full member."

She shakes her head.

"I think it is important to have people who disagree contribute to the planning, though. It is very easy to make mistakes along the lines of ... not noticing that your plan destroys something valuable by just steamrollering over all the opposition, and the best way to prevent that kind of mistake is to have many viewpoints contributing. Sometimes just having a cost brought to your attention can help you find a clever solution that leaves everyone better off."

She smiles, the solemnity draining from her tone.

"And aside from our differences of opinion, Checker is actually pretty good at navigating complicated diplomatic situations and predicting how organizations are going to react. Which seems like a valuable skill to have onboard."

"If a community exiles someone, they can say why they did it, and then other people can ask them before letting that person in. I'm not sure why you'd prefer to promise to always agree with some other community, with other laws and other courts, passing a sentence of exile. But, again, if people choose to live with those treaties, they should be free to do so!"

"And if teleports are cheap enough, then living in one place doesn't mean you're limited to interacting with the people who also live there. You can visit people in other places, and if someone's exiled you can still go meet them in their new home, and that makes it less final. And I assume you can send other people messages and so on."

"But you can't say some crimes are so terrible that you'll keep people from leaving in order to hurt them, as a deterrent. Because - even if you think this can ever be alright - there's no single set of laws for everyone. That's sort of the whole point. So if you let communities imprison people, they will do it for different crimes, under different judges, and diverge and diversify until eventually you'll have the same thing you started with - every kingdom sentencing the enemies of its king so they cannot leave. And that's the Lawful kind of slavery. It always arises in Lawful systems, and the only way to avoid this is to let people avoid the Law."

"I don't have the time it would take to learn about your alien culture, understand why you think what you do, and do my best to convince you that you're wrong. I'm a preacher and I meet a lot of different people, so I know from experience how hard it is to change people's minds. So long as you're not going to force your preferences on anyone, I'll ignore them and I hope so will you, because we have a lot to cooperate on and, given what you just said, I don't think you realize what, exactly you are dealing with when enter Golarion."

"You're worried about child abuse. There is one country on Golarion that bans child slavery. There are countries that torture all children as an institutional goal, until they learn to torture each other. Even if no-one lets them immigrate, they'll keep having children, and torturing them, and if you're not prepared to conquer and to kill then the only way to stop them will be to give their children exit rights at birth."

"In bad years children starve to death, and they are sent to the Boneyard and then to the Abyss, where they become demons who torment each other endlessly. Many demons would do anything for the chance to teleport somewhere where there are no other demons. They're fighting the crusaders to get away from the scarier demons at their backs. They're always being talked into letting someone abuse them, but only because the alternative is a threat of worse abuse. They're just like children, really."

"I have a spell that shows you a true vision of the children in Hell. I'm not going to cast it. You wouldn't thank me if I did." He hasn't prepared it anyway. "I don't really care if the nations of Golarion sign your treaties, because I don't expect most of them to last until they are given the choice."

Checker grows increasingly pale as Gord describes conditions on Golarion.

Weeping Cherry gives him a pat on the back and hands him a glass of water. "It's okay. Well no, it's very much not, but it's what we're here to fight," she says. "Let's focus on getting everyone away from the horrible torture planet -- no offense -- and then everyone can have fun arguing about the best way for the communities of refugees to relate to each other."

He takes a sip from his water, and visibly collects himself. "Yes, of course."

"I apologize," he adds to Gord. "You're right that I haven't changed my mind -- I think it would be quite interesting to have a more in-depth conversation about our perspectives, actually -- but I do see that now is not the time."

"One question I wanted to ask that is germane to our current project -- you mentioned that some of the lawful gods control various countries. Does that mean that those gods are bound by treaties to which those countries are signatories? And does that constrain the actions we can expect them to take against us?"

That is an excellent question which Gord hasn't really considered!

"They can't ask people in those countries to break the treaty, it would break their Law. Gods usually act by ordering their followers around, and those who rule countries are probably very used to working through them, and have fewer empowered followers and other resources outside their country. But I doubt any country has signed a treaty in the name of their god, so they'll still be able to act directly, or through free agents. Did you have some particular treaties in mind that might protect us?"

To Checker: "Apology accepted. I appreciate having you as an ally, and I expect we can go very far together before we have to fight out our remaining disagreements."

Checker has the arms of someone who can probably not even lift a sword, and he hasn't been in a serious fight in his life. But if he's perturbed by the thought of fighting Gord, he doesn't show it.

"I don't really know what treaties Golarion has!" he responds. "Earth has had rules for requesting neutral parley for hundreds of years, and rules about how to treat foreign diplomats and who qualifies for a shorter time. I'm not sure which of these to expect, but are there any international agreements about not attacking doctors, coordinating to address common problems like piracy, designating civilian areas, fair treatment of prisoners of war, or anything like that?"

Misha leans around Arthur to add "90% for having at least one wide-spread agreement between governments to tackle a common threat. 10% for having wide-spread standards for the treatment of clerics or prisoners, where wide-spread means at least 50% of nations in regular diplomatic contact with the country where the door is located. I'm pretty sure they don't have a compatible understanding of 'international law' or even military law."

Some countries (and armies, churches, and so forth) will definitely absolutely honor a neutral parley, letting you depart in peace. Lastwall and other Iomedaens are a pretty central example. Many others will honor a parley if they have specifically promised to before, or if they categorize you as an 'honorable enemy', or simply because they care about their reputation and future options, and because it rarely hurts to talk if you can trust your counterparty to keep to the rules.

All the firmly Good organizations will try their best to honor a parley if they think it is sincere, but if a bunch of demons talk to some Shelynites under flag of truce but the talks break down and a demon starts insulting the head Shelynite's dead brother, there's a chance they'll betray the truce, even though they'll probably regret it later. (Don't trust any demons to respect a parley.) Other factions like the Asmodeans will follow the letter of the law, and sometimes the local law says that they can reject a parley but can't pretend to accept it and then slaughter everyone, and then they'll honor that.

Gord doesn't know much about diplomats, but they represent organizations so attacking them is like attacking the organization, and so they're safe unless someone declares total war. A diplomat is probably whoever is declared to be one by the people who send them? You can't be a diplomat if you're not representing a known organization, so he's not sure how this helps them as long as they keep their world secret. 

Doctors are - not really a thing. Healing is done by clerics. Armies usually have some surgeons (who are also soldiers), in case the clerics run out of channels after a battle, but it's not a common occupation and doesn't have any special status.

Clerics are some of the most powerful and important people in the world and are responsible for a lot of the fighting! (And ruling and so on.) It would be ridiculous to expect anyone not to attack him just because he heals people. He supposes it's possible for a church to declare they're neutral in a particular conflict, and get both sides to promise to leave them alone as long as they're only healing civilians. This works because most churches are pretty powerful and you don't want to attack them without a good reason, not because they're in need of special protection.

Piracy is definitely a problem and countries sometimes band together to fight it. Unfortunately the last time there was a big alliance to fight pirates it was against the Andorens, the only nation to abolish slavery, who were raiding slaver ships and freeing the people in them.

Prisoners of war are supposed to be well treated (and you're supposed to accept surrender). This is, again, more or less enforced by all the Good factions, with the usual issue of people being grumpy about accepting the surrender of enemies who wouldn't accept theirs (most everyone kills surrendering demons). Gorumites also accept surrender and treat their prisoners well, but they are not organized enough to constitute a faction (and often fight on both sides of a battle anyway). Osirion has a foreign policy of strict neutrality, they've never started a war of aggression, but if he had to guess he'd guess they also honor surrenders. Armies of countries not ruled by gods mostly make it up as they go, depending on the general and campaign and how far their resources will stretch if they have to feed a bunch of prisoners.

Civilian areas aren't really a thing. The civilians themselves are; Lastwallers and Gorumites will leave them alone. Other Good and Lawful Neutral people also will, but armies as a whole are rarely Good, and tend to pillage their way forward as soon as they lose their supply train (if they ever had one), sometimes in their own countries. In other countries they add arson and rape and the occasional recreational murder, more or less depending on their discipline and how late their pay is and whether they won their last battle, and of course whether they consider the locals their enemy. 

(Lastwall's armies don't do this, but Lastwall has the unique advantage of fighting on three fronts against demons, orcs and undead, and none of these can be pillaged or, in most cases, raped.)

There is exactly one wide-spread treaty on battling a common threat: the Worldwound Treaty. Signatories are not allowed to attack or maliciously interfere with anyone who is abiding by the treaty and is actively fighting the demons. (There's some long verbiage about defining "actively fighting" to include reasonable downtime, people who operate supply routes, etc.) This covers both factions and individual adventurers. Unfortunately the treaty's definition of "demons" is broad enough that no group of demons can sign the treaty and start fighting all the other demons with the crusaders not being allowed to attack them in turn.

"Huh! How interesting," she comments. "Do you happen to know the exact terms of the Worldwound Treaty, so we can see whether we can abide by them? If they're mostly reasonable, we can probably qualify just by intending to provide food, water, and healing to the people at the worldwound. But if they include clauses about not assisting the demons, or something like that, we may not be able to abide by it."

She taps her chin thoughtfully.

"The fact that the worldwound still exists implies that either the gods can't do anything about it, or don't want to. Maybe we can figure out how to make our intervention worldwound-esque in the right ways to get a share of the same power or indifference. Would you be willing to say a bit more about how the worldwound came to be, and what it's like, and what factions support or oppose it?"

Gord definitely does not know the full terms of the treaty! He never read it for himself; his knowledge isn't at the level where you could look for clever loopholes. It definitely forbids helping any demons in any way, worshipping them, being empowered by them, et cetera.

Also, he is personally in violation of the Treaty, kind of by a lot, which is a reason why he never bothered to read it. He freed some slaves and killed some Hellknights who objected and then he consorted with demons and freed some Mendevian slaves and conscripts and was about to kill the crusaders who objected when he found Milliways. And he's preached to a bunch of Lastwallers ('inciting revolt') and consorted some more and... really the list goes on for quite a while, so there are a lot of people who, if they see him with them, will not be inclined to look favorably on their claim to treaty protection.

If they claim to be adventurers from a faraway place no-one has heard of on the other side of the world and whose language no-one speaks and so on, and they help others in reasonable ways even if they don't fight the demons themselves, this will be totally normal and they will be afforded the protection of the Treaty.

The Worldwound appeared during the godwar when Aroden supposedly died and a hurricane swallowed two countries and storms ravaged the world. Nobody knows how it happened; popular opinion blames a witch called Areelu Vorlesh but this does not, really, explain anything. At first it was confined to the city of Threshold, and there was hope of containing it, but over the next few decades demons kept pouring out and forcing back the surrounding nations, until at last the chain of Wardstones was erected by a miracle of Iomedae, stopping further progress. The land inside has been slowly changing, from the center outwards, becoming less like Golarion and more like the Abyss. This makes it less suited for mortals (including animals, plants, etc.) and more suited for demons. He's heard that the actual rift has also grown over time and may be miles across by now.

Everyone opposes the Worldwound in theory (except the demons). In practice, Lastwall holds the southern border, Mendev the east, Cheliax the north (being the richest of the lot, and able to support its troops by teleport), and the mysterious Irriseni hold the west. Everyone else sends thoughts and prayers; many adventuring parties, and some church delegations, also come by to help Lastwall and Mendev hold the border for a while. (No-one really wants to help the Chelish.)

"If everybody is opposed to it except the demons, that suggests that either the demons can collectively match the power of the gods, or that the gods can't effectively deal with a large planar rift, or some combination of the two. We could try opening a much larger than normal wormhole between Golarion and Earth," she suggests. "That would be a bit expensive, because their cost to maintain scales with the fourth power of the radius, but it could be worth it if we estimate a high enough chance that the gods would interfere with other attempts."

"You said that the less powerful demons are driven before the more powerful ones -- does that mean that trying to help the less powerful demons escape will set the more powerful demons against us as well? Do the more powerful demons have a known objective?"

The demons definitely cannot match the collective power of the gods. Even the demon lords can't do that, and they're not fighting in person. 

Perhaps closing the Worldwound is much harder for the gods than just killing all the demons, and they don't want to waste their power doing the latter without handling the former?

Or perhaps they could close it if they had to, but some of them like the status quo where they get to fight the demons forever. This is something he can definitely appreciate as a Gorumite! Cheliax and Lastwall are using the Wound borders to constantly train and level their armies, and maybe that's a net benefit for them. They don't want the demons overrunning Avistan, but they could be confident in the Wardstones stopping them, or they could have bigger forces in reserve that would stop any threatened outbreak.

Mendev is definitely fighting for its life and would love for the Worldwound or at least all the demons to go away, but it's the weakest country on the borders and it's not calling the shots. Many adventurers come to Kenabres for a spot of crusading and then they go home and he bets some of them don't think "I wish the demons were gone yesterday so I didn't have to fight them", they think "what a convenient way of leveling up and also getting some Good points by killing people". They help Mendev survive but they also profit from its misery, though not in a way where they contribute to it or could do any better. 

Gorum might not actually oppose the Worldwound? He hasn't explicitly said so to one of his higher ranking clerics, and he doesn't to Gorum's knowledge empower demons and their allies (because they don't go to him for power, they go to Baphomet and Deskari), but an endless battle on mostly static lines that people from all over the world can attend is something Gorum would endorse outright, if it didn't have the huge downsides of involving lots of civilians conscripted by Mendev. (And the civilians demons get their hands on, when they can bypass the Wardstones and reach some village, or when they managed to take Kenabres for a few days at the start of the last crusade, but more Mendevians die in their army than to random demon attacks.)

