Why is this literal god validating and enabling this flagrant disrespect -

Stop. Deep (mental) breaths. She had just realized she wasn't Wise enough to comprehend all the mind of her own goddess. What is she doing, trying to criticize another god, one Whom she hadn't spent her life trying to understand and emulate and obey? There are probably a hundred meanings and purposes to His every word and gesture and He just quoted Arodenite scripture and it may have been meant for her as well and she hasn't studied Aroden at all.

She's making the same fundamental error as the cleric. (Except, you know, a much tinier one.) Spending her time thinking about something that's not really her business to deal with, instead of focusing on the mission and how she can contribute. 

She smiles at Cayden and takes a sip from her hot lemonade. She's pretty sure that he's not just suggesting drinks because they're tied to his godly nature somehow. Sharing drinks and food is a fundamental human bonding activity, and Gord and Irabeth both look like they could do with one of those. She doesn't want to push food on people if they don't want it, though, so she settles for adding a platter of assorted cookies next to the lemonade and snagging a snicker-doodle for herself.

"If that means neither of you have questions to start off with," she begins. "I have questions about ... actually, Irabeth doesn't know the plan, and I'm not sure how much Cayden and Desna know. I prayed about it to Desna, but I'm not sure how much she understood or passed on to Cayden. Should I start with a summary of what I planned to do, and then people can jump in with comments and questions as I go?"

"We know the plan you prayed about to Milani! She helped us translate the rest."

"It's a good plan, considering you were working almost blind! With the gods backing it, it would probably have worked! But you had to make conservative assumptions, so it wasn't nearly ambitious enough. I think we could aim a lot higher."

"Please recap your abilities and your plan for Irabeth, and then I'll go over the problems I see with it, and we'll see if we can come up with something more daring."

"Great! Thank you."

She loves it when other people have clear, reasonable proposals for meeting agendas.

She goes through an explanation of fixity crystals, with specific attention paid to different methods of transporting people, how the existing mind-backup system works, how fast fixity fields propagate, and what magic they've figured out how to replicate. She does little demonstrations at appropriate points as she talks.

"I think that's all the important bits," she says as she finishes. "I can talk more about the preparations we're making to accept demons and other creatures that won't want to live in the existing cities right away, but they really do boil down to just pre-manufacturing a bunch of widely-spaced private habitats so that there won't be a market shock when the population jumps."

Irabeth raises her hand. "If you can duplicate spells and spellcasters and material components, all without limit, and have clones and backups of yourself in many places, that makes you... presumably more powerful than anyone except the gods." Less like a war-game or strategy planning and more like fantastical daydreaming, but accepting the premise - "I'm not very clear on how that power compares to the actual gods? If you spread your fixity field in Creation, could they... fight you?" Would they win?

"An excellent question! Gods don't have anything like the fixity field... that we know of, anyway. We can't make something from nothing, either. But while our power reserves are finite, they are very, very big, when it comes to the ancient gods. And so, we have problem number one: could other gods learn to make fixity fields, once they'd seen yours in action? If they do, could it leverage their existing power and beat your field through brute force? We don't want to rescue everyone on Golarion, only to have Asmodeus conquer the rest of Creation the next day."

"Of course, we'd give it to our allies first! And maybe that would be enough to win the resulting war. But it is such a novel power that we really don't know what would happen. Gods differ in their interests and domains, a lot. There's probably Someone out there whose powers work incredibly well with the fixity field, and we have no idea Who it'll turn out to be."

"Some gods and other powerful beings have a really, really good understanding of physics and magic and all the other laws of the universe - our universe, anyway. Some of them exist to... maintain it, you might say, fix things if anything ever goes wrong. Iomedae thinks we could convince them to enforce a treaty forbidding fixity fields in Creation, if we think it's best."

:Otolmens would forbid the door to Milliways too! She fears everything new because it might destroy Creation. She should not decide what happens.:

"I'm not necessarily against a treaty forbidding fixity fields in Golarion -- although that would be a big cost to pay. My wormholes aren't stable outside a fixity field, so we would be relying on either developing a new way to travel there, or all of our interventions would have to go through the Milliways door, which we don't control and might be easier to blockade," she begins.

"But if we're going to derive a benefit from forbidding fixity fields in Golarion, I think that might prevent us from using them there at all. If I'm understanding what Law is for among the gods correctly, just because the treaty hasn't been agreed to yet is no reason that it shouldn't already bind us."

