Yemma sighs. "There is a way I could let you in. A couple of ways, actually. Three." He extends a finger. "Easy way: if the Enemy were somehow not able to do anything, I could let you in. As long as he wasn't able to do anything about it, it'd be fine. That's probably not going to happen, to be honest." Another finger. "Slow way: go away, get stronger. Way stronger. Strong enough that you won't have to worry about the Enemy following you in. Obviously, that's not very helpful for you."
Kakara looks up at him through her bangs. "...and the third way?"
He sighs, nodding. "Third way. Quick way."
A door opens in the wall to your right. There are stairs inside.
Leading down.
"You take the stairs, and find what you're looking for the hard way," he says.
Kakara stares at the doorway. "...those go down."
"As far down as you can go," he says, nodding. "And they lead where you're thinking. I'll be honest: there are things down there that could rip you apart, shade or not, and they'd be happy to. If I were you, I wouldn't risk it. But if you really want to get into Heaven as fast as you can..." He shrugs. "I don't know that you want to head down there now, though."
Dazarel squirms free of her grip and scampers up onto her shoulders, hiding behind her neck. 'Please no.'
Yemma shoots the lizard a foul look. "I'd be glad to chuck him down there, though."
Kakara stares at the entrance to Hell, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. It looks surprisingly unimposing, for something so important.
After a long moment of thought, she sighs, deflating. "No," she mutters. "You're right. I shouldn't risk it. Not yet, anyway."
"Sorry, kid," he says, grimacing.
Not as such, no, which is the entire problem. Just - keep at it, and we'll figure out how to make it work somehow.
She'll get back to it then, once she grabs another extended death ward. It's really such a convenient spell; for all that it would take an immense number of them to run her dry, she doesn't really fancy having to experience the feeling of shadows and wraiths draining her vitality while she transports them. Unfortunately there aren't any more groups willing to cluster themselves for her convenience after that big one, but she does catch a few more greater undead and necromancers that don't get the memo or fail to flee in time.
All told it's not until late that evening that she's willing to call the job finished, and by that point she'd run the well nearly dry on death wards and had to resort to ignoring shadows until she'd found enough to be worth grabbing all at once inside the few minutes duration still available to her. Judging by the sheer variety of undead she's now catalogued and the extent to which Ustulav's ever-present cursed miasma fogs her Sight, it seems decently likely there are still some left in the country she couldn't find, but few enough that they can almost certainly be dealt with via more ordinary means as they emerge. The closest thing to a complication came in the form of a vampire named Ristomaur Tiriac, who was apparently a legitimate count and barely doing anything illegal by the standards of nobility; killing him for being undead would be one thing, but when she slipped out again Lastwall was still debating if they actually had the legal authority to hold him prisoner without him having committed a crime in their jurisdiction or them having declared war. Presumably they answered the question one way or another, because nobody says anything about it to her before Kakara decides to hunt down a bath and finally get all the dust off her.
It's only once she gets started soaking that Kakara remembers putting the undead on the moon is only a temporary solution and she really ought to find someplace less violating of the rights of prisoners to store them in the next few days. Ugh. She's still glad she didn't kill them all but it would be nice if following her principles was less inconvenient.
It's a fairly nice bath as long as you remember to grade on a curve for the fact that they haven't had an industrial revolution yet; they put her up in the high security diplomatic suites, so it's not as fancy as the setup for trying not to needlessly offend the ambassadors from Oppara and Katheer, but it's private, clean, and has heated water.
About half an hour later, Kakara is feeling a lot better about things. Sure it might not be a perfect solution, but even so it'll still help a lot of people, and she does have time to think of something better before it becomes a real problem. Her not having a good way to deal with sentient undead is also a pretty clear sign that she should really hold off and wait for help before trying to tackle the Nidal or Cheliax problem, and she should probably try and get a better handle on this planet before she assumes that they're wrong and she can totally handle dealing with Arazni and Geb, which leaves her for a bit without anything obvious to do.
She could train now that she approximately has her body back, but she doesn't really have anywhere secret that could stand up to her full power, so she'd be broadcasting what she was doing to anyone who can sense that kind of thing. Which isn't as bad as it could be since she doesn't need to maintain the masquerade here, but still, call that a backup plan. She could see if they need anything instant transmitted, but her understanding is that they actually have a fair amount of teleportation of their own and she freed up most of it with what she did earlier. Alright, if she can't help much and probably shouldn't train, what does that leave?
Hmm. She should work on getting more situated with what this planet's deal is, because just the bits she saw earlier made it obvious that Golarion has a lot going on. In addition to the fact that that means there are probably some problems she could solve fairly trivially if she knew about them, it also suggests there are dangers or roadblocks she ought to be aware of, and ideally also avoid getting into another situation where she starts transporting undead to the moon because she assumes it's uninhabited and then runs into a dozen kinds of people there she has to avoid. If she hadn't checked, she might have accidentally "solved" Ustulav by making it a problem for an entirely new group of people unprepared for it, which is pretty much the opposite of what she wants here. That means tracking down their library, and maybe talking with some historians and theologians and so forth for all the stuff she doesn't have context for.