It's hard to know what the powerful demons' objectives are, because it's hard to get them to talk and also they can't be trusted. Empirically, the most powerful demon generals take and hold territories in the Worldwound, and every few years or decades lead a big mass assault on a Worldwound fort or a breakthrough attempt in between them.

Most of the demons in the Wound theoretically answer to Deskari - or at least they came from his domain - and he definitely wants to conquer the world and kill or eat everyone who isn't a Deskarite demon. Probably his generals want that too, in theory. But almost every demon is fundamentally out for themselves and will betray the others if they think they can get away with it and stand to profit. Demons don't serve in armies out of loyalty or a common cause, they only serve out of fear. Which is why their generals drive their own armies before them and don't actually lead them.

If they help (and can convince) the lesser demons to escape, then the stronger demons will definitely consider them enemies. Some of them might attack in revenge, others only if they thought it would get them their armies back. Some might go for revenge only if they have any followers left to impress. Some balors might take the chance themselves to get away from Deskari!

Deskari and Baphomet and so on will definitely consider them their enemies. But they tend to consider everyone an enemy who isn't a subordinate, and don't really believe in good-will alliances, only in short-term coordination over clear shared goals. (And in being the first to stab their partner in the back.) So it's less a matter of earning their enmity, and more one of not moving to the top of their priority list.

Of course a lot of the power of even the greatest demons comes from having followers to begin with, so leaving them without any means they hate you but also have much less ability to do anything about it.

"Oh, that's a very different picture! I thought that when you said nearly everyone opposes the worldwound, that meant that they were actually trying to close it. If many people are benefiting from it, and so incentivized not to actually close it, that makes the 'large wormhole' possibility less exciting," she remarks.

"When you say level their armies, though -- that's another thing that sounds possibly fictional. Could you elaborate on exactly what you mean by that?" she asks. "Because people on Earth get better at fighting if they practice it, but not in discrete 'levels'. So if that's not just a colloquialism, it could be important."

Misha and Arthur finish up their discussion and rejoin the group.

"Definitely answer that first, but also: how much variety is there in desires between demons? Like, are they all variations on 'killing and eating', or are most demons interested in different things?" she adds.

"I said everyone opposes the Worldwound in theory! The most powerful countries and archmages aren't doing anything about it! The only country fighting a total war is the small weak one that's a step from being overwhelmed by demons!"

"Maybe I should have clarified that, while Lastwall and Cheliax are reasonably powerful countries that like to throw their weight around, they both have many enemies they can't defeat and aren't really in the same class as, say, Geb, whom no-one sane would dare to attack, or Absalom, whom everyone keeps attacking and failing miserably."

Mages get better in discrete 'levels' because all spells belong to a level, also called a circle. Everyone starts out casting zeroth-circle cantrips/orisons - those are the spells that can be cast and caught and cast again - and then first circle, second circle, et cetera. You always have access to a circle and all the ones below it, you can't skip any. So although people improve continuously with practice and research, it's common to talk about wizards or clerics of a certain discrete circle.

People who fight without magic (which is most of them) don't have discrete levels, obviously, they just keep getting stronger and quicker, and master more skills but not in any particular order. But mages are very powerful, and very important to fighting, so the term spread from there.

Demons are endlessly variable! There are some broad similarities, because almost all the demons in Wound come from two or three demonic realms out of at least hundreds, and similar kinds of demons get sent to the Wound for similar reasons, and above all because most people are interested in the demons' abilities and vulnerabilities in battle. There are a dozen common kinds and several dozen more rare ones, if you only care about killing them efficiently. But once you try talking to them, you realize it's very very hard to generalize.

Gord hasn't seen or talked to very many demons who were free to do what they liked. Sure, in the heat of battle - when Kenabres was overrun by demons for several days at the start of the last crusade, or when they recovered the remains of a defeated and captured war-party - most demons killed and ate and tortured and raped and hurt in every conceivable way everyone they could get their hands on. But he's seen mortal armies, victorious on a field of battle after a string of defeats, and there's a difference of quantity but it's the same kind of thing in the end. Demons are much more evil and much more unrestrained, but if you look only at armies you'll conclude humans are only interested in conquest and slaughter.

Demons who are not in fight-or-flight mode - despite all demons being constantly terrified and lashing out in preemptive defense - can be interested in very different things. There are commonalities, yes, but individual differences often predominate, just as they do with humans.

Succubi want love and loyalty and worship and adoration, and are incapable of believing it's genuine (a reasonable assumption in the Abyss), so they take over people's minds with magic. (Also sex. So much sex.)

Abrikandilu are horrified by their own ugliness, and don't see a way to fix it, so they hate beauty in others and want to destroy it. They want to drag everyone else down to their level, and failing that, they want forgetfulness.

Brimoraks love watching things burn; Gord has met a couple of humans like that too, but luckily they couldn't make fireballs.

Cambions exaggerate one or two emotions to extremes; these can be anything from pride to greed to terror to obsession. (Cambions are not a natural group any more than "Mendevian soldiers", but they go down to ordinary weapons, so crusaders don't bother distinguishing them further.)

Coloxi are cultured and courteous and make excellent diplomats as long as they're kept away from mirrors, and they are bitter and resentful because no-one wants to receive diplomatic emissaries from Deskari.

Gord can go on in this vein for a while, including various anecdotes, some from his personal experience.

The others nod along, occasionally chiming in with additional clarifying questions. Weeping Cherry thinks that most of those desires are probably possible to accommodate, since they just seem like more extreme variations on things humans already do.

Checker has questions about various political factions, and Arthur wants clarification on where and how he came by each of these anecdotes.

Eventually, Weeping Cherry summarizes:

"Okay, so I think that probably helps a lot with having a plan for what to do with the demons, and how to receive them. We should probably also talk about what kinds of accommodations other, non-demon people will be most comfortable with at some point. But I think that still leaves us with the core question of how much the gods will let us get away with, and whether there's any way to improve on that."

"Based on Gord's descriptions, I think the main thing to worry about is still direct divine intervention. Either the gods will notice and react to any interference at all with Golarion instantly, or they won't. If they do, there's not much we can do about it other than try to act with unstoppable force. If they don't, which seems more likely to me, we can probably get away with sneaking an advance team in to try and contact the Good gods."

"Gord, you mentioned gods' high-priests calling down miracles -- is there anything we can do to make it easier for the Good gods to intervene on our side like that? Also -- I notice we've been at this for a while and I'm starting to get hungry. Does anybody else want some food?"

"We can try taking out our enemies' priests with a preemptive strike. Other than that - "

Help high priests. How would you do that, if cloning them a million times doesn't work because there's still only one god supplying the spells, and if you can't figure out how to power their spells yourselves? What else do clerics need?  ...wait a minute.

"The most powerful spells require expensive components. Gems, oils, incense, inks. If you can make those they will be able to cast a lot more. My own spells don't require much, the material costs only really start being apparent at fourth circle, so I didn't think of it before. And you were going to see if you could clone some of the clerics and wizards, or provide them with whatever you think magical power is made from so they can cast more spells. That would be a really big deal if it worked."

"I think we can win if we can contact them in secret and they cooperate and we have time to plan and prepare. If we don't have any time before acting then maybe they'll have time to ask for something they know they can use, but we can't really plan for it ourselves."

He'll have some food! Most of the time he has to eat his own created food and drink, which tastes so bland he's taken to carrying salt and pepper in his bag of holding. Wizards copied all their other spell designs from clerics, but they redeemed themselves by invented a flavoring cantrip better than anything clerics have before fourth circle. (Of course they gave it a name he can't pronounce. Whatever, it's the cleanup and food flavor spell.)

She summons a table with a spread of food. Thick beef stew and crusty bread, as things likely to be familiar to him for a safe option, pitchers of ice water and lemonade, a bowl of salad with little serving vessels of ginger and Italian dressing, and a platter of fresh sashimi with little bowls of soy sauce, because she's in the mood for fish.

Misha jumps on the fish immediately, and Checker serves himself some stew, but Arthur merely pours himself some water.

"We can definitely do physical materials, and maybe do restoring spells. The researchers say that they've figured out how to grant your sword spell to people, and can cast most of the others 'directly' but are still working on making them attach to people correctly. If you're willing to let them try, they might be able to put your expended spells back, and that would be a good proof of concept," she explains, serving herself some salad.

"Are any gems, inks, and incenses sufficient? Or are there specific types that we would need to copy?" she asks.

"They can try if they're sure it's safe. I still need to open that door," he says, but his mind isn't really there. 

They think they can refresh his spells - at least spells they've seen before, it sounds like, and once they're back in Golarion they'll soon see many more. They did this in a few hours. Give them a few days and they'll probably figure out how to give him another circle. For all he knows they can give him wizard spells, or give his spells to everyone in the world, or something equally fantastical.

The common definition of a god is anyone who can grant spells. What does that make them? 

Gord never really worshipped Gorum. Not like some other people worship their gods, with ritual and prayer and submission and fervent belief. He grew up knowing Gorum wanted some good things, things that Gord also wanted, and then he was in mortal peril and Gorum chose to help him and he does feel some obligation - one he has probably long discharged, but still - he was never Gorum's servant, or sworn follower, or even ally. They have a - working partnership, towards common goals, and if either one ever changes their mind then they'll part. 

Cherry, too, entered his life unexpectedly. Not when he was in need, but the whole world is in need. And she's offering him power with a clear implication: if he relies on her, he won't need Gorum anymore. 

He's not going to worship her, anymore than he does Gorum. But. Um. He may need a little time to figure out how he feels about this. He'll eat some stew. Stew is familiar and unsurprising and doesn't feel like a test of his Wisdom.

"Most spells need very specific components," he says around the stew, "that's part of why they are so expensive. Diamonds are common, followed by sapphires, onyxes, rubies, emeralds. Some need a stone of a certain size, others can use multiple stones or crushed powder. I don't know much about other expensive components but I think there are very many kinds. Some spells are probably obscure just because it's hard to source the materials, regardless of price."

"That makes sense -- if we do send anyone into Golarion, we can send them with a pouch of different sizes of those five gems, at least. Unfortunately, I don't think we have a good way to miniaturize producing many different kinds of ink and incense without bringing a fixity crystal, though. (And I would expect bringing fixity crystals to get the gods attention the way a group of people with gems won't). Maybe we can work out a system with little packets of powder, where you just add water and then it mixes it into a custom ink ..."

She is content to eat silently for a moment, but when she has finished her salad she continues.

"As for restoring your spells -- the research team is only mostly sure it's safe. It's working on some volunteers without obvious issues, but they also haven't had the little brain structures that hook into the magic for as long as you have, and every brain is unique. The volunteers right now are occasionally reporting phantom smells and tastes a moment after a spell is restored as the spell relaxes into place. It's safe enough that I would be willing to do it to myself, but not so unambiguously safe that I would want to make that choice for you. But if you're still up for it with that caveat, we can try it once we're done eating."

"I'm willing to take the risk to myself. I'm not sure about taking the risk to your only way of getting to Golarion. Do you think you could learn something from trying it that would let you prepare better before I open the door?"

"Also, I should clarify that the inks are just an example and many spells require different materials. Gems are the most common, though. Some spells also need worked objects, not just materials; they're expensive because of the work required but should be easy for you to replicate once you see one."

"If you can walk around safely in Golarion without attracting attension - or stay safe inside Milliways while I walk around for you - you'll probably want to see if you can copy wizard spells, because not all of them are available to clerics and vice versa, and then go to some big library or wizard's shop that'll sell you a list of all the known spells and their material components. Kenabres isn't a big city, but you could buy a normal Golarion teleport somewhere else for gold or diamonds. That's if you want to figure out a lot of spells and see if you can share them and power them, instead of going immediately for powerful allies who could do the legwork for you."

"Yes, I see what you mean. I think the main thing we would learn from whether we can re-empower your spells is whether finding some powerful clerics of Good gods and getting them to repeatedly cast the spell that calls down a miracle is a viable option -- unless that spell just gets the god's attention, and so multiple castings are redundant?"

She serves herself some select sashimi.

"I don't want to send you into Golarion, because Bar says that we need someone from the world in question to hold the door to prevent it from vanishing. We might be able to work around that by duplicating you, but I don't understand how Milliways' door determines what universe people are from. And you might not want to be duplicated."

"If we don't use fixity crystals to maintain the element of surprise, the travel time to anywhere in Golarion also bothers me. Even if we can pick up a teleport relatively nearby, that's still a relatively long delay. You mentioned that gods sometimes cleric people who are praying to them, which suggests that prayers sometimes get their attention. Do you know how often that happens? If we have a hundred people run through the door and start praying to the Good gods, is that likely to get their attention?"

"I don't know what gods can, or rather can't, do with a single miracle, and whether casting many of them helps. I'm pretty sure it's not just for getting their attention, there are lower circle spells for speaking to them, like commune."

"Wizards have their own greatest spell called a wish that can do some impressive things too, like move people from anywhere to anywhere even against their will, or make people permanently stronger, or heal or resurrect people which are cleric spells wizards can't normally cast. It can't do anything miracle cannot, although you need to ask the right god for a miracle they'll agree to. Wizards are always talking about how they'll invent something that clerics can't do, any day now, but all they've got so far is giant flaming craters." (Which is also something miracle can accomplish, so no great feat.) "But maybe they can do something useful for us."

"Being cloned sounds pretty great! I'll need to think about it for five minutes and then I'm sure I'll agree. Even if the clone can't open the door, I don't see a reason not to do it." Gord always has many, many more things he wants to do than he actually can; having more Gord to do them is an uncomplicated good.

