It crashes through world after world, tracing the threads of a single soul, twisting it up into itself and accelerating like a growing snowball. 

Until--finally--it crashes. 

It doesn't, exactly, have a spatial location within the universes it passes through. It isn't that kind of phenomenon. But it links to specific concepts, and so while there isn't exactly any coordinate that it definitely occupies, coordinates closely linked with its central concept are places where it sort-of is. Generally it isn't in any one dimension long enough for this to matter, but when it finally stops--

Something happens to Areelu's laboratory. She--can't actually identify what; it's not like anything she's ever experienced before. Not that she's never been disoriented before, but this is--still different--

She takes notes, on what she can observe of it; she has the Concentration for that. Once it's over, she checks everything she can think of, to see if she can divine anything about what that was, or in case it let in any hostiles, or had any effects of its own--

The pieces of Seshka's soul are missing. 

Areelu does not handle this well. 

She looks for them, of course. In the entirety of her demiplane, first. There are test subjects who suffer, because she is unhappy. 

She tries scrying them. It isn't the first thing she tries, by some margin, but it's something she would give more than one attempt, before giving into despair. 

And there--

She smacks into the pavement. 

It wouldn't quite be accurate to say she falls onto the street; she didn't have a prior location above the street to fall onto it from. But she is, very suddenly, there, horizontally oriented on the ground, a ground which is made up of stones that are not sufficiently even and well-fitted that none of them poke her in any locations. 

Oof. 

Well, no point in just laying there. She rolls over, levering herself into a sitting position and looking around. 

"Are you alright?"

"What a good question." She speaks Hallit with a Sarkorian accent, if anybody happens to be able to recognize that. "Where are we?"

"In Kenabres, just off the main square."

"Kenabres...that's in Mendev, right?"

"Yes! And today, there's a festival." 

"A festival, huh? That's neat." 

"It is! Do you want to come see?"

"That sounds lovely." And maybe gives her more time to figure out...herself. 

"It's this way!" 

The square where the festival is occurring is lovely, draped in all kinds of banners, with musicians playing jaunty dancing music. There's free drinks, and dummies and targets to show off punching skills and marksmanship, and all kinds of other festival panoply. 

Oh, good! Dancing is excellent. She doesn't really feel like punching or throwing darts at stuff, and alcohol has got to be a bad idea with her head already as muddled as it is, but: dancing good. 

Ember hadn't really wanted to go to the festival by herself, but dancing is fun. She dances strangely, though. 

This approximately doesn't register to Lucy. Whee! Dancing is fun! Caring if other people give you weird looks is for suckers! 

--Huh, is it just her or is that kind of a lot of bugs around. 

You know what else it's a lot of? Demons! Teleporting into the square!

--Oh, fuck, that's bad. Why are demons invading a random Mendevian city. How are demons invading a random Mendevian city. Okay, first priority has got to be finding safe places to put civilians; even if her purification powers work on demons as well as could possibly be hoped, there are too many of them--

"BEHOLD, CRUSADER GODS, BEHOLD, IOMEDAE, YOU POOR IMPOSTER. YOUR CITY WILL FALL TO ME. YOUR FOLLOWERS WILL FEED MY HUNGER."

FUCK THAT IS FUCKING DESKARI WHY IS FUCKING DESKARI HERE WHAT THE FUCK HAS SHE LANDED ON. 

(Also, what does he mean, crusader gods???)

"Deskari, Lord of Locusts! Leave. My. City!"

That is a silver dragon--is that an ancient silver dragon--what in fact the fuck has she landed on--

That was a silver dragon. With one swing of Deskari's scythe, its head goes flying, and it is now an ex-silver dragon. 

THIS IS REALLY REALLY BAD. 

Would...whatever process made her...really have dumped her in a situation she couldn't survive? What a waste. 

...But babies are stillborn all the time. There's no reason, really, to expect the process that produced her to work better than that. It feels like it should, but it always feels like bad things shouldn't happen to you, personally. 

There's so much that she wants to do, and she can't do it if she dies to a freak demon attack, but--

Think.

Okay, first of all, there's a child with her. Second--it would be pretty bad if they made an undead out of that dragon. Would they? They're demons, not necromancers, they could totally just decide to eat it--but they could also, like, not. 

"Stay with me," she tells the elven child who found her. "I'll try to protect you." 

She hesitates, but shakes her head. "I can help." 

A babau that was approaching the two of them falls over, asleep. 

Oh she's a witch. She's a witch with Slumber. Thank Pulura. 

