"Well. The kind of thing gods are on Earth is a powerful entity whose presence may have plausibly-indirect effects like empowering spells that invoke them, but who isn't answering anybody's questions as far as I can tell. Or sometimes a powerful entity who thinks people should call them a god and is hard to argue with because they tend to kill anyone who disagrees."

"There's one of those on my planet, he runs a country and styles himself the Lawful Evil god of luxury and for some reason his makeshift clerics channel positive even though an Evil god's clerics can't do that."

"The concept and detectability of alignment must lead to all kinds of fascinating social technology."

"Most people not empowered by gods aren't strong enough to detect, a wizard would have to be third circle like me before you could tell by looking instead of by just assessing their personality."

"All right, that blunts things somewhat... it's interesting that chess of all things is the same in both worlds."

"Complete with the Crusading Queen variant, which was introduced on Golarion hundreds of years ago but is still not popular in Vudra. According to my chess variant book."

"Around here that's just how queens move. You have a chess variant book? Is it with you?"

"Yes, it's in my bag and you should be able to read it today if you would like."

"If there's books in an alien language on offer we should definitely call Chris's boyfriend. Do you have any others? Would you mind if we made copies to study?"

"I have two copies of the Acts of Iomedae, and the disciplinary handbook for Her theocracy. I don't mind if you make copies but I am not sure how you're going to do it if none of the spells she's invented are Scrivener's Chant."

"So—those large vehicles you noticed the hazards of on the way here aren't magical in any way. There are a lot of nonmagical conveniences like that on Earth, and some of them let people quickly make copies of written material."

"...how curious. I don't mind if you copy my books."

"We'll get on that later this morning, then. It's a bit early still, I'm only awake because of the Slayer nightmares—as part of my martial adventurer situation I get unhelpful prophetic dreams that alert me when something bad is going to happen, which it usually is, but don't tell me much about where, when, how, or what to do about it."

"...well, I'm going to guess that you have not tried praying to Desna the goddess of dreams about that and furthermore that if you did it might not even help if the gods aren't supposed to interfere here, though they can't be too dramatically not supposed to do that since I got my spells this morning."

"I have not heard of Desna the goddess of dreams before. Is she usually helpful? What's her alignment?"

"Chaotic good. I don't actually know very much about Her but if I were the only adventurer on a monster-riddled planet and I had prophetic dreams that were not very good at their jobs that would be what I might try."

"I will happily accept advice on how to pray to Desna. And then spend a while thinking about it before I decide whether to try it."

"...I have no idea if Chaotic people traditionally kneel to pray, I find it sort of hard to imagine them doing it, so I don't know what Desna prefers in that department, but if I were you I'd say something like 'excuse me, Desna, Tender of Dreams, I have an awful lot of monsters to fight and I'm supposed to get prophecies about them in my dreams but they're hard to interpret and nightmarish, if there is anything you can do about that I would appreciate it' or something like that. Not necessarily out loud. And maybe go on for a bit in case it's hard to locate people on this planet or something. - however, also, if prophecy works on this planet and I can prepare spells normally I should be able to prepare prophecy spells. Golarion hasn't had prophecy for a hundred years since a god died trying to incarnate on it but that's planet-specific. If any are low-circle enough." He digs out a copy of the Acts to flip through.

"Prophecies on this planet are traditionally unreliable, confusing, and sometimes fabricated, I'm not sure whether that constitutes 'working', but if it could result in highly reliable prophecies then it seems worth trying unless the other things you can do with your spells are remarkably valuable... how does preparing spells work?"

"I wake up at dawn - automatically, including if I'm underground or in a windowless room - though in theory I could just go back to sleep if I needed the sleep more than the spells - and pray for an hour, and Iomedae gives me the spells I ask for. It's possible to ask Her to pick but not standard or encouraged, it may be expensive for gods to do that."

"I see. Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd try for something prophetic tomorrow, just to see if it works. In the meantime, want to play chess?"

"Always."

Chess!!!

She takes white and goes for a weird knight opening just to see what happens. "I don't currently know of any way to get you back to your own world but we can look into it. There's a lot of obscure magic out there if you look hard enough, and some of it is even conscionable."

"I won't be late for the convention for weeks, and after that don't really know whether to expect to be escorted back by an archmage or given up for lost."

"What implications should I be hearing in 'archmage'? Wildly powerful spellcasters around here tend not to be... safe to be around."