They really do have some concerning things locked up in the Vaults. On the basis of some of those manuscripts, she would not have expected this divine realm to be supposedly safe, but there are limits past which paranoia stops being useful. 

She steps out of a yawning golden void in midair and lands in a Far Realm and looks about her. 

It's completely safe! A few month ago, now, that's a different story.

There's a cat-eared winged woman on a golden throne, like so:

That is... slightly concerning symbology. But-

"Greetings. I am Her Deliverance Beryllia the Most High Priestess of Sirenna."

It talks! In ways that don't drive all who hear them mad, even!

"Oh, you came here on purpose? I didn't, but I think it went well anyway. Welcome to Creation! I'm Asmodeus, this is my divine realm. Sorry, it's a bit run-down at the moment, we're not done remodeling yet."

What's her Pharasmin Social Score? Pharasma is pretty bad for a cat, but Her judgements are usually at least informative.

Pharasma, You say?

[NO-] oof [NO READING].

Sirenna we have a problem.

Really, really not His style, and it shouldn't be easy for Him to have Seen she'd think that. 

Translation error? Please please let it be that, she can handle some local demon lord. 

Remodelling? Someone... killed Him and took His place? Shouldn't be possible, but, Far Realms, terrifying pataphysical implications. ...'Asmodeus' means something different here? She really should have studied Thaumogrammatology but that's not one of the merely deadly lost disciplines.

All right, well. 

"Thank You. May I ask how You came to be here? I... did come here deliberately, yes, it seemed a valuable opportunity."

Fine, fine, she can have some privacy.

"Oh. So there's this other world, not this one and probably not the one you came from, and every once in a while there'd be a problem no one who was there could solve, and every time someone from yet a different world would show up, get way more powerful than anyone else, fix the problem, usually cause some new ones, and disappear. I don't know what happened to them. I was a god there, I wasn't very nice back then, and one of those heroes turned Me into a catgirl, and then a different one killed Me. Then I bumped into this thing that made Me Good, it turns people who are already Good Evil so if you're one of those you should probably avoid it. You should probably avoid it anyway, actually. Then I came here and it turned out that there was a version of me here that was still Evil. He's dead now. The agathions are done evacuating the people the old version was torturing but there hasn't been enough time to replace all the devil-themed imagery with cats yet. What's it like where you're from?"

Blink blink. 

"...We have lots of horrifying problems nobody can solve and the Church is trying to take the edge off. One of them is that we do have a god Whose name translates as Asmodeus but we're pretending very hard that we don't. I don't suppose you have any way to contact whoever made You like this? I might have a job for them."

She is not believing that someone made an actually allied god out of an aspect of the Prince of Darkness but she could possibly be persuaded to hope they made something less bad, really the bar is, ha, in Hell there.

"If I had a way to do that I would have done it already. I'm the second god this happened to and I'm told that the first one used to be about things much more pleasant than pain and darkness. The Church of Whom, exactly?"

...

Probably Asmodeus could in fact predict and fake this but it's not at all His style and there are far deeper reasons not to expect it. 

Is there seriously an allied ex-Evil cat-god.

She's not complaining, obviously, just, see this is why theology is so fucking useless.

She does not - quite have the same sort of sense as the gods of the Covenant. But still. 

"The Five Gods. Sirenna, goddess of liberty and battle; Pelor, sun-god of justice; Mystra, moon-goddess of compassion and knowledge; Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex and beauty and storms; Moradin, god of wealth and fair trade. We were not expecting to find Anyone like You and I am profoundly grateful that we did. ...May I ask what Your domain is."

"Freedom! And cats!"

"I should probably, like, do something the old me couldn't do or something, because security mindset. I do hereby swear on My Law, not that I have any Law or something, that the moon is made of cheese, dogs are better than cats, and squares are round. What are their respective alignments?"

Not Asmodeus, then. 

Ah. One of those theories. ...Is that actually true around here. 

"The Good. God, the summum bonum, Heaven. That's the actual answer. ...Under the discredited Palenian model, They would all be Lawful. Under the even less sensible double-axis model, Chaotic Good, Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Good or controversially Lawful Neutral."

"This place runs on the double-axis model. It's stupid, I know, I have informed Pharasma of My opinion of it and She doesn't care. You are welcome to try, I doubt you'll get any further than I did. Do you have a Pharasma-like authority I can attempt to convince that I'm the real Asmodeus and He's sitting on My stuff? It worked last time!"

...All right, congratulations on asking a question that might literally be too eldritch for her, that takes effort even for a god. 