"Okay--try to cover me--" 

And she reaches down into the well of her own power, and slams her hands on the ground--

--And white tentacles erupt from the ground underneath the dragon's severed head, engulfing it and pulling it into some kind of storage demiplane. 

Okay. Hopefully that should prevent the demons from doing anything too nasty with the corpse? ...Necromancy is not her forte.

Okay, great, mission accomplished, how is kiddo holding up--wah!

Okay, so, like. 

She has wings. Probably she could have recovered gracefully from a chasm opening up under her feet. 

You know, if her first instinct had been to do that, instead of to lunge for the child close enough to her to also have been in the path of the fissure, and wrap her up tight to protect her as much as possible from the fall.

When she opens her eyes next she is at the bottom of some kind of crevice and there is a rapier tip uncomfortably close to her throat.

“Oh. You’re awake.”

The smile on this woman’s face is appropriate for neither of finding a survivor at the bottom of a hole, nor holding someone at sword point.

“Sure am.” What happens if she tries to take the tip of the blade in her fingers and lightly move it away from her throat.

Stab! Stab is what happens!

Hrglfrgl.

Wow okay this is definitely a situation that calls for a healing spell.

YEP. THANK YOU ADORABLE ELF CHILD.

This is also a situation that calls for a TELEPORT. …Not the spell, just the—general category of thing. Okay now she and Elf Child are on the OTHER SIDE of Rapier Lady and also a little way off.

”What the fuck?”

Under slightly less incriminating circumstances Camellia would be trying to smooth things over about now. But lying is almost certainly a lost cause at this point, so…

”You are today’s sacrifice,” she says gleefully, and lunges again.

What the fuck???

Does she actually have any offensive options—she can heal, she can teleport, she can purify stuff but whatever’s wrong with this lady doesn’t feel straightforward to fix—

OH WAIT RIGHT.

Time to tentacle a bitch.

Inconvenient but not insurmountable.

...

Maybe, like, slightly less surmountable than she originally thought???

"What. The. Fuck." 

...Okay, time to try the Mireya story. 

She holds up a hand partway through. "Okay, so first of all, bullshit, I can sense people-not-being-okayness and I'm not getting any from your necklace."

Shrug. "Most people can't sense the spirits at all."

"I'm not most people. Secondly, what is the Worldwound."

...

"A long time ago, a very angry person helped some demons open a permanent rift to the Abyss in Sarkoris, and now Sarkoris...isn't, anymore. Now people are working very hard to prevent the demons from getting out."

Uh

That's levels of bad she isn't entirely equipped to handle right now

"When...when was this?"

"A little over a hundred years ago, now."

...She feels like there was supposed to be something happening soon that was not super compatible with a giant horrible rift to the Abyss! But she can't even remember what it is so she definitely can't argue that a giant horrible rift to the Abyss shouldn't have happened, except, you know, for all the normal ways a giant horrible rift to the abyss shouldn't happen.

"I...guess that explains Deskari."

"No, that doesn't normally happen."

"Well, it contextualizes him, anyway. As for you," she turns back to Stabby Lady, "try again, but this time with less lying."

Okay but what if instead she tries REALLY HARD to get out of these tentacles and stab her again. 

Well, she doesn't actually have all that much experience wielding tentacles that aren't attached to her body, and like, the tentacle-related experience she does have is a bit awash in other identities, so the sudden lunge does get her out of the grapple, but the resulting stab isn't theoretically lethal this time, and she's capable of getting her hands on the girl's rapier and demiplaning it. 

Well shit. 

Maybe she should be asleep now. 

"Thanks." It's starting to get a little awkward not to know the kid's name but asking would open her up to questions about her name and that is not a kettle of fish she wants to fry right now. 

It really isn't obvious to her what's wrong with Violence And Shitty Lying Lady--on a root level, not an expressions of bad behavior level--and whatever it is, she's pretty confident it's something wrong with her, not some kind of abyssal contamination or anything, but...she really really does not have any better ideas than trying to magic her better. 

She kneels down beside the woman's sleeping body and attempts to examine her more closely with her People Being Not Okay sense. 

Oh there is DEFINITELY something wrong with her. But it super isn't a magic something! How good is she at the delicate tangles of the human psyche?

...Better than she ought to be, for magic reasons? Like, if there's some specific trauma that's turning you evil, or you'd benefit from a smack upside the head with a big Empathy Stick, she can work with that? Like, she does have a direct sensory apparatus specifically into things being wrong with people!

