If by buildings he means crypts, he's in business. Otherwise it's going to take a fairly lengthy stroll through this fog-shrouded evening to—are those sounds of violence from off to the left?

Damn it he does not know what Good people are supposed to say instead of that. He is not really oriented enough to be confident in involving himself in any violence going on around here but maybe it'll be really obvious like a green dragon or somebody attacking a kid or something. Towards the violence he goes.

A couple of very pale people with fangs and gnarly-looking foreheads are chasing a screaming civilian, all of them in unfamiliar clothes. The civilian pelts out onto the path, sees Blai, is bewildered, glances back at her pursuers, and keeps running.

Okay, that's so much more parseable than a standoff between bandits and adventurers, or tax collectors and merchants, or orcs and goblins, or fairies and farmers. He stands between the two monsters and the civilian to block their advance. Their call if this turns into a fight or not.

Oh they are super turning this into a fight. The pair of them (tall blond guy, short red-haired girl) both lunge for him, with superhuman strength and speed but decidedly unpracticed technique.

Mace to the face of the one, sidestep the other.

A mace to the face definitely disorients him for a second, but he bounces back fast, and his buddy can apparently turn on a dime; she tries to wrench his mace out of his hand, snarling.

Well, she can't have it, it's got a wrist strap and he's got a good grip on it, and that leaves her pretty open for her own swat.

The other fellow seems to think this situation would be improved by teeth in Blai's face. Does Blai agree?

No, hard disagree there, counterproposal: chainmail elbow to the chin.

His argument is persuasive... but not on the short one, who now that she's done reeling from her face mace encounter is well-positioned to attempt a below-the-belt hit with a surprisingly sledgehammer-like fist for a girl so tiny.

The chainmail is long enough to make that awkward, though not impossible, so he has a bit of an awkward dodge there, and as long as he's awkwardly dodging he'd like a few seconds out of reach to cast Prayer.

Alas, they are uninterested in giving him a few seconds out of reach; the other guy is lunging for his face again, apparently not having learned anything the first time.

In a way stupid enemies who won't learn anything are the best kind, you can learn their openings over the course of the fight. Smash.

The girl goes for a low tackle, hoping perhaps that he'll be less annoying if he's on the ground.

He probably would be! What's her opposed grapple check like?

Decently high on account of vampire, not as high as it could be on account of her unfavourable training to bloodlust ratio.

Well, he gets an attack of opportunity on his way down and she might have a hard time holding on to him once he's there but she can get him on the ground.

She is having a terrible time holding onto him, because she reacts poorly to being hit with a mace, but luckily she has this boyfriend who—

—is dissolving into dust?

Short girl launches herself at the newcomer with a howl of rage.

Short girl can also dissolve into dust.

The newcomer looks Blai over in a thoughtful, guarded fashion, then offers him a hand up.

"Thank you," he says. Do they speak Common Taldane in whereverthefuck he is, she at least looks Avistani. Up he goes, though he's distributing his weight as though accepting her hand is a principally symbolic feature of the situation.

Much like the vampire she just killed, she's a lot stronger than she looks, though she's also not too overbearing about hauling him to his feet.

She makes a remark in an unfamiliar language, in a friendly, slightly wry tone.

He nods and taps his holy symbol on the gold wire sun part.

Thoughtful noise, questioning look?

"...Iomedae?" he offers.

Dunno-about-that headshake.

Wow, he must be on at least another continent. "Comprehend Languages?" he says, since the name of the spell is just the words used to cast it and that might be universal.

Puzzled headtilt?

Oh well. Shrug.

Agreed: shrug.

She considers him for a moment longer, then makes an inviting gesture and takes a couple steps away to see if he follows.

Sure, he will follow the local adventurer.

Local adventurer tucks her wooden stake into her bag and takes him on a stroll through a pretty bewildering town. The buildings are often brick but have a truly absurd amount of glass and a few less recognizable materials, and there are raised paths lining the sides of the roads, perhaps partly explained by the alien vehicles traversing the middle bits at speeds ranging from brisk to alarming. All the signage is foreign, and some of it glows. Even the trash in the streets is foreign.

She's keeping an eye on him to see if he has anything to say or is likely to walk into traffic.

He is briefly about to walk into traffic but then discovers that traffic and does not do that again, instead opting to follow her just short of directly registering her footsteps. He looks at all the stuff, shining the holy symbol at things that are not lit enough, though really things are startlingly lit here.

Yeah that's about what she thought.

After a few turns they find themselves in a quieter residential neighbourhood, with numbered houses and no neon signs. A few turns after that, she strides up to the door of one of those houses, unlocks it, calls out a foreign greeting into the interior, and ushers him inside.

Over the course of the walk he says something a couple times - the same thing, accompanied by a gesture - but it's neither normal conversational volume nor directed at her.

Into the house he goes.

A subtle sensation as he passes the threshold might be magical in nature, or just a product of getting in out of the mild evening chill. The house is as relentlessly foreign as everything else he's seen so far, but does seem to contain chairs and tables, in addition to this lady trotting down the stairs and engaging in incomprehensible conversation with the adventurer who brought him here. Despite some differences in coloration and other details, they have a clear family resemblance.

Was that a Forbiddance? Kind of rude to make someone walk through a Forbiddance you can't warn them about but those monsters were awfully close to a city, maybe it's unavoidable as a security precaution or she subtly alignment-read him and knew he'd be fine? Or it was some totally other thing. He will make for a chair with a view toward not sitting in it if they make "what, how can you be so rude" faces at him.

What if, instead of making faces, she fetches snacks? Here is a tin of shortbread cookies. The probable lady of the house is munching one already.

The adventurer grabs a cookie too, though she doesn't take a bite right away, being still in the middle of (probably) relating the story of how she brought a weird guy who doesn't speak the language into their house.

Sharing food is an important aspect of hospitality and fellowship! It's in the Acts! He will accept a cookie if they're offering. - wow that's really sweet.

Blah blah foreign blah blah possibly miming how the fight with the vampires was going when she crossed his path.