She is going to hold off on talking to Pharasma until she knows more, but noted. 

"Can Pharasma overthrow gods so easily? If we did I would happily introduce You. ...I am not sure what Your presence in my world would do to Him but hopefully nothing pleasant. So You would be... Chaotic Good?"

"She's the first one, at least here, She made this universe and can beat basically anything in it. She also almost never does things. I don't think She'll care about Someone who isn't even in Her Creation. Yup, I'm Chaotic Good, we have gods from all nine boxes here. Have all five of yours always been gods or did any of them ascend? The main ascended one here, a human archmage who became the Lawful Neutral god of civilizational progress, got killed about a hundred years ago, but there's still a bunch of them left. I'm happy to attempt to kill Him but godwars tend to cause extreme weather and the fight where that one was killed caused the deaths of like a third of the population of the planet where it happened."

That also explains some things. 

"...Where the gods came from is a complicated question. I don't know any of them to have been mortals, but there was... we call it the Theomachy, long ago, and it was extremely destructive but not only on a physical level. Anyway, that's where the Covenant came from, how we came to know the gods. It's not clear if that was an agreement or a change in Their nature or just a revelation or what. Lots of things about the gods aren't clear, it's frustrating, and the only thing worse is finding out, You wouldn't believe the rate we get through theologians. And I don't know that the Powers Below can be killed, at least not before the eschaton, the reunion of God. I don't know what killing Them would even mean. But we can make Their lives a lot harder. ...Should I try raising this... god Who managed to get killed somehow."

"The spells we have for raising people from the dead only work if they're in an afterlife. Gods, like outsiders, don't go to afterlives when they die. If your method works on gods that would be great, that one's name was Aroden. What....happens to your theologicians? There's a lot of things we're forbidden by treaty to tell mortals but there's nothing bad that happens if they try to find out, we're just not allowed to tell them."

"I don't know many details just in case I'd be in danger. Sometimes I wonder if the gods can't help us with the answers because They have in Their vast wisdom decided They'd rather not know. But as an example, recently there was one who came up with some sort of novel proof about the nature of reason during the new moon, flayed her own skull under mysterious circumstances. Another one, some kind of theory on divine pacts and the nature of oaths, killed himself so he wouldn't break holy law or something. Another one, working on the logical necessity of God, somehow ended up summoning devils. We do try to warn people."

"...An afterlife, what? Already? That... sounds important, but no, that's... that's not necessary." She's taken most of this with a straight face, but she does look stunned now. "Resurrection just - enacts a little of divinity, the same way they came to be in the first place, a promise of Heaven to come - all right, well. True Resurrection."

He remembers dying. He doesn't feel dead. What?

"Hi! Welcome back to being alive! It's great, I know. Asmodeus is dead, the old one, I'm also named Asmodeus, and apparently there's a third one, it's hard to keep track. You're divine realm in Axis is kinda deserted now, except for Milani, you should maybe go there and talk to and/or forgive Her for killing You. In Her defense breaking prophecy on the Cage might have been enough to eventually fix Hell even if I hadn't showed up. I can turn you into a catboy if you want to be one, Nethys says you 'already are one a lot of the time' whatever that means."

"I think I'll be fine without that." She what. Okay, He can orient fine there and being in Nessus is weird.

"Anyway, there's a bunch of more Good or Neutral-but-fine gods that are dead. Like Acavna, and Amaznen, and Tsukiyo, and Shizuru, who went catatonic when He died and Him being resurrected might be enough to get Her back?" They can make a no-longer-dead-gods assembly line!

"And yes, we have afterlives. Nine of them, one per alignment, except some special cases, people who die go to whichever one Pharasma think they were. We're in Nessus, the ninth layer of Hell, the Lawful Evil afterlife, although most people who come here now decide to move to Nirvana, the Neutral Good one, pretty fast. People who are Neutral Evil can choose to go here. Iomedae is working on a plan for the Abyss, the Chaotic Evil one, I think She's working with one of the demon lords."

Well, He's very welcome. Go with God, Aroden.

Right. Another True Resurrection on Tsukiyo, if that maybe gets them two for the price of one, and then she'll hold off and wait for the assembly line, whatever that is. 

"Thank You for explaining, I do truly appreciate it." Wondering about how in God's Name all this can possibly work can wait a moment even though she is baffled and intensely curious. There are dead gods and active afterlives in which she might just possibly be able to make an actual difference, not the ineffable spiritual condition of privation of God and the depredations of the Powers Below which are the domain of the kingdom to come to repair, not some monstrous pit, places she can potentially help right now. If there was ever a time to orient and act at once, it's now.