"It's hard to tell whether the gods notice all the prayers but rarely respond, or whether they don't notice most of them and you need to get the praying exactly right to have a good chance." (He thinks he's explained this before? This conversation has gone on for long enough that he doesn't remember everything that's been said anymore.)

"Oh, yes, that's right. And if worship is pretty widespread, a hundred additional prayers is probably not all that much more noticeable ..." she trails off, and shakes her head to clear it. "Sorry. I should let you have your five minutes. I could do with a moment to center myself anyway."

She sits back, drinks some water, and doesn't think about strange new worlds and impossible magics for a few moments.

She does jot down a list of people they might want to contact: powerful clerics of Desna, Milani, and Sarenrae plus maybe Iomedae if we can think of a way to verify her; and a wizard capable of demonstrating wish -- maybe Felandriel Morgethai, who Gord mentioned we could probably do with a thousand of?

Gord spends five minutes considering how to divide his sword and other magic items, if they fail to duplicate those, and his spells and status as a cleric if Gorum doesn't sponsor both of them, and the going-away present from his parents, and the trophy skulls.

He also needs to come up with a new name for Second Gord (he is not going to call himself Droog) but that's not five minutes' work, it calls for serious thought.

"I'm ready."

"Okay -- the way that we do this, you're going to experience a slight jump, as though teleported a little bit to the left or the right. You will both be Gord. There is no 'original', both copies of you will be equally you," she explains. "I'm sorry if that sounds basic and obvious -- we've found that reminding people of this right before they split helps reduce angst and makes people more likely to cooperate with themselves."

She'll get a last confirming nod and clap her hands.

In a sealed vacuum chamber, freshly-integrated magic handling routines spin together spells for each of his magic items. In another isolated manufacturing location, the machines punch a tiny hole through to the positive energy plane, to collect some of the components they haven't figured out a way to duplicate. Mundane chemical elements are pulled from storage and carefully assembled into an exact duplicate.

These things come together in an instant, and then there are two of him.

"I was going to say 'you can call me Gordy', until I choose a better name".

    "But now I don't know which me should say it."

"You're the new one, I was standing here all along."

    "I still have my spells and channels! That means even if you can't replenish spells, you can copy them along with people!"

"Make a thousand Morgethais for a round, get a thousand Wishes, then they can choose whether to keep existing?"

    "Yeah! A round isn't long enough to get attached to a new body, it's just a flash of experience."

"Wait, no, we have separate souls now, so they'd go on to the afterlife."

    "...do we have separate souls? How would you tell?"

"Maybe Morgethai wants to have a thousand of her to each cast a Wish and then go to Elysium?"

    "We're shutting poor Cherry out. I'm going to go practice talking to not me." Gordy goes up to the Bar.

Perhaps she should have prepared him a bit better, but that didn't go terribly. She makes a note to check in with the other Gord later to make sure he's adjusting alright.

"Having forked myself many times, I have naming advice if you want it. And I copied all the parts of you that I can perceive," she tells him. "But I don't know which of those parts, if any, you would call a soul. Do they have any defining characteristics that would help to narrow it down? In my world, most of the things that make a person themselves are located in the brain (the gut and peripheral nervous system have almost all the rest), and your brain looks pretty similar to that, although there are additional parts made out of magic and out of the energy that you channeled to heal people. And some of the structures also weave into the rest of you, not limited to the brain."

"As for copying people for a single moment -- I won't tell someone who understands what that means and sincerely wants that no, but I think it would be a cruelty to yourself, to think of your lives as disposable like that. Making a thousand Morgethais who cast a single wish, and then can retire to different places, or explore the world, or continue collaborating with herselves sounds better to me, although not everyone would agree."

"I really don't see the problem with experiencing a thousand extra instants doing something you want? If there's some reason you don't want a thousand lasting clones but want to cast a thousand spells, it seems like a good option and not cruel at all. But people are different and can make their own choices."

"A soul is - everything that makes up a person? It's the part that goes to the afterlife if you die, and comes back if you're raised, and someone who's dead still has all their memories and personality and so on. Outsiders - people from other planes, like demons and azatas, some of who used to be mortal - sort of are their souls. If you destroy their body, they're gone. But a mortal body is separate from their soul and nothing you can do to the body affects it. That's more or less what being mortal means, that you have a body that can die without the soul being affected."

"If you really don't have afterlives, then I guess you're technically Outsiders. Maybe if you saw a Golarion person die and be raised by a cleric, that would make more sense. I'm not powerful enough to raise someone myself, but there are people in Kenabres who can do it."

"...do you think you might have accidentally made Gordy an Outsider? It's important to know, I - he wouldn't risk death so casually if he were!"

Gordy comes back from the bar with a bunch of flowers, which he offers Cherry. "Thank you," he says solemnly, "for making more of me. I can't give you anything you don't have already, so this is symbolic of my deep appreciation and gratitude."

"Now, what's this I hear of me maybe not having a soul?"

She takes the flowers and inhales their scent.

"Thank you, they're lovely," she tells him, a soft smile on her face.

"As for the matter of souls -- yes, I think seeing a Golarion person die and be raised would certainly clear it up. Either the soul is ... more like an external process, something that the afterlives actively do to collect people, which is possible; or it is something built into you which I can't perceive, which is probably possible but that I would find very surprising; or it is something which I can see, in which case you both have one," she says.

"If it especially concerns you, is there any way short of dying and being raised that you could check? Some spell that interacts with the soul while its still bound to a mortal body?"

"There's probably something out there. I've heard some spells can trap the soul and prevent it from going to an afterlife when the body dies. I definitely don't have any spells that interact with souls." He has disguise self, entropic shield and the nondetection left. He could pray for one but he only has a first circle slot free and interacting with souls (harmlessly) doesn't really sound like Gorum's thing.

"If souls are possible to interact with using magic, I think that makes it marginally more likely that they're a proper component, and not just a process that afterlives do?" she guesses. "But I don't think that really helps narrow down which part of you is a soul, because I think magic should be capable of interacting with all of you."

"Either way -- probably you should just plan on not dying (unless it's important) until you've had a chance to check, just to be safe," she remarks. "We have treatments for old age that are slightly more effective if you start them early, also, so you should look into that at some point. Applied consistently, we're pretty sure that most people should be able to make it to 150, by which point we'll have better options developed. Nobody has actually lived that long yet, though, because it's only been a few years since we got effective anti-senescence. Looking into that for yourselves is not very time sensitive, though."

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?"

The Gords happily smile back! Smiling is much more universal than hugging. They've seen even Hellknights smile on occasion, and some demons. (After killing someone, in both cases.)

"Humanoid translates as - a technical term. Babaus are approximately human shaped, just - they're literally skin and bones. Like someone who slowly starved to death. Their skin is red and they sweat acid that burns to the touch. And they have little horns. If you can get the image out of my head, go ahead."

"You can't dress up as a babau, they - don't have a belly, just a wedge of skin and bone connecting their pelvis to their ribs. Simple shapeshifting like my alter self can't do it either."

"The easiest demon for playing dress-up is an incubus. They basically look like men, but with goat-horns and bat-wings and sometimes legs like a goat. They can shapechange, so even a normal human could be an incubus in disguise, and if some of you look human and some demonic and some shapeshift that should sell it." 

"What did you mean by 'running around causing trouble'? Real incubi would cause trouble using swords. You're not even trained to wave a sword around menacingly." This is a higher skill than sticking it into people. "The crusaders will try to kill demons - at least ones that are more annoying than threatening - and if you don't hold the door and stay safe inside, I expect they'll succeed."

"There is a very annoying kind of demon that's hard to get rid of, called quasits. They're like little children with horns and bat wings. They can go invisible at will - it still breaks if they hit something, but they reapply it right away - so they fly around causing havoc and are very hard to catch but they don't do much damage. You wouldn't avoid going into a house because of quasits." Well, civilians probably would. "But I expect you can't shapeshift into a quasit, they only weigh eight pounds."

"I don't know for certain what the three crusaders chasing me are capable of." Gord was expecting to likely have to run after making a stand. "Two of them are the officers of the conscripted war-slaves I freed, probably nothing special. The third one is whoever they went to get before coming after me, someone they thought could take on a warrior-cleric and a couple of demons. They could be a paladin or inquisitor or a cleric themselves." Not a wizard, all three were wearing armor. "All of those can detect evil - the weakest inquisitors can't, and the clerics only if they prepared it - paladins and inquisitors can do it at will, which is why it matters, they wouldn't waste a spell confirming someone who looks like a demon really is one. It has a range of sixty feet."

"Very strong mages and demons can fake alignment auras, but not someone like me and not babaus. Clerics can hide alignment auras, my remaining nondetection spell will do it and so will a simpler second circle spell I didn't prepare, but not fake an evil or chaotic alignment. It's more useful for hiding from magic detection than for passing off as Neutral."

She grabs an image from his visual cortex and cleans it up a bit.

"Hmm. So my shapeshifting is also limited, but it's limited in different ways. The primary constraint is that we don't know how to let a human brain control a body with a very different body plan. Like, I could not successfully become an octopus, because controlling eight tentacles and a bunch of internal muscles like that is not something my brain is equipped for. So a head, two arms, and two legs is the easiest thing to work with. We can do additional limbs, but usually by offloading control of the extra limbs to a bit of software -- you know, I have no idea how that word will translate? -- that handles moving them for you, and it's not always perfect. We call doing so 'puppetry'."

"The trickier constraint is that if we want to do this before letting any fixity fields into Golarion, the bodies need to be able to hold themselves together and move on their own. They don't need to be able to contain a full person, because I can set up non-fixity-crystal ways of letting someone back here puppet a body out there, as long as the door is open. But designing a new biological form from scratch is pretty difficult. It would be easier to use machines, but I don't know how obviously fake those would be."

She summons a robotic babau, and closes her eyes to try puppeting it. She moves it through a few poses, getting a feeling for where the limits of the design are. It makes faint whining noises as it moves, electric motors hidden in the chest cavity whirring as they pull on cables to move the parts that don't have good leverage.

"I can make machines like this bleed if necessary, but if anyone tried cutting them apart they would be very obviously not real," she has the babau say. She demonstrates by opening the chest cavity to show the motors.

She opens her eyes and returns to herself.

"So if something like that won't be sufficiently convincing, incubi are probably a safe bet. How many incubi would you expect to be able to hold the door for a few hours? What if they had backup from another kind of demon? What are they like, and how difficult would it be to coach some people on how they behave?"

The audibly-clockwork demon is not convincing at all! It is definitely concerning, because anything new and unknown is a threat, but that's not what they're going for, here.

"You remember what I said before about generalizations. But as for what the crusaders would expect - they're always direct. They know what they want and they immediately take it by force. They're smarter than the average mortal, but they don't use trickery or complex stratagems if they don't think they have to. They advance if they expect to win, retreat if they expect to lose, don't do stupid suicidal charges or go into a mad rage like some demons in battle."

"If they want to harm mortals they just torture or rape them, not - mind-control them into loving a demon, or trick them into breaking a vow and losing their god's favor, or leave them alive to wander the earth bemoaning their woe for a hundred years. They have mind control magic, but they don't use it for kicks, unlike most other demons. Oh, and they have tongues at will, meaning they can speak and understand all languages, which would explain why we can. Assuming the Miliways effect works on things we hear through the door, that's worth checking."

"So if some incubi wanted to hold this house, and they were confident they could withstand an attack, they probably wouldn't bother talking to the crusaders at all, except to show them how strong they are and how pointless an assault will be. And I'll be there and can help sell it. The crusaders will probably assume the escaped slaves are in here with us, too."

"Two or three incubi, with me helping, could easily hold this place all night against three average crusaders, or even indefinitely, because demons don't need to sleep. Unless their mystery third person is a strong paladin or cleric, in which case all bets are off. If they try forcing their way in, you can swarm them with clockwork demons, but if they have good offensive magic at range, we'd have to use the guns. Can you disguise them to look like really powerful crossbows?"

"By the way, besides alignment detection, a cleric is likely to have detect magic, which lets you see magical auras and even identify spells and magic items if you're really good with it. It's an orison, so they'll use it if they have it prepared. And an incubus would have a magic aura, on account of the at-will tongues, but I can't show you what to mimic because I don't have tongues myself."

    "We forgot to describe the demons' magic! This was very stupid of us. Not all demons can do everything, same as mortals, so you can just pretend not to have any of those abilities, but you should at least hear about them."

    "Some incubi can read minds, usual range of sixty feet. It doesn't always work, people can throw it off, and it only reveals fleeting surface thoughts, but it's useful for detecting invisible or hiding people. Some can also talk to their allies telepathically. They can enchant people into being friendlier to them or doing something they suggest, but only reasonable-sound things, not betraying your allies or anything like that. Unless you're the kind of person who thinks switching sides in the middle of a fight is reasonable. But the main thing is that they can change shape at will, looking like any humanoid species and even imitating specific people they've seen."

"Alright, say we hold this place. What will the crusaders do? If they don't attack us, they'll send at least one of them back for reinforcements. They won't all leave - unless we terrify them - because they'll want to keep tabs on us, and help evacuate the locals. Their reinforcements are four or five hours away, if they ride straight back from the city. Two or three hours, even if they find a fresh horse and gallop to Kenabres and then the reinforcements conjure magic horses, or I guess if Terendelev comes out in person or someone decides to spend a scroll of teleport because they think they need to rescue several hundred people in a village captured by demons."

"We should lame or kill the crusaders' horses, and any other horses we find. They'd have to abandon their armor to really run for it and they'd still be slower than horses. That should give us another couple of hours."