Yeah, well, the thing that's wrong with this lady is more complicated than her intercessor is going to be able to sus out in the time it takes for Slumber to wear off. 

DAMMIT SHE DOES NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT. 

She teleports out of the woman's attempt to strangle her with her bare hands. 

Her Golarion instincts say to kill the bitch and ask Nirvana to send a good lawyer. Instincts formed in more civilized areas say MURDER BAD. Less instinctive responses from civilized places say killing in self-defense is fine but, like, she's not that worried about preventing this woman from killing her now that her sword is gone, and--

Hey, what if she tries to hit the raggedy beggar child with her buckler. 

Tentacle dashes her head against the stone of the cavern, is what. 

"Well, fuck." 

The elf child sighs sadly and closes the woman's eyes. 

"...I'm sorry." 

Hug. "You were doing your best."

"I hate--people going to Evil afterlives. No one deserves that. No matter what." 

"No. They don't."

"...We should go back to the surface. People are going to need our help." 

"Can you fly us up?"

She peers up at the crack in the ceiling they fell through. "Not in that, I don't think. But I can teleport! Ish. It's not the spell, it's--even smaller than dimension door. But it'll do."

"Okay!"

Pop. Deskari is gone by now, thankfully. Attempting to tentacle him seems like, uh, a bad idea. There are still demons everywhere, though. 

"If we find somewhere safe-ish, can I put you there and bring you survivors? Do you have Stabilize?"

"Yes, I can do that."

"Wonderful." 

Okay, well, there are a bunch of armed groups of people with only normal amounts or less of thing-wrong-with-them fighting the demons. She picks the largest and most successful-looking group and bops over.

”Hi, I have an unlimited,” technically inaccurate but it doesn’t run on spell slots and she isn’t, like, immediately about to run out of mana or anything, “short-range teleportation ability, if I can get you guys somewhere halfway defensible can you protect wounded.”

“—Yes. The temple of Iomedae, over there—“

Leave it to Iomedaeans to build their temples defensibly—although actually that’s definitely a good idea here in demon borderland. Okay. She waits a moment for the commander to give appropriate orders and then starts teleporting soldiers one at a time into the temple.

They immediately start fortifying all the doors and windows.

Excellent. She drops kiddo with them and then starts gathering survivors.

And when she hits something of a lull in finding survivors, the half-orc woman who seems to be in charge asks, “What’s the range of your teleportation ability?”

“Uh—a little over three hundred feet, I think.”

That’s not ideal, but any kind of at-will teleportation ability is a resource they weren’t expecting to have. “How many passengers can you take at a time?”

“That is—sort of complicated—uh, ‘at will’ was actually a huge oversimplification. I, uh, don’t have spell slots? Instead I have a thing called ‘mana’ that I regenerate over time, at a rate that depends on stuff, and any given spell costs a certain amount of mana, and teleporting more people at a time is faster but costs more total mana than teleporting the same number of people in smaller groups.”

That is very weird. This person does not detect as Evil, but there are ways to fake that, and “demons playing silly buggers” happens a lot more often than people with really weird magic.

But then, “demons playing silly buggers” just happens a lot anyway, and it’s not like weird magic is unheard of. Not using spell slots at all is weirder than the fact that the evil Count Arendae channels positive, but not by that wide a margin.

And being incredibly suspicious of helpful people is Hulrun’s job.

”Okay. This place was a good choice in the short term, and useful for collecting the survivors clustered around this area, but in the long term I’d rather have a base less centrally located to the spot where Deskari showed up.” And Terendelev was horribly murdered.

“That makes sense. Do you have anywhere in mind? I, uh, only arrived in Kenabres today.”

“Someplace that we can get out of on our own if we have to—demons can teleport too.” Not literally all of them but enough that it’s not worth explicitly qualifying. “If the Gray Garrison hasn’t fallen, that would probably be the best choice.” Especially since it looked like that was the direction Deskari launched the Wardstone in. It’s probably fallen, though. 

“Which is—where, sorry? Uh, my teleportation targets off of distance and direction, and the better I know my destination the less precise about those I can afford to be.”

Most of the rank-and-file present would have no idea what the straight-line distance is between the temple of Iomedae and the Gray Garrison, but fortunately Irabeth has occasioned to work with people who could, or had familiars who could, fly, such that it happened to come up. Direction is easier. 

She reappears a few seconds later. 

"Gray Garrison's fallen," she reports unhappily. "--Also there's a giant glowing magical obelisk jammed into it? That seems important." 

