A man - or something that looks like a man, anyway - appears in midair and falls to the ground with an earthy thud. He catches an arm on some spines on the way down, but there's no blood, and when he stands and dusts himself off there's no injury or impairment.

The peculiar landscape stretches as far as the eye can see, except for a mountain range in the far distance. Maybe if he gets a higher vantage point?

A spindle-legged spider with a blood sac enough to fill a man a thirty times over looks at him, then loses interest and scuttles away.

There's big rock coated with glowing, swollen slime over there. It's surrounded by engorged pillow-shaped plants, each larger than a man, with their shallow roots suckling at the gunk. (They're full of fist-sized insects.)

That way is a tall, narrow tree(?) with a large patch of dead dirt around it and translucent fruits(?) at its crown. Its stem is adorned with long, upwards-pointing prongs that looks climbable. Its root network extends through the dead patch around it, and grows in an odd way where tendrils go deep, branch out, then rise back up to the topsoil layer.

Or, if he'd just like to pick a direction and start walking, the peculiar red brambles and stalk-grass seem to get thicker and taller towards the mountains, turning into patches of twisted fungoid forest. There are long-limbed things clambering between the stalks, camouflaged to the naked eye.

The other way is more clear and flat, though still vegetated with those strange plants and inhabited by even stranger fauna, like that shambling, six-legged creature with more mouth than face that's started lumbering at Kiraavi.

Huh. The tree won't be much help, but not none; he heads in that direction. He can probably outrun the creature if it comes to that, it isn't moving that quickly, and it's only moderately annoying if he can't.

The creature speeds up once Kiraavi is moving. It itself is not quite running, but its legs are the length of a man so that still makes it as fast as a human at a sprint.

Huh.

He runs for the tree. The creature is faster but he does have a lead.

When he steps in the circle of barren earth around the tree, razor-sharp spikes thrust out of the ground in the blink of an eye and impale him three ways.

Ah, so that's what that was.

This is highly inconvenient; now he's stuck.

The six-legged thing slows down as it approaches where he's impaled. It looks a little confused why this prey isn't screaming or gushing blood everywhere or such.

What happens if it tries to pull Kiraavi off the spikes? Because of the geometry of the multiple impalement, this is going to involve a bit of force and a lot more damage.

At the first really solid tug he bursts into a pile of road dust, with an especially incomprehensible swear.

The tree and all its spiny roots disappear, in a way that's a bit like melting but drier and dustier. After a few moments, the barren patch begins to spread, the leading edge moving at an easy walking pace, away from the mountain, narrowing to leave a dirt path free of vegetation.

?????

Okay, the creature is going to... leave. No thank you.

The narrow little path continues on its way, winding a bit as it goes to head in the direction with the thinnest vegetation a mile away. It doesn't seem to care what it encounters as it does so; plants and stone alike wither into dust, and animals are ignored completely.

The animals will stay very clear of it.

It'll be thirty miles or so before the path finds something that's not the local kind of horrible ecology. The environment fades into more typical grassland, and there's still some patches of lesser horribleness—just the red moss-grass and slime and smaller flora—but it's clearly the right direction.

He will stop winding about and go that way, then, away from the red.

grassland grassland grassland animals grassland grassland goblins?

They're camped near a hill cooking a rabbit over a fire, little green dudes with large ears and crude clothing and tools. They don't see the road when it's still a mile off.

People! Weird looking people, but definitely people!

He can see a mile away but he can't speak a mile away; he hustles in that direction instead.

The grass around here is a bit thick, and they're not paying that much attention to their surroundings, so they only notice the vanishing grass when it's a couple dozen meters away. Does he speak up by then?

Not quite. It's really better to be close enough that he doesn't have to shout.

They startle!

"Monster!" one shouts, pointing at the path.

        "Scatter!" a bigger one barks.

They flee in all directions. They've never seen anything like this before, but that's not a good reason not to run. That's how you die.

"Big tree!" the first one yells as they run.

"I'm not dangerous!" he shouts in a hundred voices speaking a hundred languages and yet somehow perfectly comprehensibly.

HOLY SHIT THAT'S TERRIFYING

They're going to run faster.

...okay.

He'll wait a little while - maybe a day - to see if they come back. It'd be much more efficient to have directions to someplace worth being than to keep making essentially random claims.

They don't come back. If he really wants to track them, some of them don't make it outside his mile-range sensory radius before slowing and heading somewhere to the right of the direction he was originally going in.

Huh.

Well, it's better not to scare people if he can help it. He'll angle to the left a few degrees and keep going.

grassland pond grassland grassland road!

It's a dirt road, but a nice and wide one, with evidence of tracks indicating it's still in significant use.

Ooh!

He'll give this one a couple days, too, once he's met up with it. Interesting as the new location is, all this territory-claiming is getting expensive.

After a few hours, there'll be a small trade caravan riding down the road, guarded by people on horses in armor, with someone in a robe sitting on top of one of the carriages, holding a wooden staff.

Most of them are draconic humanoids with scales, snouts and tails. Some of them look like hyena-human hybrids, again humanoid with fur and canine features. They're transporting large volumes of raw ore, gems and jewelry, some books, and supplies for the road.

Wow, do they have humans here at all?

He'll just wait until they're in reasonable shouting range, this time. "Hello! I mean no harm, I'd like to ask you a question!"

Woah! Weird spooky voice out of nowhere that sounds like an [Orator] having too much fun with their Skills. Is someone hiding in the patches of tall grass? The merchants and the driver are startled, but they look to the guards on horses for direction.

The armored riders are alert, but not overly perturbed. Their [Dangersenses] aren't going off, and while there are stories about dangerous monsters that emulate human voices, there are stories about everything. Out here there's nothing but goblins, deer and bugs.

If it's bandits, they can probably take bandits. And bandits don't usually announce their presence. And don't have such... dramatic... voices. (That feels like an understatement. What even is that?)

"Where are you?" the one in the lead calls, looking left and right. He's taken hold of the sword at his side, but not unsheathed it.

"I'm up ahead, I'm the footpath off to your left."

They're pretty sure there wasn't a branching footpath here before, a brief conference among the caravaners decides. Still, not suspicious in itself. What even to be suspicious of?

The guard leader has mentally autocorrected the voice to mean they're on the footpath, obviously. He dismounts and approaches.

"I don't see you," he calls.

Illusionists have better things to do than be bandits.

"Yes you do, you're looking right at me." With a gentle ripple, the grass immediately on either side of the footpath changes to purple flowers, starting where it meets the road and continuing for a hundred feet or so. "Can you tell me where the other gods are, and the nearest city?"

The Drake does draw his sword at the sudden flowers, and doesn't put it back, but he holds his ground.

(Quietly, below the volume anyone not standing right by him could hear, he murmurs, "Tekss, illusions? Invisibility?" The words echo faintly from all the other guards, and the robed person on top of a cart. The sound seems to be coming from small stones secreted in their various headwear.)

"The gods are dead," he says aloud. "What are you?" His tone isn't accusatory, or all that disbelieving, just curious and wary.

(The robed person answers, through the speaking stone network, "No, but something weird's going on.")

"I'm a god from a different world, my avatar ended up here in an accident. Gods are common where I'm from, though, I know dozens. Do you know what happened to yours?"

"What happened?" What a strange question to ask. He shrugs. "They're dead. There are living ones in your... world? What do you mean by that?"

"There are. If you're in a hurry you could bring a piece of me with you and I'll tell you about it on the way; I'd like to be someplace with more people, here. I can pay for passage, if you'll take something I can make, metal or gems or spices or something."

"Weird," and kind of hard to wrap his head around. "We're not on an emergency, but no reason to hold up the caravan if we don't need to. They trade metals and gems, yeah, if you can pay I don't imagine they say no, but it's not my call. I can ask. What are we talking about by a piece of you?

"A small vial of dust will be fine; I can make one. I'll want you to turn it out on the ground at your destination."

He eyes the spontaneously flowering dirt path.

"IIII might have to clear that last part with someone. But I'll take a vial, sure."

"Thank you. If there's someone I ought to talk to before getting set up I'd appreciate being brought to them, I guess."

A small glass vial full of road dust with a ribbon tied around the neck to allow it to be worn as a necklace appears in the middle of the footpath in front of him.

"I can also keep watch for danger on the road if you can tell me what to look for, I don't have the visual range of a normal person but I'm better at spotting hidden things."

"We'd appreciate a heads up for anything bigger than a cat hiding in the grass, but these roads are safe enough most of the time."

He takes the vial and goes off to talk to the caravan head, a Gnoll in loose embroidered dress.

"Did you catch all of that?"

        "Most of it. We'll take a standard payment for unexpected ridealongs, I suppose." She suspects she can ask for more, but she doesn't want to take the risk of offending the god, or whatever it is.

"That's a gold coin," he tells the vial. He draws one out of his satchel to indicate. It's small enough to close a fist around, and only mostly gold, the rest copper and nickel.

"Sounds reasonable. I can't manifest things from the vial but I've made one back on the path for you."

Presumably there's nothing hiding in the grass around here?

Nope! All safe. Someone goes to pick up the coin and offer it to the Gnoll lead, who inspects and gives it a scratch on the rim.

"Let's be off, then," she says. "Vyrll, would you ride by us so I can hear what this... god... has to say? Do you have a name?"

"Kiraavi of roads and travel, at your service. You wanted to know more about the gods of my world, I think?"

"I'm Prish, [Caravan Leader]," says the Gnoll. "This is Vyrll."

        "[Captain] of Salaz' Scales," he fills in, swinging back on his horse.

They start moving. "Let's start with that 'world' thing, don't we?" Prish says.

"That part was a surprise to me, too! I'll have to explain a bit about how gods work to explain how I know, but the place I come from is a sphere, and this isn't a place that could exist on that sphere, and neither are most of the other places I've gone the same way I came here from my home sphere. Even ignoring the part where my sphere only has gods and humans for people."

"You live on a sphere?" asks Vyrll. "That must be weird."

        "You only have humans?" Prish raises an eyebrow.

"So you've been to a lot of different worlds?"

"I'd only been on the one up until a couple days ago! A giant snake with a mirror for a face appeared next to my avatar on the road and ate it - when I make part of myself that's like a normal person or an animal, that's an avatar - and then my avatar was here, or rather over in the bloodfields. I trapped the snake in a hole and let it eat a few more parts of me and they all went to different places but this one is by far the most interesting."

Yep, that sounds like a thing that could happen.

"In the Bloodfields. You're lucky it's not quite into summer yet, or I wager you'd be toast. I'm surprised you made it out in one piece anyway."

"Oh, I lost the avatar in the first two minutes, they're not much sturdier than normal people and I didn't realize the tree I wanted to climb had spike traps for roots. I'm fine, though, physical damage like that can't do much to me."

Prish is laughing at Vyrll now, he knows it, she has that smirk. He scratches his neck. "Right, that's good."

        "That's how all gods are like, where you're from?" Prish asks.

"I'm more adventurous than most, and roads are unusual as a terrain type, but aside from that yes. Most of us are forests and fields and mountains and things. But we can all make avatars and other things and we're all hard to hurt. We're powered by attention the same way normal people are powered by food, and the traditional way to handle that is to accept offerings from people who like us and want us around - I'll be more useful than just noticing nearby ambushes to you if I end up claiming the whole road, I'll be able to keep it firm and smooth and let you know about the weather up ahead and pass messages to other caravans and bring you emergency supplies and things."