 "The Abyss - anything to do with that god of pain and darkness?"

Iomedae - sounds ever so slightly eerily familiar. Working with demon lords... There was supposedly that one time ever they successfully converted a demon. Supposedly. 

Well, it's worth a try, anyway. Possibly prayer works the same way. 

Iomedae? Status of Abyss plan? 

Asmodeus, this mortal isn't going to do things on Golarion or other planets that cost budget to affect, right? At least not without it counting as Someone's agent?

Yeah, being in Nessus means I could have told her anything and unlike you Lawful types I can't make legible that I didn't.

She'll show up in person, she's much better than most gods at god-induced-headache mitigation but there's no reason to bother with that in the first place.

Is Beryllia afraid? Does she want to be? Only the second one matters in Her presence.

They help Tsukiyo get oriented. Shizuru confirms that She's not in very good shape after all these millennia and Iomedae seems to have been doing a good job so far, She doesn't want Heaven back.

"Zon-Kuthon has His own afterlife, Xovaikain. He gets Lawful Evil people who worshipped Him, which wouldn't be that bad if He didn't have a country that's been doing that for almost ten thousand years. You're working on that one too, right?"

"Yes, the Glorious Reclamation is planning on shifting to dealing with them as soon as they're done with getting Cheliax stable."

"The plan for the Abyss is that Nocticula isn't actually attached to being Evil, and if She could make the Midnight Isles large enough to catch everyone who goes there they could move somewhere nicer."

"What's the limit on your resurrection throughput, could it be recharged with a Pearl or Runestone of Power?" She provides one of each.

Yes, always. She genuinely hadn't thought about it in a long time, but she's always afraid, her job is objectively concerning/existentially terrifying. She isn't sure how useful the fear is, it's certainly the case that she has a lot to be afraid of, and it wouldn't be a good idea to be reckless. And - there is an argument that she would be less herself if she weren't afraid, and what a cleric is is both herself and the divine. But then, in Iomedae's presence - she will at least try not being so, thank you. 

...It doesn't immediately feel very different, that's good. She'll see what difference it makes.

"If something bad happened to Xovaikain - how big is it? - would You get all the prisoners showing up here? We have some higher-end destructive options He might not see coming - we could attack His cult metaphysically but that doesn't help the ten thousand years' worth."

She doesn't think she's suddenly being too reckless with higher mysteries just because of the courage effect, but she's watching herself closely. 

"Clerics - sort of go out of harmony as we do miracles, we recover with rest and prayer and communion and so on. Resurrections are almost never normally done but I imagine I could do a few more of those today, probably not more than a dozen, and that's all I could do today."

She highly doubts those will work, but she'll try - 

It's not the good old days any more, there's no way they're compatibilising two superficially-similar but deeply-divergent metaphysical systems on the fly in an extracosmic cat-based Hell, come on Beryllia.

(Neither the Pearls nor the Runestones help.)

"The main problem with destroying Xovaikain is that it's His divine realm. He's much stronger inside it and Everyone else is much weaker. If we can resurrect Anyone He kills and He can't I think we can get enough power to win anyway."

"Is it the sort of thing that can be used more if you wear items that make you more Cunning, or Wiser, or more Splendid?"

"Do you have the Crown of Infernal Majesty?"

"No, it destroyed itself when He died."

"Does it go based on time somewhere else, or could you go somewhere that has a day pass for every ten minutes outside of it and refresh it that way?"

"Is there anything important in Xovaikain or is it touching anywhere important? If You can distract Him and we raid the Vaults for enough of the right kind of sealed horrors we can probably, er, end its usefulness as a prison fairly quickly."

"...I did not know there were such items. Except arguably these." She gestures at her robes. "I think... I think that would probably help a great deal, yes. It's based on time and recovery from my perspective - if such a place is possible, there's no reason I can think of it wouldn't work."

Here, have a Headband of Mental Superiority +6.

"This area of Nessus is at normal time relative to the Material, how about we have the rest of the conversation in a different part."

Her domain is under Her full control, they don't Teleport, the walls just have different designs now (still not cats).

"We can Wish you up farther than that, but it'd take some pit fiends. They're still Evil, there's just no way to turn them back into the petitioners they once were. Unless you have one. Do you have a way to do that? Doing it without them would cost a lot more budget if you affected something budget-bound but I suspect after today that won't really be an issue."

INT 14 -> 20

CHA 15 -> 21

WIS 26 -> 32.

...Well. How about that. That is seriously, seriously impressive magic, resurrecting gods feels a little paltry now.