"The Wardstone. Damn. We need to recover it." 

"If we can find a good place to put it and I can accumulate enough mana I can teleport it. It'd be, uh, way more mana than I have right now, though, probably there isn't a good spot within one or even a few hops and also the Wardstone is...uh...it has people in it. Kind of a lot of people. Dunno what's up with that."

"--It what?"

"--Okay, so--my existence is complicated, there is a sense in which I came to exist only a few hours ago and a sense in which not that--and I am missing vast chunks of basic background context, what is a Wardstone?"

"The Wardstones are a gift from the goddess Iomedae, placed by her herald in Kenabres and other cities and fortresses across the Worldwound. The chain of Wardstones forms a protective barrier that stops the expansion of the Wound and prevents demons from crossing. Deskari picked it up and threw it after he killed Terendelev."

Terendelev must be the dragon. "...Demons were showing up before she died, though?"

"Yes." She isn't able to fully prevent the exhaustion from creeping into her voice. "We were given a warning, by an old elf called the Storyteller, that something was wrong with our Wardstone, some days before the attack. We hadn't yet been able to figure out what, or how it could be repaired, before--" she gestures to one side, indicating the entire clusterfuck.

"...Well, the Wardstone had people in it, and the people had a certain degree of not-okayness. Taking people who are not okay and causing them to be okay is sort of my whole thing, so--I might have an angle on that. Again, it'd take kind of a lot of mana, though." There were a WHOLE BUNCH of people in there. 

If this is a trap--if all the helpfulness up until now has been bait for a demonic trap--this is where it snaps shut. 

"What do you need in order to regain mana?"

If the answer is human sacrifice she's going to smite evil and try to kill her as fast as possible before she can teleport away. 

"Okay, so the thing that I am is called a [Magical]* [Girl]**, and every [Magical] [Girl] has a [Theme] and a [Virtue], and my [Virtue] is [Agape]. And the way a Magical Girl regains mana is by, uh, inhabiting, her virtue. So, like, healing is usually net-positive for me, mana-wise, because it's really easy to be in a headspace about helping people, while you're helping someone? And my [Theme] is [Ascendancy]***, so healing is really cheap for me, even though it does cost mana.

*Magical both in the sense of being magic, breaking the laws of physics and such, but also in the more figurative sense of being really cool and emotionally moving, like sunsets and soap bubbles can be magical despite definitely not being supernatural.
**Suffix denoting a bearer of the preceding characteristic; connotationally but not denotationally feminine.
***The transition of mostly people but also objects, from an original state to an improved state; centrally including things like healing, purification, and self-actualization.

...What. 

Okay, so, this is pretty far opposite from what Irabeth was expecting out of a potential demon trap, but it's also not anything she was expecting for not a demon trap. Leaving aside the weirdly comprehensible words in--she's heard enough Celestial to know that that wasn't Celestial but it seems more like Celestial than like anything else she's heard of. But on the other hand this girl seems to just keep pulling things that are completely unlike anything Irabeth has heard of out of her ass! So maybe she shouldn't think of it as particularly similar to Celestial after all! But whatever the fuck that language is is still incredibly far from the most out-there thing about what she just said. 

"Well, there are plenty of people here who could use healing," she says, instead of attempting to actually grapple with the implications of this girl's claims. Although, actually: "Actually, we seem to have failed to introduce ourselves." Which, you know, much less important than getting people to safety, but there seems to be a lull here anyway. "I'm Irabeth Tirabade, head of the Eagle Watch." 

Aw maaaan. Well, she wasn't going to be able to put it off forever, and at least she's already displayed her magical language. 

"My name is [Magical] [Girl] [Ascendant] [Lucy]*, but you can call me--Lucy. For reasons. It should be easier to pronounce."

*The fundamental shape-of-person that she is

Irabeth nods. "Thank you, Lucy." 

"Well, hey, I'd rather it was under better conditions, but helping people is my jam." 

Okay now time to go heal people. Well, no. Irabeth could also use a bit of healing. Boop her first, then go heal civilian refugees, then the other--Eagle Watch? Guys. 

People watch her intently as she does this. Her conversation with Irabeth wasn't exactly private, and while knowing less about how magic normally works makes Lucy's whole Magical Girl bit less out there, if "infinite free healing" was a thing very often Worldwound veterans would expect to know about it. 

That's nice. Those people, too, should have nice things. 

...There's a thought that's been simmering in the back of her mind, that she's mostly been ignoring in favor of high-paced DO STUFF, which is coming more to the forefront as she performs the lower-mental-overhead work of healing people. 

