"Do not sound entertained. I am supposed to be on the fact-finding expedition."

"You fret more than I remember you to, Klbkch. Gazi volunteered her assistance, did she not?"

She tilts her head at Blai to proceed.

He does not know Antpeople Inside Baseball so he ignores it. Into his office they go. "Where would you like me to start?"

"I have heard your abilities described as 'spells', but they behave entirely unlike the spells I know of."

"Yes, Golarion spells are different from what mages here do. They're mostly slower and come in limited numbers. I don't know enough about local magic to enumerate other differences confidently. I can show you some orisons if you'd like."

"That would be illuminating."

He can Create Water and Scriven off a clean copy of his heavily annotated translation attempt and cast Guidance - "on you, if you'd like?" - and he's also got Resistance, though those last two don't look like much.

Xrn inspects him attentively as he casts. She'll decline the Guidance.

"...They are more like spells than Skills," she acknowledges. "Though I would classify them as a third category, by [Mages]' nomenclature, as they are magic, but do not qualify for the technical definition of a spell. But where are they coming from? I do not see you moving any mana. It is almost like casting from a scroll."

"They come from Iomedae. Clerics can also learn to make scrolls but I haven't picked up the knack and don't know if Golarion scrollwork is like what you have here. I am able to cast - though not fully use - a zeroth-circle wizard spell, if you would like to see that to compare."

"Very much. I can scribe you a scroll for comparison, and I would ask more on how Iomedae grants spells, but—the wizard spell."

"Prestidigitation." He's started branching out his use of it a bit, since there aren't laundry wizards. He's still very bad at using it to clean but he will slowly pick at a stray inkblot with it.

"Interesting." She watches with intense focus, seeming to count something on her fingers, as he deinks the blot. "This one I can understand more clearly. It is entirely unlike our practice of magic. It is also still not a spell, by the strict meaning. Or rather, it is a spell, but not a Spell."

She pronounces the second word in the same way "Skill" and "Level" are sometimes affected to disambiguate.

"Yes, the magical traditions don't seem to have contacted each other in thousands of years if ever."

Prestidigitation. No, she didn't do that bit right—Prestidigitation. Prestidigitation?

"There we go," she says, satisfied, turning a bit of her finger green. "Oh, this does a lot of things. It binds up a part of... there are not the words for it in this language." She forms a cube in her palm. It doesn't have the characteristics to stabilize, but she's going to try it later anyway.

"Congratulations, that took me weeks. Also I needed a spellbook but perhaps you're doing something more like a Golarion sorcerer..."

"A spellbook is ordinarily essential? What for? I shaped magic into the structure I observed you cast, though not the way it—unfolded from—we do not have the word for it either. And it is not anchored to me the way yours is; if I release it, it..." She lets the spell dissipate. "Yes, it's gone now."

"I don't know whether you'd be able to catch it with more practice. Sorcerers can and they don't need the spellbooks. The books are written with spellsilver, a magically active metal that I couldn't confidently identify even if you had a candidate specimen to show me, laced in the ink; the structure is drawn in place, usually annotated, and then sort of - peeled - renewably, from the drawing. The structure a prepared arcane spell hangs on is called a 'scaffold'."

"As if a reusable scroll, the casting of which you anchor to a 'scaffold'. Many methods of scroll creation use rare materials, some of which include metals, but nothing so standardized. I promised you a scroll to compare, did I? Would that be useful for comparison?"

"I expect I won't be able to cast it. I wouldn't even be able to cast an arcane scroll from Golarion, even if it was a spell clerics also get. But if you could bring it by tomorrow I can prepare some spells that might help me make any sense of it at all."

"Very well.

"Meanwhile, the spells you receive from Iomedae do not require a spellbook, or a scaffold? How does it work?"

"I ask Her for them every morning. I have a certain number of slots, as though I had a scaffold of that size, but without the part where I have to construct a scaffold and hang the spells on it."

Nod.

"But they're the same type of scaffold and spell your wizards have? Is Iomedae a wizard, or is the question a category error?"

"Iomedae used to be a human, and the god she got her spells from at that time was, when he was a human, a wizard. So it's not necessarily a category error, but she was a paladin - sort of like a cleric but with fewer spells and more combat prowess and stricter alignment requirements - not a wizard. And even if she was still sort of a paladin after ascending I don't think She can be one now because Her god died about a century ago. I don't think I have exactly the same type of scaffold as a wizard except for the tiny one I hang Prestidigitation on. There are - a lot of ways to be a caster on Golarion, but some spells are common to many of them, like Light, and others are idiosyncratic to a particular sort, whether that group is large or vanishingly small."

"Not unlike Skills," Xrn says. "Her god died? How did that happen?"

"He tried to move to Golarion to bring about the Age of Glory but something went terribly wrong."