"So your body is the road, and you can observe it and change it and... talk from it, like you're doing right now. And you can expand it, claim or create more roads? I know that path where we found you wasn't there before. And you can provide road services, and in exchange you want people feed you in attention? I'm not sure what that means. What kind of offerings?"

He's a bit concerned about bringing this thing to Pallass now. Kiraavi's spinning it like he's a friendly street cat that neighbors toss scraps to, but what he's actually talking about—"if I end up claiming the whole road"—"we're all hard to hurt"—is total observation and unilateral control over the largest trade route between Pallass and Salazsar, if not the entire road network through Izril.

That's if he can't, you know, "claim" the whole Walled City and hold its very existence hostage for arbitrary demands.

A glance at Prish, and it's clear she's thnking the same thing.

"There's a few more details but that's basically right. For offerings, the part that feeds me is the person thinking about what makes it a good offering for me; the exact thing doesn't matter much for that. I like getting travel gear that still has some good use in it, though, since it's less expensive for me to move things around than to make new things and I like people to be able to ask me for supplies they need, and I like books about people's travels."

Thing is, if they don't want to deal with Kiraavi, what are they going to do? Dig up and burn miles and miles of dirt path all the way to the Bloodfields? Would that even work? And he's been friendly so far...

Prish says, "So what's your plan once we get to Pallass? It's where we're going, by the way."

"Well, part of that depends on you, if you're interested in telling people about me that'd be useful. If you're just going to dump me out and go about your business I'll want to wait and see how things are done here before I introduce myself. I'll probably have to make another avatar when I'm ready to, in that case, I'll be less confusing that way if people here aren't used to gods."

"I think I'd get in trouble for dumping you out without so much as a letter to a Wall-Lord," says Vyrll. In fact, he's going to stay outside the walls until someone with the authority says otherwise.

        Prish says, "What's an ideal outcome, average outcome and bad outcome for you, here?"

"In the long run, or just at Pallass?"

"Why not both?"

"Well, in the long run, I'm a little nervous about whatever killed your gods, so I'd like to find that out before I do very much here, but if it's safe enough and seems like it'd be mutually useful I don't see any reason not to get to work on claiming your whole road system. That won't be quick, though, I have some energy reserves that I can put toward it but I wouldn't want to overextend myself; generations, probably, if your world is as big as mine and you live as long as the humans I'm used to. So the best case would be - whatever problem your gods had is known and resolved, and people straightforwardly... are you all right?"

Vyrll and Prish are sharing a confused look.

"I didn't follow all of that," Vyrll says. "What are you concerned about? The gods are dead."

"Right, and I don't want to join them."

"What would cause you to join them?" Inquiring minds want to know.

"Well, I'm also a god?"

"Right, and you're not dead."

"Right. And so I need to know why your gods are dead, so I can be sure it won't happen to me."

"...I don't know if they died of a reason..." Vyrll looks at Prish.

        "Everything dies of a reason," she sensibly points out, though she sounds less certain of this.

"The dragons?"

        "I thought there was a war with the dragons."

"What weren't there wars about? If that's why they're not around anymore I didn't hear of it."

        Prish shrugs.

Vyrll turns back to the road. "Sorry, what were we talking about?"

"...we were talking about what I want to do at Pallass and in the future. There's a... safety question.... that I'm hoping someone will be able to answer for me, and I expect that's going to be the most important thing. But if it goes well, I'd like to look into claiming your road system, I think it'd be mutually beneficial." He sounds mildly bewildered and much less upbeat than he was a few minutes ago.

Haha whether the Walled Cities should let an alien god seize absolute control of the already contentious road networks is so none of Vyrll's business.

"You'll have fun negotiating that," Prish says dryly.

"We'll see." He's not actually in the habit of negotiating with mortals, and it's not like they can stop him. ...probably. It's probably not like they can stop him. "So what other species of people do you have here? I've seen drakes and gnolls and goblins, so far."

Ominous.

        "Humans live up north. There's Antinium, to the west, and—" Prish grimaces "—in Liscor. In the whole world, there's... too many to count."

"Lizardfolk, Nagas if you consider them different," Vyrll offers. "Uh, Half-Elves, Half-Giants..."

        "Beastkin. Minotaurs."

"Fraerlings."

        "Selphids, Dullahans..."

"Demons."

        "Drowned Folk."

"Stitchfolk."

        "If you're counting Goblins, then Ogres, Trolls..."

"Beastkin."

        "I already said that."

"Are we missing any, still?"

        "Oh, absolutely."

"I really hope I can stay and meet them all." He sounds delighted and wistful. "What about the political situation, what's that like?"

"That's a terribly broad question."

        Prish snorts.

"In Izril, we have humans in the north, Drakes and Gnolls in the south. Drakes and humans are 'ancient enemies'—" he makes quotes with his claws "—but we fight each other more than the north these days. Petty squabbles over land and mines and tariffs. The six Walled Cities are the big fish; most of the smaller towns and cities are protectorates of some flavor of one of them. Pallass, where we're heading, is one of them—the City of Invention. We're coming from Salazsar, the Walled City of Gems. Those two tend more unfriendly than not, but this is a good year."

        "Walled Cities are the Drakes," Prish clarifies. "Gnolls live in them, but they're Drake cities, Drake lords. The Great Plains are Gnoll territory, south of here, and east past the High Passes."

"Anything specific you wanted to know?"

"Huh, it's a pity I'm not a different kind of god, most of us can make mines. You're mostly fighting other people, the walls aren't to keep animals out or something?"

"They do that as well, but mostly it's for war."

        "The Drakes are insufferably proud of their walls," Prish informs.

"They're tens of thousands of years old," Vyrll huffs.

"Mm," he muses, displeased. "I don't offer healing, since so many of the other gods at home do that it's easy to find if someone needs it. That'll take a generation to change, but maybe I should, if you're having wars. I'll have to think about it."

"That will be popular," Vyrll agrees.

The path crests a hill, and Prish points. "There it is, Pallass. Can you see it?"

"Without an avatar I can't see past a mile, no."

"You'll have to wait until we're closer, then. Any questions before we're there?"

"Do you have any idea how I'll be received, what things people might be interested in hearing or want reassurance about?"

I mean, if he's asking.

"I predict they will not want you to claim anything inside the city," says Vyrll.

        "Drakes really like their walls," Prish repeats, snorting.

"If we're being safe we should wait outside for someone to come out and talk. I'd start with the high-level interactions you have with people where you're from, before explaining your exact abilities. Senators get twitchy."

"Seems reasonable. Is it called the City of Invention for a particular reason, by the way?"

"They specialize in engineering, manufacture and crafts. Pallass exports the best steel you can get in volume in Izril, and other metals and alchemical goods; for themselves they build siege engines and moving elevators and all sorts of machinery. And the city itself—well, you'll see."

At least if it's within a mile of the wall he will. "How much longer do you expect it to be?"

If Vyrll could hear Kiraavi's thoughts, he would laugh.

"Ten minutes," says Prish.

"All right." He's looking forward to it. "One thing I might be able to do is share inventions back and forth between the worlds, is why I ask."

As they come up of Pallass, it becomes clear what they meant he should see.

The walls of the city are tall. Stone and metal, straight and proud, and three hundred feet tall when enough comes in range that they cap out. Side to side, they span more than Kiraavi's range; and as his sight peneterates into them, they get... complex.

The outer layers are just solid material, not even with balistraria carved out for archers, just pure fortification. Deeper in, there are great columns and gears of brass that thrum with strange power, spokes driving through the stonework with unclear purpose, and chambers around and between them with the occasional Drake scurrying down for—maintenance? Deeper in are steamworks and machinery, pumping heat and water and something dense and energetic through the walls.

Even farther in, the construction opens up, but not to the flat settlement of a city—into floors. Great, conjoined platforms anchored by titanic struts and cables, nine of them from top to bottom, the lowest one extending farther than Kiraavi can sense, the highest continuing on the top of the wall itself. Each is almost a city in its own, with its own buildings and streets, teeming with people and industry. Some structures are built for this architecture, joining from floor to ceiling, some ascending through multiple floors. But there are also parks and markets, houses and yards, all that a city has stacked on top of itself eight times over.

Stairs run down the grand ramps that connect the floors, but it's the elevators that are the backbone of traffic: moving platforms lifted by cables along throughshafts that rise up and down the floors, stopping at each level for Drakes and Gnolls to step on and off. Operators take payment and turn the controls; if Kiraavi tracks where the cables go, he'll find the drive shafts powered by the hydraulic network plumbed through the walls and floors.

It's like an ant hive of people, but rather than excavated into the dirt, instead lifted from it, every tile and stone quarried and set by mortal hands.

"Oh, wow. I see what you meant."

The gates are large, made of ancient steel, and driven by cables and pulleys. It encompasses not only the first, but the second floor, offering a straight two-storey cut towards the center of the city, with bannisters on the second floor where it parts for the road. One can only imagine what they needed to drive through here.

Once they're within shouting distance of the guard station inside the gate, Vyrll turns his horse and trots off to the side.

"Tkirr," he calls to one of the other riders. "Get us a senator, will you? Maybe that annoying Errif guy."

To Kiraavi, "We'll have to sit tight for a while for them to send someone."

"Sure, I'm not in a rush." He has plenty of machinery to examine.

There is so much machinery to examine! About forty percent of it is perfectly understandable—composed of moving mechanical parts and fluids from which motion proceeds with cause and effect. Another forty percent of it is understandable in the same way but operates on materials with vaguely unreasonable physical properties, for what they appear to be, and something weird might be going on with them. Twenty percent, mostly the stuff in the inner walls, is just not really clear what it's doing, but it's doing something, and something really weird is definitely going on with them.

He's confident he'll figure it out eventually! He uses his most-remote avatar back home to manifest and poke at a few of the weirder substances, skipping any that look potentially volatile.

There are some interesting metals and alloys he might not have seen before. Some of the strange stuff, used in instruments and strange kinds of machinery, is what some civilizations would call technical ceramics, which really has very limited apparent similarity to ordinary ceramics. Brittle but strong.

Some of the more absurd structural materials, like the major cables that hold the platforms, fight him a bit, and come out... not absurd? It's still really good quality steel and so on, but missing the specialness, and definitely not able to hold up to the stresses they're being subjected to in Pallass.

The mysterious brass(?) structures anchored deep in the walls really don't want to exist, and sort of come out as steaming slag if he tries to force it.

The highly energetic sludge in some of the systems just completely refuses to manifest.

It's weird how some of the materials won't come out for him! The ones that do are more than enough to keep him occupied for a couple hours, though, if the senator takes that long, with occasional delighted comments to Vyrll about what he's learning.

Vyrll didn't know most of this and doesn't quite follow a lot of it, but it is pretty interesting!

The senator takes an hour, which is long enough that Vyrll gets fed up and takes some time to brush his horse while they're waiting. Eventually, the senator does come, though, with a small entourage of two guards and a smartly dressed secretary. He's a Gnoll with a fancy vest embroidered with a very intentional symbolic pattern, and wearing a small hat, with a great air of self-importance.

