This isn't where Raafi went to sleep. He'd set his bedroll up on a comfy patch of moss under a tree, and now - he still has the bedroll, at least, and his pack, but the tree and moss are nowhere to be seen, replaced by a strange metal room with still, stuffy air and an implausibly clear night sky out the window.
"Hello?" he calls, getting to his feet.
"You wanna try the little one now, see if it does anything at all to inform the later experiment?"
"I don't have it prepared right now, but I can put it in my next batch if you want to try it before the stronger one - I do my devotions at noon, that's when I get more spells."
She nods. "I don't usually prepare more than one or two combat spells. And g- ah, blue, clerics can't spontaneously cast inflict spells - purple ones can, there's a chance you'd offend someone suggesting they had one on hand like that."
"Hopefully there won't turn out to be too much like that. And we'll do whatever we can to smooth it over, of course." She's grinning, clearly thrilled: "I'm not sure you realize how big of a favor you'll be doing us if you come."
Wag wag. "I'm excited about it! Limbo was a big deal but having now visited my parents and handed over the job I can acknowledge that Oerth's a lot more interesting. You're gonna have modern plumbing and the Internet and genetically engineered crops and ibuprofen and it's gonna be great."
"All right, I won't push." She pats his upper arm, still grinning. "It is amazing here, though."
"You should ask, while you're here. I hear they're only bottlenecked on an interested demon, not sure how reliable that is though."
"I'm not sure you'll be able to do anything big there right away, Pelor wants to keep this world a secret from ours until they're more ready to defend themselves from our scarier elements. There are definitely things you can do, but it might make sense for you to come back and forth some, if there are things you want to do here."
"Sounds good. I imagine we'll want Raafi bringing you around to different places, so we don't make people too suspicious about any one place, but he's going to need a break soon - I don't know what you have in mind as most critical, but maybe we can get that done and then let you terraform Mars while he relaxes."
"I'm not actually sure yet what's most critical because I don't know how your species mix or the presence of magic or any other factors are affecting things like your parasite load or access to clean water or food supply. If I guess wildly the first is much lower than Earth's once was if diseases have any trouble at all hopping species and clerics can address disease, the middle one could be fine already if you can magically purify water or something, and your food supply is least likely to be comfortably surplus because if it were you'd probably have had more kids about it in the absence of birth control till it wasn't any more, and if that guess is right I might want to eradicate your disease-spreading mosquitoes just because that's so disproportionately useful but it'd also require some ecological research I may or may not be able to replace with a five-minute chat with Ehlonna about whether the mosquitoes are more important there than they were on Earth, and after or in place of that if secrecy's a priority it'd be the genetically engineered crops thing though you'll be very bottlenecked on harvesting them and distributing them till you can have conspicuous machinery."
"We do have trouble with food, yes. Diseases that affect one humanoid species usually affect all of us but clerics do help - I'm not sure what standard you're thinking of, though, and it's not that uncommon for us to end up overwhelmed when there's a bad outbreak of something. We do have clean water - that's not exactly handled magically, but when there's a problem we can use magic to trace it back to the source. Mosquitos - the god of the wilds will notice if you wipe them out entirely, that's a problem even if it's fine otherwise, you'll want to coordinate with Pelor and Ehlonna on it. And crops should be straightforward to distribute, if you don't mind them being passed off as a wizard's invention - Lastai's church is mostly urban but Pelor's is everywhere and Chaav's boys will help, too - that's Lastai's brother, he operates in rural places."
"I don't mind them being passed off as a wizard's invention. If I'm ever less busy I wanna pick up wizardry. Though they aren't my invention per se so that won't make it even retroactively true. We can say the wizard is named Norman Borlaug and write him a letter about it explaining. Gods have siblings?"
"Not in the same way mortals do, usually, but yes - they don't have parents, but they started together and have similar domains; Chaav is the god of joy. Anyway, I think you'll do fine as a wizard - I'd say we can sponsor you to college but I doubt you'll need it, no matter what they end up doing when they find out you can make as much gold as you like."
"Your gold market'll crash if that happens much, you know. Gonna need demonproof currency."
"Mmhmm. I'm sure that's a problem but I have no idea what to do about it. At least we won't have to worry much about people starving while we figure it out."
"Uh, that might depend? If I triple your wheat yield and the farmers won't take cash because they can't buy... soap and labor help and nails and firewood... with the cash, then you have an issue unless barter's still popular."
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