"Another problem is that we're sitting right on the main road between Kenabres and Nerosyan, and a random patrol or company could come by at any moment. The locals will probably send some people up and down the road for help, if they think the danger's here and not there. So that's another reason we'll probably only have a few hours undisturbed. Unless we can subdue everyone and force them into some of the other houses and make sure nobody escapes."

"Forcing people into the houses shouldn't be too hard -- if we target the crusaders and anyone else who might be able to get a message off by magic first, we can then have as many people as we need playing lower-level minion demons to round people up. And if we take out the horses first ..."

The discussion goes back and forth for a while, fleshing out more details of the plan. They ultimately agree that with so much uncertainty, a simple, robust plan is probably best. Weeping Cherry takes more diagrammed notes. Eventually, she summarizes the plan thusly:

"Okay. So, first we do any prep-work we can with the door closed, such as making sure Gord and Gordy can use guns, preparing ones disguised as crossbows, getting volunteers rounded up and organized, costuming, distributing armor, making sure everyone is fed and well rested, etc."

"Once we open the door, the first person out is Gordy, while Gord holds the door invisibly. Gordy shouts a distraction to cover the away teams riding out invisibly. They make for Kenabres and Nerosyan. They take radios to stay in constant contact, and can warn us about any parties coming down the road in either direction."

"Once they're clear of the door, we get the volunteers and forks of me who are most closely aligned with Desna, Milani, and Seranrae into Golarion to try praying directly. They hide invisibly near the door and start praying, darting back in when they need invisibility refreshed. Immediately behind them are the people who volunteered to play incubi. One of them charges the crusaders with Gordy, while the other guards the door."

"We try to take down the crusaders first. Gordy and the incubus can be equipped with knockout gas to help with that. Once we have the crusaders down, we cripple the horses and start looking through the town. Some other volunteers can come out to help with the sweep -- some mix of invisible and looking like the incubi or Gordy, in order to keep people from panicking over there being too many demons. We make sure that anybody else capable of magic is knocked out as well, and then round up the villagers and make them stay in their houses so they can't send for reinforcements."

"We coordinate from in here using the radios. If anything that looks like a miracle starts occurring, the away teams successfully contact the good gods, we lose contact with them, or twelve hours pass without success, we immediately deploy a fixity field across Golarion."

"If anyone else does come up the road, Gord and the two incubi deal with them too. We don't anticipate problems holding the door with that amount of force, but we can deploy some weaker-looking demons to help if necessary. If it looks like we can't hold the door without escalating to levels of force that would draw more than local attention -- because a high level adventurer or Terendelev decide to show up -- we deploy the fixity field."

She steps back from the diagram.

"Does that seem like a fair summary? Anything I missed, or any last-minute questions before we start preparations?"

It's a good plan! A third Gord is cloned so they can cover both away teams and the door.

And various teams attend to the preparation. Some of Weeping Cherry's self-tree tracks down volunteers for the away teams and the local operation, and brings them up to speed.

"So you can see why I thought of you. Do you think you would be interested?"

"Interested!? Of course! This is way more important than my campaign. Let me get my sword ..."

"Yes, I think I am. I will want to hear a few more details ..."

Other parts of her self tree work on designing armor, the very best that they can make while still looking like only very fine armor of ordinary make.

The costumers help some people get shifted up as incubi, and have fun designing 'backup' demon costumes for various contingencies.

Other people work on getting equipment together -- bags of holding full of gems, crossbows with hidden gun barrels, knockout gas grenades, flashbangs.

One person talks to a bunch of horse breeders, to find good, well-trained horses that they can clone.

Weeping Cherry makes sure everyone is appraised of the planned time, and encourages everyone to get some sleep, and makes sure the plan is clearly disseminated.

"You can rent a room from Bar, or from a hotel, or you're welcome to sleep at my house," she tells the Gords.

She takes the Gords to a range, and shows them how to use all of the new futuristic equipment.

Her self-tree decides which forks are going on the away teams -- Pine to Nerosyan and Mangrove to Kenabres.

They all get a good nights sleep, a few tricks pulled to sync up everyone's sleep cycles. They have a large breakfast, and then go over all the preparations one last time and get kitted out.

In a corner of Milliways, just in case it works, she kneels, and meditates on what she has learned about Golarion's gods.

When she has prepared herself, she prays.

Seranrae -- I want to do a great Good. People on Golarion are hurting, and I can stop it. Everyone is hurting each other, and I know that with resources and time to grow they can be better. Please, shield me from the Evil gods long enough to get everyone out and away from their influence.

Desna -- People deserve to travel freely, because free travel lifts everyone up. I want to free the people of Golarion. I know I can do it, if the Evil gods don't interfere. Please, shield me from their influence long enough to give everyone the choice of where to go.

Milani -- The way Golarion is right now isn't right. I want to make the systems that force people into conflict unnecessary. I want to free everyone, let them forge their own future unbound by their current chains. Please, shield me from the Evil gods long enough to shatter the status quo beyond recognition.

And everyone lines up before the door, in order by their place in the plan. The festive garlands hung above their heads clash incongruously with the anticipatory mood. A line of chalk on the floor marks the extent of the fixity fields, the crystals pulled back to give a few inches clearance from the door.

Weeping Cherry stands to the side, her headset linked to everyone's radios. She counts them down.

"3"

Everyone tenses.

"2"

In the outer solar system, one of the backup servers accelerates out of range at close to the speed of light, just in case.

"1"

Specialized manufacturing chambers spin together spells of invisibility, wrapping them around the away teams and the horses.

"GO!"

Irabeth happens to be near the gate when the solders rush in. Demon attack on the camp outside, they enchanted the sentries to fight on their side and murdered the captain in his sleep and got away. There was a cultist cleric with the demons. They need help to pursue them and rescue their men.

The city guard might not make it in time. Irabeth volunteers. She'll take a few unempowered inquisitors from gate guard duty, and of course Anevia.

(They were not, officially, on duty. Going for a leisurely walk around the city always ends the same as a patrol anyway. They never leave home unarmed or unarmored.)

Babau tracks are easy to follow, clawed outlines that smell of acid. They lead down the road to Nerosyan. Irabeth keeps them to a trot; they're at least half an hour behind the demons, some of them in heavy armor. If they tire out the horses before catching them, the chase will be over, and they have to move at the speed of their weakest mount.

The two soldiers share what little intelligence they have. They're a newly-raised company, on their way to the northern border. They stopped for a night outside the city. (The army prefers not to pay for lodgings when the men have tents already; the city authorities prefer not to host rowdy soldiers overnight.) They, uh, went in for a drink - only a couple of hours, out of the city by sundown, quite legal - met a cleric in the tavern, said he was Gorum's, bought them a couple of rounds. Naturally the men started talking with him, heard some war stories - the officers, being good Iomedaeans, virtuously kept to themselves - when it came time to leave, the men were drunk enough to talk back, refusing to leave and trying to disobey orders. 

They disciplined them, of course, knocked them sober and put them on morning watch as punishment. Woke up to shouting, the captain dead, the company treasure looted, and that bloody cleric and two babaus and the sentries making a fighting retreat. They had wounded to tend to and not enough men left for pursuit.

An hour later the babau tracks turn off the main road and double back. Anevia swears the boot-tracks they were mingled with keep on going straight towards the capital. 

The inquisitors' duty is to guard the city. They're going to follow the demons, not the tracks leading away. Demons are easier to catch anyway.

The soldiers beg her to follow the boot tracks. They think their enchanted comrades might be there.

She sends Anevia with the inquisitors, to track down the demons and to ward off any ambush, and rides on herself with the soldiers. Even if they can't catch up to the cultist cleric, there will be other people and villages on the road and they need to be warned.

Irabeth is no tracker but she is slowly becoming convinced they're following the trail of just one man. Where did the kidnapped soldiers go? She'd rather not dwell on it and it's too late to turn back.

One of the soldiers with her haltingly asks how the Inquisition deals with enchantments. Could someone be so enchanted the Inquisition couldn't detect it, or remove it? They uh, know the penalty for deserting, and they can only imagine what working with demons and murdering your own captain gets you on top of that, and - the lads were greenhorns, deluded, they don't deserve to die horribly, so surely if they were enchanted by demons and the Inquisition couldn't prove otherwise... they'd be let go?

She tells them the truth. Enchantments can be detected and also broken. The soldiers will be tried in a court of law. Being enchanted is a valid legal defense. She doesn't give voice to what they're all thinking, that the inquisitors will kill the deserters if they judge they can't capture them safely. The mood is sour enough already. She deliberates spending most of her lay on hands on defatiguing the horses, decides against it. 

She finally glimpses the fugitive in the distance, just as he turns off the road toward a small village. She curses and speeds up to a gallop; can't let him take any hostages. They're three hundred yards behind him when he runs into a building -

Opens and shuts the door again, several times in quick succession -

Then the door slams open - he's standing inside, grinning - there are sounds all around her, like a crowd of men and horses running, must be an illusion - divine favor, divine bond - the horse can't run straight into the building, she prepares to slow down at the last moment, get in cover of the walls - 

- there are moderate Evil auras on both sides of her -

"Ambush", she shouts, and tries to turn her horse away from the presumed invisible babau who'll have set their spears against her charge -

There are loud bangs and their horses scream and collide - she rolls away in time, lay on hands, get up get up find a target to smite - sees the soldiers trapped beneath their horses - there are two more copies of the man, and incubi, they've got shapeshifters - the incubi don't detect Evil, the copies of the man do, more illusions - no time to channel - she charges the nearest man, smites him, she can take at least one of them with her -

- he takes the hit and grins and she hears more bangs, seeming-incubi with crossbows fading out of invisibility all around her, she feels their bolts penetrate her back, there are bangs all around her and she falls -

Anevia, forgive me -

Irabeth wakes up disarmed and weak as a kitten, lying in a dark room. There's a woman bending down over her.

It takes her a moment to realize her wounds are gone. She feels - healthy, as far as she can tell, besides being terribly weak. She can barely sit up in her armor. She has some lay on hands remaining, no weapons or spells, and her mind.

Inheritor, she prays, but her heart's not really in it. A divine intervention isn't worth it, to save a village of a hundred people and one paladin. She prays for her death to be swift and merciful, if she is to die here, and waits.

"Hey, I'm really sorry about this," Weeping Cherry says, sitting down by the restrained crusader. "My name is Weeping Cherry."

She reaches over and taps on an orb, which starts glowing gently, slowly getting brighter to let Irabeth's eyes adjust.

"I have had an extremely weird day, and I think that's going to be the case for you too, if it isn't already. Since you're my prisoner, I should probably start by clarifying your rights. You have the right to remain silent -- I will not coerce you to speak, except by offering to fairly trade you things. You have the right to food, water, healing, and privacy. Unfortunately, due to the ongoing situation which I will clarify for you in a moment, I cannot leave you completely unmonitored. But your right to privacy means that I will not read your mind without your consent. You may also request a different guard if you don't want to deal with me specifically."

She looks at Irabeth to see how she's taking this, but continues speaking.

"I will hold you for a maximum of twelve hours. After those twelve hours, you will be free to leave unharmed, or to take a complementary teleport to any allied jurisdiction which permits them. Your strength has been cursed as part of the measures taken to restrain you. I expect to be able to lift these curses on your release in twelve hours. I have taken out a large insurance possibility against the eventuality that the curses cannot be lifted in a timely fashion for some reason, with yourself listed as the beneficiary. You also have a right to representation. If you feel that personally negotiating with me is not in your best interests, you may appoint someone else to negotiate deals on your behalf, or refuse to negotiate. Due to the ongoing situation, the person you appoint must either be one of your companions, a resident in this village, a member of an allied jurisdiction, or wait until twelve hours from now to be contacted."

"As of approximately five minutes ago, you are receiving a universal basic income, paid continuously in Stars and held in an off-planet account. You have various less urgently important rights concerning this money, which you can ask about at any time. You may use it to purchase items that will not assist in an escape, and I will see that they are delivered here safely and sent with you when you are released."

"Lastly, you have the right to immediately leave for any allied jurisdiction permitting teleportation if you swear to cooperate with safe transport arrangements and certain minor restrictions on your behavior lasting not longer than twelve hours."

She smiles at her.

"I understand you must have many questions. Do you understand these rights as I have represented them to you? Do you have concerns or clarifying questions that I should address first? If not, I have some additional information about the situation to share, and some questions for you in your role as a paladin."

She softens her voice to add "Also, you don't have a formal right to a hug, but I will give you one if you want. This whole situation seems like it might be fairly overwhelming."

She sounds like a Lawful outsider, possibly a Lawful Good one. Until she claims to be paying her in stars on another planet; at that point she just sounds crazy.

This is almost certainly some kind of nonsensical demonic plot, but Irabeth has little left to lose, so she'll play along, as long as she doesn't have to reveal anything the demons could use, up to and including her name. She certainly won't negotiate or swear to anything while she's anywhere this confused.

"I understand most of what you said but I do not understand how some of it could be true or what it would mean if it were, and I would like you to keep explaining the situation."

"Cool! That is entirely reasonable. Please feel free to interrupt with questions at any point. If you let me know what specifically was confusing, I can elaborate about that first, but it's very valid to not want to give your captors any indication about what you found surprising."

She collects herself.

"So the explanation should probably start with the fact that I am from another plane, I had never heard of Golarion until yesterday, and I am relying on an only mostly-functional translation ability to speak this language. So I hope you will bear with me if there are any communication difficulties."

"There is, apparently, a magic pocket dimension that calls itself 'Milliways' that occasionally opens portals to different worlds. When that man you were chasing ran through that door, he ended up in Milliways. Shortly thereafter -- Milliways does weird things to time; I don't understand the mechanism -- it opened another portal to my world."