Nodding along, interjecting occasional questions, setting the cookie tin down on the coffee table where they can all reach it and moving to sit in an armchair across from Blai. There's a chess set on the smaller table next to her, set up looking like someone was partway through a game and then bumped the table and knocked over half the pieces.

Ooh! They have chess on this continent!

The adventurer catches that look and interrupts herself to gesture between Blai and the chess set with an incomprehensible question.

Her relative(?) perks up, evidently also interested in hearing the answer to Blai <-> Chess (?).

...he can set up the board into a fresh game? Actually he can start doing that, pause on the queen, and then set her on a random square and check if they do Crusading Queen moves here: yes, no?

Nod nod, yes, that is normal queen behaviour.

Setup setup setup. Voilà. Yes? He didn't mix up the weird looking bishops with the rooks or something?

Nope, looks good. She inquires by gesture whether he'd rather play black or white.

He'll take white. Pawn go.

The mystery lady plays fast and well. After a few moves she introduces herself as, "Chris."

"Select Blai Artigas," he replies. She plays fast! It's very good!! He will also play fast!!!

The adventurer, now spectating, introduces herself as well: "Eliza."

"Eliza, Chris," he nods, testing his pronunciation. Knight takes pawn.

Nods all round, and Eliza makes a decent attempt at, "Select Blai Artigas?"

Chris is too busy improving her strategic position to devote any more attention to names at the moment.

Nod nod. He picks up a bishop for a moment, "Select," handwobble, sets it back down in its new location.

That gets a thoughtful noise out of Chris before she refocuses and makes her next move.

Comprehending nod. "Select," point at bishop, pause of separation, point at Blai, "Blai Artigas."

He nods and gets his rook out.

Does he now. Chris threatens it.

Aha, but that leaves this approach to her queen open.

She has a plan for that too, as it happens.

Oh no! Well, in six moves won't she be surprised when it turns out he has another sub-plan down that branch of possibility.

Will she? She doesn't look very surprised, and she's threatening his pieces again.

Maybe she will not be surprised at all! Whee!

Chris proves to have a good head for strategy, a fondness for shortbread cookies, and an enigmatic smile for every occasion. She ends up playing just a little too cautiously, and Blai ekes out a win, but if things had gone a little differently she might very well have beat him.

So, swap sides and play again, then?

Yes!

Thought so! Here's a weird opening he might not have seen before.

(Their spectator heads upstairs for unknown purposes.)

Blai will play chess all evening if nothing stops them.

Chris is happy to play several games in a row before inquiring via mime if he's hungry for something besides cookies. Once she has the measure of him she starts to outpace him a little in games won, but Blai can definitely still take some games himself even when she's going all-out and knows his style.

She is the best chess player he's gotten through more than three games with and he is learning a lot from her!

When she broaches the subject of food, he is going to presumptuously look in the pantry - he doesn't know what the refrigerator is - and find that he's kind of bewildered by everything in it, and give up and go looking for a large pot and a platter of some kind. He expects odd looks for this behavior because he can't exactly say "I have a Create Food today" and he will brave the odd looks unless they escalate to something that might mean "what the fuck are you doing".

...well, she's certainly following him curiously as he rummages through her kitchen, but she's not trying to stop him.

Once he has a large pot and a big plate and a wooden cutting board he is going to make sure she is not imminently interruption-inclined and then start casting a spell over them.

Oh, she wouldn't dream of interrupting this.

Eliza also shows up to spectate.

The spell takes ten minutes and then the pot is full of some kind of cheesy beans-and-greens stew, the cutting board has a neatly stacked pyramid of rolls and miniature pies on it, and the platter is covered in cheese and fruit. He lowballed the amount a bit from its peak - their house doesn't look like they do a lot of entertaining - but it's still more than enough for dinner tonight and breakfast and lunch tomorrow for the three of them.

It will need salt. He didn't find obvious salt anywhere in the pantry so he will go get the rock salt from his bag and start scraping some of it into the stew.

Eliza observes this for a second and then fetches the salt in its cardboard-box-with-spout, pours a bit into her hand, and holds it out for his inspection. Behold: salt.

Oh! How convenient. He will go re-bag his rock salt and sprinkle a generous several palmfuls into the stew and pour a little pile of it on the edge of the cutting board full of bread things.

They can all sit down to a comfy dinner of magic food at the breakfast table in the kitchen, then.

Over dinner, Eliza grabs a notebook and pen and draws a stick figure comic, the art mediocre but legible: civilian fleeing vampires, guy with mace fighting vampires, girl with stake showing up to kill vampires, girl with stake and guy with mace walking along the street toward a house. She draws a prologue panel above them that shows her leaving the house by herself, and an arrow from that to her first appearance below, and an empty square next to it, and an arrow from that toward Blai's first appearance.

Oh, well, he's no great shakes at drawing and the pen is unfamiliar and so is the stick figure idiom, but sure, he can draw his stick figure and the giant snake with a mirror face lunging at him (or... just being in one of the many configurations of snakeyness that snakes can be without much obvious visual suggestion of movement, actually). He traces the border of this drawing with the hand that isn't holding a chicken pie. "Cheliax, Avistan?"

She makes a thoughtful noise, but shakes her head in the not-ringing-a-bell way.

"......Golarion?"

Hmm, okay, she has a guess at what he's getting at. She puts down her own chicken pie and walks off and comes back a minute later holding a globe.

He hesitates in inspecting the Mediterranean but ultimately decides: "Not Golarion." And shakes his head in case the "not" is not clear from context.

"Earth," she says, indicating the globe, and "North America," indicating a particular continent, and "Sunnydale," pointing at its west coast and waving around at the house-at-large and by extension its surroundings. But unless he seems keen to continue this cultural exchange, her next move is to put the globe down and keep eating dinner.

He will study the globe a little bit but then he will also go back to his dinner.

It's got raised topography and colourful markings and some kind of slick coating on the paper covering its surface, and there are a whole lot of places labeled on it. It's also very light and kind of delicate, and that paper is peeling in a couple of places.

