Sending fails cross-plane sometimes, she'll try one more time. 

Nope.

Well, that's ....quite bad news actually. 

She puts the wand back in her haversack. "The civilians are where?"

"Behind the lines," says the blue-and-white armored woman who is now walking through the door, the daggers in her gauntlets now retracted but her voice made to echo by her face-concealing helmet. "Head down that street seven blocks and you'll start finding people taking shelter - you'll forgive me if I don't say where the hospitals are, all the ones the Tyrant knew about he shelled."

She extends a hand. "Countess Ilderia. The Pretender."

(There's an aura of - relaxation, almost, fading tension, that appears when Ilderia walks into the room. She's tense, humming like a wire, and everyone else sees her, calm but energetic, in control, and they all relax because their commander is here and they have faith in her.

It's an effect that may be familiar to Iomedae.)

Uh huh. Is she evil. And is she lying about whether the Tyrant 'shells' the 'hospitals', that's a claim in some ways more important than any about who started the war or who is the nicest person. She extends her own hand. 

"Iomedae. Knight-Commander of the Knights of Ozem. Are you willing to repeat that under truth magic?"

She is not evil!

(... right now. Barely. Give it another week of retaliatory war crimes...)

"Pleased to meet you, Iomedae."

Pause.

"Always."

Iomedae is well aware that when she asks Aroden for special favors they are paid for in catastrophes in some distant place that He could have prevented, if He hadn't chosen to let Iomedae break the rules instead. 

Also she needs to know. 

Zone of Truth?

"The Tyrant destroyed the places where the sick and injured were gathered, on purpose?"

"The Titanium Tyrant targeted and is targeting anywhere and everywhere my soldiers were or are, healthy, injured or sick, using mundane weapons and artillery and superpowers, to wipe out the ability to resist of me and mine and in retaliation for my attempts to assassinate him. This included using explosive weapons on hospitals that contained noncombatants."

Well, that's different. Not good, but different. "Why'd you try to assassinate him."

"For the same reason that nine out of ten people living in Novapest would if they had a chance: Because he is a tyrant, openly and honestly. Because he has farmed out Novapest into a dozen petty tyrannies, and placed unqualified and brutal men with full license to rob and pillage in authority; because his daughter can walk into a street and kill the first man she sees and get nothing but a lecture, and because I was sick of his tyranny. Because one-thirteenth of Novapest is a walled cage where one man in three is tortured until Livia can turn him into her eternal slave. Because one-thirteenth of Novapest is ruled by a traitor who murdered her only benefactor, and another by Fear with a human face, and another by a blackmailer who loots where he likes and tears down what better men built. Because there are better ways a kingdom can be, and because no one else was going to do it."

And that's not all of the things that are important to keep track of, but - it's quite a few of them, and Iomedae does know that they have an audience, and that there is a battle on, and she does not want to test the audience's patience. 

"All right," she says. "I want to help. What do you need?"

"I need to kill the Tyrant and everyone who works for him. What powers do you have, and do they include anything that can deal with someone who can control momentum and wears armor that absorbs energy or someone immune to powers with impenetrable armor who can control the sun?"

Iomedae attempts to translate this into words that make sense. Someone who has energy resistance and also cannot be damaged by weapons as they arrest their movement - there are lots of ways to solve that, but they're not ones she possesses specifically - 

- someone immune to ...magic? with impenetrable armor who can control the sun -

"I'm a paladin," she says. "I'm good at killing evil things. And at negotiating peace, where it can be negotiated. It's fine if my enemies are immune to - powers - but if they are immune to powers and to weapons both then I wouldn't expect I can do much of anything to them. ...is killing someone who can control the sun safe? The sun is very big, and many worlds circle it, not just this one."

"Poor wording; he controls light, not solar fusion, but enough to use all the light that reaches Earth from the sun as a weapon. The Tyrant has a great many knights - those two are just the scariest." She says this with a what-an-interesting-challenge grin. "I don't think negotiating peace will work for either of us - I'm here for his head and he's here for mine, and there won't be peace as long as both of us are alive."

"Paladins are Lawful. We keep terms if we offer them, it's never a bad idea to try to negotiate with us, there may or may not be anything better than trying to kill each other but if there is, we'll find it. I believe you that your Tyrant does not want to retire quietly and I do not have enough context to enable it anyway but if you find yourself at a point where it'd be possible to talk if only either side could trust the other, that's what the gods pick us for. 

Smiting people might get past invincible armor or not, it depends how it works."

She nods. "It does not move or change when struck; instead of moving or changing, it expends energy from a reserve to counteract the force that seeks to move it. Exhausting the reserve is almost impossible, and he has other defensive abilities, just ones easier to overcome."

"I don't think people believe in paladins, here. Something I'd like to change."

"The gods only pick priests? I can see how that might happen if no one was prepared to pay the setup costs. No good guess whether smite bypasses that. It's more likely to than most things."

"Most people I know don't believe in gods. Or find them worth worshipping, if they do." 

"- I think this world works very differently than you're used to."

"Noted. Where do you want me right now."

"- Learning how the world works. Century, give the five-minute speech, he'll tell you when you need it."

And a fresh, firm smile "- Thank you."

(And then she really needs to run off.)

It's a good answer. Iomedae likes her. She turns around to whoever she's supposed to be getting the five-minute speech from.

Century is the guy who was doing most talking!

He's also going to split into two identical people, one of which will collect the squad he was with and head off and the other of whom is going to pull a lightning-bolt badge out of his pocket and hand it to her. "Which of these things are new - guns, Ilderia's armor, me doing this?"

She's boggling at that more than at anything else that's happened. "The effect of the things you shot at me is not new, the mechanism might be. Ilderia's armor is nicer than I've seen before." She takes the badge. "Uniforms are not new, I don't know these colors or this symbol. Bilocation is not new. But only archmages can do it and you're not otherwise acting like an archmage so maybe you're something different."

(Century is a distributed intelligence. He's not much smarter than the human average, but there's more of him, and figuring out that Iomedae thinks she's from a fantasy story took less than thirty seconds after seeing her, even before she said 'archmage'. This may explain some of his actions.)

"The guns are powered by chemical explosions, used to propel fast-moving projectiles that can kill anyone not superhumanly tough or very well armored. The colors and symbol are Ilderia's," he says. That's the simple part.

"- I think that things are very different here. 'Archmage' is not a natural category. Most people with powers have one ability; I can have a hundred bodies, Ilderia controls electricity, the Tyrant is unnaturally clever, a dozen people make armor like Ilderia's. The guns are just normal machines, every soldier without better has one."