She wants to try purifying a demon. 

Probably, like, a dretch, or a quasit, or something, first. Something smallish and not too powerful, as demons go. But demons are corrupted human souls, and mending souls and uncorrupting things are pretty central aspects of her toolkit!

And being a demon, like, sucks. She is aware that demons tend to be attached to it but they're wrong actually. 

She's not sure she can ask these people to help with that. From the point of view of being invaded by demons, a demon turning back into a normal soul isn't overwhelmingly better than a demon dying. Which, like, they're also wrong about, but if purifying a demon takes a lot longer than killing them--they aren't wrong to want the demons gone as soon as possible. 

...Elf Kiddo seemed to understand. 

She finishes healing the guy she was currently working on and looks around for her. 

Elf Kiddo is earnestly talking to a guy Lucy already finished healing. 

Cool cool cool.

Lucy goes and sits down next to her, waiting for a lull in the conversation. 

"--think she would really appreciate it. Hi!"

"Hi. How're you holding up?"

"Oh, I'm fine! This nice man was just telling me about his sister."

"Oh?"

He flushes. "It's--we're not as close as we used to be when we were kids. It's not, like, important, or anything." 

She takes his hand and looks him square in the eye. "My existence is sort of philosophically complicated, but I contain memories of having siblings who were very dear to me. Falling out of contact with them would have been awful. If this is something that matters to you, then it is important."

"I--okay. But, uh, the demons. The demons, are objectively way more important?"

"That I will grant you. Um," to kiddo, "because my existence is philosophically complicated, I was avoiding introducing myself to you earlier. My full name is [Magical] [Girl] [Ascendant] [Lucy], but you can call me Lucy." 

What the fuck does "Lucy" have to do with any of the stuff in that name??? their perplexed bystander wonders. 

Elf Kiddo beams at her. "That's a beautiful name! I'm Ember. I used to have a longer name, but I forgot it."

Forgot it? Huh?

...Elf Kiddo--Ember--is not wearing clothing you would expect of...someone whose parents were taking good care of them, and had money. Which, like, lots of people don't have money, but--she's a witch--this isn't all suspicious on its own or anything but--

"Um. Where are your parents."

"I think my mom is still in Kyonin. My dad's dead." 

"--May I hug you."

"Of course!" 

Hug. 

"I'm sorry about your dad." 

Hug. 

"I miss him. But I'm sure he's okay, wherever he is." 

"Will it...bother you, if I ask more questions?"

"I don't think so. I can always not answer, if I don't want to." 

"How long ago did he die?"

"Oh, it was...a long time ago. Fifty years, maybe? Thereabouts." 

"Are your scars related?"

"Yes. There was a fire, and a very kind knight pulled me out before I could die, but then they died instead." 

"I'm sorry to hear that." And then she is going to stop pushing her luck. 

...Wait. Hang on. Her name is Ember. That's--did she pick that or--

--No, you know what, she can ask that question later.

It’s not like she doesn’t have any other questions to ask now.

“Unrelated question, I want to try purifying the demonness out of a demon, how do you feel about that?”

Ember gasps. “Oh, that would be wonderful! Nobody should have to be a demon!”

“I don’t…think…that’s possible?” their bystander hazards.

“I’d say ‘you never know until you try,’ but actually a failure wouldn’t prove an impossibility, just that I wasn’t doing it right. And it may or may not have ever happened on Golarion before, but there’s never been a [Magical] [Girl] on Golarion before either!” Probably.

This is so far above his pay grade it’s not funny and he’s just going to shut up now.

"Can I help?"

"Absolutely. Your ability to put people to sleep could be really useful. Especially if we go after a Dretch and not a Quasit, Dretches love naps."

This is probably a mistake but: "How do you even know that?"

"That is a good question! And the amount of philosophically complicated my existence is means I don't know the answer!" 

Well, he was correct that asking was a mistake but this is relatively harmless as far as regretting that particular life choice goes. 

"...The lady with the sword woke up before you were done with her."

"Yeah, but I am way more specced to handle metaphysically straightforward ick like Abyssal taint than whatever mundane thing was wrong with her. Also, she didn't have a specific love of naps I could press on to keep her under." 

"Okay, then. I'll do my best." 

Another hug for Ember, because Ember is amazing. 

Probably if they're going to fuck off to do Good Science* to demons, she should go tell Irabeth. 