"I think the right answer probably depends a lot on how easy fixity fields are to reverse-engineer and how much Golarion magic lets us intervene without fixity fields. I know Wish is supposed to be able to do 'anything', but I don't know exactly what that means. Does it seem feasible to replicate the free transport and infrastructure my world enjoys without fixity fields by using sufficient numbers of Wishes?"

"What you're describing isn't Law exactly, it's - more like a set of values that you can use Law for, and not all Lawful gods share those values."

"There are gods who would recompense or reward you for holding yourself in advance to a proposed treaty. Lawful Good ones, because they promise to reward people who behave like that to incentivize cooperation, and Neutral Good ones, because they'll see you doing Good and want to give you more resources for doing Good again, and above all Abadar, who just really values mutually beneficial deals."

"Almost all those gods will be on our side anyway, either in using fixity fields or in promoting a treaty against them, regardless of whether we use them first. Because we all want mostly the same things, and eventually we will agree on whether fixity fields are good or bad on net. Except maybe Abadar, because He'll do almost anything for the right price and I don't know what He'll predict as the result of allowing fixity fields, which determines how He'll price forbidding them, and whether our enemies can outbid us."

"Asmodeus is a Lawful god. He will make a deal if it benefits Him, and not otherwise, and support a proposed treaty for the same reason. If He can use fixity fields against you, He won't care that you refrained from using them against Him, He will just use that to win. He makes and keeps deals, but He's hostile and we don't want anything in common, so it doesn't help us to refrain from attacking Him."

"Other Lawful gods sometimes make a deal with Asmodeus to not spend resources fighting each other, so both sides can use them for something else. That requires them to agree how much resources They'd spend on fighting each other without a deal, and what the resources are worth to each side. But that only works in advance, because They're predicting the result of having a fight, which means the option to fight is still on the table."

:We can connect Creation to your world! If we open the door to Golarion, and also the wormhole, and then I work on it for a while. Other gods can also help if They want! But it would take time and power and I am not sure how much without trying. If we make a portal others could attack it, but we can make a spell like Gate or like Plane Shift that would reach between the worlds.:

:Also! I have better teleports and plane shifts for you!! It was always too expensive to tell mortals about them but I made them anyway! Here, Cherry, look -:

A spellform appears before her, far more complex than any Cherry had seen before, stabilized at ninth circle. If a Golarion wizard saw it, and had the Intelligence and spell-circles to stabilize it, and the Spellcraft to understand what it did, and the Wisdom to understand what it would do, do to the world once people had it, they might call it -

Greatest Teleport.

"Neither of us are really experts on magic, you really want Nethys for that - Nethys, are You there" - Cayden twists to look around as if expecting another god to materialize behind his shoulder. Nothing happens.

"I guess not. He's usually everywhere, you get used to it eventually. Anyway, we'll tell you what we can, just keep in mind we don't know everything."

"Most spells do just one thing. Wish is not like that. It does whatever you tell it to. The trick is explaining what you want to happen. I guess 'defining' might be a better word."

"Most arcane spells were invented by wizards who copied bits of divine spells. The strongest divine spell is Miracle, which also doesn't do any specific thing. The caster asks their god to solve some problem, and the god does - whatever They want about it, really. Some of the power comes from the caster, and some from the god, and the power limits what They can do, and so does the intervention budget. But within those limits, the only limits on what the god does are Their own nature. Do They understand what is going on? What the results of Their intervention will be? How to use raw power to achieve the desired effect? Do They like doing that kind of thing, or do They refuse to do some things?"

"When wizards tried to copy Miracle, they got the - framework that translates magical power into action. But there's no god behind it, no guiding intelligence that understands how to actually use the power to do something useful. So every time they cast Wish, they have to specify exactly what they're doing, in a language meant for a god's view of reality, on the level of the bits manipulated by magic, which is very hard for mortals to understand.

"Also, and I can't stress this enough, wizards mostly don't have the senses to really see what they're doing - that's going to be your biggest advantage, casting Wish and seeing not just the result but the process that produced it and what went wrong."

"Over the years wizards invented some Wish instructions that work well, like moving people or replicating other spells. But that's not really using Wish like you'd use Miracle, it's not flexible. All they really have is a couple dozen specific spells that happen to stabilize to the same spellform. And no one wizard has all of those. Most wizards really aren't the sharing type."