Kiraavi has plenty of attention available to play with the new toys and also keep an eye on things around his bearer; he alerts Vyrll when the senator's group breaks off from the crowd to head toward them.

Vyrll stands more respectfully when the senator shows up.

"I understand there is someone I am supposed to meet," says the senator.

        "Senator Jealwind," says Vyrll. He presents the vial. "This is Kiraavi."

"Of roads and travel; it's good to meet you. I'm a god; I came to your world by accident a few days ago and I'm hoping I can be useful here."

"Our gods are dead, so I'm afraid I don't entirely understand what that implies. Are you a sort of... terrain spirit, i am told? Like an elemental? I hear you're interested in offering services relating to road maintenance and safety, in exchange for compensation in kind."

"That's the general gist of it, yes. I can make and monitor roads, and bring news and guidance and supplies to people on roads I have watch over, and keep the roads themselves in good condition and discourage bandits and other dangers. At home I also help coordinate and supply emergency evacuations in situations where they're needed, from natural disasters and wars and things, but it looks like there'll be less if any need for that here, your walls are very impressive! On the other side, gods like myself are sustained by attention, and that's traditionally given in the form of offerings - the specific item being offered doesn't matter, the important part of the tradition is figuring out how the offering is relevant to me. I do especially like offerings of travel gear with good use left in it - it's less costly for me to give someone in need something I already have, rather than making it, though I can do both - and books about travel and distant places."

The senator nods along with the explanation, though he's a bit confused by the description of offerings.

"Hmm. Yes, the city has systems already in place for emergency response and suchlike, though I don't speak for the Watch. Are you thinking of selling these services on a specific basis to individual travelers, with payment at the point of sale, or as a more... generalized arrangement, where your assistance isn't granularly metered, and travelers pay a toll of 'offerings' on entry to your roads?"

"At home it's a generalized arrangement and purely voluntary; everyone is welcome to travel on my roads and I won't refuse to help someone just because they didn't have the foresight or the resources to help me first. They'll remember that I did; that's good enough for me. There is a practical consideration, though: the amount of attention I get determines the distance I can protect; if I'm mostly ignored that won't be very much."

"Similar to a lending library," he says, satisfied. "That simplifies logistics, though I concur with, well, the standard funding issue of all similar endeavors. Do you have a minimum requirement of attention required to sustain your... existence? Or is it merely a mattter of degree for your corresponding strength? If the latter, then the issue is considerably less urgent to clarify."

"It's effectively the latter for your purposes; my arrangement at home is plenty to sustain me. There is another practical consideration but last time I tried to discuss it something strange happened, and I'd like to try approaching the topic obliquely to see if that helps, if you don't mind."

"Do please."

"If you were to go to a new place, and when you got there you learned that there had been gnolls there in the past, but they were all dead now, I imagine you'd want to know a few more things about that before you decided to stay, right?"

"It depends, I suppose? Most places had people living there in the past who all died off."

"Mmhmm, it could be that, but it could also have been a recent plague, or a war that some people still had a grudge about, or something dangerous like that, and it'd be smart of you to find out first."

"Yes, that makes sense."

"Your gods being dead is a similar situation for me."

The senator takes a few moments. The secretary exchanges a look with the guards.

"Thaaat's reasonable?" he says finally. "I don't know what you can do about it, though. They're dead—they've always been dead, as far as we know, that is."

"Do you have records about that? Not right now, I mean, it's just such a big risk. I want to find out what I can before I do very much here."

"No?" This is a little confusing, but it's probably a cultural gap. How does he clarify this. "It's always been known that the gods are dead. It's just a fact. There's not much about it."

There's definitely something weird still going on, here.

"If you have records of them being dead going back a few hundred years, that's probably safe enough to start with."

There's definitely something weird going on here, the senator thinks.

"Drake records go back tens of thousands of years," the secretary offers.

"I'd like to see your records myself, I think, which means I'll want to go into the city - I'll make part of myself look like a gnoll for that. Will that be all right?"

He's got no idea what Kiraavi is even looking for, but sure.

"If you agree to obey the laws of the city, you can enter like any other person. Your manner of speaking may startle people, though. Do you want to defer the details of interfacing with the city until you are better oriented? I must admit it's unclear to me what you want from our side."

"Not necessarily anything, if you don't consider yourselves responsible for the roads and don't mind me taking them on. It did seem polite to make sure you didn't have any objections before I made a claim right on your doorstep - roads I'm monitoring are part of myself; I can give them up but I generally prefer not to."

"Oh, yes, that's—I hadn't given the particulars of that much thought. Roads in the territory of a city are claimed by that city, and inter-city roads in the greater territory of a Walled City or other major city-state are claimed by the city-state. For example Pallass considers ourselves to have the unique right of military passage, access control, and tollage of the major highways west and south of the High Passes, and north of the Rakul River."

And actually those borders are disputed as well, but Kiraavi will likely not be impressed by the standard spiel, especially as the the senator is rusty at it.

"I was imagining you to be... well, similar to a service contractor, though as discussed that's not precisely the right model. But if you're expecting a more comprehensive claim on the roads you service, especially in ways resembling territory rights, the Assembly might have more to say about it."

"I should probably speak to them, then. I can make a gnoll avatar for that, too, but I can't do it here right now; if you can authorize me to make a small claim right here, which I'll give up later if either of us conclude that I should, I can make an avatar from that - an avatar is a part of me that looks like a person or animal and can move around independently."

"I don't think there's any specific law against you claiming a small patch by the road, so there's not actually a formal authorization I can extend—the claims issue is a diplomatic problem, not a legal problem, we could say. But for the purposes of clarification, you have my permission as a Head Speaker of the Assembly to make a claim no more than ten feet in radius, where we're standing, on the understanding that you'll give it up in the future if requested."

"That's good enough for me, thank you. Vyrll, turn me out please?"

Dump!

The ground under their feet changes to neat blue-grey cobbles, starting where the vial was dumped out and extending into a circle with a diameter of about fifteen feet. As it stops, a spry but elderly gnoll in simple travel gear appears in front of them. "Much better, thank you." The words sync imperfectly with the way he's moving his mouth.

It's slightly disorienting, but the senator doesn't let it show.

"A pleasure to meet you in person... in more embodied person," he says with a nod. "And now it occurs to me, did I introduce myself properly? Senator Errif Jealwind, Head of the Merchant's Guild, and Speaker of Trade in the Assembly of Crafts."

"It's good to meet you, Senator Jealwind. I imagine we'll be seeing a fair amount of each other if you're responsible for traders in the area."

"Yes! That's the capacity in which I was invited here; I'm very interested in safe roads. It's half the risk, and half the cost, in every merchant venture.

"Now, the steps here: I believe we want to convene in a smaller group with interested senators who will have either strong or useful opinions on the project, generate a proposal which is satisfactory to all, and finally submit that to greater Assembly for approval. After this process, ideally, you will be able to conduct your business with the highways of Pallass' greater area, possibly with supplementary guidelines for interfacing with local authorities for the smaller towns and their roads.

"I expect this process to take several weeks, and then more if the proposal is rejected by the Assembly and sent back for further revision."

"That sounds reasonable to me. I should warn you that I'm not used to normal peoples' politics, only gods', so I might need some coaching. I do have priests and acolytes back home who can advise me a little but they'll only know what I tell them about the local conditions."

"You'll be able to hire an aide if you wish to—oh, do you have any currency?"

"I can make coins, though as I understand it that's rude to do very much of. I can also move trade goods between my home world and this one."

"I'd very much like to hear more about that! Can you move anything between any locations?"

"I can move any object that's sitting on me to any part of myself that's big enough for it to sit on. I can't do living things and it does take some attention but if I'm already having a conversation somewhere it's pretty trivial."

"If you can do that we can obviate half of shipping! It works—intercontinental, if you can do it interworld?"

"Once I have a claim there, certainly. It's not a very sustainable thing for me to do regularly, though - traders depending on me as they travel are a good source of attention, porters picking up packages and carrying them off to be sold aren't particularly."

"Understandable," he says. "Perhaps for small, high-value deliveries?" He sees the conflict of interests, but everything has a price. "The alchemists will pay you a lot to teleport in rare reagents from Baleros and Chandrar, which you can spend on expanding road travel."

(Do they want to get in the city while they talk? The secretary will deal with immigration control for them.)

He'll follow the senator if he starts moving, yes. "Mmhmm, I just want to be clear that I'm not in a position to replace your entire shipping industry even if I wanted to. At home I have plenty of use for regular currency and I don't expect it to be any different here."

"Of course." The senator was, in fact, unsure whether Kiraavi was a currency-using type of entity. No one's ever accused Khoteizetrough of having a bank account!

Entering the city proper, the degree of urban planning that goes into Pallass is even more evident. It's how it has to be, really, when even the land being built on has to be purposefully made to specification. There are smithing districts, insulated and reinforced to bear the work of high-level craftsmen, residential sectors located towards the inner rims of the floors to get more sunlight, warehouses built along the heavy-duty goods transport elevators with great wide streets to run pallets down, alchemy labs cloistered in even more reinforced negative-pressure zones...

The progression of floors makes the city into a sort of inverted pyramid shape, reminiscent of a stadium, and the 'arena' in the center is left open: public space reserved for gardens and open-air plazas, with a scarce few important-looking buildings on the rim.

It's incredible. It doesn't take long for him to notice a Skill in use, either, as he takes it all in. He waits to spot a more conventionally visible example and points it out. "What's that? It can't be a blessing if your gods are dead..."

It's a Drake blurring around a carriage headed his way, translocated a good dozen feet in an instant, yelling at the driver to watch where they're going.

"That? Oh, probably [Flicker Step] or [Flicker Dodge], something like that. Blessing?"

"Blessings are minor powers gods like me can give to people, things like improved endurance or an improved sense of direction. Something flashy like [Flicker Step] would be an acolyte power, which we only get one of and share less often; mine is extended senses. Regular people from my world don't have powers aside from those, so it's surprising to see them here."

"So no one gets classes unless a god hands one out to you? Or, no, Skills at all? That sounds terribly inconvenient." Horrible, really, but he's not going to say that to Kiraavi, aforementioned dispenser of Skills.

"If Skills like that are common it's inconvenient to say the least, comparatively. People do all right without them for the most part but I'll have to see if it's something I can import at all."

"[Flicker Step] specifically is a reasonably advanced and moderately rare Skill; maybe one in three thirty-year-olds has something as generally impressive as that? One in two fifty-year-olds? I'm guessing. But the more common sort of Skills, you want them to... well, do your job, right. You can be a cleaner without being a [Cleaner], and lots of people clean their own homes, but if you're doing it all day for money you don't want to do it bare-classed."

"People in my home world do get better at things with practice but nothing like that. Does it just happen, here, or do you have to do something special for it?"

"Some classes you can only get if you meet certain conditions, or if someone or some body endorses you for it, like you have to be employed by the Watch to become a [Guardsman], but for most cases it just happens when you go to sleep. There are a few factors that go into what classes and Skills you get, but mostly it's what you spend your time doing, the kinds of challenges you face, and what you feel most—yourself—about."

"Huh. Well, that's not promising, but it's interesting to know about, anyway. What kinds of Skills are common here?"

"That's a really broad question to answer!"

