"Ah, I apologize."

He goes downstairs and has another little pie and waits.

Five minutes later she comes down the stairs wearing daytime clothes and looking refreshed.

"Right, where were we... Alignment and spellcasting? What does 'cast from Wisdom' entail?"

"There are three independently variable mental abilities - different spells improve each one - and different ones affect how good a caster is at their spells, so, a wizard needs to be cunning but not necessarily wise or splendid, sorcerers usually cast from splendor but sorcerers vary a lot so maybe not all of them, and clerics from wisdom."

"...am I right in deducing that... people in your world can cast spells from a pretty limited set? Two casters of the same kind probably know a lot of the same spells, sort of thing?"

"Clerics are more like that than most casters, but no one is inventing most of what they know from scratch."

"Yeah. Well, we have the inventing from scratch thing. And the 'there is one martial adventurer on the planet and it's me' thing."

"I can imagine a planet where the gods all agree not to pick any clerics, and I can imagine a planet where wizardry has not been invented, but it seems strange for there to be a planet where sharp objects have been invented and there are vampires around and no one is picking up the sharp objects except you."

"Oh, plenty of people pick up the sharp objects. I'm just the only one who's supernaturally good at using them."

"They just... don't make any progress past the picking up a sharp object stage of training?"

"...people can learn how to be more skilled at using sharp objects, but they can't learn how to have reflexes as fast as a vampire's. People can get stronger by using and developing their muscles, but they can't get as strong as I am because that's not where I'm getting my strength."

"So they don't... with casters we say 'circle up' and there's no such obvious benchmark for martials but there are marked differences between the kind of martial who adventures with first-circles and the kind who adventures with fifth-circles."

"Circle?"

"I'm third circle, that means I can cast third circle spells. It's a loose and general range on - everything else - toughness and how hard I hit in a fight, how likely I am to make my save if a hostile spell targets me..."

"I think we don't have—so consistent a structure—around any of that, and depending what you mean by toughness, people might just... not get more of that through training, here."

"Training per se not on my planet either, people don't circle up more than maybe once except through navigating situations of genuine risk."

"Hmm. No... no, I don't think navigating situations of genuine risk has... effects other than on how people think about and react to situations, here."

"Well, I guess maybe that's somehow a Golarion thing, though it's very weird to think of it that way. I admittedly did not wake up to more spells than usual this morning but one fight with help against a couple of tough but not obviously overwhelming vampires would usually not do it by itself."

"I guess we'll just have to see—I mean, if you intend to keep fighting vampires. I wouldn't want to presume."

"I'm not sure if it's actually an efficient use of my channels if there are no other clerics at all, the same channel that might hurt a few vampires would also heal anyone in a thirty foot radius of me. And I only get two a day - most people get more but I'm not Splendid enough, that in particular goes off Splendor."

"It might be hard to arrange a thirty-foot radius full of people who need healing and could benefit from magic. Or, well—I think I know how I'd arrange one; I'm wary of the possible consequences. See, the existence of magic isn't public knowledge in this world. And there's no clear obvious reason why absolutely everyone who knows about magic, a highly diverse group of people many of whom hate each other, have coordinated on not going public. So my best guess is that there's some subtle curse enforcing that outcome, and attempts to do highly visible works of magic like healing everyone in a thirty-foot radius might tend to backfire. Highly visible works of magic do happen—for a recent example, the town mayor turned into a giant snake and tried to eat the graduating class of my school last week—but it did backfire, in that we killed him, and people are already going back to ignoring it. I think this outcome is overall evidence in favour of the subtle curse theory."

"Oh dear.

"Unfortunately getting an answer from Iomedae about it requires a fifth circle spell and also expertise I don't have."

"...your goddess answers arbitrary questions intelligibly if you ask them with a powerful enough spell?"

"...yes. How is that your question, why are you asking that instead of 'you have to cast a spell to talk to your god'."

"The reason why I said that the question of gods is complicated around here is that a lot of spells invoke them, some of their symbols are known to have power against vampires, and we're so short on reliable communications with any of them that it's not clear whether they're meaningfully beings as opposed to some kind of side effect of unknown forces."

"Well, they might not be the same thing that gods as worshiped on Golarion are, there are plenty of other kinds of things that can hand out magical power - and if they don't do it in the form of making clerics that's a pretty substantial sign all by itself."