"Hey, I've healed everyone here, and for mana-building purposes, Ember and I want to go see if I can rip the demonicness out of a Dretch."

*As opposed to Evil Science

Irabeth can feel a headache brewing. She REALLY wishes Anevia were here. Instead of definitely fine somewhere else and absolutely not dead. 

"Can either of you defend yourselves if any kind of demon closes to melee range with you?"

"My teleports have a very good reaction time! Some bitch with problems managed to put a rapier through my throat and I got away and Ember healed me up fine." 

"...I think it would be best if you didn't end up with a rapier through your throat again." 

"...Yeah." That's the kind of thing where you only have to fuck up one time for things to go very very badly. 

"Would you be willing to take one of my men with you?"

Well, on the one hand carrying two passengers instead of one ups the mana cost by more than carrying one passenger instead of zero, but on the other hand, they can just get places in ways other than teleporting. Possibly with occasional exceptions. 

"That should be fine, thanks." 

Irabeth looks at her consideringly for a moment. Given what she claimed her "theme" was, she's unlikely to cause a certain sort of problem...and separating him from the rest of the men could be a good thing...

"Staunton!" she calls. 

A grumpy dwarf emerges. "Yes?"

"I'd like you to escort these two ladies," she nods to Lucy and Ember, "as they...go about their business." 

Translation: do fucking weird magic things. 

He nods shortly. He doesn't know if being around two random strangers will be better than being around a large group of other crusaders, because there are fewer of them, or worse, because the lack of witnesses will encourage them to greater cruelty, but either way, it's not like he has the privilege of turning down an assignment. 

"Thank you!" This guy has more than nothing wrong with him but less than Rapier Girl, and less...insidious. Besides that she can't say, she's not great at interpreting non-magical things wrong with people yet, but either way, best practice is to be polite. 

He nods stiffly.

(This isn’t surprising or anything; plenty of people are civil in front of Irabeth.)

Okay then! Time to head out and see if they can corner a Dretch alone or something. 

There are a handful of Abrikandilus loitering outside, does that count?

Absolutely not!!! Tentacle the bastards and run away before they can get free.

—Or, well, fly away. Whatever, that’s fine, it doesn’t take mana, and she can fly low enough that she doesn’t get separated from Ember and Staunton.

Come to think of it, her magical girl outfit including high heels might have had something to do with her tripping and falling into the crevasse earlier.

She’s tempted to just fly up high enough to locate somewhere with one or a few dretches hanging around, but that’s just asking to encounter a Vrock or a succubus or something, so, no.

They can run into a small handful of Dretches a short while later.

Perfect. Okay, so they need to separate one of them from the others, or just Slumber all of them so the other two can’t interfere while she’s working on one—

The trio of dretches notices the trio of crusaders before Lucy can even finish the thought, let alone decide on a strategy. Stinking Cloud.

—Ough. Okay, well, that’s unfortunate, but doesn’t negate the previous sentiment. She will just sort of land and dry-retch while Staunton and Ember handle the situation for a bit.

This is a kind of situation that Staunton has a lot of experience handling! Actually, the hardest part is that he’s supposed to leave one of the three Dretches alive. He doesn’t exactly approve of doing weird experiments on demons—it seems like the kind of thing that is just obviously a bad idea—but his judgment is demonstrably bad and Irabeth told him to go along with what Lucy and Ember wanted, so.

…Oh. Well.

She isn’t going to scold Staunton for killing the other two Dretches. She would have preferred to avoid that, but “don’t kill the demons that are invading your city” is just obviously not an instruction you can give someone, and she hadn’t even tried.

Realistically…even if she can un-demon a Dretch, she’s not going to be able to do so at a scale that will save every one of them in Kenabres, let alone the rest of the demons. If she tries to inhibit the Crusaders from killing demons without having an immediate, strategically and not just morally better, way of neutralizing them, then that ends with worse outcomes overall than if she hadn’t been involved at all, which. She can absolutely do better than.

So…

…She’s not into necromancy, obviously. But—she’s pretty sure, that getting stronger as a magical girl, doesn’t work the same way as getting stronger normally does, on Golarion. The overwhelming majority of people she’s been are from not-Golarion places, and some of them are almond certainly from outside Pharasma’s Creation, and there are lots and lots of ways she can recall to get stronger without probabilistically annihilating yourself. She has no reason to think she now works like a Golarionite and an intuition that she doesn’t.

And even Golarion has dragons, who just get stronger with age.