Plenty of wizards keep incredibly erratic sleep schedules, for all that you'd think them needing eight hours a night would put a stop to that. The library is still open and accepting visitors, at least if they happen to be authorized.
Great, then she's free to enter.
Despite what other comparisons between worlds might suggest, the comparison here is rather less negative towards Golarion than you might expect. Oh, certainly, Garenhuld has mass printing, a far larger literate population, and significantly more state capacity and income to throw around than anyone on Golarion could manage in their wildest dreams, but like the rest of Garenhuld society they are averse to rapid changes. Many of them - particularly public libraries - do serve as community gathering points and organizational structures, but in terms of media their primary content is books and they shelve them just the same as Golarion does. Their more adventurous fellow, meanwhile, has the benefit of thousands of years of extra literary tradition to draw upon, and if they lack mass adoption of movable type and electric lighting they make up for it with scrivener's chant and continual flames. The Vigil library is not what it once was in the days leading up to the Age of Glory when it was run by Aroden's church, but it's still an old, well respected institution that has had plenty of time to build up its collection and a firm understanding of the value and power of the written word. They have aisles and aisles stacked with books, and only the raising of practical complaints like 'people without fly speeds getting access to them' prevented this from extending straight up to the ceilings.
Huh, somehow despite all the ways in which Lastwall seems to have a surprising amount of its shit together for its level of technology, she still hadn't expected that. Maybe due to the sheer military and religious focus of most of their other particularly impressive achievements? Still, she's not going to complain about her task being more feasible than she thought. What have they got in terms of omnibus histories, timelines of magical development, recorded kinds of divine intervention, that kind of deal? She's also blindingly curious about what passes for mass media here and the afterlives, but she has to do some prioritization here, especially since it's not as easy to just go read four of them at once without getting particular notice as it was at home.
Golarion doesn't really have the kind of history that you can fit in the pages of a single work, no matter how ponderous; even if one ignores everything prior to the Age of Destiny due to inadequate records, there's still over eight thousand years to get through. That approach would also involve completely ignoring the fact that Golarion actually had an advanced ancient civilization of the sort that the saiyans only pretend was real on Garenhuld, and that what happened there turned out to be extremely consequential. Still, she's not the only person in history who has wanted a way to get a sense of everything known about the past, and there are some works she can lean on for an extremely broad strokes sketch of everything.
In retrospect, perhaps her expectations about the ways in which Golarion's libraries were lacking was misaimed. For all that their buildings are fine and their contents surprisingly full, the state of their research leaves a lot to be desired. Kakara isn't exactly an academic - despite her mother and Gemina's efforts, she never put more effort into her schoolwork than was necessary to maintain her grades - but even so she still finds the local offerings to come up remarkably short in comparison. Between the omnipresent and visible signs of authorial bias and the seeming allergy many of these authors have to the concept of showing their evidence, she's fairly confident that if she were to use her pastsight on the subject of many of these books she'd find no shortage of evidence that contradicted their claims. They don't even seem to do it in service of some artistic goal like making their work easy to read, or at least not so Kakara can tell through the translation provided by her new magic spells. A quick look at the other sections reveals similar problems with their contents, which is good news when it comes to showing this isn't the result of someone trying to selectively tell her history but very bad news about their ability to do research. The worst part is, between their own lack of records from Earth and how frightened most people back home are of anything new she has no idea if this is normal or not - it feels like the kind of thing that a more normal planet would be better at by this level of technology, but maybe the cause goes the other way around and you need to get better at research methods before you can figure out an industrial revolution?
Whatever, that's not the important bit here. What is important as a takeaway is that several of the things that Lastwall has pointed to as the biggest problems in the world are very new, like infernal Cheliax. which is also a really good sign for how feasible it's going to be to take them apart - a century isn't nothing, but with that little time it'll probably be a lot easier than Nidal as long as she can supply them the necessary force, and nothing in their books on the history of wizards are suggesting she can't. Iomedae mentioned she should try to hold back to about the level of an ordinary ninth circle to not give the game away to Asmodeus early, but from the looks of things even that kind of power is enough to do a lot of shaking up the political landscape as long as they aren't too afraid of being killed. It also suggests that she really ought to see about getting some local guides on the other continents and in the underdark too, since their view seems pretty locally centric - it might be that the biggest problems in Golarion are all in Avistan or on the inner sea, but she ought to check before assuming it. There's also a couple other candidates for high impact interventions on a local scale, like dealing with Treerazer; the elves are apparently doing a pretty admirable job keeping him down, which makes it much less of an impending disaster than the worldwound, but it seems like it's something she can go a long way towards solving just by sending everyone involved back to the Abyss.