Dinner seems to be a hit; Chris and Eliza are munching quite contentedly.

Oh good. This is not a Menadorian farmhouse but this was his plan for arranging hospitality on his trip.

It is unlike a Menadorian farmhouse in so many ways!

Case in point: after dinner, Eliza leaves Chris in the kitchen to put all the extra food away and beckons Blai out to the living room for another game of chess. Her playstyle is different from Chris's but clearly related.

Eee!

Heh, cute.

Slightly fond smile or no, though, she's sure not going easy on him. And although she has less practice than Chris at chess in particular, her head for strategy is really something.

He has improved today, but like, one day's worth.

He can perhaps look forward to improving further if he stays with these folks for a while.

After playing a few more games, Eliza would like to show him to a guest room upstairs and then, ideally with minimal awkwardness, also show him to the upstairs bathroom and ensure that he understands its most crucial functions.

He definitely has to think about the bathroom a while but if she demonstrates the flush function he will nod.

Oh good. In that case, (an incomprehensible phrase which probably means) goodnight.

"Goodnight."

And he will take off his armor and drape the gambeson over something so it can dry out a bit overnight and he will sleep in the guest room. Till dawn.

Dawn arrives on its usual schedule. The rest of the house is quiet at this hour.

Up he gets; across the hall to pee he goes; down on his knees beside the guest bed he falls. He sleeps with the holy symbol on. Here is a sitrep, Iomedae, he doesn't know how important the constitutional convention is but if it's important enough to be worth doing anything this is the situation there is to do anything about. Here are his plans absent any outside intervention. He would like two Share Languages and two Comprehend Languages and mostly normal oh-shit spells besides that.

An hour after dawn in the house of someone who regularly spends all night patrolling for vampires, he's gonna have the place to himself for a while yet.

He's going to go have a couple leftover rolls and then if nothing's going on a bit of a nap, yeah.

He is uninterrupted at this!

He may or may not wake up a little later when there's a sound from down the hall - not exactly a yell or a cry, but definitely some kind of distressed exhalation.

Yeah, the nap wasn't that deep. He pokes his head out the door to his room.

Eliza is emerging from her bedroom in black flannel pajamas with pretend-chalkboard math on them, looking sleepy and shaken. She tries to muster a friendly good-morning when she sees Blai, but her heart's not in it.

...will she take his hand?

...after a thoughtful pause, sure.

"Share Language."

...processing...

"I didn't have that prepared yesterday because I was not expecting to have a teleportation accident but today I have two, if your mother would also like one. It lasts twenty-four hours."

"My aunt," she corrects, absently. "We'll see. It might be a better idea to give it to her boyfriend." Having a concrete puzzle in front of her seems to be a steadying influence. "All right, so what is your story?"

"I am a third circle cleric of Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of victory over evil. I was traveling to attend a 'constitutional convention' that my country's new Queen's party member is holding but encountered the teleportation snake thing en route and arrived not far from where we met."

"Well. I'm the Slayer, which I assume is as confusing yet full of possible implications to you as 'cleric of a Lawful Good goddess' is to me."

"I was just parsing you as 'some kind of martial adventurer' and that... still sounds about right? Which parts of being a cleric of a Lawful Good goddess are confusing, do you not have clerics, not know about alignments, not have any gods..."

"Let's say we definitely don't have clerics or know about alignments, and gods are a more complicated question. As for 'some kind of martial adventurer', I think that implies that... there are... other ones? And around here there aren't. Being as good at killing vampires as I am puts me de facto in charge of defending the world against whatever is trying to end it this year."

"...those were vampires?"

"Yes. At least if your language magic is being reasonable about how I should use words. They're former dead humans who drink blood and catch fire in sunlight. There are a lot of them and it's a problem."

"Are th- you wouldn't know if they were vulnerable to positive energy without clerics, would you, unless you've got a lot of... druids or something..."

"I don't think we have a lot of druids."

"Okay, well. Clerics are a kind of spellcaster. We're particularly important on Golarion for healing, with positive energy, which damages the undead, at least the ones I'm used to, but I did not think vampires looked like that so I will want to test it before I go around channeling energy at all your vampires. Clerics each get our powers from a god, different gods pick different sorts of people but we all cast from Wisdom. Alignment indicates whether someone is Lawful or Chaotic, or neutral, and also Good or Evil, or neutral. I am probably Lawful Neutral but my goddess is Good and clerics show their god's aura so if you looked at me with alignment detecting spells I'd look Lawful Good."

"We don't have alignment detecting spells. I think we don't have, hmm... the level of consistency I'm hearing implied here? My aunt does magic and she invented most of it herself and it's rare for inventing it yourself to go as well as it did for her but normal for any spellcaster who does a lot of magic to be making half of it up. If we did have alignment detecting spells, I'd expect different ones to give different results about the same people a lot of the time." She glances down the hall to the bathroom. "...we should continue this conversation downstairs once I'm done waking up. Excuse me."

"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."

"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."

"My country was recently conquered by an adventuring party including either two or three archmages depending on how you count someone who's sixth-circle but one of the sorcerer types whose circles lag their overall strength, and also the god of trade's high inquisitor, and also our new Queen. They're at least most of them Good - the inquisitor is probably lawful neutral and the arguable archmage I hear very little about - and have been working with an arm of my church dedicated specifically to conquering my country because it needed doing. I admittedly don't know how much their colossal amounts of good deed doing could be covering for, in their aggregate alignments."

"Well, I wouldn't tend to look favourably on conquest, but depending on why and how badly it needed doing..."

"It needed doing very badly."

"I'll take your word for it." She makes another move. The theme of this game seems to be Weird Risky Knight Stuff. She's managing to keep on top of the consequences of her actions so far, though. "So people can do a colossal amount of good and a moderate amount of bad and you just see the aggregate and not how much of each there was?"

"If the bad was all very recent and the good longer ago then the alignment might shift to track the new habit but if it's all interspersed, yes."