Which means that eventually, if she isn’t unlucky enough, she will have phenomenal cosmic power. And…and this is the part where her not being into necromancy comes into it…Geb and Arazni form a proof of concept, that a dead Outsider is not actually categorically irretrievable.

And that means that the correct thing to do is to chill the fuck out about demons dying, for now, and also as she kneels over the Slumbered survivor, to touch the ground and send tentacles to pick up the corpses of the other two and hammerspace them.

Staunton notices that, obviously, but given that he already knew she was doing mad science to demons he does not particularly draw conclusions from it.

Okay.

So.

It is, in fact, fairly easy to keep the Dretch asleep, once she’s got her magical “fingers” tangled up in it. A Dretch’s desire for rest is one of the most non-horrible things about it, so it’s easy to lean into.

Pulling out the demonic essence is…harder.

People are complicated, and she doesn’t want to unmake this one, but the corruption of the Abyss has sunk in very deeply. Trying to simply regress them back to when they were a relatively resurrectible grub would be relatively simple, but that kind of calling-forth-data-from-the-past is a little mana intensive for what she’s trying to do.

So she has to carefully, carefully comb through the metaphorical strands of this creature’s being, identifying the exact ways in which they’ve been warped by the Abyss, and ever so delicately teasing out the corruption while leaving the formerly-corrupted structures intact.

She would also like to leave them corporeal, if possible. She doesn’t understand all the cosmological bullshit involved, but when a person hangs around on Golarion past the death of their body, they are an incorporeal ghost. But when they move on and become a petitioner, they’re solid again. Lucy isn’t categorically opposed to creating a new body for this entity and reinstating them as a mortal, but again that would take a lot of mana that she doesn’t have going spare right now, even if she were capable of doing it, which she thinks she might not be, yet.

But the delicate combing is working. It’s slow going—she’s vaguely aware that Staunton has had to commit some more violence in the background while she’s been working—but it’s working.

And eventually she sits back, and stretches, and yawns. “Done.”

…The creature in front of her, still curled up asleep, sure doesn’t look like a Dretch.

On reflection, Staunton thinks he wouldn’t have been surprised just by the intended mad science doing something, but—it, uh, seems? To have worked??? He certainly isn’t detecting evil off of…that…anymore…

His estimate of Lucy’s power level creeps upwards significantly. Also, what the fuck.

“Oh, that’s so cute!”

“I don’t think this form is permanent, I don’t exactly—”

“—What the fuck!”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I, um, a thing happened, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing, necessarily, I…um. I. Think. I might be a cleric now???”

Well, this might as well happen.

“Oh. That’s strange.”

“Well, to be fair, it’s objectively less strange than undemoning someone.”

Giggle. “That’s true! I think I like the undemoning better, though.”

“Well, obviously. Still, given the timing, I appreciate the gesture of support for the project.”

“Which god is it?” He’s definitely not personally interested or anything but it might end up mattering at some point.

“That is a good question. Let me—” she waves her wand around, creating various crude holy symbols out of the same white material that the body of the wand is made of. She picks each one up, tries praying with it, and then tucks it away in hammerspace, until she gets to a sort of T-posing angel.

“Sarenrae,” she concludes. “Neat.”

It’s less reassuring than Iomedae or Torag, but it could have been soooooo much worse. He tries hard not to think about the possibility of it having been Nethys. Encouraging redemption is so much less concerning than encouraging mad science.

“Well, I don’t have time to pray for spells right now, if I even can not at dawn, so I suppose this’ll be more useful tomorrow. Though the thing that replenishes mana is the emotional significance of healing, not the specific spell I was using, so having a manaless source of healing is convenient.”

Areelu is more confused than she had expected to be, but it’s hard to argue that things aren’t going well.

She’s definitely not sending Suture to interface with Seshka for the foreseeable future, though.

“—So, as you can see, purifying a Dretch worked!”

Irabeth stares at the Creature. “I do see that.” For…whatever value of “worked” Lucy is working with. She, uh, she’s not sure why this outcome is desirable, but if it increases “mana,” and “mana” is necessary to fix the Wardstone, then so be it.

“Anyway, I don’t think I have enough mana to fix the Wardstone yet, but I have more than twice as much as I did when I left, so it might make sense to go see if I can see how much I’ll need? By looking at the Wardstone again.”

“I don’t have any insight into how to manage your mana, but would that be a good idea, with the Garrison in enemy hands?”

“It should probably be fine, as long as I’m careful.”

Irabeth doesn’t ask “and are you going to be careful,” out loud, with her voice, but she’s thinking it at the top of her lungs.