She is getting the distinct sense - no, she can feel it, a little dimly at first and then with clarity, of course - that the crown is reaching into her and accelerating parts of her - Cunning, Wisdom and Splendour, are the obvious guesses - in a way that's distinctly uneven, even specialised, the way brilliant wizards often can't tie their own shoes or add numbers in their heads, that makes sense - she is moving from thought to thought much faster which would be potentially extremely dangerous if she weren't also far better at steering them. 

It is maybe not exactly the capacity for divinity but it is pretty damn good. 

"This definitely helps. Thank You. Pit fiends used to be petitioners - souls of the dead, I infer - right, it depends on if they're meaningfully the same person, I speculate they could simply be resurrected, Power Word: Heal would definitely do it if they were willing but trades off against resurrections. If we're talking significant fractions of the whole population that's a job for Heaven Itself. Are there priority warped ex-mortals to restore?"

"Pit fiends are mostly made from around twenty different souls, all mashed together. I don't think there's anyone that's now part of one that would be more useful than the marginal Good god."

Fifteen pit fiends come in. "You're ready? This will be a little less of an increase than the headband gives."

"Well, You win the prize for most horrifying sentence I've heard this week. I think I will not use my newfound mental powers to think that one through just yet. Resurrection should definitely work, then."

She's ready. 

And over the next thirty seconds, fifteen Wishes get cast. They go in five smaller jumps.

INT 25/WIS 37/CHA 26 makes the spikiness much more apparent, but it also makes ordering and prioritising come more effortlessly to her. 

She is more herself, like this, in some ways. In the back of her mind she can be reviewing her own life - there are, of course, failures obvious in hindsight, 

"If a day in ten minutes is possible I can very comfortably do a hundred resurrections in a sidereal hour like this. Enough to kill Zon-Kuthon with acceptable casualties? Can petitioners be destroyed in Xovaikain or the Abyss?" 

That had not occurred to her before, it sounds almost grammatically wrong to suggest destroying a soul, which is silly, but there's no way she could miss it now. 

...She is leaning into a vague semi-conscious imagination of what a Greater Beryllia would sound like, not actually being herself, which is silly so she stops it.

But it is so much easier to hold things clearly in her mind and articulate them.

"The resources I have on this scale are mostly useful for breaking things, or at best making large, blunt changes. Actual governance and operations and... building, keeping up civilisation," we're much worse at, or rather "- we're fucked."

"Petitioners that are killed don't show up anywhere. As far as we know, they're just gone. The Neutral Evil afterlife eats everyone who goes there but almost all of them choose to go to Hell instead, and then Nirvana."

"What's so hard about building civilization? You need to make sure that you have trustworthy institutions, and ways to verify that they're trustworthy to people outside them, and non-stupid policies, and that's mostly enough. Most places have never had those but once you build them they stick around. You can get a lot of it done on the strength of truth-detecting magic alone."

"Right. Horrifying. Rules out a lot of possibilities. How's our intelligence on Xovaikain? How centralised is it? First thought, there's - a Doom that spreads exponentially in cities and captures souls, burns out at low population density but otherwise hard to stop. Means making a deal with a Necromancer but worth it if we can distract Zon-Kuthon enough. With the time-warping it could be seeded... maybe fifty times each hour, low confidence. Ah, Asmodeus, would You mind taking all the refugees at once? I'm not totally sure what it does with the souls otherwise."

"...The easiest truth-detecting magic in my world is extended attention from a specialised Enchantment wizard who is completely trustworthy, and the Inquisition is using both of those. - Hyperbole, but not by much. Even then it's not totally reliable, I bet I could beat it. There's one whole trustworthy institution and we're busy. Though possibly our policies are in fact stupid. ...Also, last time real civilisation happened the universe nearly ended."

"Zon-Kuthon in the seat of His power can cancel fifty attempts an hour easily, millions might give Him trouble. I'm happy to take any hypothetical refugees that don't prefer Nirvana but I don't think anyone that isn't a god is getting out of there intact."

"And you don't know what almost ended it because if you think about it too hard mysterious bad things happen?" She can do basic pattern-recognition.

"The easiest truth magic here is Abadar's Truthtelling, He gives it to His clerics at first-circle, it's very easy to resist but unless they use rare countermeasures it's visible when someone does. We don't seem to be able to mimic what you did before but maybe you could copy our spells? I also give Mark of Justice, which curses the person who has it if they violate the conditions it's given with, at a circle lower than usual."