"My world is very unlike Golarion. As far as we're aware, we have no souls or magic. The man you were chasing thought that we might be outsiders, because he claimed that outsiders don't have a separate soul that lives on after death. What we do have instead of Golarion-style magic, is a kind of very advanced technology that allows unlimited teleportation, creating and altering items, healing, and a variety of other minor effects. We have used this technology to solve most of our problems as a society. As soon as we heard that people on Golarion still had problems with disease, injury, food scarcity, etc., we started making plans to help."

"I can't share the exact details of our plan, or why it requires imprisoning you for twelve hours, unless you swear to me to not use the information against our interests. Likewise, the questions I have for you in your role as a paladin are related to figuring out whether we can trust Iomedae with information about the plan. The man who spoke with me about Golarion did not have good things to say about Iomedae, but also admitted that he could not provide a list of public commitments she has made which we could use to determine whether going to her for help would be a good idea."

"We expect our plan to bring aid to Golarion to either be complete or to fail within twelve hours, which is why that's the maximum length of time we plan to hold you. Getting information from you about Iomedae could potentially speed the plan up by a lot, depending on the exact details. I'm currently expecting that you providing this information will save approximately 5,000 lives in expectation. My primary intention is to keep giving you what information I can about my world, myself, and our capabilities until you feel able to trust us with answers to our questions about Iomedae. If there are monetary inducements, demonstrations, or guarantees that could help convince you faster, I am working with a large budget for this purpose."

"With that clarification, do you feel comfortable asking specific questions, or should I default to providing more background details about what my world is like, and what we expect Golarion to be like once we're able to distribute aid?"

She pours herself a cup of tea from a kettle sitting by her on the floor.

"Also, do you want a cup of tea, or anything else to make you more comfortable while we talk?"

"You are being very reasonable and - correct, upholding Law and Good, towards your prisoner. So I hope you are not offended by me saying this, if you are being truthful. But it seems much more likely to me that you are lying, or perhaps deluded." She doesn't detect Evil but that only means this woman cultist is too weak to detect.

"I was pursuing demons and a cultist cleric. I saw him and what may have been other demons" - without an Evil aura - "in the fight where I assume I was captured. I do not know who healed me, or why, but it still seems much more likely to be a demonic plot than an accidental contact with a new plane whose inhabitants are somehow more powerful than all our magic despite having none of your own." Unless their gods grant them 'technology', but not magic? Irabeth doesn't understand what it could mean, to have non-magical teleportation or healing or conjuration; these are simply some of the kinds of magic that exist.

"Show me proof. Something that could not be faked by illusion or shapeshifting. You should find it easy, with the abilities you describe. Do this and I will do everything I can to help you contact Iomedae and to answer any questions that would help you decide to talk to Her, as long as I do not need to reveal any classified information about myself and my posting."

She doesn't believe her, not really. Maybe she's seizing on any sliver of false hope instead of facing her impending death. But still she prays - Inheritor, look this way, for there is something here that You may want to see. And if there is not - I do not need your rescue, others need it more - I am your willing servant, and I trust You, and I will see You in Heaven.

Meanwhile, just after the door opens:

Right behind the away teams, several members of Weeping Cherry's self-tree rush through the door and kneel out of the way on either side of it. There are three of them, for parallelism. Each one holds a holy symbol of Seranrae, Desna, or Milani. They start by repeating their previous prayers several times, and then continue by explaining more details of the plan, explaining when they will move without divine intervention, and what would make them move right away.

Sarenrae does not understand most of the prayer, not in detail. Mortal minds are hard, and this one is unusual, and She hasn't really gotten over prophecy breaking yet. But She can clearly hear the intent behind the words:

I am Good. I am going to do Good. I need your help, but only to stop the Evil that would stop me. Guard me against Evil, as I go about doing Good.

It is not Her way, to intervene against future Evil without yet knowing the shape that it may take. And the mortal is not praying to be granted power. She will watch closely, and learn, and think, and stand ready.

It is rare and refreshing to hear a prayer addressing Her domain of travel in its Good aspect, rather than the Chaotic! A gratifying tribute to the shared cause of Good that, despite the myriad takes on what Good even is, a Lawful Good mortal will pray to Her or Kofusachi about travel, and not to Abadar.

The contents of the prayer are also unusual. The mortal promises she will cause great traveling to occur, but not to help people travel to, not for the sake of travel itself, as Desna conceives of it. She wants to let people travel from, to let them escape - whatever they may want to escape, if there is a better place for them to be.

This is not quite as Good as Desna would have it, nor as Chaotic, but it is still very Chaotic and very Good and She is of course in favor, at least until she has to pay an enormous bill. 

Who is this mortal, and where did she come from? This is the sort of question that's easily answered on every other world using past-watching, and requires either ridiculous gymnastics or exhorbitant power expenditure on Golarion (or watching everything all the time, if you want to end up depressed like Nethys).

(She isn't sorry past-watching broke. The other gods were using a bastardized reverse form and calling it prophecy, and Desna always hated pretending the future was set in stone. But it makes Her life a lot harder sometimes.)

...another one of the mortal just appeared! Out of a bit of folded space that Desna was reasonably certain didn't lead anywhere, until she saw it appear mortals (praying mortals! pretty shiny Good mortals!) out of, as it were, nowhere. She was watching carefully and there was very definitely no conjuration involved.

Mortals don't just appear from thin air. Therefore the mortal came from somewhere. Therefore Desna can go where the mortal came from. (She is the goddess of travel. She can go anywhere.)

If She sends a little bit of Her awareness all the way into the folded bit of space -

"Welcome to Milliways," the space says.

The folded space isn't a god, but it isn't not a god either. It has a domain, and an avatar, and it answers prayers from mortals that are directed the right way. But it isn't built in the same way as Golarion gods -- it is something different, a stranger from outside creation.

What it is, first and foremost, is a bar.

It's a place where people come to make friends and meet new people. It's a place where people talk honestly. It's a place where people celebrate, and do things they ordinarily wouldn't, and stumble home drunk lightened of their burdens.

It's a place where strangers lives touch, where stories begin. It's a place where universes meet, like two young lovers stealing kisses in the night.

It's a place where everyone -- everyone -- gets a first drink free.

"What can I get you?"

Hey. Hey. Cayden. You are so going to want to see this. 

"I want to meet everyone and hear their stories and go to all their worlds and see everything and help everyone! I bet I could do that in drink form, too!" Amulet of the Planes, cursed blessed to always choose a target never visited before, turn the daily charge into a liquid, major artifact, easy as. "But if you can't -"

"Please, please do surprise Me."

"I can't give out magic," the bar apologizes. "But here, I think you'll like this one."

And it passes her a bundle of abstract sensory impressions with a little umbrella in it.

It tastes like turning over a stone, and discovering a hidden world of tiny, delicate creatures. It tastes like running into a stranger in a train station and bonding over how wonderful it is that in twenty minutes you'll both be in an entirely new country. It tastes like someone who spends years carving a tiny intricate statue out of jade, so that they can leave it in an old hollow log, not knowing who will find it or when.

"I can also recommend you media, though. Books from any of the worlds that I can reach."

What She wants from books is - not just beauty and knowledge. Not the things She'd see for herself if (when) She goes to the worlds where they were written. She wants to explore, to find the strange and the beautiful and the new, to be surprised and delighted over and over and over again. She doesn't want to be told where to go, only what to avoid, because it's empty or dangerous or boring.

She's looking for travel advisories.

In return She offers all the wonders of Creation (in book recommendation form where available), and Her personal help connecting Milliways to more worlds and helping more people find it, if it is something She can help with. Not in payment, commensurate or otherwise, but because She wants everyone to have this, everyone across all the worlds.

She'll be going through all of the doors that open into Milliways from now on, exploring and helping people and thrilling in the discovery of endless new creations. This isn't something she asks Bar for, or even tells Bar about. It's something She is, that She wishes made known, the innermost legible core of Her, with an enormous earnest happiness and gratitude and goodwill towards whoever made this possible, and whoever will use it like She will.

Bar appreciates the offer, but Desna is the wrong kind of being to help with opening doors. Bar doesn't control where the door opens. In some sense, the fact that it doesn't is the tradeoff that lets it reach so much further than a being like Desna can.

In fact, now that She is here, the door will not open to anywhere where Her interference would be ... uninteresting. Not the right kind of story. The door is controlled not on the level of gods, but on the level of the landlords, who sit outside of time and are mysterious even to Bar itself.

That said, She is welcome to stay as long as She likes, and invite people from the worlds She can reach. Several of the other patrons also plan to wait for more doors and travel through them.

In terms of travel advisories -- Bar recommends these books here. These ones are published by big inter-world alliances, and cover all the worlds they know how to reach. These ones cover specific worlds that are particularly important to be prepared for, for one reason or another.

Desna will need to either start a tab, pay for the books with something Bar is allowed to accept (counterfeit is fine), return the books after She is done with them, or talk to that mortal over there. The mortal has offered to cover people's tabs up to a certain amount, but needs to know they exist in order to pay, for privacy reasons.

She's not going to stay if that stops people from other worlds from using the magic door!!

...that means there's more than one Milliways, otherwise Her staying here would count as affecting the worlds to which the door would no longer open, and She can't affect worlds She can't even reach.

Desna decides She's going to leave sometimes, go out to see the many worlds, and come back occasionally for more. That way everyone should get the Milliways experience best suited to who they want. She'll miss some interesting visitors that way, but being the goddess of travel means no part of Her should stay in any one place forever.

She opens a tab. She can of course provide gold, but that's boring, how about this minor artifact that does poorly targeted interplanetary teleport instead?

And She settles in to read, and watches the little wormhole. She's not going to wiggle through it uninvited, it looks uncomfortable. Cherry's going to open her door eventually and that will count as invitation.

...oh yeah, Cherry prayed to Her! She's feeling very generously inclined right now, but the request wasn't very specific, was it. What's going on outside?

Milani is young, as gods go, and very small; even Cayden outweighs her many times over, fellow upstart that He is. She cannot answer many prayers, but she receives few enough that it works out, barely. Usually she passes them along to Someone else who might help instead of her.

She makes art out of necessity, coordinating Good and Chaotic gods in unlikely alliances, helping them balance their different interests and costs on the thinnest edge that makes an intervention barely worth it. She can do this because she understands Golarion's mortals as few others can - easily, cheaply, intuitively - better by far than vast alien Sarenrae, who does not understand why anyone harms another, or Desna, who can read all thoughts but only at great expense to Herself; better even than Iomedae, Who cut out her own humanity, Who can coordinate better than anyone if She spares enough attention but Whose attention is managed far too well to notice the unlikely and the unforeseen.

Where Iomedae fights for Good optimized and triaged and carefully doled out, and writes off whole causes as lost, and Cayden is called on to help one person at a time, Milani wants to reform systems. She is not well known or well understood, rarely invoked and rarer still to answer in her own name. But when a rare prayer reaches out to her very heart, she will - not answer, she can't afford to just answer - she will do her best, and try to rope Anyone else she can into it as well.

Oh hey, some people are here already! But they're not coordinating properly -

Hey guys, team huddle. I'm going to tell you exactly what the mortals prayed about. 

They'll subsidize her costs; it's a long-standing agreement she has with some gods who trust her not to misuse the contents of prayers not actually directed to her, a tough market to get into for Chaotics but an invaluable service for the same reason.

(Gods do not communicate in words, not even Milani. She's not going to insert a long complicated disclaimer saying this transcription doesn't fully and faithfully represent what passes between them, she's not Lawful.)

That's really great! She says she'll do it earlier with an intervention, but she didn't ask for a particular one, what would be best?

We should talk to her, to coordinate. I think it's best to help her messengers to reach our mortals, quietly. We could send down some people here and now, but others would notice. The Night Monarch can go anywhere and talk to anyone, and every time she does Hell inevitably hears about it sooner or later.

Uh, Desna? Why are you moving so much of Yourself into Milliways? To god-sight there are vast trails of butterflies descending from the stars; visible only to Her allies, but - wait! Don't incarnate! Asmodeus will notice and so will everyone else!

Don't worry! I'm just here to go into a bunch of other worlds soon, this is GREAT.

Don't go! We need you! Golarion's people need our help so much more than those of Cherry's world!

It'll be fine! I'm bringing back a bunch of butterflies that were exploring some new stars in Creation that were really quite boring by comparison. 

Oh Good. 

Should we call Iomedae in? She has a paladin here already.

Cherry doesn't want to talk to Iomedae yet, so Iomedae won't talk to her. But the paladin is praying, so She'll be here soon and then She can help us talk to Cherry. Milani can do it herself (with a boost from Sarenrae) but nothing beats talking to an already-empowered mortal, if you want them to still be in good shape afterwards.

She could have missed this prayer, humbly offering something to Her attention without, actually, claiming that it deserves it. She never has enough attention to go around, and She trusts Her paladins to make the right call on what really matters. 

She's not going to miss it when three other Good gods are metaphorically jumping up and down on top of it waving a flag for Her attention.

Orient. Prioritize. Call in more of Herself, to better see and understand, reevaluate the potential benefits, reprioritize. Flag it for higher attention, pulling in resources from projects that couldn't afford Her sudden temporary absence a moment ago. Repeat, and repeat, until She achieves the optimum balance between what resources She can use here and what She judges will not trigger a worse reaction elsewhere by its absence, by telling the wrong adversary to invest enough in finding out where She went.

I am here. I'm going to talk to My paladin Irabeth and with her help to Cherry, and let all of You speak to Cherry through her if You wish.

We can call on many others, Who would help us and would also benefit from this new opportunity.