Thaaaaat’s pretty fair.

”One passenger doesn’t increase the mana cost that much; would it make you feel better if I brought Staunton?”

“Immensely.”

“Alright then.” And she goes and collects Staunton and vanishes.

The Wardstone is beautiful.

It’s not that she hadn’t noticed that the first time, but this time she knows what a Wardstone is, if not why it’s full of people.

Lucy steps closer, closing her eyes and resting her hand and forehead against the glowing surface.

And Staunton settles into a guard stance, watching warily for demons to show up.

Which one does! In fairly short order!

Minagho was informed, of course, when some crusader teleported in and then out again. It probably wouldn’t matter, but it was the kind of thing she had to keep an eye on, so to speak.

When someone comes in and starts meddling with the Wardstone, she didn’t need to be informed. Meddling with the Wardstone is her job, and she can feel it as soon as someone else touches the blasted thing.

She wasn’t particularly expecting the interloper to be the same teleported from earlier, but her escort!

“Staunton! Darling!”

Oh no.

“Minagho, you bitch.”

“Now, is that any way to speak to an old flame, my love? Don’t pretend you haven’t missed me!”

Hm…as much fun as it is to rile him, she can’t afford to let him stall her while the girl in white does unidentified things to the Wardstone.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have time for a proper reunion, right at the moment. Just let me—“

Lucy raises her head from the Wardstone, examines Minagho, raises her wand, and fires a bolt of brilliant light at her.

Minagho screams.

And Lucy lunges for Staunton and then they are out of there.

“What did you do?” he asks, once they’re safely clear.

“Just threw some purification at her. It was, uh, easier than with the Dretch, because with the Dretch I needed it to actually work.”

“A Lilitu is a powerful kind of demon.”

“Well, there’s a difference between being easy and being cheap. Anyway, let’s get farther away, I don’t think Lilitu get Trace Teleport just off species but I don’t know what else she is.”

He nods emphatically.

SAVAMELEKH GET YOUR IDIOT ASS UP HERE I FOUND SOMETHING THAT SUPER EXTRA NEEDS KILLING

This is not an efficient use of a Sending but Minagho does not, in fact, care. 

Savamelekh does not show up immediately. That would be like saying that Minagho gets to boss him around. But Minagho does not, generally, suffer from that particular delusion, which means that that message coming from her is probably actually something important, so he doesn’t keep her waiting that long.

“So I didn’t get that much more detail on the Wardstone,” she explains to Irabeth a little later, “especially compared to if I had had longer, but I think the people in it are celestials of some stripe—getting all the Abyss out of that Dretch was actually pretty helpful, I think, for identifying Outsider natures? I could be wrong. But they’re definitely Outsiders and they’re definitely not demons.”

“There were angels participating in the first crusade,” Irabeth says slowly, “they left, saying they had a different mission…and then the Wardstones were given to us.”

“That lines up with what I sensed, yeah. The good news is I don’t have to wait until I have enough mana to fix the entire Wardstone in one go, I can cleanse individual angels who have things wrong with them. The bad news is, uh, Minagho was there.” And had some kind of History with Staunton, which she hasn’t pried into yet.

“That’s some pretty awful news.”

“Yeah. It took her a little while to show up, though, she can’t be everywhere at once. Not even every part of the Gray Garrison with access to the Wardstone.”

“Do you expect to be able to consistently accomplish something in the interval before she arrives?”

“…Maybe not, if her reaction time improves.” Which it pretty much has to, right, it’s not like only the good guys are allowed to learn from experience.

“It may be possible for my people to create a distraction. But—not repeatedly.”

“…I…assume you mean because there would be casualties, not just because she would get wise to our tricks.”

“There are always casualties, on the front lines against the demons.”

“Okay, well, for now let’s call that Plan B. Um, is there anything else I could be doing right now, to help.”

“We were hoping to find a more suitable long-term base, when you originally scouted the Grey Garrison,” Irabeth reminds her.

"Right. I would guess that Staunton can, uh, evaluate a place's suitability as a base, if he sees it, for whatever criteria are less obvious than 'is it filled with demons' and 'is it mostly intact.' Because that is the level of obvious that I, personally, am qualified to evaluate. But, like, if you had a map, to show me places that would be good candidates, that'd be helpful? Because I'm not qualified to evaluate that either."

Irabeth can’t help but smile a little bit at that, lips twitching.

“I’m afraid we didn’t happen to have a great many maps on hand when the demons attacked, but I’m sure we can manage.”