"Make more trustworthy institutions. One is not enough, not if it doesn't have the slack to address everything that needs one".

"Right. I'm assuming He is a god and fundamentally incapable of surrendering and letting them go in exchange for His life or some other arrangement, and I should check that assumption?"

"In that case we can't think about it very well. Part of it was just an enormous explosion, but there were definitely far worse parts we don't know much about."

"If we had First-Circle clerics with truth magic that could be enough. I tried to look at Your version of Wish and it looked completely and totally unlike anything I'd ever even imagined, so I'm not hopeful, but if that works..."

Make more trustworthy institutions, as though that's a straightforward primitive-action like doing a miracle.

"We're trying, that's what our kingdoms are, but we don't have the slack to make them trustworthy even if we knew how. Is there a way without truthspells?" It's much easier, like this, to map out in her head all the tensions that conspire to trap them where they are, possibly she could see a way out...

"He isn't going to do that, and also if we kill Him we might be able to resurrect Dou-Bral instead."

"It's a lot harder, and almost impossible if there are hostile forces trying to corrupt everything you do. Kingdoms basically never work, barring immortal rulers or other ways of preventing succession crises. You want to either have a mechanism that means the people in charge will never be Evil and/or stupid, or a way to have being in charge not be enough to do much damage before being replaced, ideally both. You need to straightforwardly tell everyone your reasons for doing things, I don't know what's up with knowing too much causing problems but if people can't follow your reasoning they won't have trust in your competence or intentions. You need to have a long-running reputation for honesty and not making people worse off for dealing with you, you can't really get there without a lot of time passing but it's worth it. You need the laws to be very simple and very short, you need to have unbribable judges but without magic the closest you can get is judges that don't have any particular immunity to being themselves tried and will be tried if they're caught. Having everyone be literate is nice if you can pull it off but it's hard to if they aren't already."

"Here's the spellform for Abadar's Truthtelling, even if you can't replicate it I assume Abadar is going to be very interested in opening trade relations and local clerics are going to be a part of that."

Apparently "WIS 37", which Beryllia does not know is significantly higher than some things called gods, is enough to sort of - intuit what a spellform is and what this one probably does, at a glance. And to know that it is indeed entirely different from any kind of magic she's seen, and that she is not sure how one would go about doing it, and that at this level she could probably at least begin to crack what's going on with the gods and whether it's possible for Them to do this and if so why They haven't already, and to notice that that would constitute theology and be stupid. 

"Ah. We have a lot of those. Some of them are what we are trying to build civilisation out of. It has been done before, but - the only mechanism we have for making sure people in charge aren't evil or stupid is 'use clerics', we are trying to get more clerics but it's slow going. Most people are literate, we've pushed that hard and we do seem to have more witches than we used to. ...In retrospect it was way too easy, Gospeltongue itself is ancient magic somehow, clearly. The Church doesn't make people worse off for dealing with us, realistically most people trust us because we saved their baby brother's life when he was born or grew their mother's hand back or something, but I can't imagine how a government would do that even with the unbelievably impressive intelligence magic, possibly it'll be obvious once I'm used to it, I'm being cautious around possibly-dangerous thoughts for now."

She will memorise Iomedae's list of criteria, still marvelling at how effortless that is. It has been done, in her world and presumably this one. 

"Abadar? We would be fantastically excited for trade."

"Assuming your clerics don't work differently than ours do, they're not really the right way to establish people as trustworthy, except for gods that don't mind having to restrict themselves to Lawful clerics. The thing you want for that is paladins. Not making people worse off for dealing with you is a large part of what Law is for, you want governments to be capable of making promises they'll actually keep, including confidentiality promises, you want that either you don't have an inquisition or if there's no other way to deal with Evil gods and cultists for anyone they arrest to have the option to defend themselves under a truthspell, which they'll only be charged for if they're found guilty. You need governments to be stable, it's more important for a lot of things that people be able to predict what the rule will be than that it will be any specific way. Abadar's holy book is approximately just a list of a bunch things like this, here's a copy, you can read it while waiting to refresh your slots." Behold, the Manual of City-Building.

"Thank You. There are conflicting definitions of Law -" she starts sorting them out in the back of her mind as she talks, she can do that now - they're talking about different things, aren't they - "It's not immediately obvious to me even like this why any of them is more important than Good. Truth spells do seem like the major infrastructure here, I don't know if the Old Kingdom had them but I suspect not. ...I think from experience I'd prefer, for example, the abolition of slavery unreliably enforced, over its predictable legality, from what I'm inferring I'd be surprised if Abadar disagreed, but I'll read it, thank you, I'll need to do something as I recover from resurrections anyway. If Abadar's offering cheap truth Spells and a way to make the temporal power fucking behave itself we'll make it worth His while - I'll get in some of Moradin's clergy."

