ridiculous premise #76
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Guns? No. But the plague was one of the enemies Alfirin and Iomedae were expecting to face on Golarion. Alfirin was not able to memorize all of pharmacology, but Tetracycline synthesis was an obvious choice, to cover the gaps in penicillin's effectiveness. Lastwall's been stockpiling the stuff for the next plague outbreak for almost a year now, and if they don't have enough for a regular widespread outbreak they have enough for the army and to supplement the clerics working in Andoran, and between Abadarans enticed by cold hard cash and Pharasmins ticked off about Tar-Baphon and foreign Good clerics who are... Good... and perfectly willing to go treat plague victims if someone else can arrange transportation, that's a lot more clerics than Manohar was probably expecting.

 

Also it won't do Andoran any good now but in a year or two if the swarms are still a problem they'll have DDT. She and Iomedae had originally decided learn how to synthesize it to kill all the mosquitos eventually, but she had already decided to accelerate the timeline so it could be used at the Worldwound, mixed with holy water. Because fuck you, Deskari.

 


 

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Even if you could get their clones (and Alfirin has an idea of how to get their clones), Abrogail Thrune and Aspexia Rugatonn are hard to assassinate. The palace in Egorian is enormous, substantially Forbiddanced, substantially Teleport Trapped, substantially underground. Its staff are mindread and closely monitored. Much of the staff has permanent arcane sight and will notice magic items. People who shouldn’t have any spells up are routinely sent down hallways that dispel them. Both the Most High Priestess and Her Infernal Magistrix go around with guards, and both of them are very powerful in their own right and wearing spectacularly expensive bracers of armor, and no one can get into melee range of them unexpectedly without being murdered.

 

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Cansellarion has four people in the palace in Egorian. They don’t tend to live very long,  sometimes because they get caught and sometimes because the rate of murder of staffers not suspected of treason in the palace in Egorian is fairly high. They report via regular scries, during which they’ll hum lullabies and nod or shake their head in response to message questions. Three of them are people too weak for an alignment reading, in roles without much secure access and with less close surveillance; the fourth is a paladin of Iomedae's with an item that masks his alignement, who is allowed to haul heavy things to secure areas by virtue of being able to pass detect thoughts screening; he has fairly severe brain damage most of the time and is observably too stupid to be planning anything.

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He smuggles two guns in, special ones carefully designed to look like a metal measuring tool with moving parts, needed for some construction. The guns aren’t magical; the bullets are, but they are in their lead-lined chamber, and won’t show up as such to anyone looking. When a voice says his mother’s name in his ear, he heals himself with Lay On Hands, and briefly remembers his purpose. 

“We need you to shoot Aspexia Rugatonn. It will probably take two shots. There isn’t an exit plan. The other gun is for Nantes.”

He is not fearless by Iomedae’s power (someone could notice the auras, were he that powerful); he’s just, you know, the kind of person who’d do a job like this in the first place. He smiles broadly. 

 

 


 

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It's much easier to soul trap people when they wake, disoriented, in their clones, especially if you have gone ahead and laid some cursed items on the clone three moments ago.


 

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Abrogail Thrune wakes in her clone and re-buffs herself and alerts her guards and takes Aspexia's hand for the Plane Shift to where they'll be regrouping, which is her last mistake.

 

 

 


 

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Felandriel Morgethai considers herself too dignified to do things like shout "why! won't! you ! die! already!" at her enemies but when they learn Razmir sacked Vellumis in a Time Stop again she is very seriously tempted. Instead she and Nefreti, with the magic item from the mysterious third archmage, chase him home, again. He's Mind Blanked but the thing Nefreti's using isn't precisely divination. It is, she says seriously, that it's been done before.

 

This time the plan is to dump him, beaten unconscious and then Baleful Polymorphed, in Nirvana and if Hell wants to try to retrieve him from there it won't be Golarion's problem.

 

 

 


 

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The moment she's done with Abrogail, Catherine possesses Cansellarion. She casts her spells; a maximized time stop, a wish to bring them inside the forbiddance. A limited wish from her staff to destroy some of the intervening walls, and a second that she casts herself using Alex' blood to power it in place of a diamond to punch the rest of the way through. (He's a paladin. He has blood going spare.) She gives Alex back his hands to make his first attempt before she has to cast another time stop -

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It's a little strange, being in a time stop. There's a pit fiend frozen in place almost within arm's reach. He can see two more by the gate… Second Alfirin said he'd have seven or eight moments, and while that should be plenty of time it won't be if he wastes it all staring. He raises Heart's Edge and wills it to unravel the gate. It goes down the first try.

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Catherine casts another time stop. Then a second spell, not one that Cansellarion recognizes. And then a plain old teleport out, forbiddance be damned.

 

 


 

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There are not a lot of people who could convince Lastwall's leadership that at the moment of his great triumph they should assassinate Alexeara Cansellarion for no reason they need to know about, but Marit is one of them. They'll do it very temporarily, obviously. 

 

 

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Powerful paladins are very hard to kill, but this is a fact about the world which was much more true two years ago. No one is very hard to kill right now.

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They raise him. Some people in the room look apologetic, but Marit is too much of a spyglass archon for facial expressions and also wouldn't have looked apologetic even when he was human.

 

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"I am confused." Usually your allies do not kill you and then immediately raise you. It was one of Iomedae's clerics doing the raise, so he's sure it's not nefarious, but he still has no idea what it actually is.