"Hmm. That makes sense. It does mean that alignment is... a crude instrument with which to measure someone's character. But given the limited number of possible labels I guess I knew that already."

"Empowered followers of gods you can get a little bit more specificity - Abadar, the god of trade, can and does pick Lawful Evil clerics, but not ones who will cheat people, if they can still create water they're not embezzling, not even under loopholes that would let them remain Lawful to a detection spell. There are a lot of contexts in which I'd rely on a Lawful Evil Abadaran cleric and far fewer where I'd rely on an arbitrary person who read that way."

"Oh, interesting... and what might you say about a cleric of Iomedae, that way?" She makes another move, for once not Inexplicable Knight Behaviour.

"For some reasons of personal background I have actually had very little contact with other Iomedaeans. I expect there are commonalities and that Iomedae would not have selected me if they were not true of me but I don't know what they are."

"So you were selected, you didn't seek her out?"

"Yes. I think that's unusual but I don't know how unusual. Though 'Select' is the standard title for all Iomedaean clerics."

"Unusual for Iomedae or for clerics more generally?"

"I think unusual for organized churches. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a cleric of, say, Erastil, was surprised one morning, because He's the god of farming and communities and is going to usually choose people who were focusing on those things and not haring off to seminary in a city somewhere."

"I think I see what you mean, yes." Back to Inexplicable Knight Behaviour. "So what are your plans while you're waiting to find out if your move to this world is permanent? We're happy to have you in the guest room, especially if you can conjure food reliably and especially if you're interested in helping me fight vampires and solve other Slayer-related problems. Though I'm not sure how well you'll take to a Slayer-related schedule if you wake up at dawn every day - I'm out past midnight most nights, patrolling."

"I can conjure food reliably but it takes up my only freely allocatable third-circle spell slot, if you want me on support casting and can generally afford to feed yourselves it's probably not the best use of the slot. I can go back to sleep after I pray for spells, if that's called for. I would usually say that if there is only one cleric on the planet it would make more sense to deploy them in a safe behind-the-lines healing capacity but if that invokes the curse I don't have anything against adventuring per se."

"If we deploy you in a safe behind-the-lines healing capacity and try not to invoke the curse you'll be healing... me, mostly, which seems less efficient than you healing me and also helping me fight vampires. You were doing pretty well against those two. Also, I wouldn't say one person who can heal everyone within thirty feet a few times a day is a world-changing amount of healing, whereas one person who can keep up with me in battle without getting killed might conceivably be a world-changing amount of combat effectiveness. What else can you do with that third-circle slot? Food is pretty cheap so most things are probably worth more than the food, but Slaying doesn't pay spectacularly well so if we run over budget on monster-hunting supplies it's possible we'll be grateful for the food as a backup option once in a while."

"The food won't last, it'll be gone twenty-four hours after I cast the spell, so it's really best if you're feeding more than a dozen people. Or some horses. But even if you're eating solely by spell you can get away with casting it every other day, and have a big dinner followed by a big breakfast on a day you aren't casting it. At third circle for combat I like Channel Vigor and Summon Monster III because you don't have to decide all the details till the moment of casting; Dispel Magic, if you're fighting casters sometimes; Greater Hide from Undead, though there's a weaker version at first circle; Locate Object might be useful; Protection from Energy; Remove Disease; Speak with Dead if you ever need to interrogate a monster victim; Stone Shape is good for fortifications but that does not seem to be the kind of operation you're running..."

"Yeah, fortifications aren't really a factor in this kind of conflict, since the people I'm trying to protect mostly don't know there are vampires after them. What does Greater Hide from Undead do and what's the difference from the weaker version? What are the limitations of Speak with Dead?"

"Hide from Undead ends like invisibility d- excuse me. Hide from Undead ends if any of the hidden individuals channel positive energy or attack anyone or touch any of the undead. Also they get a save, so it won't always work. The Greater version allows a save but it'll be harder because it's a higher circle spell, and instead of it automatically ending if someone attacks or channels or touches an undead, they just get another save then. In both cases if they guess you're there they can act like they've guessed you're there, just not in a way where they can sense you. Speak with Dead only works on corpses, not undead, and gets - probably ten questions or so if I cast it, maybe more, and how useful the results are is never fantastic and will depend on whether the dead creature would have been cooperative with me in life, and it has to be mostly intact to be able to talk. I'm not actually sure if the soul in the afterlife can register the conversation or not. It will only answer questions it could have answered before dying, so probably not but it could just be another limit on the spell."

"We don't really know much about afterlives on Earth besides being able to guess that there might be some, is it different on Golarion?"

"Yes, with the right spells you can view or speak to or visit the dead. There are nine afterlives corresponding to the nine alignments."

"I see." Her Inexplicable Knight Behaviour is starting to catch up with her; it's looking likely he's going to win this one. "I wouldn't have guessed 'nine', but then, if they correspond to the alignments it makes sense... maybe we have a different arrangement since no one has heard of alignments here. Or maybe this is just the Ignorance Planet where people are ignorant of a bunch of things."

"Or you could have something strange going on, I certainly don't know about all the strange things that might be going on in the world. Check. I'm not sure not knowing about alignments would be in any way a barrier to facing Judgment intended to rule on one's alignment. Pharasma the Creator does not claim to be Good. Or Lawful."

She weasels cleverly out of check and manages to nab a bishop on the way, though really she's only delaying the inevitable. "I guess more to the point the one thing I do know about the collection of planes that may or may not be afterlife-related but certainly exist is that there's, like, thousands of them, which is a bigger number than nine. So either the rumours that those planes have something to do with the afterlife are false because the nine-alignments thing is true instead, or the nine-alignments thing is true for you and false for us, or something else is going on."

"...maybe many people are creating demiplanes? There are more than nine planes, it's just that the nine Outer Planes are the afterlife ones, and that's not necessarily exhaustive, there's a god with a divine realm in the Plane of Shadow instead and I think He collects His people there."