"If you're wondering why so few Wish wordings have been found, by the most intelligent mortals and some actual demigods over millennia of trying, consider what happens what happens when you get it wrong. All that power, poured into the spell, and no working instructions for using it, or for carefully managing its flow or whatever. And the thing a bunch of undirected power does, by default, is blow up, and boy does it blow up a lot."

"There was an archwizard once, a divination expert, who was obsessed with finding more Wish wordings. At the end of his life he donated all his research to the temple of Nethys in Absalom. It's still in their library, in the public section even. It's called Seventy-Four Safe Wish Wordings For Making Giant Flaming Craters."

"Understanding how fixity fields work, from seeing just the field and not the generator, is at least not trivial. Not to Desna and Me, anyway. As I said, there may be gods who'd do it easily given the chance. If we want to let Golarion gods use it, you could show us your generator. Or we could invite Someone else better suited in and close the door again."

"Using the known Wish wordings - and all other known spells, most of which Wish can replicate anyway - is probably enough to do most things your world does. Transport is easy. Other infrastructure can mostly be done by copying existing things, and it should be possible to design spells for that."

"The one thing magic doesn't do is get you something from nothing, including getting more magic. Arbitrarily many Wishes can do almost anything, like rescue everyone in Golarion in the same round, because Wishes can move people. But we'd need enough casters, because each Wish only moves a few dozen people. There are plenty of Good outsiders who could cast it from scroll, but that would require too much intervention budget, unless they're all summoned to Golarion first. Still, if we keep planning we can probably find a way to move everyone off Golarion, without using fixity fields, in a single round. That's how we'd probably do it, with your resources. But that's what I called unambitious." He looks at his audience expectantly.

She now desperately wants to try reverse-engineering Wish. Probably some of her have already started doing that, and she should focus on this. But that description of Wish just screams for trying to figure out how to compile the software that runs on the fixity crystals to run on Wish substrate instead.

She shakes her head and tries to refocus on Cayden's question.

"I mean, taking six seconds seems slow -- I don't see why we shouldn't be able to do it instantaneously, now that Desna has shared FTL -- but I get the feeling that's not what you mean."

She glances at Gord and Irabeth.

If rescuing everyone in the world isn't enough, what's left? Perhaps a better question is: if they do it, what comes next?

Most demons aren't in the Worldwound. If the other demons in the Abyss come to Golarion, they can be rescued too. In time, the Abyss would grow empty, because demons are made from Chaotic Evil mortals. Except it wouldn't, because the Pharasmins say there are people from other worlds in the afterlives -

"What about the rest of Creation? Besides Golarion. There are other worlds, aren't there?"

:There are forty-seven thousand, three hundred and forty-four inhabited planets, and I keep finding new ones. Most of them have people with souls who go to the afterlives. Some have native outsiders or people without souls. The oldest and strongest gods in Creation - Asmodeus, Abadar, Sarenrae, Zon-Kuthon, and me - and Pharasma - are present in most of them.:

Irabeth has in fact read holy scripture. She doesn't need to think for very long to find the answer that should have been blazing obvious if she hadn't spent all her life fighting demons in what was ultimately a distraction from the original reason Iomedae ascended, before She was forced to become the Inheritor.

"We have to rescue everyone in Hell."

"She gets it! Have a cookie." Cayden pushes the dish towards Irabeth.

His voice grows more serious. "Cherry. Have you had occasion to contemplate the nature and the scope of Hell?"

"Most people on Golarion do not grasp it, and most of those who do cannot truly face that horror. They hear the words 'eternal torture' and they think of pain, the burning and rending of flesh. They think of it as punishment proportional to some crime, or torment enough to make evildoers repent, or the greatest evil they can imagine visiting on their own enemies."

"But the ruler of Hell is not like the mortals of Creation."

"He is one of the oldest gods, with the knowledge and experience of many millions of years. He has devils, and damned souls, and whole other races doing His will. He understands physics, and magic, so far as they can be understood, and He controls the planes of Hell, and has time enough to experiment. He is bound only by His own nature and Lawful commitments."

"You have the power of the fixity fields, and the technology to transfer minds into machines. Consider, then, what is the greatest amount of suffering permitted by the laws of physics and magic which does not yet destroy one's personhood completely."