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"I'm not sure how our friend's relevant powers work," Marit says, "but believe them not to be robust against a person dying and getting raised."

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"...I didn't tell anyone that that was part of the plan… and I wasn't aware that she was using those powers regularly."

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"We are differently specialized," Marit agrees. "...congratulations."

 

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"Thank you. I take it they haven't launched any response yet?" Saiville shot him before they had gotten to that part of the conversation.

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"The remaining powerful people we're tracking fled for the Worldwound, including the pit fiends we'd identified. As far as we can tell, it's over."

 

 


 

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"I have good news and bad news on the radio today. The bad news is that Abrogail Thrune is no longer among our listeners. The good news is that this is because the forces of the Glorious Reclamation trapped her soul and finished conquering her country. …really a lot more good news than bad news, there, I guess. Anyway, the fighting in Egorian is over, the fighting around Ostenso is over, the neutral arbitrators responsible for determining who is in charge of Cheliax for the sake of determining who has the command of its Worldwound forts has determined that it's Lord Marshal Cansellarion, and you might think there's not all that much more to do.

You'd be wrong, though. Nearly all of the work of our lives is still ahead of us. Cheliax is free, but it's poor, because Asmodeus impoverished it, and it's damaged, because Hell did everything in its power to rip up the traditions and habits and virtues that made a people stand up to him. The churches that ought to minister to the Chelish people have all been uprooted; the local leadership who ought to have advocated for them and served them are all avaricious idiots at best and tyrannical sadists at worst. It's going to be a long journey. But at least the part of it that's about killing each other at spectacular scale is mostly over. At least from here the way to move forward is by building. 

I can tell you more of the truth, now, about where I’m from. I’m from Cheliax, from the archduchy of Menador, but when I was fifteen a magical accident picked me up and dropped me somewhere else. It says in The History And Future of Humanity that all of the stars in the sky are other suns like our sun, and about them are other worlds like our worlds, full of people both more and less alien than you would imagine; and it is on one of those worlds that I found myself, and saw the things that Golarion could grow up to be. I know that republics can work, I have seen a place where they do. I know how rich the world can get, and how fast the world can get that rich, and I’m going to see it done here, in our lifetimes, for the benefit of our children. It will take a million hands and a million minds and a million inventions, and we have them. 

And I can tell you now about airplanes. On Earth, you see, the world I visited, there are no wizards and the gods empower no priests, and all their great beasts are long dead, and so you might think that people could not fly. But people want to fly; it’s in our nature. If the world doesn’t hand us the strength we invent it ourselves. They jump off cliffs with cloth wings - don’t do that - and rise in baskets powered by heated air - tune in next week if you want to learn how to do that. 

Airplanes are built out of purely mechanical parts, there's no magic to them, and built well they can fly a Teleport's length in less than two hours, and fly across the oceans to the distant continents in six. I've been wanting to build them for ages, but while Hell had my homeland in its clutches other matters had to come first. But now, we're going to have airplanes. You'll see them in the sky sometimes, like a bird whose wings don't move, soaring eight miles up in the sky because the air's thinner there and that lets them travel faster. 

Asmodean Cheliax could never have had airplanes, because they are a complicated endeavor that requires people to do a good job on hard complicated work that if it fails will fail only years later, and tyrannies do terribly at that; and because the building of them in the first place required madly ambitious and frankly silly people to spend all their time trying more and more elaborate ways to attach a motor to a wooden frame and try to make it go fast enough it'd stay in the air, and only free people have the nerve, and the creativity, and the conviction that it is their birthright and their destiny to soar through the skies.

Some people believe that the heavens are up in the skies above us. In a strict sense, this is false. No airplane can convey you to paradise. But in another sense, I think that this is true, because the voice inside you that cries out to try a thousand different ways to reach the heavens by your own strength is the voice that builds paradise and the one that carries us there.

I have seen the tops of clouds. I was not surrounded by wizards and nobles and important people; I was surrounded by crying babies, and tired parents, and dockworkers and bookkeepers, all of us paying a few weeks' wages to soar across the continent to wherever our missions carried us. The waitresses handed out aluminum cans of apple juice. Heaven's not up there, but at the same time, it kind of is.

I want to congratulate you, people of Cheliax, even if the only thing you did in the war was hide away and survive it, even if you served your evil queen until she met her evil end. You are free, now, and being free means it's your choice what to do from here. You can do profoundly stupid things with your freedom if you'd like. But you made it here, to this crossroads, and I'm glad for you, and I am eager to see what you choose to make of your lives from here, and I really do believe that most people choose goodness, and progress, and airplanes and blazing ambition, when they're free to choose at all."

 


 

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Lilia returns from Vudra and gets oriented.

….well.

Wow.

She really wasn't expecting any of that, but most especially the signs of her mother openly aiding the Reclamation. 

 

"Where am I needed now?"

 

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"We won, in no small part thanks to you. You can retire, if you want. That's not a trick, or a test."

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If it's not a trick or a test or an order Lilia flatly has no idea what to do with it. She feels…rejected, she thinks. She's aware this is pathetic. "Understood," she says.

 

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"Is it? Do you want to retire, or do you want me to keep using you?"

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"I cannot imagine you have accomplished everything you want, even if this was - a big thing."

(They've stirred up a bunch of hornet's nests, for one thing. It's hard to predict what the demon lords at the Worldwound will do when they see the writing on the wall, but probably not 'go quietly'. Arazni's back in play. Geb is back in play.)

(It's definitely that and not just that it would hurt to be useless.)

 

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