"I don't know of any magic that can create a plane, even a demi- one. That's not to say it doesn't exist, lots of things exist, but the things we call 'hell dimensions' in English are definitely not created by anyone I've heard of. And there's thousands of them all full of assorted hazards and rumoured on very thin evidence to be related to the afterlife. I suppose they could've been created a long enough time ago that the records were lost. It wouldn't entirely surprise me to learn that Earth was the hobby project of an extraordinarily powerful person with strange priorities and a messed-up sense of humour."

"I'm unfortunately not powerful enough to cast any of the spells that would let me follow up on the eventual fates of the souls here."

"Well, that doesn't leave me any more ignorant than I was yesterday," she says philosophically. "Hmmm... check." It's a pretty weaksauce check but she had the shot so she took it.

He takes the offending piece. "If I keep fighting vampires on a nightly basis we will probably have a good idea whether I can circle up here or not soon, I'd expect to notice some of the intermediate stages. If I can - well, if I can it will happen if I'm risking my life, so I might die, but if I do not die then Sending is fourth circle for clerics."

"And that's a spell that will talk to a dead person?"

"Yes. It has some failure rate, but, like, 'I'd want to do it three or four times' not 'if I fail every day for a month there's no one there'."

"Hmm. Good to know." She's mostly getting serious at this stage in the chess game but it seems she has room in her heart for at least one more wild knight move... no, wait, this one might be legitimate good strategy artfully disguised as more nonsense.

Blai has the high ground control of the center. "Check."

She weasels out again and takes advantage of previous setup to improve her position slightly but it's not going to save her. "Is risking your life strictly necessary, for gaining circles?"

"No, you can risk someone else's life, and some people get there off - political intrigue, at least if they don't have a secret adventuring hobby on top of their political intrigue - but it has to matter in roughly that amount and roughly that way."

"Huh. Well, fighting vampires is a risky business but I'm going to be trying pretty hard to keep you alive, if you do decide to join up."

"I appreciate that."

"And we do have access to some decent protective magic."

"What does it do?"

"Turns aside hostile magic very effectively, helps a little against especially bad luck when it comes to getting injured."

"How long does it last?"

"Until something damages it enough that it needs to be renewed. And if nothing does that we renew it every six months, but that's wildly overcautious, it would probably last more than a year if I ever went a year without nearly dying."

"...that's very impressive duration."

"My aunt specializes in defensive magic."

"There are abjuration specialists on Golarion but - in general spells just don't last that long unless you're doing something extra with diamond dust or fifty-person rituals or something."

"She has a trick that lets non-casters anchor part of the spell for her to make it more powerful. I suppose you could call it a ritual."

"There are Golarion exceptions too, things that aren't persistently magical any more after the spell goes off or that last until dispelled, but they're unusual and the major every-caster-gets-this-one-if-they-can abjuration spells at the high levels usually top out at twenty-four hours like Share Language does."

"I think, with the magic I'm used to, people don't usually... cast spells as often as once a day?"

"Oh. Clerics do the dawn thing, arcane casters need a full night of sleep to refill their slots so it works out to once a day for them too."

"Huh. I wonder what's behind all these differences..." She tries something clever that also isn't going to save her.

"Check. Some of it is probably gods negtiating about things but they don't publicize the details when they do that."

This is her worst weasel yet. "I'm still not confident there are gods here, so the thought of negotiations between them is an odd one to contemplate. Do they have diplomats, I wonder?"

"They have heralds but I don't know intergod diplomacy to be among their roles. Checkmate."

"What do you know about them, then?" She starts setting up the next game.

"When Iomedae was mortal her now-deceased god Aroden sent His herald Arazni to assist Iomedae's crusade against the lich-king Tar-Baphon. One occasionally hears about heralds appearing to deliver messages from gods, though gods can also grant visions and I'm not sure exactly when it's more cost-effective to send a herald instead of doing that."

"Once again, there's nothing nearly so organized happening on Earth, or at least not that I know of." She finishes setting up; she's given Blai white, this time.

Pawn go. "The curse sounds like someone must have been - fairly organized about it, maybe? Even if it was long ago."

"Either that or one specific witch really didn't want to get caught turning the village blacksmith into a rat."

"Would it not be... easier... to affect one village for one lifetime... than the entire planet indefinitely? - what is going to happen if it wears off suddenly, is anything set up to be a catastrophe if it does that?"

"It would be easier if you had exact control of what you were doing but most spellcasters, especially panicked ones reaching beyond their means, don't. To be clear, 'panicked village witch' is not my top theory here, it's just - in the range, and plausible in a way that I'm getting the impression it wouldn't be in your world." She's playing much more seriously this time around, at least so far.

"I'm sure stranger things have happened but that would be a remarkably strange thing and point to some other force intervening on the situation."

"Around here it's... still out of the ordinary, but less out of the ordinary than that."

"How do people become witches around the curse in the first place?"

"The curse doesn't seem to mind when individual people find out about magic because someone told them on purpose face to face, or because they survived a monster attack and managed not to rationalize it away as a weirdly bitey mugger. I'm not eager to test the boundaries extensively, but I'm comfortable telling one person at a time if I have a good reason. I'm planning to treat knowledge of your world the same way for now."

"Understood. How did you and your aunt first find out? I assume her boyfriend also knows if you were proposing having me cast Share Language for him."

"Yes. So—being the Slayer is inherited, but it doesn't pass through the family; every time a Slayer dies, some teenage girl somewhere in the world has a nightmare about vampires and wakes up with superpowers. If she didn't know beforehand, she does afterward. As it happens, though, we did know beforehand, because Chris has known about magic since... before I was born, I think? I'm not sure she's ever mentioned how she learned. It could've been someone she met, it could even have been through our family."

Nod. "And the boyfriend?"

"You know, I've never asked. I'd assume family connections, though. That's often how it is."

"What does that woman who was running away from those vampires likely think happened?"

"Most likely she has settled on 'assaulted by weirdly ugly people' by now, but it's possible she's one of the more observant or resilient ones and will manage to remember that they were vampires. Unlikely, though."