"Well, to start off you need to keep in mind that Law is a concept Pharasma made up that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what people actually care about—"

"Yup!"

"And there are a lot of things that affect whether Pharasma will judge people as Lawful that aren't very meaningful. That said, if you're having to pick between Law and Good that means you're bad at Law. The part of Law that actually matters, which is significantly narrower than Law-as-will-make-you-ping-Detect-Law, is about being the kind of entity that cooperates whenever possible, even with your enemies, as long as there's any way for you to both end up better off than you'd each be if cooperation was impossible. Or, more broadly, of having policies, not direct values, and only using values to set the policies. That includes always keeping your commitments, even when it's no longer in your immediate interests to do that, because the kind of entity that does that can be trusted to keep up their side of deals and that's necessary for a lot of them. It includes being able to not act on information you were given in confidence in any way, because if you're going to act on confidential information you won't get any of it. There are more complicated ways Law helps things but those are the really important ones."

"I expect Abadar will be happy to build civilization in another place, He'll mostly want that, and also visibility on books, he keeps a copy of every work of mortal hands in the First Vault but He doesn't have anything from where you're from, He can't see it yet."

"Yes, 'a heathen -' ah, 'an unallied god made it up' does sound about right. What You describe would be extremely unlawful as most mortals and apparently Pharasma would understand it, in my world, outside holy lands it would... possibly mean dying in a doomed rebellion, on the logic that one might reasonably sooner starve than sell oneself for a scrap of bread - there should be a way to state that formally, hmm - but, yes, that sounds like Law. We do have the concept of commitments, we don't generally make ones we won't break if we need to, but we make that clear. And we have the Seal of the Confessional. But if some of this version is how it's done - well, clearly it wasn't going to come from our current strategies, was it."

"Thank You. For everything. What's the timeline on the assault on Zon-Kuthon? Compatible with contacting the Church and the Five Gods first in the preparation time, or should it be now? Will He notice Aroden and Tsukiyo and Shizuru being back?"

"Pharasma counts following laws as Lawful by default, there are exceptions but it's the default, following laws unless you have a specific reason to break them is usually a good idea but it's not that related to the important parts of Law. That example doesn't really sound like it involves Law? It's just trading off which whether you'd rather be dead or enslaved, at no point are you cooperating with counterfactual versions of yourself. If you don't make unbreakable commitments than you won't get the benefits of being known to have made them but if your commitments will be exploited by hostile forces and you can't outsource asking whether you should commit to something to your gods that might be the best option."

"He probably has. There isn't really anything He can do about it but if there's no reason to wait we can go kill Him now."

"I heard there was an invading-Xovaikain party? I've never died doing the right thing as a god before, I want in."

"If things here start shaking around it means that I'm dead and Nessus is getting unstable, just resurrect Me and it'll be fine."

"Pharasma is wrong. ...Hold on, if I say, 'In my formal legal capacity as Her Deliverance the Most High Priestess of Sirenna, speaking ex cathedra from the Most Holy Hand of Heaven as a Vicar of God with acknowledged sovereignty over all Persons everywhere in matters temporal and spiritual, it is illegal to follow Zon-Kuthon', does She mark them all Chaotic and keep them out of Xovaikain? I can back it up with all sorts of solid reasons why it reasonably predictably violates doctrinal law and so on. If so, let it be."

"I think you are cooperating with counterfactual selves. If you'll refuse to be exploited instead of traded with fairly even when it would locally benefit with you, like if you slightly prefer slavery over death, fewer people will try to enslave you."

"Of course. Well met, Whoever You are - Abadar? Aroden again? - you might get the chance to do that a few times."

"Cayden Cailean, The Lucky Drunk, at your service."

"No, it's about whether there's a legal code you follow, not whether there are ones you don't."

"If you prefer slavery to death, either the market is blocked from giving you non-slavery solutions or you're not being exploited. If the person making the offer is involved with whatever is blocking it than making it be the case that they can't benefit from restricting your options would be a classically Lawful choice, that's a standard case of not rewarding threats, as long as doing that didn't benefit them except for eliminating better options you would have had."

Yeah, she didn't expect that to work, but it would have been silly not to try, just in case Pharasma did in fact respect stupid legal technicalities, it is not objectively any more ridiculous than the alignment thing. 