The senator strokes his chin.

"The lowest-level skills you get when you first pick up a class are usually 'knowledge Skills' like [Basic Cooking], [Basic Woodworking], [Basic Brewing] and so on. Just gives you a good fundamental grasp of the domain, like if you'd spent a month or two learning it the long way. A step above those are 'enhancement Skills': [Lesser Dexterity], [Enhanced Intelligence], [Heat Resistance]. They do what you think they'd do.

"Level five to ten, you might start getting activated skills: [Check Sum], [Instant Drying], [Charming Smile] and so on. Usually can be used multiple times a day, weak to start off and get better as you level. I think that's as far as I can say which is common."

"Enhancement Skills sound like my blessings, so I suppose those won't be very interesting here - plenty of people at home have at least one blessing, but not all of them, and acolytes are rare."

"I think people will be plenty interested if they can just buy an enhancement. Most people only get one or two, even if they pick up a second class, and the problem is like—let's say you're an [Accountant] and get [Lesser Memory] at Level 10, it goes to [Enhanced Memory] at 15, and by the time you're Level 20 you're getting skills like [Instant Report] and [Force Compliance], you're probably not ever getting [Enhanced Intelligence], even though in theory it's a 'lesser' Skill than the ones you're getting.

"But at that point enhancing intelligence is more, not less useful, right, because it's a—force multiplier. So there is very much scarcity in those foundational enhancements."

"Ah, all right. Well, I can only give out six, and I didn't pick them to be useful with Skills, but I'm sure some people will find them useful. Mine are direction sense, weather sense, improved endurance, improved memory, poison resistance, and improved understanding of body language. - I do think I'm going to want to check on that safety issue I mentioned earlier before I make those available, though. Right now there's nothing stopping me from leaving entirely if it turns out to be dangerous here and those would, a bit."

"Memory's going to be popular with us paper pusher types, poison resistance almost certainly with the alchemists, endurance with laborers and adventurers, but you probably know that."

He waves them towards an elegant-looking marble building. 

"These are the city archives. I don't know what you're looking for, but we have histories, copies of founding documents of the city, copies of all the treaties and laws, autobiographies of important people, everything you can think of related to the running of a Walled City. It'll take me a while to rustle up the people you need to talk to, so Sacrra can give you the tour and assist you with your research."

"Thank you. Did you want to take a vial with you, in case you have questions for me or anything while you're doing that?"

"Oh, can you do that? Of course you can do that. Yes, that would be convenient."

"Here you go." He's been paying attention to local fashion - his own avatar is dressed relatively smartly as travelers go, though definitely as a traveler - and can make a decent attempt at a vial-and-necklace design that matches the senator's outfit without matching it so closely that he won't be able to wear it with anything else he might own.

"Stylish," compliments the senator. "And I suppose I don't need to make the parting pleasantries, as you're also coming with me."

"Mmhmm," he chuckles. "You can ignore me if you're busy, though, most of my attention is on other things." Such as the library his avatar is now heading for.

The senator heads off down the street again, and the secretary, Sacrra, a blue-scaled Drake, can take him into the archives.

"What kind of document are you looking for, here?"

"Old ones please, the older the better, describing what the world was like at the time they were written. If they have old newspapers that would be a good place to start."

"If you're asking the very oldest substantial records we have, those will be the incomplete founding documents of Manus, dated between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. They write about the geopolitical landscape of the time, major threats and resource constraints, discourse on governance and law...?"

"That might be a reasonable place to start. Do you know what's missing from them?"

"I don't particularly remember, but the index will probably tell you."

And she can talk to the archivist to get access to the materials in question.

"These are all copies, so don't worry about incidental damage—not that you're allowed to damage them, I just mean they're not priceless historical artifacts."

"Thank you. While I'm looking at these, can you try to figure out what the oldest document like this is - one about daily life, fairly broadly - that I can see the complete original of?"

"How are you defining a document? When I say incomplete documents I mean—we don't have some of the documents we know once existed, but the remaining ones are individually complete. For example, we have the full text of the founding constitution of Manus, though that might not be 'daily life', as you say."

"Something weird and magic-looking is happening with the thing I'm trying to find out about; I'm worried that the topic will be missing from anything that's been copied or had parts removed. And unfortunately if I tell you what I'm looking for we'll run into the magic. So - something with a complete enough view of the world that if the thing I'm thinking of was around - and it would have been a pretty big deal if it was - then it'd be strange for it not to have been mentioned, and where any mentions definitely won't have been lost."

That sounds incredibly concerning?

"Would the autobiography of a notable historical figure work?"

It is incredibly concerning, he's just expressing his concern elsewhere.

"That sounds promising."

"...I'll see if I can dig something up."

And he'll read the founding documents, or rather go through their index to see what's missing and whether there are any suspicious patterns in that.

It is wholly unsuspicious. No, really. Archival damage is just what happens when your documents are over twenty millennia old, and your city gets sieged or spellbombed every few decades, and internally couped every couple of centuries, and once-in-a-thousand-years disasters happen once every thousand years. They've only preserved as much as they have, which is actually a lot, because the Walled Cities keep separate copies and corroborate with each other now and then.

The missing bits are fairly miscellanously distributed and cited as "destroyed in the fourth-floor collapse of the Second War of the Plains" or "damaged in the Great Fire of XXXX" et cetera. Some sections are entirely destroyed, but they're mostly things like addendums on civil law, or minutiae of inheritance tax policy, or treaties with cities which no longer exist.

That's good news. Is there any mention of gods? If the index doesn't mention them he'll start by scanning through their diplomatic records.

There is an index by topic, yes; gods are not in that index, no. Diplomatic records chronicle relationships with other cities, with small towns and settlements under Manus' aegis, with the Gnoll tribes, with Dragons and Dragon-cities, with emissaries from other continents...

Despite this being ostensibly the founding of Manus, it's clearly understood that the physical city of Manus predates the city-state being founded in these records which the modern Walled City of Manus claims continuity from (there are archivists' notes for the reader in the more popular articles!) so the diplomatic situation isn't starting from scratch.

The records do not speak fondly of the prior rulers of the Manus, of which "Manorachtt", also named the "Dragonlord of War" and the "War-Tyrant", is most mentioned, and said to have been expelled from the city but not slain.

The overarching challenge at the time seems to be diplomatizing the states previously allied with Old Manus who are now being petitoned by the tyrant in exile to condemn and declare war against the new Manus government's treasonous seizure of the city. (The writers sound assured that the latter is unlikely, but the former may be problematic for the city's long-term diplomatic and economic prospects.)

Manorachtt sounds plausibly like a god; is there any clear indication that he wasn't one?

The authors probably think this is extremely obvious and so don't specify by default, but some careful reading will turn up multiple sentences which unambiguously imply that Manorachtt is a Dragon. Further reading suggests some states are ruled by Dragons, some are not, and many Dragons do not rule or reside in states.

So, not a god, probably a dead end. He'll look more into dragons later. What about trade relationships, that seems like another promising avenue, even if this region wasn't claimed by any gods maybe they were trading with someplace farther afield that was. He'll pay particular attention to the place names, see if any of them seem like people names. (Places that aren't people are often named for their features, after all, and even when linguistic drift means the meanings have been lost to mortals, he can tell.)

Manus is named after a person! Its original name was essentially a conjugation of Manorachtt's name (which is itself is also a localization) to mean "dominion of Manorachtt", which drifted over time in common usage and has been officially, legally declared as "Manus" only with the recent regime change.

A lot of important cities around here have similar etymology. Smaller towns are indeed often named after natural features, but still sometimes after people, though not usually using the dominion-of linguistic construction (there's actually multiple such constructions).

The north side of the continent has more boringly named federations, but there are still some city-states or cities named after people, some of them in the dominion-of style, some of them not.

Does he want intercontinental trade too? Gnolls tribes?

Intercontinental locations seem like a promising avenue, before he goes tracking down the dominion-of people to make sure they're all dragons or whatever. Gnoll tribes might also work but he has no specific reason to think they will, he'll save those for last.

There's healthy trade with the continent of Chandrar and less trade with Baleros. Very limited trade with Drath and Rhir. 

Chandrar is also full of places with people names in the same way as Izril, but if you read carefully it's also possible to deduce that Chandrar also has a nasty case of Dragons-ruling-the-most-powerful-states.

Less data on the others, but there it seems to be mostly non-people names, though there are still people names.

Drath place names are in a different language! The other continents have some foreign etymology snuck in at spots, too, but Drath places are actively a different language and just transliterated into the local one (which appears to have changed much less than expected through the ages).

He utterly fails to notice that there's a second language involved at all.

It's looking increasingly like dragons might be key to the mystery, here; while he's waiting for Sacrra to get back with the autobiography he'll see if he can find books on dragons and identify something that looks promising, since he can do that from here.

There's nothing like "A Primer on Dragons" or anything, but there's a section on historical relations with Dragons, and another on Draconic philosophy, and another on Drake pre-history.

Drake pre-history refers to the era around and before the founding of what historians refer to as "modern civilization", a period which spans at least, uh, 30,000 years, and is marked by the creation of the first Walled Cities, either under the command of dragons or in defiance of them, depending on the account. Zeres likes to argue they were the first Walled City but everyone else is pretty sure that isn't true. All information on this era is from (alleged) verbal accounts from Dragons, distorted ad infinitum through retellings and embellishment and possibly wholly made up. Most "real" historians consider this field to be nonsense.

Draconic philosophy isn't philosophy by Dragons, but philosophy on how Drakes relate to Dragons, how the psyches of the two species reflect on each other, the study of the cultural and social impact of their shared history, and a lot of arguments about whether the Dragons were cool and sexy, or horrible tyrants all Drakes are well rid of.

The secretary comes back with a book titled Memoirs of the First Gardener 1st Edition Annotated.

"How are you getting along?"

"No luck so far but the dragons seem like a promising lead. Do you know if they allow checking books out of the library? This would be faster if I had my priests at home helping with it."

"No, but you can purchase copies, and they keep a small stock of the more well-known volumes. The others you'd have to wait for a copyist and pay more for it."

"That's all right, I'll keep going by myself. Do you happen to know if any dragons live near here?"

The secretary snorts unwittingly, then covers her mouth. "No, sorry—there hasn't been a dragon sighting confirmed in five thousand years."

"Huh. Is it common knowledge what happened to them?"

"Picked too many fights, didn't have enough children," she says. "Most people think there are still some out there, but they don't show themselves. Six thousand years ago was the Creler Wars. Dragons were a dying breed even then, but the last Dragonlords came out then to fight. Not all of them survived, and the rest went back into hiding, even more reclusive than ever, and some of them showed their faces in the centuries after, but since then—we're on our own. For better or worse."

"That might be what I'm looking for. Can I get an overview, to start? And if it looks promising I'll want to buy a more comprehensive accounting." If dragons were filling the same niche as gods and now both of them are gone, mutual destruction isn't implausible as an explanation.

"About dragons? So they used to control large parts of the world, mainly Izril and Chandrar, parts of Terandria too—we think they're from Izril originally, but it'd be so long ago that no one is sure—and the Drakes in particular are descended from them. They were around when we built the Walled Cities, and they ruled over us in those early times.