"She saw me, too, though I didn't cast any flashy spells so I suppose there might be nothing to curse away there."

"Yes, most people who see you in that outfit will assume you're wearing a strange costume for personal reasons."

"...well, the holy symbol really isn't optional and I don't have any money and the armor is pretty useful but I'm not attached to the clothes per se if that comes up."

"We can get you some clothes to wear in any non-combat situations where you might have to pass for an ordinary person from Earth. Nonmagical conveniences make clothes cheaper around here than I think you're probably used to. The holy symbol does come across as a pretty bold fashion statement but I think much less of one without the rest of it. Actually, speaking of nonmagical conveniences, I should explain showers and laundry now that we have better communication available - after we finish this game, maybe." She's doing much better than she was during her crazed knights phase.

"I can in principle cast from nearly any blade but this one is more orthodox both because -" rook up in your business, "- it's the more complete symbol and also because I don't know any of the theology that I would need to make sense of Lawful subterfuge. Also I sleep with it exposed, I've got it wrapped up so it doesn't stab me that way."

"Lawful subterfuge?" she asks, deploying appropriate countermeasures.

"I think it's possible for Lawful Good people, whose orthodox presentation involves declaring themselves including to their enemies, to be spies. Somehow. I just don't know how it is they do that. I would be concerned about failing to rederive some principle that is important even at lower grades of - acting incognito - if I were going around casting from a knife that was not particularly reminiscent of the sword-and-sun. I did it for a few weeks before I came by the materials to fashion this one but I did it in a fortress full of my own men whom I'd loudly and publicly announced the situation to."

"I would personally tend to think that displaying your holy symbol openly is much less meaningfully communicative, and therefore much less necessary, in a world that's never heard of your god. But I can see how you'd arrive at the conclusion that you'd better stick to it."

"Oh, it certainly is far less communicative, but - hiding it isn't right either. Especially since I will not share a language with most people I might encounter to explain the situation at greater length. If they can derive something from the sword as a symbol that they wouldn't from me having a table knife in a sheath they're entitled to it."

Contemplatively: "But then that gets into the question of how to communicate across cultural and language gaps more generally, and whether there are times when it's more appropriate to conceal something than reveal it because revealing it is more misleading - like hypothetically if you went somewhere where a sword-and-sun symbol was in use by a local organization that has nothing to do with you and whose goals are broadly opposed to yours."

"Hm, that's a puzzle. I guess I could put the little sword on a backing of Iomedae's mortal heraldry, which is completely wrong as a matter of how devices are supposed to work but I don't immediately have a better idea for how to display it without telling a - visual homophone of a lie -"

"I don't know of any such organization around here but I can imagine contexts where even if it was important to me to be known to associate with a symbol like that, I'd hide the symbol because it would tell people more false things than true ones. I think I have different priorities around truth than you do, though."

"Well, all that aside if I don't display it I'm delayed in casting or channeling with it by having to draw it, which is a pretty serious practical drawback."

"Yes, that's also an important consideration." She's making moves that don't advantage her much in the short term but hint at possible future plans. "What are the constraints on what counts as a symbol? You could potentially come up with something that looks more unremarkable but still works for practical purposes. I don't expect you to need to do much casting under conditions where looking unremarkable is a high priority, but emergencies do hate to be predictable."

"My understanding - which is for reasons relating to my personal background very poorly catechized - is that it has to be a genuinely sharp blade at least loosely in the form of a sword or knife, but the sun is for practical purposes optional. I could just carry a sword instead of the mace but the mace is magic and I haven't been trained on a sword. I do usually carry my table knife and that has worked before and would work again if my symbol were damaged or something."

"I have spare swords and can teach you to use them," she offers. "A sword is a much bolder fashion choice, and might be illegal to carry in some contexts, but it seems like the sort of thing that would be useful for you to have as an option even if it's presently kind of a niche option."

"Swords are illegal to carry in... what contexts?"

"I'd have to look it up. The laws of this country aren't designed to account for monster attacks, and swords haven't been at the forefront of military technology for centuries, so carrying around a big weird old-fashioned weapon is the sort of thing a person is more likely to do for trouble-causing reasons than reasons of personal defense. I have to do some carrying of big weird old-fashioned weapons myself in the course of my work and I try to keep them away from contexts where someone not in the know about magic might be as confused as I am about whether they're legal."

"Is the mace legal?"

"I can double-check if you're worried but I don't think it has the same problems because it's not sharp."

"Curious. Well, in anticipation of situations where swords are legal and displaying my holy symbol unwise I guess I should pick up the rudiments at some point."

"I haven't done much teaching but I expect to manage well enough to get the basics across, and hope to manage better than that." She makes another move. Things are still going well for her but she's not giving it her all - too focused on the conversation.

The conversation takes as much room as it takes; the chess game chases away anything else that would have been bidding for attention. That bishop was defended, better luck next time. "I've received training on crossbows but don't have one with me, the border my fort helped to hold was having some supply issues at the time I left and I couldn't justify taking ammunition."

"I have access to crossbows. They're a bit of a niche option for me but there's times when I'll take one hunting vampires—the classic way to kill vampires is a wooden stake through the heart, so a crossbow bolt with a wooden point works just fine if your aim's good enough, but you do need the aim or it just annoys them."

"I'm not very good with them - haven't the grace - and don't expect I could reliably shoot the heart. But there's a spell that creates ammunition and an enchantment on the quiver of it can affect everything it creates that way, and it might be worth seeing if holy or axiomatic bolts work well even if they don't strike the heart."

"Holy sounds potentially promising; what's axiomatic?"

"The same thing but for Law instead of Good."

"Worth a shot, I suppose. So to speak." She makes another move. Several things about her long-term strategic plans begin to come clear.

"I can get Align Weapon for Law as a domain spell, but my other option at that circle isn't the same for Good, I get Qualm instead - makes the target question all their decisions and worse at doing things till they stop and collect themselves for a moment."