"Asmodeus does not optimize suffering above all else, He values many other things as well. The torture is carried out by His devils, who are not nearly as powerful or as intelligent as their master, and who must be able to comprehend and take pride in their work. He must permit the fear and the threat of greater suffering, for the mortals who fear going to Hell as well as the souls already in it. The Good gods have bought the reduction of suffering from Him, over the aeons, in trade for something else He valued more."

"But when you think of Hell, and ask yourself what price and what risk you might put on ending it, you should not imagine it to be full of mere lakes of fire and brimstone."

Air hisses through her teeth, involuntarily.

There are fundamental limits, imposed by lightspeed and the density of physically possible storage media, on how fast a human-like mind can run. Her civilization's ability to run uploaded people is lagging a few orders of magnitude short of that, and most of the uploaded people in her world choose to run more slowly even than that, to stay somewhat synced up with non-upload civilization.

But a god, with millions of years to run experiments? They can probably get pretty close to those fundamental limits.

The thought that floats to the top of her mind is that she wasn't fast enough. If she had been smarter, if she had drilled into what Gord knew about Hell, if she had treated things as though they were more urgent, could she have spent less time with the door to Golarion open? Even just a few milliseconds of indecision probably contained more suffering than she has managed to offset in the entire time since she invented the fixity field.

She bursts into tears.

"H-How," she tries to ask, but her voice comes out whispery and indistinct. "How many?" she signs, letting Milliways handle the translation. "People in Hell: how many?"

And in her world, prices already elevated by preparing for Golarion spike even higher as people dump more resources into preparing. Even if time as stopped, it still feels urgent. Rationally, they have all the time in the world. Emotionally, many of the people preparing, including Weeping Cherry's self-tree, feel the need to do something about this.

The uploaded members of her self-tree who weren't yet working in accelerated time drop into it, doing their best to pick apart the magic they've been shown, reaching for some new capability that will solve this more surely. A thousand magic experiments bloom in safely isolated testing chambers. Most of them explode, but some of them explode in experimentally useful ways.

And the feed from Weeping Cherry's point of view sits on a thousand virtual monitors, as they wait to hear the answer. Maybe it won't be good for them to hear. But it feels like they have to know, like they have to understand the scope of the problem to begin fixing it.

So they work, and they think, and they wait.

"We don't know for sure," he says softly. "Most of them are killed eventually. And we don't know all of what goes on in the lower planes. But our best estimate is between one and ten million billion souls. If there were many more, we think Asmodeus would let us know, because it would give Him more bargaining power."

"I'm sorry I didn't have any gentler way of breaking it to you."

She nods, more in acknowledgement than understanding.

"Thank you for telling me," she signs.

Ten to the fifteen is a lot of people. But. Not an unimaginable number. Her world has approximately ten to the ten people -- one for every hundred thousand in hell.

She forces herself to take a deep breath.

"Give me a moment," she continues. "And then, yeah. We should talk about how to get them out. But I need a moment."

None of this is strictly new information. Gord didn't know the numbers, of course, had no way even to guess at them, but he doesn't think he'd have reacted very differently to hearing a different number.

They're talking as if Hell is - the worst thing there is. The worst thing that could be imagined, almost. And it's clearly very very horrible, and in a sense it has to be the worst afterlife, right, because Lawful Evil is the opposite of Chaotic Good. But Gord still feels that he's missing something, and he's not convinced it's only because he doesn't know any fundamental laws of the universe.

"I'm confused. There are people - the Chelish, the Hellknights - who think they're going to Hell. I've known them to be very Evil, and very Lawful, but they're not - insane, usually."

"None of them act like Hell is - the worst thing imaginable. Like something you'd burn the world down trying to escape. Or trying to help other people escape, if you're Good. Some of them even sell their souls to devils!" Maybe all the ones who do act like it don't make it to the Worldwound, but even so...

"And there's this spell, Vision of Hell, I've seen it cast and even cast it myself and all it does is shake people up a little? The Asmodeans claim it's a true vision. And it definitely has lakes of fire."

"Also, if Hell is so much worse than the other Evil afterlives, why don't more Evil people go Chaotic instead? I've heard Pharasmins say similar numbers of people end up in each afterlife, worldwide."

"The Asmodeans," Cayden says sadly, "are very good at certain ways of lying to people. And most people are very good at lying to themselves."

"I'm not the best person to explain this. I find Lawful Evil mortals difficult to see, and in my time as a man the Asmodean church was small and weak. But I will try to explain to you why the world you grew up in does not refute the truth of Hell."