"I don't remember the full details, but the gist is the Walled Cities revolted, and Chandrar revolted, and the Dragons lost the war, and... so they weren't a contiguous political unit, see, they were very individualistic, and a lot of Dragons didn't take a side in the war, and some of them supposedly fought on our side, and they didn't have territory they controlled as a species separate from the empires of other species they conquered...

"What I'm trying to say is the Dragons were thinned out a lot, but they weren't extinct, but also they didn't have a 'homeland' to be driven back to, and the popular interpretation is their... society... sort of... atomized? I don't know if 'society' is the right word. I don't know much about it, and I don't know if historians know that much about how Dragons were like before, or why they died, or if it's just, you know, pet theories that got popular over the millennia.

"Anyway, whatever the reason is, that's around the time they started dying out. Not immediately, but over thousands of years. We kept killing them over time, not systematically, but just... you piss people off, things happen... and they didn't make enough more to replace themselves, so the story really tells itself, doesn't it?"

"That doesn't rule out my theory, at least. I think what I'd actually like next is something abut the relationship between the Dragons and the Walled Cities written just before the war, if you can find it."

In the meantime, it's been long enough for a useful test; what's senator Jealwind up to?

"...may be able to reduce patrols and divert resources to strike teams. You know Shirka's going to push back on the proposed cuts to 3rd Army." He's talking to a Drake in fancy clothes in a different building down the street. He's acquired a different secretary(?)

The pre-existing secretary says, "I was glossing over a bit there; it's less a 'war' and more a series of rebellions and wars between rebelled states and remaining Draconic states over many centuries, maybe millennia, depending on who you ask. There's not a good chronology of it. The Dragonfall Wars, that's the term you're looking for. And the Manus papers are actually during the Dragonfall Wars, and what we have before that is very sparse and not authenticated."

Good, people don't forget about him if he ignores them for half an hour. He'd been a little worried about that.

"That does sound like it might be what I'm looking for. ...I suppose I can try asking, at a bit of a remove... There's a subject that, when I bring it up, people from this world can't think about it, they just forget what I said. Does that sound like a known phenomenon? Something to do with a Skill, maybe?"

"That... doesn't sound good. It sounds like something a Skill could do but I don't know of any specific cases, off the top of my head... there are lots of skills that forbid actions, less that forbid thinking... It might be a spell, as well as a Skill, but I don't know if that makes a big difference to the considerations."

"I haven't heard about spells yet but I don't expect it will, no. What I'm trying to find out is whether whatever-it-is is dangerous to me - there's reason to think it might be - so I'm looking for something that discusses the topic from before the effect was in place, as a starting point to trace forward from and try to figure out what happened. If there's an event where most of your records were lost - well, it's not good news, but it does seem like it might be a clue, someone who set up an effect like that would probably want to cover their tracks."

"I think you might be underestimating how hard it is to not lose records over tens of thousands of years. The very, very oldest buildings in Pallass are thousands of years old at most; even the oldest platforms. There are fires and sacks and collapses. The only part of the city that's supposedly intact from its founding is the walls, and even then the outer layers get refurbished every couple of decades, and who knows about the insides, so I personally take that with a grain of salt. The same goes for every Walled City.

"And the other problem is people can just... make things up. Wall-Lords that want to make themselves or their ancestors or the city look good. Legends and stories that aren't clearly marked and become impossible to tell apart from genuine events with time. Any claims about more than ten thousand years ago are more myth than history, except very specific records with precisely traced lineage, like the Manus documents.

"There's no one event where we lost our records, it's just that information decays over time and the times you're talking about are a very long time ago."

"I suppose that would be the case, if your gods are dead. Do you have any suggestions for how I might figure this out?"

"Most Skills that affect minds, and in general Skills which have nonphysical effects on people directly, can be more easily resisted by high-level people. So I'd look for the highest-level person I can find and ask them about it, see if they can work past it."

"That seems reasonable. How would I go about it?"

"That's the catch, isn't it? It's hard to get an appointment with important people. The highest-level person in Pallass is either [Grand Strategist] Chaldion or Saliss of Lights, one of those. In all of southern Izril... I really don't know. It might still be Chaldion, but I'm biased, of course. Just by presupposition, the humans probably have someone similarly powerful in the north. In the whole world... the King of Destruction? The Blighted King?"

She shakes her head.

"Your best bet would be the [Grand Strategist]. If your situation with the roads goes well, you'll have to meet him sooner or later."

"All right, thank you. I'll see if I can get senator Jealwind to arrange for that sooner rather than later." He reallocates a sliver of attention to waiting for an opportunity to ask. "In the meantime - you mentioned spells, is there anything else like that that I should know about?"

He's winding down the conversation, probably going to leave the building soon.

"Spells—magic, you don't have magic where you're from?"

"Some gods' acolyte powers bear a passing resemblance to spells, but aside from those and the blessings - and gods ourselves, if you count us - no, we don't."

"Wow. How you explain it to children is spells are like Skills, but [Mages] learn how to cast them instead of getting them by leveling, but that's not really right. Magic is—a part of the world, which [Mages] learn to manipulate, and turn into effects? A spell is magic which [Mages] form on the fly and 'cast', for example to shoot a fireball or freeze water. You can put magic into scrolls, which lets the spell be cast at a later time, possibly by a different person. You can put magic into objects, which is 'enchantment', creating a persistent effect, like a rod that's always cold.

"There's also naturally-occuring magic and magic phenomena, like undead from natural death magic, or slimes which are animated by magic, or animals with innate magic like Coruscdeer. Do you have those where you're from?"

Elsewhere, he brings senator Jealwind up to speed on his mystery, insofar as it's possible to.

"Not at all, except again, gods. We are a naturally occurring phenomenon and occasionally one of us will get creative with their avatars but that's as close as it gets."

The senator echoes the suggestion that Chaldion is a good person to bring the question to, especially, he notes, as hostile mind-affecting Skills could be a matter of city security! He's somewhat unnerved by the report. However, it's not easy to get something on the [Grand Strategist]'s desk, even for him, so they should report it to city intelligence, which with a Head Speaker's name on it will probably get to Chaldion sooner.

"That's so strange. It has to be something about the nature of our worlds, then... I wonder if you can do magic? Not all species can do it, but it's not dependent on levels. I don't know if it'd depend on your avatar, but Gnolls can't."

He's willing to talk to city intelligence; he can bring his avatar over if it'll help.

"I'd like to try it - I should probably know more first, though, and I might need to go meet up with the senator again in a minute. But my avatar's species shouldn't matter at all, it only looks like a Gnoll."

"What specifically would you like to know? So one reason I thought it might be a spell is that whereas Skills in the vast majority of cases expire on the owner's death, a spell can be anchored to persist in perpetuity, like the enchantments on the walls of the Walled Cities. And from your reading I'm guessing you think it's been around for a long time?"

The senator's actually going to go back to his office and write up a proper report before going to intelligence, and will consult Kiraavi to get down an overview of the effect.

"My main concern is whether using magic would tie me to this world, in any sense - I'm a god who depends on attention for my survival and there's an effect that makes you unable to pay attention to or remember a particular thing about gods, I expect you can see how that's alarming. Right now if I need to leave entirely I can, there's nothing holding me here, but I don't want to do anything that might jeopardize that. It's why I'm not offering blessings yet, it's a weak connection but they do connect me to the people I've blessed."

The effect doesn't seem to be self-protecting, surprisingly, so he can describe the effect in some detail for the senator. He'll be up front, if it comes up, that he has no reason to think that the effect is new at all or dangerous to most people, but it could be very dangerous to him.

Any worldwide information-censoring effect is worth investigation, even if not alarm!

"Would the same concern hold if you transported a piece of, say, magicore, to your home, and tried doing magic there? I'm assuming here the issue is no ambient mana where you're from; thats what the magicore's for. Or, actually, getting a human from your world to try first; we know humans can do it. It's very hard to learn to cast even a Tier 0 spell from just a book, but the beginner exercises will tell you if you're doing something."

Oh, certainly! He just doesn't want to cause unnecessary panic.

"I'd want to know more about spells and magicore before I did anything like that. If the effect gets loose in my world it's not just my life or even my species that I'm risking, most of the humans depend on us in one way or another, too."

"...Right. If your world's never had to deal with undead before and they start happening, that would be pretty bad.

"If you want to know more about the nature of magic, you'll need someone who knows more than me. Don't know who, though—all I'm thinking of is Grimalkin, but..." She grimaces. "Fissival's a long road away."

"I don't generally consider that a bad thing. Inconvenient in this case, though, I'll grant you. Are there regular caravans? It won't cost me much to send a vial and a letter if there are."

"Oh, yes. I keep thinking of you as someone who can be in only one place at a time. I don't know about caravans, but the mail to Fissival takes five to seven weeks, one way. If you hire a Courier you might get something there in two or three weeks, but that's ridiculously expensive.

"Well, the sooner I start the sooner I'll be there - I don't know that it's worth a courier when I don't have income here yet, presumably you'd rather I not create very many coins."

"I'm not certain about it, but perhaps better to err on the side of safety. If you simply sell silver as a metal it wouldn't be hard to make enough for a Courier, though."

"I can do that, if you can introduce me to a buyer."

"Any jeweler's or metalshop will buy a big block from you... you may be overestimating what I mean by 'ridiculously expensive'. It's only one gold or so, if you want to mail a small vial. The Courier will be taking it as part of a batch delivery of priority mail."

"Oh, that does sound different. What other things cost about a gold, just to give me an idea?"

"A good-quality book costs about a gold? A loaf of bread is a few copper, it's two hundred copper to the gold, so... fifty loaves of bread? An average quality healing potion?"

"We don't have healing potions at home."

Also, are there any jeweler's or metalshops within a mile of his various holdings?

"...Oh, I don't know if those are magic but you'd think so, yeah."

There are jewelers, but not anything that unambiguously looks like a metalshop.

"How do those work?"

He'll check out the nearest jeweler's to the gate he has a claim by - do they have any signage up about buying metal, or anything?

Some of them say they buy used jewelry.

"They're made of Eir gel, distilled from it somehow, I think, which has accelerant properties, so when you use it it accelerates your healing. It can be applied topically or by ingestion. It doesn't help infections, though, just makes them worse, and it's the same as if you let it heal naturally, just faster, so if you've broken a bone you need to be absolutely sure you've set it correctly or it's going to heal wrong and that's a whole headache."

He can work with that.

"So if I want to swap out one of my blessings for improved healing, it sounds like I should tilt it toward infections, got it. I'll have to think about that, though, it's a hassle - remember how I said blessings tie me to people? As long as anyone alive has a particular blessing from me I can't change it to a different one. I'm not especially in the habit of blessing children but I'd still expect it to take sixty or seventy years to change one out. - let's head to the jeweler's, I don't think there's anything else I need here and I'd like to get the Courier going."

They can go jeweler-wards! The closest one that buys stuff is only a short walk away.

"That sounds terribly inconvenient. And it would be as if you're working with one blessing less, for the duration you're trying to cycle it out. I'm not sure infections are the highest priority thing going around, though, a lot more people die to monsters or accidents than diseases. If there's one thing it would be very exciting if you could do, it's making people level faster."

"I might be able to do that once I know more about how it works."