We can do it later but right now adding more people would risk the secrecy and could add conflicting interests. Not everyone is as in favor of letting everyone travel away from Golarion as Desna is.

Hey, guys? Did you know they have stars made not from positive energy but from giant explosions? I can't wait to see them!

Did someone say GIANT EXPLOSIONS?

Oh for - we were trying to keep this thing a secret! How long have you been listening?

You know that I am always everywhere.

I see all things and all futures. The possible futures contain great Good, and also great explosions.

I have always believed in Your fundamental inner Good! Now that You are here, You will help us steer towards the most Good future!

Nethys, are You steering for the future with the greatest Good, or that with the most explosions?

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."

"Did you think - Cherry, did you for a moment think that I never tried to come to them in good faith?"

"I served in their bloody war! I tried doing things their way! Heard their sermons, read their books! Tried to convince them, so many times, to do the right thing - to stop killing people, enslaving, torturing people, innocents who couldn't fight back - coming to a village, stealing the food, raping the women, enslaving the men for their war - helping devil-worshippers grow stronger because they wanted them to kill some miserable dretch whose only crime was being born with the wrong bloody alignment - did you think working with demons was my first choice?! I went to every faction along the godsforsaken border - I even went to the Hellknights after the paladins rejected me - 

"Everyone knows not to go to the Iomedaeans with their problems! The only people it doesn't leave worse off are the bloody Iomedaeans!"

"Of course I thought you tried going to them in good faith! 'I promise you will not be worse off' is a very easy promise for someone to keep: they can just ignore you. You going to them and them not changing their behavior about it is disappointing, and the fact that they support slavery in the first place is alarming, but those things both count against Iomedae's church's Goodness, not whether they're likely to lie, and speak more to the intolerable conditions on Golarion," she replies.

"Here, Irabeth, would you just step through here, please?" she asks, gesturing Irabeth towards the door and the fixity field beyond.

"The thing that does make me question whether they're actually going to keep promises is the fact that Irabeth prayed to Iomedae when I had made it clear I wasn't sure whether I wanted that. Now, there are reasons that could make sense -- such as if she already knew about this promise of Iomedae's, which it sounds like she might have, or if she had already given up on cooperating with me, which might be fair under the circumstances -- so I'm trying not to judge her for it. But I think I wouldn't have done that in her place, and I think doing that without explanation was hostile and counterproductive."

She shakes her head wildly, some stress leaking into her voice.

"But, just so we're clear here, none of that is important! I have already failed at keeping information about what is happening here away from Iomedae until we could verify that it would be safe. I have already messed that up beyond the possibility of fixing. The question now is what to do next. And the possibilities are: either Irabeth is lying about what her goddess said, and fetching us more resources is a distraction or a play for time, or she isn't and it's genuinely an attempt to help. I happen to think the latter is more likely, but I understand if you don't agree. The question of what to do remains the same."

She collects herself.

"If Iomedae had wanted to stall for time, she could have just done nothing. It will be hours before we would have heard anything from the away teams, and I still intend to roll out the fixity field in a bit less than twelve hours at the latest, so in the case where she's working against us, she can't win extra time to make us worse off by lying about it. We're already on guard for any potentially hostile divine interventions, and can't meaningfully devote more resources to that. So that's why I said we should dedicate this time to improving the plan on the assumption that we'll soon have access to more spells -- because it's a good course of action either way."

Gord plants himself firmly in the doorway.

"I'm not the one they wronged, everyone else is! All the people they leave worse off in their wake, the farmers enslaved for their wars and the refugees burned to prove they're not demons! They raise people into blind obedience from birth, and tell them it is right and good that an immortal paladin queen has the power of life and death over them, a wrong and a sin if they fight back or steal bread when they are starving, until they half believe they deserve both death and damnation! The graveyards are filled up with corpses left worse off in the name of some greater good perpetually out of sight!"

"So you messed up and Iomedae found out. Are you going to give up on your dreams? Now that she knows, you might as well tell her all your plans? She says she won't use you against your purposes, but she sure as Hell hasn't promised to use you for them! Find allies of your own choice, not the first god who happens to come along!"

Irabeth has long experience in staying calm, remaining civil, and bearing undeserved insults. Her father was lauded as a man of saintly good temperament (you know, for an orc); she herself was sometimes complimented on being a paladin, the 'despite' hanging loud and clear in the air. A raving cultist is so much water off her back. She just hopes Cherry is the right kind of person to be impressed by her civilized demeanor, instead of being swayed by emotion.

Despite the stakes she feels - at peace. This is where she belongs; this is what she is meant to do. Perhaps the Inheritor made her wiser, she marvels, the better to carry out her new task. 

"The world contains great evils not of our making. We Iomedaeans work to fix it, as best we can, and sometimes this means accepting a lesser evil, or even causing one for, yes, the greater good, because we are not all-powerful, and we must choose our battles. We don't make anything worse - not knowingly, not deliberately - by our presence. All the evil you see exists despite us, not because of us."

"A paladin queen rules Mendev, and yet Mendev is a horrible place to live. This is the demons' fault, not Queen Galfrey's. Any achievable alternative to her rule would be far worse."

"I know this not because I am an expert on Mendevian politics, but because that is what Good is. If the Queen thought it better for Mendev for her to abdicate, or if the Goddess thought it, she would be gone without a second's thought. I know that, because I know she is a paladin."

"Iomedae's place, within Lawful Good, is to be the General of Heaven. Being a general means allocating resources, making painful choices, leaving some people unrescued and letting some of your men perish so that the others might live. We do not see what She does, we cannot always make sense of Her actions, and She cannot afford to explain them to us. But we know She is wiser than us, and better, and we have faith that if She orders us to die it is in a worthy cause."

"A general may send some men to die, to save the rest," Gord says bitterly. "His men, who chose to follow him and to obey that day, for the sake of their brothers and their cause."

"His men, Iomedaean. Not bystanders. Perhaps I shouldn't expect a general of slaves to know the difference."

"I am a cleric of Gorum. I know the bloody price of war, and those who choose to pay it. What you do with your war-slaves is not war, it is slaughter."

"Hey!" she interjects.

"I am aware that bad things are happening! It is my sincere hope that we will all be able to contribute to fixing that. Sir Gorumite, if you think that I am making more mistakes I would really appreciate concrete suggestions for how to do better -- right now I want to put Irabeth inside the fixity field, where I can copy her spells, and potentially directly observe if she gets another vision. I also want to hear if she has any specific things to say about why her god didn't want us to roll out the plan immediately. The best case here is that she says 'oh, you forgot to handle this thing', we fix that, and then everyone on Golarion is saved and this argument becomes moot."

For a moment, Gord contemplates closing the door, but they will still be there when he opens it.

He's not going to sulk like a child because he didn't get his way. He's going to grin and bear it and keep fighting until the day he's dead and afterwards as well.

"The fixity field will let you observe her, but it will also let Iomedae see the field and perhaps build her own. Are you sure that is wise?" 

"It's possible I'm working from the wrong threat model -- I assumed that Iomedae's attention being drawn to this general area meant that she would have already had a chance to look, since that was our justification for trying to avoid any attention from the gods. Do you think that that's not the case?" she asks. "You probably still have better intuitions about gods, since you have more experience."

She is so glad they have shifted back to discussing something concrete and actionable. Being outside of her protections is stressful. Being under time pressure is stressful. She is so much better at dealing with concrete problems than with interpersonal problems under these circumstances.

"Also, if the priest from Absalom shows up and has Resurrection to copy, I'm going to want to copy that because otherwise we'll have a harder time getting people out of the afterlives. So that is also in the balance as a possible consideration."

"Gods both see and affect the world mainly through their empowered followers, and secondarily through regular people who pray to them or are just very well aligned - people who worship them and understand them and want the same things the god does."

"This is - received wisdom, not something I know from my own experience. Maybe that's not a hard limit, just easier for them to do. For all I know, Iomedae has seen all there is to see through the paladin's eyes through the open door."

"I would be much more at ease with followers of the gods we wanted to contact. Iomedae passed on a message from Desna, but all it said was see you soon. If I could make demands of the gods, I would have them tell us clearly that we should work with Iomedae and her servants as we would with Desna and Sarenrae and Milani, and that their goals and ours won't be harmed by it."

It really is ridiculous that someone would think Chaotic or Neutral Good more trustworthy than the specific kind of Good that exists in order to be trustworthy. Having Law is supposed to make people trust you more, not less! It's as if, in opposing Lawful Good, he has inverted not only his values but his logic and clear thinking as well!

Of course she lets none of this show on her face.

"We can pray for that," she suggests. "I will not pray about it myself, if you do not wish me to, although I realize I cannot easily prove this to you."

Is anyone here aligned enough with Desna or Sarenrae to successfully pray to Them? They're not the easiest goddesses to make yourself understood to, Cherry is as Lawful Good as she is, and the Gorumite's apparent definition of Good is - at least at odds with his actions this morning.

"Okay. So for one thing, I don't think praying to one of the other gods is going to get a response," she says, pointing at her invisible forks kneeling out of the way next to the door. "Or it already would have. Although perhaps they should ask explicitly for verification," she adds.

"One thing we could do, though, is pull the fixity field back, take Irabeth through the door, close it to block Iomedae's influence, and then bring the fixity field back. I suspect that would prevent Iomedae from seeing anything, although maybe not if she can, like, read a paladin's history or something like that. So maybe we should wait to do that until the priest arrives, and then do it in one go, returning with overwhelming force."

She turns to Irabeth. "In the case that you are trustworthy, which I do still think is more likely, I apologize for giving you the runaround like this. But the dashing swordsman has already helped me avoid several pitfalls due to unfamiliarity with Golarion, and I do think his advice has helped make this whole operation a lot more robust, so I want to take his concerns seriously."

That actually sounds reasonable? Also, Cherry is being very nice and understanding and - trusting of him, even over the Iomedaean paladin. It feels different when it's coming from someone who is, actually, good as well as Good.

"Alright. Let's do that." He unblocks the door. "And - thank you. ...For taking my concerns seriously."

That man seems really upset! What is he saying? 

Desna will happily pay Milani to be the resident mortal-translator. She has plenty of data, now that She's practically in the same room with the mortals, but it's still a bit expensive to understand it Herself.

He's saying he doesn't trust Iomedae or Her paladin, and wants a clear sign from one of us if we want him to work with them. They're discussing whether to pray about it, but we'll have a better way to answer soon.

I can see he is a cleric, but his god did not mark legibly who They are. Do any of You know?

(There is a general headshaking and muttering.)

He claims he's Gorum's. Chaotic Evil.

He has given Cherry Good advice, though!

I knew it! There is Good in everyone, even Evil people!

He is not advocating Gorum's goals. If Cherry rescues everyone and lets them leave places where they are unhappy, there will be far less war, not more.

I vote against telling Gorum.

Chaotic Neutral deities often empower followers who do not advance their goals.

I knew it! There is Good in everyone, even Gorum!

They are closing the door! Finally! See you all in a wing-beat -

With Cherry and Irabeth inside, Gord closes the door to Milliways.

And a grinning man in chainmail with a tankard in his hand claps him on the shoulder and says: 

"Well done! Have a drink!"

He was there all along, you just didn't notice him before now. It couldn't have been otherwise. No Good adventurers' bar is ever without the Dashing Swordsman.

"Aaah!" she cries.

She had just started to relax after the most dangerous and high-stakes event of her last several years, her HUD flickering back on as the fixity field washed over her, when he was just suddenly there.

Her reflexive teleport puts her crouched on top of one of the garland-covered beams, from which she peers down in a manner not unlike a cat who has just been startled into explosive motion by something entirely mundane.

The man is ... strange. He has a normal human body, with blood, liver enzymes, eardrums, and all the other expected pieces. But he also has great, coiling braids of magic bound to every molecule of his being. The magic hangs heavy around him, like a cloud. It twists away, in directions she cannot see, packed so densely that she can hardly see him under the visualization.

She lets herself float down from the beam, entranced by watching how the threads of his magic tie him to the tankard in his hand, to the sword at his hip, and to the rest of the bar around them.

"Excuse me, but are you ...?" she asks, her voice trailing off.

He bows. "Cayden Cailean, god of freedom, drink, and brave adventuring, at your service. I'm a friend of Milani's. And with me - please do not be alarmed -"

A million butterflies flutter down from the rafters. They are living patches of space, insect-shaped cutouts that flit and float and flap their wings in mesmerizing patterns and never let you forget, for even a moment, that theirs are not wings of flesh of blood. They come together into a dizzying cloud and cling and merge and swirl until -

A person stands besides Cayden. She is human and butterfly, goddess and mystery, she is all the stars of Creation shining with the terrible light in which new souls are born. She is ancient and alien beyond measure, she is nothing that ever grew on the soil of a friendly planet, and she sees and understands and loves and helps every soul of every race that does not wish harm to others. She is -

"Desna, dear! Tone it down a little for the new mortals, please."

She is a lovely woman, entirely nonscary and appropriate to an interdimensional bar!

:Hello, everyone. Hello, Cherry. Thank you, for being you and doing what you did.:

Her mouth moves but what comes out is not speech, not a language of the kind translation spells or software are meant to handle. It is pure meaning, the kind that Truespeech technically works on if you don't mind being left with a terrible headache. Milliways handles it fine. (If the Landlords get a headache, they can come and complain in person.)

She places a companionable arm around Cayden's shoulder.

"Desna isn't the best at talking to mortals, so I'll be helping her translate. I'm ex-human, like Milani."

"Now, I'm sure you all have many questions, so" - he smiles disarmingly - "let's sit and talk over a good drink, shall we?"