"Most people do not know their own alignment. Judgement often comes as an unpleasant surprise. They aspire to some ideal - Good, Chaos, Law - and they hope and flatter themselves that they have reached it. Sometimes they are right, and sometimes they are tragically wrong. And it is often easier to do Evil, by accident or necessity or in ignorance, than Good. So while few people wish to be Evil, more are judged Evil unwillingly than Good or Neutral. Many who choose and keep to the Law find themselves in Hell rather than Axis or Heaven. But it is hard, for a man unsure of his fate, to give up Axis for the Boneyard or the Maelstrom."

"Cheliax is worse. It teaches its people that the victory of Hell over all the planes is ordained, that they cannot escape it. It tells them that if they come to Hell willingly, if they come in before the big rush, they will be better treated. It makes sure, every day of their lives, to bend them towards Evil. But above all, it makes them think repenting and achieving Neutral is harder than it truly is, and it misleads them about what Good and Evil even are."

"Raised in a world of lies, taught by the Asmodean church from birth, some of them come to believe it in truth. And the rest, thinking they cannot turn to Good, are unable to face their impending doom - the choice of Hell or the Abyss. For it is very hard, in Cheliax or out of it, without the knowledge or support of your family and friends and priests and leaders, to understand and to accept that your likely afterlife will consist of horrible torture followed by a final death, and still act to positively choose it over something far, far worse."

"But even out of Cheliax, the first instinct of people who fear Hell is to do Good. They know, instinctively, that it is Evil and not Law that threatens to wrong them. The priests of Iomedae and Erastil and Torag, of Shelyn and Sarenrae, will help them earnestly to be Good, and many are saved that way. But it is not their first advice to break your Law and deny Hell fresh victims."

"As for the spell, and scries of the afterlives and the stories of those raised from the dead: they show a truth, but not the worst truths of Hell. For Asmodeus does not wish people to fear Hell as much as they should, and so avoid it."

"There is information which the gods cannot tell Golarion, by treaty. Every Good and every Lawful afterlife sets an area apart, for new petitioners who may still be raised and people plane-shifting from the Material, any who may yet return to Golarion."

"In Axis, wondrous technology that would make each peasant richer than a king, and disease and starvation a thing of myth, is kept hidden from mortal visitors. In Heaven, the greatest weapons and spells built for the wars with Hell, the knowledge of the enemy gained at great cost, are kept secret. In Nirvana, some who have achieved peace are not permitted to return to the aid of others. Even in Elysium, where no rule is universal, the gods keep watch over their own domains, enforcing the intervention budgets lest there be a war of all Law and all Evil upon Chaoic Good."

"Hell is made of nine planes, each only accessible from the last. The first plane, Avernus, is where the damned souls first arrive. It is the area Hell permits to travelers and divinations. The worse tortures are in the deeper layers, where none but devils may go. And so it is that the Good gods would pay a price, for telling Golarion how terrible Hell truly is; for it is news that Asmodeus bargained to keep secret."

"The Chelish you have met, strong enough to register an alignment and expecting Hell and having seen it in visions, are misled three times over. They think they cannot ever do enough Good to make up for their past. They think they cannot escape their masters, in this world or the next. And above all they are led to think - better the devil they know."

Cherry takes some more deep breaths, and focuses on the pungent bitterness of her drink. She pushes away the sharp, instinctual horror, but that just leaves the slower, more intellectual horror.

Particularly, if the very first other universe they encountered contained something like this, what does that say about the disposition of the rest of the multiverse?

She only half pays attention to Cayden's explanation, trusting that she will be able to refer to the transcript later if any of it is important.

The note about the structure of hell does catch her attention, though.

"What does 'only accessible through the first plane' mean?" she signs. "Plane shifts only go there? Or any kind of travel, even a new kind, only goes there? How does it work?"

:Every plane is adjacent to some others! Travel always goes between adjacent planes.: Desna makes an illusion of the planes.

:Magic like Gate and Wish can reach any plane but it goes through other planes to get there. Most planes like this! But Hell and Heaven are series of planes that block travel. You must visit each plane before the next. Visiting gives them time to react and stop you.:

:This is not the nature of the planes! It is the will of their rulers. The planes are Lawful and their nature is to obey. To force your way it is not enough to be stronger than the ruling archdevil, you must be stronger than the plane. Or to kill or unseat the ruler. I am not strong enough to force my way to Nessus.: It is very frustrating to admit this.