And at the jeweler's he can inquire about what he'd get for a jewelry set he takes from his pocket, necklace and bracelet and earrings in silver with sapphires and tiny pearls, with a design inspired by local fashion and a few of the more interesting offerings he's gotten over the years.

The jeweler peers it over with a looking-glass and mutters a few skills to himself, before pronouncing a bid of four gold for the set.

"You'd get a better price somewhere that'll looking to resell," the jeweler admits. "I'd be breaking it down for the materials, which is a bit of a shame for a nice set like this, but I'll buy it if you'll sell it."

"I'm in a bit of a rush today, so I'll take the four gold, but thank you for letting me know. I'll have to remember you next time I come into something that's damaged."

Then he can be enmoneyed.

The secretary says when they leave, "Do you want to head to the Runner's Guild and send your vial? You'd need someone to... receive it. At least on paper."

"Are there any relevant - schools, guilds, things like that - that we could send me to the head of? Or some relevant department? I should be able to pay my way once I'm there, that's not a problem."

"You might try the Admissions Office of the Scholarium? That's the magical academy of Fissival, the foremost in Izril. The Admissions Office probably gets a lot of mail and doesn't aggressively filter it, and the local Runners will know how to route it; that's why I suggest it and not the Headmaster. I don't know if they'll dump out a vial on the ground just because a letter told them to; is that necessary, or can you create an avatar from inside the vial?"

"I can't create things from a vial but I can hold a conversation. Though come to think of it I may want to send something slightly larger so I can make at least small things. Usually in a case like this the Courier would be one of my priests, so I wouldn't need to worry about talking someone into turning me out."

"Perhaps you should ask if Senator Jealwind has an associate in Fissival you can send to," she suggests.

The senator is just about finishing up the report for intelligence.

"Good idea."

"Excuse me. I'm looking into having part of myself brought to Fissival to ask some questions about magic, and I'm wondering if you happen to know anyone there who might be a good choice to receive me."

He's on good terms with a Mage Lord of the Teleportarium. He can write a letter of introduction.

That makes it easy. He sends his avatar to go get it.

"Is there anything else I should obviously be doing right now?" he asks, when he gets there. "I'm not sure whether you're all right with me putting a tent on my land claim or whether I should find someplace else for my avatar overnight, most obviously."

"If you have money, it would better to rent a room in a inn. Sleeping outside the walls would be an unusual thing to do, so if word goes around, some of the senators might not take you as seriously. Not by a lot, we're not Salazsar, but it doesn't sound worth the risk."

The senator's also going to hand off the mysterious censorship effect report.

"I don't sleep, but I can afford to stay at an inn, sure. Can you recommend one?" Sometimes it matters, he knows from watching his priests navigate this sort of thing.

He'll recommend an upscale one on the 8th floor. He's not sure why Kiraavi needs a place to stay overnight if he doesn't sleep, but it's probably mysterious "god" things and he's not going to ask.

He doesn't, that was the point of mentioning it, but wandering the streets tends not to go over very well, at least in human places, and he doesn't know what if anything is open overnight. He'll rent a room for tonight, anyway - he can sell some more jewelry for it if need be - and get the letter of recommendation and a shallow metal bowl on their way to Fissival, and then check the angle of the shadows to get an idea of how much time is left in the day.

The mailing process is smooth and uneventful, though even a small bowl as opposed to a vial or a letter will cost him six silver extra. Fancy inn is five silver a night, so what he's got is plenty enough to cover it. It's late afternoon but not quite evening. All the stores are still open.

At this point, his priest would be shopping for offering trinkets, or asking about the local god, neither of which is really an option here. (Or, he could go shopping, but for various reasons that doesn't seem like a good use of his time.) Instead, he'll see what there is to see around here - are there museums? plays? are people gathering anywhere in particular?

There doesn't seem to be plays. There are museum-ish looking places—exhibits and collections for technology or history or art—but it's not clear if they're meant to be open to the random public, or only by invitation. Won't stop Kiraavi, of course. They don't look secret, if that's a worry.

There are some small parks, designed to be relaxing and atmospheric while space-efficient without feeling crowded, where residents are strolling or reading. There's a sort of obstacle course with sections for all ages, featuring some self-moving parts that might be a combination of magic and engineering; it's hard to tell at a glance, but he could probably figure out if he cared to study it.

On the 9th floor, above, there are some spaces where craftsmen appear to be doing... tech demos? Lectures? Individuals explaining their craft to an open audience, with varying complexity, while they work on a demonstrative piece. Someone's giving a talk to young-looking Drakes and Gnolls on the basic principles of alchemy.

On the middle floors of the city, he'll find restaurants and bars and markets, less of the hullabaloo of the sprawling bazaars on the first and second floor, more targeted for the citizens of the city. There are plazas and benches and pedestrian-only streets, and buskers playing music or performing tricks for money.

Oooh, an alchemy lecture, that looks like a good use of his evening.

Alchemy is about taking the natural properties of materials, and extracting, refining, expressing, and resynthesizing them in different ways! A lot of [Alchemists] at a high level have Skills to supernaturally enhance or add entirely independent effects into a potion, but that's the exception, not the rule. You don't need Skills to make a healing potion, and you don't need to know magic either!

The Drake is going to show off how to make an simple burn salve from aloe gel, Sage's Grass, cooking oil, beetroot, and honey. You can do this at home with ingredients from the store! The salves you can get from an alchemist's is a lot more complicated than this, but the basic principles are the same.

It's a bit of a lengthy process for how few ingredients there are. Stop adding the active base when the beetroot turns yellow. Heat until the oil layer starts glowing blue. Repeat the solvent washing until when you add salt to a sample, no solid precipitates.

The output is a vial of viscous gel that emits a faint turquoise glow.

Weird! Can he duplicate the vial of gel?

It's not glowing when he duplicates it.

Can he find a store with the relevant ingredients and equipment to try the procedure overnight in his hotel room?

It'll take some finding to get the type of portable hot plate the demonstrator used, since his room doesn't have any heating elements, but it's certainly doable. The innkeeper would probably not be terribly happy with this use of the lodgings, though. Of course, the innkeeper is not by default hanging around searching his guests' shopping for sketchy goods.

Well, Kiraavi certainly isn't going to intuit that this wouldn't be welcome on his own.

Fortunately one of his acolytes catches on to what he's doing while he's getting the equipment set up and warns him. He relocates his acquisitions to his land claim - it's not big enough for a full-sized underground room, unless he wants to risk destabilizing the area with insufficiently reinforced walls, but he can store a few small things underground there - and instead direct his attention elsewhere for the evening. 

Activity quiets down as the night lengthens, but the street lights stay on, albeit dimmed, and there'll be people on the streets even at midnight, and some stores and bars run 24/7. The archives he was at earlier aren't currently in range, but some buildings identifiable as government facilities are open with a skeleton crew overnight.

Senator Jealwind is still awake drafting documents until almost midnight; he's put the vial on a table in his home office.

Nothing much happens that's interesting, though.

He has plenty of things to do at home, too, checking on his various ongoing projects and scanning lesser-traveled roads for problems and doing various bits of planning and logistics work. (Would have been nice to be able to play with the alchemy, though.)

He's paying enough attention to the new world to greet senator Jealwind when he comes in in the morning, anyway.

"Greetings! I've got the Secretary of the Treasury and the Speaker of Roads hooked, I think. Do you have the time to meet them this afternoon?"

"Sure; what are they going to want to talk about, do you know?" And is he going to want to offer the Speaker of Roads priest status, because it sure sounds like he might.

"So I see there as being two... three possible high-level outcomes of this whole business. The first is that you can claim the major roads the Pallass currently maintains, which is the most efficient but has some awkwardness around rights, ownership and security. The second is that you can't claim most of the roads Pallass currently maintains, but can claim the ones that are redundant, or create your own—this is inefficient, but makes sure we don't completely lose our road network if something goes terribly wrong. The third is that you can't claim or create any roads, which is probably unlikely, but I'm including it for completeness.

"First, we'll want to understand the mechanical effects you claiming a road and providing your services has, and the mechanical effects of offerings. Then, in each of the cases, we want to discuss what the exact rights, powers and responsibilities you and Pallass have regarding the roads in question. Then once we have a set of workable options, which might not be exactly the same as the ones I suggested, we'd try for a general consensus on which we prefer best, or what concessions we'd want in each case.

"We probably can't cover all of that in one day."

"Probably not, no. That's all right, I'm not in a rush. The one thing I'd like some time to think about before it comes up is war-related policy. At home, wars in the sense you have them here are rare, since gods have other ways of handling conflicts and very much prefer that their people stay alive, and I've mostly been able to stay out of them aside from supporting the refugees like I would with any other sort of disaster. I expect things will be different here, though. Can you give me an idea of what I can expect?"

"There are... two types of war, I suppose. There's the more civilized type kind of war Drakes, Gnolls and humans tend to conduct, where there are rough forms of rules armies are expected to abide by, and everything is... predictable. The kind that ends in peace treaties and concessions and changes to the border, but low civilian casualties. Refugees—do happen, and sacks do happen, and mass exoduses, but no one's going to object to sheltering of refugees.

"I expect the generals will want you to take Pallass' side in that kind of war, impede enemy movement on our roads, help supply our armies, and so on. I expect they will be satisfied with you providing ordinary services to our military but denying it to enemies'. I think they will grudgingly accept if you decline service to all war operations, or only service defensive operations. I nonconfidently predict they'll be unhappy if you want to provide service to all passing militaries regardless of affiliation, even though it's technically as symmetric."

"There's the other kind of war, which is wars of... annihilation, let's say, or destructive conquest. Fighting the Necromancer, or the Goblin Lord, who made serious attempts at conquering Izril, and in the former case raising everyone as his undead slaves. Wars where when they take a city, you expect everyone left is enslaved or dead at the end of the day. The city will be upset if you decline service in those cases, and even more upset if you want to help the invaders.

"There's the obvious issue that the line between the two is unclear and the military has an incentive to argue it's the latter at all times. You might prefer to set an agnostic baseline—not assisting any foreign incursions or actively impeding Pallassian military operations, for example—and negotiate any additional work on a case-by-case basis."

"That all seems... fairly reasonable. I don't have any reason to think I'll want to uniquely support Pallass once I have connections elsewhere, and I won't be able to support myself here without those. My policy at home has been to stay out of wars - by which I mean not impeding a traveling army, but not helping them either, or just providing food to spare nearby people from being raided for it - or if I don't stay out of it I'll support the defender, and I've been as happy with those policies as I expect to be with anything. The annihilation case doesn't happen at home, and there I'd want to support a defending city, which seems like a decent reason to want to make that my policy the rest of the time, the last thing you need in an emergency is an argument about how to react."

"Yes, of course if you had roads in Salazsar's or Manus's territory it would hardly be reasonable to expect you to allow our armies passage; this is with respect to the roads in our jurisdiction only. I'm not familiar enough with these matters to comment on emergency response, so you'll have to discuss that with the armies. But it doesn't sound like it'll be a blocker, just a matter of ironing out the details."

"Ah, I'd been misunderstanding - I don't usually think of normal people as holding significant territory aside from where they live and work. That might change my approach, yes. I'll have to think about it, and I should probably hear more about how you think about that sort of thing. Not necessarily from you personally, I understand that you're busy."