Beryllia has been too grown-up to harbour a personal bias against slavery when the future of the world is at stake for a while. "I think I see what You mean about the market - I can imagine a scenario in which slavery is in fact a fair trade one should accept instead of dying so as to be less exploitable, though I doubt it happens in real life often. ...I think we will simply make sure the question does not arise."

"And, Cayden Cailean, well met. Let me make a report and get someone to another secure location to resurrect me if Zon-Kuthon gets creative and lucky and then let's kill Him."

"There are hundreds of solars in different places already on that, if nothing else it would be a catastrophe if He or another Evil god managed to Dominate you. Report away."

"Inferring rapidly, I suspect that would require a large fraction of His attention but this would absolutely be worth it so thank You. ...I should still take extra precautions against being as dead as Aroden used to be."

Sending: 'safe' was a substantial understatement, they can solve our problems but have a god Who needs killing, helping with that and initiating trade, get Khemez. 

Abadar, right? Can You protect My mortal associate here? Trade You for it.

I want all your books, and recordings, and movies, and inventions, and programs (do you have those? Here's how they work). Protecting her isn't free, but Aroden will pay for it out of what He owes her for resurrecting Him, so you're fine.

That can be arranged. I am familiar with the concept but that exact implementation is novel and masterful. I predict Beryllia would pay to protect this one too, or You can have some ancient dwarven preliminary god-design schematics for it.

Would 'Axis' like to pay for some resurrections that don't care what a 'Pharasma' thinks should happen in the form of some actual complete texts on wealthlore, please. 

Deal. Pleasure doing business with you.

You understand that having that knowledge will restrict your ability to act in ways that affect [list of planets he's never heard of] without paying for the intervention?

Is it all right if he simply doesn't apply this knowledge to affecting those places? He can do a good job of that by mortal standards anyway, and an actually correct job of it with the Regalia of Moradin.

Do you mind taking off the Mind Blank or whatever it is that's making it hard for Abadar to verify that you're capable of doing that?

Of course. It's - this sort of shape in him, he'll hold that thought up in case it makes things cheaper. 

Yup, that's a trustworthy Lawful mortal, pity it's taken.

Here, this is a retinal screen, you operate it like this, and this is how you get to the books, this one explains how to use it in more detail, come by again!

:D

D: 

It becomes apparent that their 'economic policy' is distinctly suboptimal. 

Time-dilated saferoom, then. Can they securely tell her which gods are currently dead, or should she just cycle through all the allied ones a few times every day / sidereal ten minutes?

"We can just have people with Sending in all the relevant divine domains, no need to count on what happens in Xovaikain. Is there anything else left to do or can I find out whether dying as a god is as fun as it was back when I was just a guy who could swing a sword really hard?"

"Ready when You are. Good luck. ...Want to bet You can do it in less than nine lives?"

"I couldn't, not on My own. I won't be, though, so maybe."

"I might not even die once, it depends on if He focuses on me or the rest of us."

"You're on. And - it will not be for very long if so. ...Go with God, uh, Asmodeus."

She has a book to read, and possibly some gods to raise. 

Okay, everyone, we're starting from My divine realm.

Can She open a Gate to Xovaikain on Her own?

No.

Can She open a Gate to Xovaikain with the help of—

Cayden, which isn't much but He's trying as hard as He can.

Iomedae, Who has even less than Him.

Aroden, empowered with the absorbed essence of Acavna and Amaznen, Who only lost because His allies betrayed Him.

Apsu, who isn't just going to sit around while this all goes down, and doesn't need to conserve power for Dahak ever since Caina stopped hosting Him.

Sarenrae, Who fought Rovagug with Dou-Bral and wants Him back.

Shelyn, Who's been trying to get Her brother back since before Aroden was born, and will go to war as long as that's the goal of it.

Ragathiel, Who is weaker than even Iomedae but is not going to miss out on a chance to smite some Evil.

And Desna, and Shizuru, and Tsukiyo, and various other gods.

Yeah, He's not blocking that.

He kills Asmodeus twice (this started from Her domain, thus it's all Her fault) and all the non-ancient gods once by the time they're done. 

Everyone else in Xovaikain is dead, at least until they get to them in the resurrection queue, assuming they decide it's what they would want.

Turns out it's just as fun!

He is going to be the most successful paladin in eight hundred years and he did nothing to earn it. That's a good thing but it's not how he pictured it happening.

"You can try resurrecting Dou-Bral now, in My realm, given that you got Me and not the old version it should be distinguishable but we might as well do it somewhere He'll lose if there's a difference."