Questions bubble up in her mind in no particular order. She drags over a table and set of chairs for them, including a backless seat to accommodate Desna's wings.

But she is back within the reach of the support systems that she's built, and questions from the rest of her self-tree quickly organize themselves by priority in her HUD.

"Is there anything time-sensitive that we should handle first?" she asks. "I would assume not, but I don't know how you got here or whether your presence interferes with the timestop effect."

She makes herself a mug of hot lemonade -- she feels that this situation calls for something stronger than usual -- and then follows it up with a pitcher and some more mugs in case anybody else wants some.

"We got here the same way you did, through the door! Golarion is time-stopped while the door is closed, so there's no rush."

"And that's why we can talk to you like civilized people! Not just because we have time. With the door closed, we are for all intents and purposes no longer in Pharasma's Creation, and that makes almost anything possible."

"You see, gods are bound by all sorts of agreements. Well, I say 'bound' -" he grins - "for the non-Lawful among us, that just means if we break them, everyone else has solemnly promised to kill us dead. And one of the most important agreements is about interfering with the Material, and Golarion in particular."

"Doing things - anything that goes beyond just looking and affects the world - costs energy, obviously, but it also uses up our intervention budget. This isn't a real resource like magic or sunlight, it's just a number that the agreements made up. Everyone has a budget - how much depends on a lot of complex factors - and different kinds of intervention are cheaper or more expensive."

"For example, making clerics and paladins and so on and granting them spells is very cheap! The agreement makes it so the cheapest, most effective way to influence the world is through mortal proxies. So we end up with all these stupid proxy wars. I'm eliding a lot here, the empowered mortals need to be aligned and leveled and that's not just an agreement. But this is the reason Iomedae empowers paladins like Irabeth here to smite evil instead of smiting it all Herself, which She's frankly terrifyingly good at." He glances at Irabeth, who is nodding along.

"It also costs budget to tell people on Golarion something they don't know already. A lot more if no-one knows it. A lot of information is priced so high that no-one can possibly pay for it, so it's effectively forbidden, and that includes most kinds of new technology. We don't suppress it if mortals invent it on their own - although some gods definitely try to discourage it - but we're not allowed to just give people all the nice goodies they have in Axis."

"And that is why the great wizard Felandriel Morgethai can cast a Wish that will shake the very heavens, but doesn't have a flush toilet in her tower."

"Oh, that's wonderful news!" Cherry declares. "That technology isn't being deliberately suppressed, and that you can talk to us in detail, I mean."

She pauses for a moment to consider.

"You talking to us like this, though -- is it that telling us while outside of Pharisma's Creation doesn't count, that you don't expect the fact that you told us anything to get back to the other gods, that you expect to be so powerful by the time we open the door again that you're not worried about them, or that telling us this is worth your deaths?"

"It doesn't count right now. After we open the door I will have causally affected Golarion, but counting just the end result of my actions is much cheaper than all this walking and talking. And I get a discount, for only telling you things which Iomedae was going to tell you anyway, since She intended to pay the full price for that if She had to. That's what I'd say at my trial, anyway, if I intended on having one."

"None of that matters, though, for two reasons. First because, yes, if helping you rescue everyone on Golarion costs my life, that's a price I'll cheerfully pay."

"And second, because the lovely Bar enforces a stringent security policy which lets me kick back here until the heat dies down. I'd like to see Achaekek try to threaten me now." He seems very cheerful about this.

:I will not die or stay here! I will go to all the worlds where Milliways opens. Your world, Cherry!:

"Ah, okay! That all makes sense," she agrees.

"Desna, normally I would say that you are welcome to use the teleport system, but I'm not totally certain whether it would work on gods, since I wasn't able to see that you were here until you ... incarnated. You can try it, if you'd like, and you're welcome to use my wormholes. I would appreciate it if you would agree not to go into people's private spaces or near the backup servers, though, since people would be scared and upset if that happened. But I bet there are a lot of people in my world who will love to meet you!"

:I do not need your teleport! I go places, it is who I am. I only need your door open. And I will not go to private places where there is no great Evil or un-Freedom.:

:This is not a promise for all worlds. If another world opens to Milliways and someone says the whole world is private, I may still choose to go there. But not your world! Because you are Good, and good, and I am grateful, and I like you.:

That is ... probably as good as she's going to get from a magical alien intelligence dedicated to the concept of travel. And it's not like she wants anywhere to harbor Evil or un-freedom -- she knows of some marginal cases, but by-and-large the solar system is a very nice place.

The question isn't even how well Desna's concept of good lines up with her own, really. She knows that her view of good isn't complete, that it isn't sufficient to build a good world. That's why free movement is the principle to which she's devoted so much of her effort. When people are free to choose between systems and places, each of the strange and myriad kinds of Good supports and reinforces the others -- an antifragile system, where introducing contradictory viewpoints only makes everyone stronger.

The question is whether Desna would threaten that, by being a powerful being outside the law, squashing dissenting voices and restricting people's choices. And looking at the butterfly woman in front of her, she can't imagine anything less likely.

Someone in her self-tree publishes a solar travel advisory, and a press release stating that the first of the newly contacted aliens may shortly be visiting Jupiter orbit under her own power.

Another of her pops in and opens the door, leaning against it to prop it open. The door has been re-built to open onto a courtyard, Jupiter just rising over the rooftop.

"I hope you'll help us plan how best to get everyone else out of Golarion," she tells Desna. "But I suspect you can split your attention, and I wouldn't dream of delaying you if you wanted to start exploring."

"Before I ask more questions about the evacuation plan, did you ... are you two alright?" she asks, turning to look at Irabeth and Gord.

She can absolutely split her attention! Keeping so much of it in such a small space for so long was the hard part, really. For a few moments she looks less like a self-contained person and more like a protrusion from higher dimensions, as butterfly-shaped bits of her spiral away into magical forces and places even Cherry hasn't learned to see yet. Which also happen to lie firmly outside the door.

:Done! I'm so happy! Your world is beautiful:, she tells Cherry earnestly.

She is present at the most important event witnessed by mortal eyes since - the Shining Crusade's final battle? The ascension of Iomedae, of Aroden? Earthfall?

She is present, meaning she is capable of moving and speaking and so she might possibly, conceivably, affect the course of history and derail the final triumph of Good over Evil.

(It does not at all occur to her, sitting in the presence of two incarnate gods, that she might have anything to contribute.)

Never in her life has she been more grateful for her inability to feel fear.

...Irabeth wonders if perhaps there was something she could have done better earlier, before she passed through the door that leads out of the world.

If she had been better, faster, smarter, could she have done something, said something that would have let Iomedae Herself sit at this table deciding the fate of worlds? Did she already fail to do the only thing that mattered, the one thing she was personally meant to do?

But Irabeth has been blessed this day with much greater Wisdom and Charisma by her goddess, that she may treat equally with the other mortals here, and so she understands the implication of Cayden's words -

Iomedae could never have sat at this table outside Creation, where the treaties of the gods may be evaded. For She is Lawful, and will honor them of Herself, though there be no-one to watch or cast blame. Perhaps She could not even intend or cause others to break the treaty, or to profit Herself from the breaking. 

She made Her best move ignoring that possibility, and still She could expect to win whether or not the meeting took place. Law only ever makes you stronger, not weaker. Her Goddess is far wiser than mortal Irabeth can comprehend, and she trusts in Her judgement, without reservation.

Perhaps her greater Wisdom was only meant to guide her in the event she stayed outside the door. Perhaps it is meant for after she comes back. Perhaps she has already accomplished everything she was ever meant to be. Cayden and Desna are allies. Surely they know more of Iomedae's goals and plans and abilities than she does, and have no use for the guidance of a paladin, chosen perhaps by random luck out of all Iomedae's followers on Golarion or even in Mendev.

But Irabeth has been reminded that she does not know all the intent of Her goddess. She must continue to do her best, whatever is required of her. She will.

And so she pulls herself together enough to answer Cherry with a nod. "I'll be fine," she promises.

Gord has blown right through his suspense of disbelief. That makes it the third time, today. He's no longer sure he can act appropriately surprised by anything that happens.

He's not scared. He tries to rationalize this to himself: one fears hostility, not power, and he has no reason to think these gods are hostile. It feels like empty posturing. His fear response is probably just broken, along with the rest of his emotions and situational awareness.

What should he do? What should he say?

The stakes have never been higher. They'll probably never be this high again. A word from him - Gord, third circle of Gorum, random adventurer of no real importance - could change the fate of worlds.

Gord has changed his mind many times over the years, has done many things he regrets bitterly. Only one thing at the very heart of him has held true, an idea through which he makes sense of the world as much as of himself. An Iroran monk he met once said it best:

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

If you want the world to be different, to be better, go out and make it so. No-one else will. If you sup at the table of the gods, ask them, persuade them to do what you want. When will you ever have a greater lever to move the world? Why do you hesitate?

But what do you say to gods who are already more Chaotic and more Good than you could ever be, and who have lived years beyond counting, and understand you better than you do yourself?

Gord desperately wants to make the world better and right now, for the first time in many years, he has no idea what he should do about it.

"I'm fine," he tells Cherry quietly, "it's everyone else who isn't. Back home. And I don't know how to help them anymore."

She reaches over to pat him on the back.

"I think that feeling like that is natural. I know I've felt like that, sometimes. I think the world is complicated, and exhausting. And it would be okay, if you needed to put down this burden and take time to rest. It would be okay, if you felt like you needed time to grow before you had anything to contribute."

"But look who is here," she says, gesturing to everyone at the table. "There is a paladin you don't agree with, a woman who knows nearly nothing about your world and your culture, and two powerfully Good beings who, despite their wisdom and benevolence, aren't mortal, and therefore don't have a mortal perspective."

She turns to look him in the eye.

"I think we need your advice," she tells him.

"If you suddenly evaporated, we'd certainly go save those people anyway, but I think you can help us do it better, in ways that are more suited to the people of Golarion. Just like Irabeth will help us figure out how to do this in a way that will be less scary to the established powers, and Desna and Cayden will help us figure out how to do this in a way that is more Good and more likely to succeed against the opposed gods. Not in a way where we drag each others ideas down, but in a way where we build them up, pointing out the easy tradeoffs that leave everyone better off but to which each one of us alone would have been blind."

"You know," Gord says a little unsteadily, "that was the most atheist thing I've heard in my life. Telling two gods to their faces that you know better."

Deep breath.

"Alright. I'm going to try. Don't know if I can do better than you all, but. I'll trust you to tell me if I'm doing a lot worse."

Why is this evil cultist interrupting a world-shakingly important meeting and wasting the time of literal gods to complain about his obviously entirely justified feelings of inadequacy, instead of just silently resolving to do his meager best like she is?!

Irabeth doesn't say anything, but she thinks this very loudly in Gord's direction. It probably shows on her face, if you're inhumanly Wise and a god.

"Well said!"

"You know - I do know you know, I'm just reminding you - just like the Chaos in Good is freedom, the Good in Chaos is diversity. United we are stronger, and a big part of that is because we're not all alike. None of us is better than any other in every conceivable way and circumstance, not even the gods."

"This was before your time, but Aroden had this beautiful saying - it is the destiny and the birthright of men to surpass their parents and their gods. I think that's important to aspire to. We're often not equal to the task in front of us. But the only way to change this is to keep trying, and get better, and fail and fail until we finally slay that monster and climb that mountain and face the sunrise."

"And when the odds seem insurmountable, and you see no way forward" - he grins sharply. "Why that, cleric of Gorum, is when you grow the most if you succeed anyway."

"But it helps to have allies, and a friendly bar to have a drink in, before you go face that monster. So we're all going to do our best, and work together, and see the sun rise over the mountain."

Why is this literal god validating and enabling this flagrant disrespect -

Stop. Deep (mental) breaths. She had just realized she wasn't Wise enough to comprehend all the mind of her own goddess. What is she doing, trying to criticize another god, one Whom she hadn't spent her life trying to understand and emulate and obey? There are probably a hundred meanings and purposes to His every word and gesture and He just quoted Arodenite scripture and it may have been meant for her as well and she hasn't studied Aroden at all.

She's making the same fundamental error as the cleric. (Except, you know, a much tinier one.) Spending her time thinking about something that's not really her business to deal with, instead of focusing on the mission and how she can contribute. 

She smiles at Cayden and takes a sip from her hot lemonade. She's pretty sure that he's not just suggesting drinks because they're tied to his godly nature somehow. Sharing drinks and food is a fundamental human bonding activity, and Gord and Irabeth both look like they could do with one of those. She doesn't want to push food on people if they don't want it, though, so she settles for adding a platter of assorted cookies next to the lemonade and snagging a snicker-doodle for herself.

"If that means neither of you have questions to start off with," she begins. "I have questions about ... actually, Irabeth doesn't know the plan, and I'm not sure how much Cayden and Desna know. I prayed about it to Desna, but I'm not sure how much she understood or passed on to Cayden. Should I start with a summary of what I planned to do, and then people can jump in with comments and questions as I go?"

"We know the plan you prayed about to Milani! She helped us translate the rest."

"It's a good plan, considering you were working almost blind! With the gods backing it, it would probably have worked! But you had to make conservative assumptions, so it wasn't nearly ambitious enough. I think we could aim a lot higher."

"Please recap your abilities and your plan for Irabeth, and then I'll go over the problems I see with it, and we'll see if we can come up with something more daring."

"Great! Thank you."

She loves it when other people have clear, reasonable proposals for meeting agendas.

She goes through an explanation of fixity crystals, with specific attention paid to different methods of transporting people, how the existing mind-backup system works, how fast fixity fields propagate, and what magic they've figured out how to replicate. She does little demonstrations at appropriate points as she talks.