"Ah. A lot of Izril isn't formally owned, but is considered within the sphere of influence of a state, and there are in-between cases and grey areas—but yes, to take an unambiguous example, if Salazsar marches an army within a hundred miles of Pallass without notice and approval, this is considered threatening and is in violation of extant treaties, and the same for the converse.

"You might want to look into an aide, since I understand you've determined a reliable source of spending income."

"I'm not sure I'd call it reliable just yet but I should have one soon, yes. Can you recommend someone, or a way to find someone?"

"I can recommend some with good credentials. People normally hire by posting a job opening, but it won't work in your case since nobody knows who you are."

He can list some candidates who worked with him or other people on campaigns in the past, and have expertise on inter-city politics and the broad Iandscape of Izril, and which are currently between jobs. Does Kiraavi have additional desiderata?

He needs someone who's flexible and good with unusual situations, mostly. It'd be useful if they liked travel or had been to a lot of places, too.

This Gnoll's claim to fame is interfacing for the Walled Cities with Niers Astoragon, a famed general from Baleros who came to Izril during the Second Antinium War to fight the Goblin King; he followed Astoragon to Baleros for three years before returning to Izril. He's worked in cities across this continent from Zeres to First Landing. Not a Pallass native, but resides here in semi-retirement and takes interesting consulting cases. This probably qualifies.

That does sound like the right sort of person, yes! He probably needs a letter of recommendation and directions? He'll send his avatar over for the letter, and to drop off a bowl so he can accept things like that here or at the senator's office in the future.

Yep, this person has an office at this location and probably has a receptionist or secretary who'll better inform Kiraavi on next steps and what to expect.

(They'll ask for contact information and say to expect one or two days for a response.)

He can leave a vial in lieu of contact information, if that works for them?

Yep, that works!

And with that done he has the rest of the morning free, until his appointment with the Secretary and the Speaker this afternoon; he should use it to get an income set up that can support him and his aide. There might be enough jewelers to do that sustainably - Pallass is so much bigger than any city he's seen before - but it seems wiser to ask at a proper industrial center that can take bulk deliveries on a regular schedule. Probably there's something like that within range of his gateside claim?

The 9th floor has bulk industry encompassing entire supply chains from ore processing to end-user goods like swords, armor and tools.

Can he find one that doesn't produce swords, and ideally not armor either?

Certainly! How about this bulk manufacturer for cooking pots?

Someplace that wants smaller quantities of higher value things would be much better but that doesn't not work. It doesn't have to be metal, maybe there's a fabric mill that wants dyes or something?

If he doesn't want to wholesale rare alchemical ingredients on account of Might Come Out Wrong, there's this appliance manufacturer that buys high-purity gold and silver as an enchanting substrate.

Might Come Out Wrong and also he doesn't want to disrupt an industry that might not be able to recover if he has to disappear on it, he's seen some things like that happen in his time. Bulk gold and silver is perfect, though, he'll go talk to them about what he can do.

They happy to buy his gold and silver! It needs to be 99.9% pure, and they get it from their current supplier at twenty-five gold pieces per hundred grams of gold, one gold piece per hundred grams of silver. Across all their production processes, they use a kilogram of gold and ten kilograms of silver per day. Their current supply contract lasts for another two months, but if Kiraavi can undercut their current prices by more than 15%, they can cancel the contract at the end of this month and tank the penalty clause.

He can do that; he's not familiar enough with their haggling norms here to want to push too hard, but 275 gold a day is plenty for his current needs and a nice discount compared to their current supplier. He'll leave them a bowl rather than bother with the logistics of safely transporting the metal through the city, and he can receive his payments there as well.

With that taken care of he just needs to get some coin together to support himself for the next month; that seems like a reasonable use of the rest of his morning, and he'll check with senator Jealwind about where he should send his avatar for the meeting in the afternoon.

They're going to want at least a two-month contract—with exit clauses, of course—but that's perfectly satisfactory.

The senator refers him to where the city treasury office is; if he tells the reception he's there for the 2pm on roads with Secretary Vedrinn, they'll point him the right way.

There is a chance - not a big one, at this point - that he'll need to leave suddenly, but unless something catastrophic happens he'll have plenty of time to make a couple months' worth of metal for them before he goes, and if he's leaving anyway he'll have no reason to charge for it, which he suspects will easily make up for the inconvenience.

He gets to the treasury office with half an hour to spare and will go where he's directed.

Vedrinn Silverscale, the Secretary of the Treasury, is a... silver-scaled Drake with a cane and a monocle hanging from his tailored vest. It's his office, but he's seated at the lounge area around a glass-surfaced table, together with Senator Jealwind and a Drake with mottled lime-and-green scales, whom the Senator introduces as Beiscal Swifttail, the Speaker of Roads.

"Hello! It's good to meet you both. I assume the Senator has explained at least the basics of my situation, did you have any questions for me about that before we get started?"

"We've heard the summary from Senator Jealwind, yes," Secretary Vedrinn says. "I'm not sure I understand the exact parameters of your abilities, still, but perhaps that's something you mean to cover now?"

        The Speaker of Roads, Beiscal, nods in agreement.

"Mmhmm. So one of the most fundamental ones is that I'm not embodied in the same way you are; I am roads, including bridges and other features of roads, and I can take a number of other forms but that's what comes most naturally to me. I'm also specific roads; I can take over an existing road but not all roads are part of me. For roads that are me, I can make them into whatever sort of road I like, and I'll naturally maintain them, and I can see and hear what's happening on them and nearby, and I can speak to and understand anyone there regardless of their language. I can also create things that are normal to find on or near roads, for example trade goods or reinforcements to nearby terrain, and I can teleport things that are mine from one part of myself to another. I also have some offensive powers that I generally reserve for bandits; that's primarily an ability to produce lightning bolts but I can also cause a minor earthquake if that's somehow called for. I can also grant blessings - these are minor improvements to various aspects of a person, and I offer direction sense, weather sense, improved endurance, improved memory, poison resistance, and improved understanding of body language - but I'm not offering them yet, as they metaphysically tie me to the people I bless and I'm not sure yet that this world is safe for me to operate in, but I'm hoping I'll be able to figure that out soon. There's also a stronger sensory power that I might eventually give out to people who have decided to work with me in the long term, with the same problem with giving it out right now. I can give up a road I've claimed, but there's rarely a good reason to do that - I don't get back any of the energy I spent claiming it. If I do anyway, the land stays in the same condition I left it in and will weather naturally from there.

"The energy for all of this comes in the form of attention paid to me by normal people, which in the part of my world I'm most established in is traditionally given in the form of physical offerings - the person giving the offering picks something they want to give, figures out what makes it a good offering, and brings it to a location I've set up for offerings to give it to me and tell me why they think it suits me. The object itself isn't the important part of that, it's the time spent thinking about why the object is a good offering for me that matters. I do like offerings that are useful to travelers, though, since it's useful to be able to pass them along to people who need them, and moving things around is much less expensive than making them. Attention being the thing that powers me has some implications for the types of things I can and can't do, too - it probably sounds tempting to ask me to take over your shipping and teleport all your goods from one place to another, but that's ultimately unsustainable; moving things around isn't expensive but it's not costless, either, and it means I lose all the traffic from the traders who'd usually be carrying it, which would cut into my budget pretty sharply. I am willing to do some moving of goods, though, especially in cases where they can't usefully be transported the usual way - urgent letters, fragile plants, that sort of thing.

"In terms of my usual policies for my roads - anyone can travel them, and giving an offering is optional. I don't base any help I give on whether someone has given me an offering, either - the attention I get from people knowing I'm there and available to help them, and from the memory of it afterward, is enough to make that worthwhile even without one. I'm not in the habit of interfering with armies on my roads but the political situation is very different at home, and I may do things differently here. I am in the habit of helping people displaced by various disasters, and coordinating the efforts to do that with other gods, but hopefully that won't come up here and it's not my primary area of concern in any case.

"Do you have any questions?"

Speaker Beiscal says, "Are you able to pay attention to and protect all roads that are part of you, at the same time? Is there a limit to how much roadway you can be, separate from how much it costs at the time of claiming?"

Secretary Vedrinn asks, "How total is your operational support for any given road which you are? More concretely, let's say: How many times in ten will a lost traveler ask for directions on one of your roads, and receive a response? How many times in ten will a bandit attempting to rob someone on your road be noticed by you, and how reliably are you able to stop them?"

Senator Jealwind: "Is there a rough... exchange rate, or rules of thumb, for how often you can do teleportation and what offerings or compensationyou would need to make up for it? I won't hold you to any exact numbers, but just to get a picture of the relevant factors, the moving parts of the problem."

"I'm able to pay a moderate amount of attention to all of myself, but attention is one of the things I'm constrained on - I have an amount of it available proportionate to my size, so it's not that I'll outgrow myself, but if I grow into a particularly difficult area I might have to pick some other areas to pay less attention to so I can deal with it. Under what I consider normal circumstances I'm able to notice whenever someone asks for me, and somewhere around one time in five I'll need to ask them to wait for a few minutes so I can pay enough attention to them, but I can choose where I'm doing that and I'll prioritize people with something urgent like a bandit attack. The chance of me noticing an attack when I'm not asked for is lower, and of course it's hard for me to figure out how many cases I'm missing, but it's not many once I'm familiar with an area and know how much of my attention it needs, especially since I like to proactively deal with banditry. We also don't have Skills in my home world, so I'm not sure what your bandits will be capable of compared to mine; I do expect to be useful but I don't want to promise that I can handle them in every case or even most of them yet. At home I don't get them every time but enough that it's a nonissue on most of my roads.

"For the road claims themselves, there is an upkeep cost; it's minor compared to the cost of the claim and I don't expect it to be noticeable to you on any scale smaller than a continent, but it could happen that I lose part of my claim if I don't get enough attention to keep it. I haven't had that happen in millennia and I'm really not worried about it, but if it does I'll be able to choose which parts I lose.

"For teleportation, the teleportation itself is all but free, the cost there is in the attention needed for it and the secondary effects. If you don't mind waiting until times I'm otherwise idle I expect to be generally willing to transport things that can't travel normally for two or three times the cost of normal transportation - I don't want to undercut anyone who might figure out a better way to transport things. For things that can be transported normally... I'd ballpark that each person in a normal caravan at home spends an hour to an hour and a half each day thinking distinctly enough about me for it to be useful to me, and with guards and scouts and so on that's more than one person per wagon, so roughly two or two and a half hours of time per wagonload per day it would have otherwise traveled, plus any extra from travel issues or time spent thinking about me before or after a trip. Of actual attention; in some places they have traditions that would be more suitable for this than the offerings but they don't have perfect efficiency. I'd still prefer to see people traveling, I think that has benefits above and beyond just being useful to me personally, but that would be the starting point for me to not obviously lose out."

Beiscal nods. "The threshold I'm looking for is whether it'll be safe to travel without guard, and it sounds like the answer is—eventually yes, but not immediately because you'll need time to adapt to the local conditions? That's good as anything, since travelers and merchants won't immediately trust us if we tell them they don't need to hire guards anymore."