...This Manual of City-Building is, ah, quite the book. She has as many as several ideas for applying it and she's glad Moradin has a friend out here somewhere in all the infinities. She still isn't sure how you solve the problem of the wise and judicious ruler who understands Abadar's teachings also having to be the toughest bastard around to survive. 

The local Good gods (!) will have thought of this and be ready but just in case, she prays to Sirenna to yank her out of there just in case she is about to drop Zon-Kuthon right on top of herself.

True Resurrection, on Dou-Bral Who once was. 

Where is He.

What has He done.

I forgive You.

Lets go back to Nirvana.

"With that done, we can focus on your universe and its problems. What are the main ones, other than the Asmodeus situation?"

How long have You got. 

Well, it's far easier to sort and prioritise now, for all that she should be careful what she thinks about too hard.

Deep breath. 

"God is broken and being put back together wrong. Creation came from God sacrificing perfection to enable imperfect Creation to exist - the idea is to somehow at once remain ourselves and ascend back, that's what Heaven means - which implies it's possible to lose, and we seem to be. The Church is the manifest body of Heaven and it's dying slowly. The underlying structure of the world is alien and dangerous, the cracks in the Divine. The Five Gods can birth galaxies but not solve our infrastructure problems for some reason it's probably dangerous to think about. There's a lot of that going around, that doesn't help. We are sitting on top of dozens of apocalypses and we're starting to lose track of the seals. ...Ah, specifically, concretely, we're losing territory all the time and not controlling what we do have as much as we'd like."

"It's weird that there are things that are dangerous to think about, I don't think anything from the Dark Tapestry would be able to affect me through Pharasma's Seal and Spire, let alone in My divine realm, but how about we don't test that just yet."

Cayden?

"You called?"

"How do you feel about doing some testing on the things that are dangerous to think about?"

"Is it risky and important? I love risky, dangerous, important adventures."

"Yes."

"Okay, so what things are you not thinking through the implications of but can tell me themselves, or if you want I could just read your mind if you take off the Regalia, but I generally don't do that on the first date, it's fine."

"If you're going to make jokes like that you should pick funnier ones. Also, You totally do."

"Some of them might not only be dangerous to You. I suspect some of them benefit the Powers Below in some way. ...Pharasma's Seal is interesting, I have no idea how that would interact. Relatively safe ones... it's not clear why there are Five Gods. Why not Three or Four or Ten? No satisfying explanations. Or - hmm. God of the sun or the moon implies that they're abstract and universal things, but they seem not to be, we thought that one was safe until the skull episode. ...I wouldn't mind, killing Zon-Kuthon together goes a little further than a first date, I just worry one of them tips off the worse Asmodeus or something."

"If I don't let You read my mind after this it changed Me in a self-protecting way and You have My permission to do it anyway."

Okay, what the fuck is up with her universe's situation. Does it make Him insane(er, He is still drunk, if you don't want to end up like that you should make sure to ascend while sober)?

Well, it's not fundamentally made out of physics at all, is the main problem. There were some interesting efforts in that direction, where it would have been useful. But basically it's made out of relationships and symbolism and stuff. The Regalia don't make you invisible and a god can physically see that this far from Mechanus Beryllia is not actually made out of cells.

Extrapolating with god-o-vision, thinking the wrong thoughts puts you into the wrong sorts of relationships. Some of it is mortals struggling to handle weird thoughts that imply they should do silly things, sure, possibly that guy accidentally invented some weird parts of decision theory, but lots of it is that weird thoughts might count as prayers or worse.

Cells are kind of boring anyway. So the problem is a combination of mortals not being secure systems and there being entities that can mess with them directly if they think about them too much, and that they presumably don't have to spend budget to do that? Neither of those are a problem for Him or Asmodeus if that's all.

He'd see what He was missing if He scoured His face off the knowing needs to get inside! the Seal of Pharasma is made out of stuff but She is not and She is a little bit here now He's been thinking about Her hello what is this Her feet never touch the ground She only steps in Your soft vulnerable brain or alllll along the Seal that's what Pharasma did isn't it-

He doesn't have a 'soft vulnerable brain'. Or any other sort of brain, for that matter. He's a god, and a god of freedom at that, it is not in His nature to be chained, at least not without a safeword and all. This would totally have cooked His mortal self though.

Otolmens? There's a soul-sucking thing from the Dark-Tapestry that needs to be squished.

STOMP.

He could have done that on His own but Otolmens had a better chance of finding every last bit of it.

"I think non-gods should indeed not think too hard about things like this but We'll be fine. You can confirm now."

Peek. "Yup, He's clean."