"...interesting. That could come in handy if it wasn't scarce - a moment of distraction can easily be decisive when fighting a vampire, but it's not unusual to meet multiple vampires in a single patrol. Depending how the weapon thing works and whether vampires have a problem with it, that could end up being better."

"Also scarce, unfortunately, it lasts minutes rather than seconds but certainly not all night. But I only get two choices of what to do with each domain slot, that's how they work, and usually I get Divine Favor, Qualm, and Prayer, but I can do Protection from Evil, Align Weapon (Law), and Magic Circle against Evil, if those are better. - Protection from Evil is better against summoned creatures than against undead but will not be useless against undead, but, again, minutes only."

"My first instinct is to systematically test all this stuff against local vampires and take notes on how well it seems to work and whether anything reacts unusually compared to what you're used to."

"That sounds wise; in particular I should try a Cure spell on a vampire to make sure it reacts the way Golarion undead would before I try channeling at a larger number of them."

Nod nod.

"I'll have to be able to lay a hand on them but as soon as I do the spell can discharge on them, so I can do it in combat if I can cast a spell without getting taken out while I do it."

"That seems feasible to arrange."

"If you don't get a stake through their heart do you have a ballpark sense of how much damage it takes to take one down, are we talking about wolves or dinosaurs here?"

"I've never fought a wolf or a dinosaur, and I haven't gone all-out against a human for comparison, but - the same sorts of things damage and impair them as damage and impair humans, but they're tougher, it takes more force to get through to them, and stronger so it takes more to knock them off balance - I'd guess I hit a vampire about twice as hard as I'd hit a human for the same effect, very roughly speaking? The only things that kill them are fire, sunlight which causes fire, a wooden stake through the heart, removal of the heart or head, and I've heard if you immerse one completely in holy water they sort of melt but I've never had enough holy water on hand to try it and the description sounded even less humane than setting them on fire which I also don't love."

"...I can make holy water but it requires powdered silver and only does a pint at a time so that would be a lot of holy water and if you're not worried about them spreading the flames the humaneness consideration would seem to push against its use, yes."

"Vampires burn very fast once they catch properly, I've never seen one spread flames. Definitely not worth the powdered silver to make a vat of holy water to drown one in, outside of really contrived scenarios involving a lot of unconscious vampires, nothing to stake or behead them with, and extremely flammable surroundings. I also don't know if your holy water is the same as ours for Slaying purposes, but our holy water doesn't need powdered silver to make, just a cooperative priest of our most popular questionably extant god, so again outside of contrived scenarios it's probably better to use the local stuff."

"...I'd like to take a look at some with Detect Magic up, though I suppose I don't expect the information to be useful in any way given what you already know, and didn't prepare Detect Magic this morning."

"What are the tradeoffs if you plan to prepare it tomorrow?"

"Right now in those slots I have Guidance - that's the muttering and the gesturing I'm doing all the time, it makes me slightly better at whatever I spend it on in the next minute, I am not using it to cheat at chess and mostly discharge them on trains of thought that seem like they might matter - and Create Water and Light, which do what they sound like, and Stabilize, which would prevent a dying person from getting any worse if otherwise left unattended for a while."

"What are the daily limitations on all those? Clean water is cheap enough that creating it is probably pretty useless unless we're on a long trek away from anywhere with a water supply... Stabilize sounds very handy to have around for rescuing vampire victims, I've occasionally been too late to save somebody and it's one of the worst parts of the job." She's getting measurably worse at chess while her brain fills up with real-life logistical considerations.

"Those are all orisons, I can cast them as many times as I want." He has trauma around not having Create Water prepared but that's not important. "There is also some kind of light situation around here that I don't understand, I don't know if that makes it also make sense to drop Light in favor of, perhaps, Mending, Detect Poison, Read Magic, Virtue, Resistance... Mending does what it sounds like but there's a weight limit on the mended object and it takes ten minutes to cast. Detect Poison and Read Magic are what they sound like. Virtue gives someone a little extra robustness but it doesn't stay and it doesn't come back if they get hit and it's spent on making that hurt less. Guidance improves someone's saves, if they're trying to dodge a fireball or throw off an enchantment or not get sick they want that or a better spell that does the same thing."

"Yes, light is cheap too if you have the right widgets, and the widgets are less conspicuous than a mysterious glowing object. I'll get you one and show you how to work it. What's the weight limit on Mending, approximately? We could probably come up with some things to mend."

"For me about five pounds. I don't know if it will work on, uh, miracles of Azlant or whatever you call the strange things here. Widgets."

"Well, then, seems worth testing. What do you think of Guidance, Detect Magic, Mending, and Stabilize as a lineup?"

"I wouldn't be inclined to prepare Mending every day. It takes a long time to cast, which means it's almost useless in the field and you'll notice what's accumulating to be fixed; there will not usually be more than a few hours' of objects accumulated over a few days. Unless you are proposing opening a business about it, which I'm not averse to necessarily I suppose."

"I hadn't thought of opening a business, but no, I meant a lineup for tomorrow specifically, for testing purposes. —does Mending restore damaged books?"

"For tomorrow it sounds suitable. Usually not to completely like-new condition - we can still trust sealed letters if they don't look at all tampered with despite how common the spell is - but it can repair tears and so on."

"Hmm, how much can it fix damage to the text itself, do you know?"

"If the layer of the paper with the ink on it has been abraded off entirely Mending will get back very vague shapes that might rule out some candidate words if you're fortunate and your glyphs are highly distinct, but will not be legible. For stains you want Prestidigitation, which is not a cleric spell but which I also separately know. I'm terrible at it but if there are very important stained books I can practice its cleaning application and probably eventually get it working, it has several uses and I usually only use it to make chess sets and have historically usually had access to real wizards for laundry."

"Interesting. We can try Mending on some books that would be nice to have in better condition, then - I don't think any of them have stains specifically as a major issue but if I'm wrong we can reevaluate."

"I'll probably take me months to get Prestidigitation working up to the standard for cleaning, if not longer, I don't really have the cunning for wizardry and count myself lucky I was able to learn to hang and catch the spell at all."