"I think that's all the important bits," she says as she finishes. "I can talk more about the preparations we're making to accept demons and other creatures that won't want to live in the existing cities right away, but they really do boil down to just pre-manufacturing a bunch of widely-spaced private habitats so that there won't be a market shock when the population jumps."

Irabeth raises her hand. "If you can duplicate spells and spellcasters and material components, all without limit, and have clones and backups of yourself in many places, that makes you... presumably more powerful than anyone except the gods." Less like a war-game or strategy planning and more like fantastical daydreaming, but accepting the premise - "I'm not very clear on how that power compares to the actual gods? If you spread your fixity field in Creation, could they... fight you?" Would they win?

"An excellent question! Gods don't have anything like the fixity field... that we know of, anyway. We can't make something from nothing, either. But while our power reserves are finite, they are very, very big, when it comes to the ancient gods. And so, we have problem number one: could other gods learn to make fixity fields, once they'd seen yours in action? If they do, could it leverage their existing power and beat your field through brute force? We don't want to rescue everyone on Golarion, only to have Asmodeus conquer the rest of Creation the next day."

"Of course, we'd give it to our allies first! And maybe that would be enough to win the resulting war. But it is such a novel power that we really don't know what would happen. Gods differ in their interests and domains, a lot. There's probably Someone out there whose powers work incredibly well with the fixity field, and we have no idea Who it'll turn out to be."

"Some gods and other powerful beings have a really, really good understanding of physics and magic and all the other laws of the universe - our universe, anyway. Some of them exist to... maintain it, you might say, fix things if anything ever goes wrong. Iomedae thinks we could convince them to enforce a treaty forbidding fixity fields in Creation, if we think it's best."

:Otolmens would forbid the door to Milliways too! She fears everything new because it might destroy Creation. She should not decide what happens.:

"I'm not necessarily against a treaty forbidding fixity fields in Golarion -- although that would be a big cost to pay. My wormholes aren't stable outside a fixity field, so we would be relying on either developing a new way to travel there, or all of our interventions would have to go through the Milliways door, which we don't control and might be easier to blockade," she begins.

"But if we're going to derive a benefit from forbidding fixity fields in Golarion, I think that might prevent us from using them there at all. If I'm understanding what Law is for among the gods correctly, just because the treaty hasn't been agreed to yet is no reason that it shouldn't already bind us."

"I think the right answer probably depends a lot on how easy fixity fields are to reverse-engineer and how much Golarion magic lets us intervene without fixity fields. I know Wish is supposed to be able to do 'anything', but I don't know exactly what that means. Does it seem feasible to replicate the free transport and infrastructure my world enjoys without fixity fields by using sufficient numbers of Wishes?"

"What you're describing isn't Law exactly, it's - more like a set of values that you can use Law for, and not all Lawful gods share those values."

"There are gods who would recompense or reward you for holding yourself in advance to a proposed treaty. Lawful Good ones, because they promise to reward people who behave like that to incentivize cooperation, and Neutral Good ones, because they'll see you doing Good and want to give you more resources for doing Good again, and above all Abadar, who just really values mutually beneficial deals."

"Almost all those gods will be on our side anyway, either in using fixity fields or in promoting a treaty against them, regardless of whether we use them first. Because we all want mostly the same things, and eventually we will agree on whether fixity fields are good or bad on net. Except maybe Abadar, because He'll do almost anything for the right price and I don't know what He'll predict as the result of allowing fixity fields, which determines how He'll price forbidding them, and whether our enemies can outbid us."

"Asmodeus is a Lawful god. He will make a deal if it benefits Him, and not otherwise, and support a proposed treaty for the same reason. If He can use fixity fields against you, He won't care that you refrained from using them against Him, He will just use that to win. He makes and keeps deals, but He's hostile and we don't want anything in common, so it doesn't help us to refrain from attacking Him."

"Other Lawful gods sometimes make a deal with Asmodeus to not spend resources fighting each other, so both sides can use them for something else. That requires them to agree how much resources They'd spend on fighting each other without a deal, and what the resources are worth to each side. But that only works in advance, because They're predicting the result of having a fight, which means the option to fight is still on the table."

:We can connect Creation to your world! If we open the door to Golarion, and also the wormhole, and then I work on it for a while. Other gods can also help if They want! But it would take time and power and I am not sure how much without trying. If we make a portal others could attack it, but we can make a spell like Gate or like Plane Shift that would reach between the worlds.:

:Also! I have better teleports and plane shifts for you!! It was always too expensive to tell mortals about them but I made them anyway! Here, Cherry, look -:

A spellform appears before her, far more complex than any Cherry had seen before, stabilized at ninth circle. If a Golarion wizard saw it, and had the Intelligence and spell-circles to stabilize it, and the Spellcraft to understand what it did, and the Wisdom to understand what it would do, do to the world once people had it, they might call it -

Greatest Teleport.

"Neither of us are really experts on magic, you really want Nethys for that - Nethys, are You there" - Cayden twists to look around as if expecting another god to materialize behind his shoulder. Nothing happens.

"I guess not. He's usually everywhere, you get used to it eventually. Anyway, we'll tell you what we can, just keep in mind we don't know everything."

"Most spells do just one thing. Wish is not like that. It does whatever you tell it to. The trick is explaining what you want to happen. I guess 'defining' might be a better word."

"Most arcane spells were invented by wizards who copied bits of divine spells. The strongest divine spell is Miracle, which also doesn't do any specific thing. The caster asks their god to solve some problem, and the god does - whatever They want about it, really. Some of the power comes from the caster, and some from the god, and the power limits what They can do, and so does the intervention budget. But within those limits, the only limits on what the god does are Their own nature. Do They understand what is going on? What the results of Their intervention will be? How to use raw power to achieve the desired effect? Do They like doing that kind of thing, or do They refuse to do some things?"

"When wizards tried to copy Miracle, they got the - framework that translates magical power into action. But there's no god behind it, no guiding intelligence that understands how to actually use the power to do something useful. So every time they cast Wish, they have to specify exactly what they're doing, in a language meant for a god's view of reality, on the level of the bits manipulated by magic, which is very hard for mortals to understand.

"Also, and I can't stress this enough, wizards mostly don't have the senses to really see what they're doing - that's going to be your biggest advantage, casting Wish and seeing not just the result but the process that produced it and what went wrong."

"Over the years wizards invented some Wish instructions that work well, like moving people or replicating other spells. But that's not really using Wish like you'd use Miracle, it's not flexible. All they really have is a couple dozen specific spells that happen to stabilize to the same spellform. And no one wizard has all of those. Most wizards really aren't the sharing type."

"If you're wondering why so few Wish wordings have been found, by the most intelligent mortals and some actual demigods over millennia of trying, consider what happens what happens when you get it wrong. All that power, poured into the spell, and no working instructions for using it, or for carefully managing its flow or whatever. And the thing a bunch of undirected power does, by default, is blow up, and boy does it blow up a lot."

"There was an archwizard once, a divination expert, who was obsessed with finding more Wish wordings. At the end of his life he donated all his research to the temple of Nethys in Absalom. It's still in their library, in the public section even. It's called Seventy-Four Safe Wish Wordings For Making Giant Flaming Craters."

"Understanding how fixity fields work, from seeing just the field and not the generator, is at least not trivial. Not to Desna and Me, anyway. As I said, there may be gods who'd do it easily given the chance. If we want to let Golarion gods use it, you could show us your generator. Or we could invite Someone else better suited in and close the door again."

"Using the known Wish wordings - and all other known spells, most of which Wish can replicate anyway - is probably enough to do most things your world does. Transport is easy. Other infrastructure can mostly be done by copying existing things, and it should be possible to design spells for that."

"The one thing magic doesn't do is get you something from nothing, including getting more magic. Arbitrarily many Wishes can do almost anything, like rescue everyone in Golarion in the same round, because Wishes can move people. But we'd need enough casters, because each Wish only moves a few dozen people. There are plenty of Good outsiders who could cast it from scroll, but that would require too much intervention budget, unless they're all summoned to Golarion first. Still, if we keep planning we can probably find a way to move everyone off Golarion, without using fixity fields, in a single round. That's how we'd probably do it, with your resources. But that's what I called unambitious." He looks at his audience expectantly.

She now desperately wants to try reverse-engineering Wish. Probably some of her have already started doing that, and she should focus on this. But that description of Wish just screams for trying to figure out how to compile the software that runs on the fixity crystals to run on Wish substrate instead.

She shakes her head and tries to refocus on Cayden's question.

"I mean, taking six seconds seems slow -- I don't see why we shouldn't be able to do it instantaneously, now that Desna has shared FTL -- but I get the feeling that's not what you mean."

She glances at Gord and Irabeth.

If rescuing everyone in the world isn't enough, what's left? Perhaps a better question is: if they do it, what comes next?

Most demons aren't in the Worldwound. If the other demons in the Abyss come to Golarion, they can be rescued too. In time, the Abyss would grow empty, because demons are made from Chaotic Evil mortals. Except it wouldn't, because the Pharasmins say there are people from other worlds in the afterlives -

"What about the rest of Creation? Besides Golarion. There are other worlds, aren't there?"

:There are forty-seven thousand, three hundred and forty-four inhabited planets, and I keep finding new ones. Most of them have people with souls who go to the afterlives. Some have native outsiders or people without souls. The oldest and strongest gods in Creation - Asmodeus, Abadar, Sarenrae, Zon-Kuthon, and me - and Pharasma - are present in most of them.:

Irabeth has in fact read holy scripture. She doesn't need to think for very long to find the answer that should have been blazing obvious if she hadn't spent all her life fighting demons in what was ultimately a distraction from the original reason Iomedae ascended, before She was forced to become the Inheritor.

"We have to rescue everyone in Hell."

"She gets it! Have a cookie." Cayden pushes the dish towards Irabeth.

His voice grows more serious. "Cherry. Have you had occasion to contemplate the nature and the scope of Hell?"

"Most people on Golarion do not grasp it, and most of those who do cannot truly face that horror. They hear the words 'eternal torture' and they think of pain, the burning and rending of flesh. They think of it as punishment proportional to some crime, or torment enough to make evildoers repent, or the greatest evil they can imagine visiting on their own enemies."

"But the ruler of Hell is not like the mortals of Creation."

"He is one of the oldest gods, with the knowledge and experience of many millions of years. He has devils, and damned souls, and whole other races doing His will. He understands physics, and magic, so far as they can be understood, and He controls the planes of Hell, and has time enough to experiment. He is bound only by His own nature and Lawful commitments."

"You have the power of the fixity fields, and the technology to transfer minds into machines. Consider, then, what is the greatest amount of suffering permitted by the laws of physics and magic which does not yet destroy one's personhood completely."

"Asmodeus does not optimize suffering above all else, He values many other things as well. The torture is carried out by His devils, who are not nearly as powerful or as intelligent as their master, and who must be able to comprehend and take pride in their work. He must permit the fear and the threat of greater suffering, for the mortals who fear going to Hell as well as the souls already in it. The Good gods have bought the reduction of suffering from Him, over the aeons, in trade for something else He valued more."

"But when you think of Hell, and ask yourself what price and what risk you might put on ending it, you should not imagine it to be full of mere lakes of fire and brimstone."

Air hisses through her teeth, involuntarily.

There are fundamental limits, imposed by lightspeed and the density of physically possible storage media, on how fast a human-like mind can run. Her civilization's ability to run uploaded people is lagging a few orders of magnitude short of that, and most of the uploaded people in her world choose to run more slowly even than that, to stay somewhat synced up with non-upload civilization.

But a god, with millions of years to run experiments? They can probably get pretty close to those fundamental limits.

The thought that floats to the top of her mind is that she wasn't fast enough. If she had been smarter, if she had drilled into what Gord knew about Hell, if she had treated things as though they were more urgent, could she have spent less time with the door to Golarion open? Even just a few milliseconds of indecision probably contained more suffering than she has managed to offset in the entire time since she invented the fixity field.

She bursts into tears.

"H-How," she tries to ask, but her voice comes out whispery and indistinct. "How many?" she signs, letting Milliways handle the translation. "People in Hell: how many?"

And in her world, prices already elevated by preparing for Golarion spike even higher as people dump more resources into preparing. Even if time as stopped, it still feels urgent. Rationally, they have all the time in the world. Emotionally, many of the people preparing, including Weeping Cherry's self-tree, feel the need to do something about this.

The uploaded members of her self-tree who weren't yet working in accelerated time drop into it, doing their best to pick apart the magic they've been shown, reaching for some new capability that will solve this more surely. A thousand magic experiments bloom in safely isolated testing chambers. Most of them explode, but some of them explode in experimentally useful ways.

And the feed from Weeping Cherry's point of view sits on a thousand virtual monitors, as they wait to hear the answer. Maybe it won't be good for them to hear. But it feels like they have to know, like they have to understand the scope of the problem to begin fixing it.

So they work, and they think, and they wait.

"We don't know for sure," he says softly. "Most of them are killed eventually. And we don't know all of what goes on in the lower planes. But our best estimate is between one and ten million billion souls. If there were many more, we think Asmodeus would let us know, because it would give Him more bargaining power."

"I'm sorry I didn't have any gentler way of breaking it to you."

She nods, more in acknowledgement than understanding.

"Thank you for telling me," she signs.

Ten to the fifteen is a lot of people. But. Not an unimaginable number. Her world has approximately ten to the ten people -- one for every hundred thousand in hell.

She forces herself to take a deep breath.

"Give me a moment," she continues. "And then, yeah. We should talk about how to get them out. But I need a moment."