Vedrinn puts on a thinking face. "Most bandits are low-level. If you're a high-level fighter, you make better money as an adventurer or hired sword. A lightning bolt will take care of them easily. The other thing I'm worried about is monsters, which don't follow the same rules. Goblins usually go down easily, even Hobgoblins can't take a [Lightning Bolt], and they respond to deterrence, but when it comes to Hollowstone Deceivers, Shield Spiders, or hells forbid, Crelers... some of them will go down to lightning, but they can swarm."

"In those cases, your average hired guards won't help," Beiscal observes.

"True enough; from a traveler's perspective, they can save the coin. But from the army's perspective, monster culling is still relevant."

Senator Jealwind is mapping out some figures on teleportation costs and not responding yet.

"They'll get to watch me figure out the bandit situation, yes - by the time I'm telling them I haven't seen a bandit in six months and they and everyone they talk to haven't seen one in a year I expect us to be in agreement about how safe things are.

"For monsters, it's a bit more expensive for me to fortify the roads but I can do it, engineering projects like that are one of my strengths. Bridges, too, if I didn't mention that earlier."

"Bridges—those would be very exciting to have cheaply, but we don't actually have that many rivers," admits Beiscal. "If you get to talk to Oteslia, they'll be over the moon about that."

"I'm don't have a good picture of how you'd fortify the roads," says Vedrinn. "So Hollowstone Deceivers—Rock Crabs, they're also known as—are ten feet tall and wide, with rock shells, and pincer claws that can break unenchanted stone. They're rare this far south, but some of them migrate here when the summer rains hit the Floodplains. They don't often attack travelers, but when they do, their guards don't often win, which is why the 3rd Army follows up on all reports of them."

"I'll want to talk to someone who knows about more than just one monster and has had more than a minute to think about it, but my first thought against Rock Crabs would be some kind of bollard situation made out of a material harder than they can crack, probably diamond with a shell of something less unpleasant to look at in the sun, with roof struts to stop them from getting in on top and fortified shelters at regular intervals."

"You can make fortifications out of diamond?"

        "Salazsar's not going to like that."

Senator Jealwind snorts. "What are they going to do?" To Kiraavi, "Salazsar exports a lot of gemstones."

"...oh, naturally occurring diamonds are rare, aren't they." He chuckles. "Yes, we can make them, they're nothing special at home. Please don't get into a war over it."

"It's not that much up to us," Jealwind says. "I don't know what they'll do about it. Try to trap you in an agreement not to resell any gems you make, I suspect. But if we end up with roads paved with real diamond but no one is allowed to dig them up—it's stupid, for one, and second it'll tank the value of gems just with the knowledge that this exists out there."

        "If they want war, let us have war," says Vedrinn. "...Is what Thrissiam would say. I'd normally call him a fool, but in this case..."

                "We're not compromising road safety just so Salazsar can keep their tidy monopoly," Beiscal says.

"Not only that. If Kiraavi is willing to sell gems and metals," Jealwind turns to the god, "they're immensely valuable in enchanted goods, or simply ordinary construction."

"It sounds like I should get a courier on the way to Salazsar to speak to them about it. I hadn't been planning on selling gems, but if they're useful for enchanting - I do like technological progress, I'm still not sure it's worth having a war over but it seems worth looking into."

"I have a contact there," Jealwind says. "I'll write another letter for you after this."

        "We can untangle that knot later," Vedrinn agrees.

Beiscal says, "It sounds like between the unknowns of the monster problem, the bandit problem, the jurisdiction problem and the attention budget topic—I'm not certain people will spend an hour to an hour and a half every day on the road thinking about you, or maybe I'm not imagining what "thinking about you" means correctly—we probably want to start with a trial area, and a non-unique road—that is, a road between two places which have other connecting routes—and see how that goes." 

"It's not an hour and a half consecutively; a few seconds or minutes here and there adds up over the course of the day. I do expect it'll be less until they're used to the idea of me, and that's fine, I'm willing to operate at a loss here for a while as long as I'm making progress toward sustainability. A trial road sounds reasonable, in any case - ideally one that needs improvements, so I can show off how I'm useful."

"There's a privately operated road between Veiss and Wicess run by the Hothorn Mining Company," says Beiscal. "They built it to transport marble from their quarry forty years ago, but a city popped up around the site, and now it's used by travelers and merchants for ordinary travel, with tolls that go to the Company to pay for the road. It runs through swampland, and the place is infested with burrowers and monsters, so there's a lot of upkeep required and it's not always done well. It's not the only road to Wicess, but it's the shortest one, and popular for that. The Company has been making noises about handing it over to the city of Wicess, and Wicess wants Pallass to take over; but nobody wants it because it's a money sink.

"They'd pay you to take it off their hands, if you commit to keeping it running well, and you'll have fairly broad and uncontested control over it because it's non-unique was already privately operated before, not like if you wanted to claim a public highway. Which will let us defer the questions about jurisdiction and war response."

"That sounds perfect, yes. Are any of the monsters ecologically important that you know of?"

"Ecologically... important?" Vedrinn repeats.

        "As in, how you can't hunt out all the predators in an area, or the prey population will go out of control?" Jealwind says.

"One of the reports suggested that the original roadbuilding work which drained parts of the swamp and flooded others is one of the reasons why the monster situation has been getting worse in the last decades," Beiscal offers.

"Or if you get rid of an annoying herbivore you might lose the valuable predator that eats it, yeah. I don't have much experience with that sort of thing compared to most gods but I can see if someone is willing to give me advice about getting things back under control there."

"You want a Gnoll shaman for that," Jealwind says, "but you'll be hard-pressed to find someone willing to leave their tribe and travel up to Wicess to consult... maybe less hard-pressed, if you can shower them in riches."

"Just getting advice from them where they are might be enough, too. I'll look into it, thank you."

"If we're taking this route, we don't need to take it to the Assembly yet," says Jealwind. "We'd ask to vote on a broader program only once we have the trial showing results. I'd still want to circulate a notice on what we're doing, and I'll run privately it by the President of the Assembly—or Vedrinn, if you want to?—but we can get the cart rolling sooner."

"That sounds fine to me."

Then they can spend the rest of the afternoon ironing out the details of the road between Wicess and Veiss, and catching Kiraavi up on where it is, the characteristics of the two cities, the type of traffic the road sees, and major incidents and problems reported in the last few years.

Senator Jealwind can get a vial en route to Salazsar on the gem scarcity problem, which will arrive in about two weeks, likely just before the Fissival one.

They can also get a vial on the way to Wicess; Speaker Beiscal can write the letter for it. That one will be five days. They'll probably negotiate taking over the road with the company's branch office in Pallass, and get it confirmed to Wicess over [Message], so everything will be already set up for the handover once Kiraavi gets there.

His schedule is getting crowded, in a good way. He writes it up as part of his nightly maintenance, to hopefully show to his new aide soon.

✨Trial road✨: Wicess; ETA 5 days

Gem scarcity: Salazsar; ETA 2 weeks

Magic: Mage Lord of the Teleportarium in Fissival; ETA 2-3 weeks

Income: local, ETA 1 month (sufficient funds exist for now)

 

Mystery memory effect: awaiting response from city intelligence to get an audience with [Grand Strategist] Chaldion

Road reinforcement consultant

Gnoll shaman/other environmental consultants

Priests

Alchemy? Weird materials?

Intercontinental contact

Tomorrow, the aide he's trying to hire will call back and ask if he has time today to meet.

He does! (He's looking around the city, now that the sun is back up, with plans to go to the library later.) He can be there in... probably fifteen or twenty minutes?

Sure, his schedule is free.

The Gnoll's office is small and cozy, filled with strange doodads and a painting of a city built around and into an enormous tree. The person himself is gray-furred and casually dressed. He introduces himself as Marekh, no surname. "I got some of the details from the letter, but I'd like to hear it from you."

"The short version is that I'm a god, from another world; I've written up an explanation of what that means I can do, but the most relevant things are road maintenance and security, some transportation of high-value goods, and some creation of goods that are rare here, and also that I can exist in many places at once." He materializes a copy and hands it over. "I'm working on getting established, but I'm not familiar with how things are done here or basically anything about the region, the people, magic, Skills, politics with normal people rather than gods, all of that sort of thing; I'm working with some fairly important people and I keep having questions that aren't at all appropriate to waste their time on, but that I still need answers to or advice on. I'm also used to delegating the type of work I'm doing right now - interfacing with bureaucrats - so if you're interested in picking that up or advising me on it that would be useful."

"[Read Document]... Interesting Skillset you have here."

"Managing politics. Yes, that is what people hire me for. Or hire me to consult for, these last few years, but this is interesting enough I'm inclined to get my paws dirty. What are your short-term, mid-term and long-term projects? Risks, challenges? What do your organization and relationships look like in one month, in one year, in five?"

"In the short to medium term I think I have enough going on and I want to get it under control before I do much of anything else - the main thing is that I'm taking on a road between Wicess and Veiss in a few days and I'll need to figure out how to fortify it against monsters and get the ecosystem rebalanced so there are fewer monster-related problems in the long run, and for that I need to speak to someone in Salazsar; I'm used to sometimes using gems as a building material and I'd rather not provoke a war with that. In the longer term I'd also like to start making some of the rarer and more useful gems more widely available for industrial purposes, but I understand they aren't going to take that very well, so I want to know more about that situation so I can make an informed decision about whether and how to go forward with that. It's also been recommended that I find a Gnoll Shaman to speak to about the ecological issues around my new road and I don't know how to go about finding one. 

"There's also a strange effect - someone suggested it might be a spell - that affects local people's memories when I try to talk to them about a certain topic, and I'm not sure that's not a safety issue for me; I've been advised to find someone high-level to speak to about it, and I'm waiting to hear back from the intelligence bureau about getting an appointment with [Grand Strategist] Chaldion. If that goes well, it'll open up the option for me to give my blessings here. I'm also curious about whether the local magic works for me but might not be able to safely interact with that for the same reason; I'm on my way to Fissival to ask about that.

"In the slightly longer term I'd like to make contact with as many cities as I can in the area, even if I'm not ready to expand to them yet; I don't want to accidentally destabilize things because I didn't know something was going to bother someone. In the long run I do want to expand in a sustainable way to as many places as I can, including intercontinentaly, and support and facilitate communication and trade between them all and between them and my home world.

"The main risk I'm worried about is the memory effect; depending on what that turns out to be I may need to abandon this world altogether. I also don't want to start any wars if I can help it, and I've already found one way I could have accidentally done that, so I'm worried about there being more. That's not my highest priority, if gems are useful enough to you I'll want to make them available even if Salazsar does insist on having a war over it, but I don't want to do it by accident or without sufficient preparation. As a more mundane concern, I'm not sure what it'll be like operating in a world where nobody knows how gods work; I'm going to need to keep a closer eye than usual on my energy reserves and on whether my usual approaches are working.

"As to what my organization is going to look like, I don't know yet. At home I can count on people having an idea of what it means to work for a god, which means I can look for people who have their own ideas about what they should be doing for me and mostly come out all right. That won't work here, obviously, since nobody knows what gods are. In the short term I suppose I can just hire people for specific work as I notice I need them and see how that goes. In terms of relationships - I like to be at least cordial with everyone but I'm used to there being an everyone to be cordial with, if that makes sense? Most regional politics is between gods, at home, and I'm not used to working with bureaucracies. I do still hope to have mostly good relationships with them but I'm not entirely sure if that's a reasonable way to look at it."