"Is it teachable, if we find someone with sufficient cunning to learn it?"

"...I'm not competent to teach it but I do have the spellbook page and someone of exceptional brilliance might be able to get somewhere with that and watching me prepare it, I'm not sure."

"Something to think about but not a high priority, then."

Nod.

Yawning aunt trudging down the stairs.

Cheerful greeting, and a few followup remarks.

Intrigued reply; increased pace toward breakfast.

"I told her you have the ability to share your language and some books that could be copied and translated. She's going to invite her boyfriend over to see the books."

"If you have blank paper I can run them off with the orison Scrivener's Chant, if we want more copies."

"How fast does that work? Using book-copying widgets might be faster, depending."

"About a page a minute."

"Hmm, the widget probably outperforms that but only probably, for a single copy of each book. For multiple copies there's economies of scale, I don't know if Scrivener's Chant has those. And I don't recall you having Scrivener's Chant on the menu today so that's an advantage in the widget column."

"Yes, scrivening would need to wait. Widgets are plausibly the superior solution if you have them for this as for so many other things."

"It is a very widget-heavy society I live in."

Speaking of which, Chris seems to be having a one-sided conversation with a very widget-looking object over there.

Maybe it is a Widget of Sending. "Is that a Widget of Sending?"

"I don't know precisely how Sending works but it sounds like approximately yes."

"Sending delivers a twenty five word message to an arbitrary target. Important for coordinating, say, military response at teleport distance."

"Widgets of that kind - it's called a 'phone' - establish a two-way connection that transmits sound across long distances between two such widgets in an appropriately coordinated network. So, same broad logistical purpose, different exact mechanics."

"More useful within the network but lacks the - complete independence - of a Sending," concludes Blai. "Sending can reach across planes and such."

"Yeah, phones can't do that. They need a lot of widgety infrastructure to do their thing. It used to be impossible to carry one out of your house and have it still work, because they had to be linked to the infrastructure physically; we've solved that one but we haven't solved the interplanar case because the existence of other planes falls under the same curse preventing magic from going public."

Chris puts down her phone and, presumably, reports on the outcome of the conversation.

"She says he'll be here soon."

"How soon is soon, given that there are transit widgets? - are the other planes you can reach from here under the same curse?"

"They are not! By and large they have other problems, but not that one. Hmm, I'm second-guessing my instinct to say 'a few minutes' because I'm not sure this language counts time in the same ways I'm used to - we divide days into twenty-four hours and hours into sixty minutes, does that track?"

"Yes, actually that's identical."

"Well, then he'll be here in a few minutes and our systems of timekeeping correspond very conveniently and," she glances down at the chessboard, "I've forgotten whose move it is but I suspect that means it's probably mine."

"It is, yes."

She makes a move. The distraction has thrown her off but not too too badly.

Aha, he cleverly anticipated that move.

That's the sort of thing she has come to expect from him, yes.

They can pass the next few minutes like this without any trouble.

Then the doorbell rings.

Chris gets it.

The person on the other side greets her with a smile and a kiss on the cheek, then steps inside to be introduced.

"This is Rupert, Chris's boyfriend," says Eliza, and then presumably the reverse in the local language; Blai will be able to catch his own name but little else. Without actually waiting for further interaction from Rupert she adds, "He wants to know where the books are."

Here they are in his bag. "These are two copies of the Acts of Iomedae, this is the Lastwall disciplinary handbook - Lastwall is Her theocracy - and this is a book of chess variants. I also have some letters but don't know them to be of academic interest."

Rupert has questions!

"—he wants to know some things about how the books were made, I'm not sure how capably I can translate them—how much do you know about where the paper and the bindings and so on came from?"

"...not much. The nicely bound Acts and the handbook were a gift from a Commandant who received my letter when I was Selected and the other one is just on standard issue fort paper that we were issued regularly along with food and other supplies and tied together with string. I traded a passing adventurer for the chess book."

She translates this for Rupert.

He nods along and has a few more things to say.

"Would you like to bring your books to Rupert's house where he can use the gentlest of book-copying widgets on them? You could also let him borrow them and return them later today, but I'd imagine you might not like to let them out of your sight, seeing as they're the only written material on this planet that's in a language you speak."

"He's more than welcome to borrow the less nicely bound Acts, since I have the other?"

"Sure. But does it seem a reasonable use of your morning to take your other books to Rupert's house and watch him widget them? It seems so to me but you may have other priorities."

"I am perfectly willing to take your advice on the matter." He collects the books into a stack.

"We will travel by transit widget."

She gets up and gets her shoes and jacket.

Blai has... a Worldwound coat. It's not cold enough for a Worldwound coat and he will do without.

Out they go to Rupert's transit widget, which is stationed just outside. He opens one of the forward doors and gets in.

Eliza opens one of the rear doors and gestures Blai into the seat thereby revealed.

Plop. And then the door... closes? Nnno it's not all the way - closes? How do you close this thing so it will be closed.

With assistance, for now.

With the door firmly shut, Eliza gets in the other side and says, "An important safety measure in transit widgets: the seatbelt." When she's sure she has Blai's attention she demonstrates pulling it from its housing by the door, extending it long enough, and then clicking the tongue into the holder. "I can help you with yours if you need me to. The idea is that transit widgets go at such appalling speeds that if they hit something, everyone inside gets thrown around pretty badly; the seatbelt ensures that you have a much less rattly and injurious time of it if that happens. In the course of normal operation they do not hit anything but we like to be prepared for things to go wrong."

"Understandable." He puts his seatbelt on just like the demonstration.

Eliza says something to Rupert, and the transit widget rolls forth.

...ah. This transit widget has a property Blai does not like.

"Some people find travel by transit widget mildly nauseating, but I've never experienced this effect myself so I can't tell you much about it," she mentions.

"Is it dangerous?"

"No, just uncomfortable."

Then he will endure it stoically.

"I can look up if there are any known ways to alleviate it."