On the other side of the mirror is, apparently, a hexagonal corridor with a metal grate for a floor, unnaturally harsh white light shining up from beneath it. The walls and ceiling are paneled in some stranger black material. The air smells…weird. He feels lighter, as though his body is suddenly a third of its usual weight, because in fact it is.
Within seconds of his arrival, an alarm goes off. “Intruder, level four,” says a disembodied voice in a language he doesn’t recognize at all.
Because he doesn't know what that means, the content of the message cannot make him any more alarmed than he already was, but that's pretty alarmed. Why is he lighter. Can he fly - no, apparently this isn't a Fly variant. He looks in both directions along the corridor in hopes of seeing clues to which way he should go.
Well, from one end of the corridor, two armored Martian marines are approaching him. They aren’t wearing helmets, and they don’t have the good armor, so they are still recognizable as men in armor. They aren’t recognizably armed, though Blai may still understand that their heavy machine guns are pointed at him in a threatening manner.
“Freeze! Hands up!” shouts one. Really what one does with intruders on a warship is shoot them but his bosses are going to want to know how the fuck this guy did manage to intrude on their warship in the first place. He is, perhaps, not yet processing how incredibly primitive Blai’s armor is, and he actually doesn’t recognize his mace as a weapon at all.
Blai doesn't know what that means! However, he will regardless hold his hands - not up, exactly, away from the mace and the holy symbol.
They do not shoot him. One of them will come and take the mace—which they still do not recognize as an intentional weapon but could definitely be an improvised one. They don’t take the holy symbol, having no concept that it’s more than decorative. The other will grab Blai’s wrists and cuff them behind his back.
“Look at this shit the skinnies call armor,” says one.
“He looks like an Earther.”
“So does Fred Johnson.”
“How the fuck did he get on the ship, then?” He might have believed that Earth had developed invisibility or teleportation or some shit.
The marines gesture for Blai to follow them and head back down the corridor.
Well, he doesn't like anything about this but he is not commanded to like it. He follows.
They lead him down the corridor and down a flight of metal stairs. At one point they pass a section of wall covered in living plants and artificially lit to almost the brightness of a sunny day, but there are no windows, or drafts, or really any indication that there’s an outside world at all.
Eventually they come to an area that’s recognizably a prison, although everything continues to be made of unfamiliar materials. The doors to the cells are some kind of transparent not-glass.
One of them appears to say something when Blai enters the hallway, although no sound is audible from Blai’s position.
The marines push Blai into one of the open cells and shut the door. (This is done by pressing a button, causing the door to slide out from its concealed position inside the wall with a whoosh.) They take his backpack first, but not his holy symbol.
Once the door is closed, the handcuffs automatically unlatch and fall from his wrists.
There’s a cot in one corner, with a thin mattress that is nonetheless much more comfortable than anything available at the Worldwound, possibly more comfortable than anything available in Golarion if you aren’t rich. In the opposite corner is a toilet. Otherwise the cell is bare.
Maybe this is underground. They look like humans, if strange humans - well, the woman might not be a human? But she could be one, she'd just be an exceptionally spindly one or something. And they have some way to Permanency Daylight so they can grow plants down here. The gravity thing he has no explanation for but stranger things have happened.
He nudges the cuffs into the corner of the cell. He starts taking off his armor, he doesn't need it in a cell. "Do any of you speak Chelish, common Taldane, or Infernal?" he asks the hallway, in case they can hear him, though probably they can't, he couldn't hear the one guy.
No one bothered to turn on the noise canceling on Blai’s cell but they did for all of the other prisoners, and it works in both directions. No one can hear him at all except the marines, who are already leaving. (Babysitting prisoners isn’t their job; the cells are in fact really hard to break out of, and the automated security system will fill the entire brig with knockout gas if it detects any serious attempt at escape.)
Naomi does see his mouth moving and taps her ear twice, which is the Belter sign language gesture for “I can’t hear you”.
He neither understands nor Comprehends Belter sign language but it's easy enough to figure out from context; he nods. Once he's got the armor off he - can't read the Acts, they took his bag. He gives Iomedae a brief sitrep in case She needs that and then Prestidigitates himself a chess set.
Oh.
Nearly all the details of Blai's report are, on closer examination of the situation, inaccurate or misleading, but it doesn't matter, because she wouldn't have been able to see this place at all if Her cleric hadn't called her attention to it. She still cannot see it well—it is very far outside her normal sphere of influence, and prophecy is clouded around the arrival of Her cleric out of Golarion, which is the part of this world that she would ordinarily be able to see most easily. It doesn't matter, because a human civilization that has begun to grow the kind of strength they would need to challenge the Lower Planes on their own territory is the kind of thing that shines in Her vision like a blazing sun.
Also Her lone representative to this civilization is completely out of his depth and doesn't even speak the local language. Her capacity for extraordinary action on the Material has been spent all but utterly, but fixing that last one is, at least, a fairly ordinary action.
One convenient thing about Her cleric being trapped in deep space millions of miles from the nearest planet is that the treaties governing when, exactly, clerics should receive their spells do not fully apply, because a number of their referents do not exist. She still has to grant spells on a fixed cycle with a length within a certain margin of 14,400 standard time units, but Blai has traveled in a manner permitting the cycle to be reset, and since there are—she quickly checks—no other clerics of any god in this star system, there is nothing preventing the new spell-granting time from being 'right now'.
Blai feels the familiar prod that would have told him it was 'dawn' during those months at the Worldwound when the sun doesn't rise or set at all, even though there's no way it's been 24 hours since the sun last rose in Cheliax. Here, have a Comprehend Languages or several. You're going to need them.
- oh, okay, it's dawn Right Now, he will abort the prestidigitation and fall to his knees and get right on that. He will in fact go for a lot of Comp Lang without any prodding as long as he has the opportunity. Three of those plus an Air Bubble for Oh Shit situations. Drop the Spark and pick up a Stabilize, nobody in the cells looks likely to have a medical emergency but they don't seem to be being closely supervised and you never know. Two of Share Language in case anyone'll shake hands later when they're less busy or something, and an Owl's. He'll keep the Create Food, he doesn't know if they feed prisoners here.
Elsewhere, and meanwhile, Blai’s backpack and the books in it have ended up on a table between four deeply confounded MCRN officers plus one of the two marines who initially arrested him, who is only less confounded because that isn’t his job.
“It’s got to be from Earth,” says Captain Yao, examining the pack. “The quality of the fabric is bizarrely terrible but Belter gear looks like it’s made of sixteen different recycled tarps, not like this. Maybe a test subject—no, actually, I’ve got nothing. Did we get anywhere on the books?”
“The computer says it’s a real language unrelated to any other it knows of,” says Lieutenant Lopez. “And that’s ridiculous, right—but maybe someone actually did make up their own language, it would be almost as hard to break as any encryption, and way harder to steal the key…”
“He did say something as I was leaving the brig, sir,” says the marine. “I didn’t catch it but that might have been because it was a language I didn’t speak.”
“People sometimes pretend not to speak a normal language. Because the law requires us to obtain an interpreter for prisoners who don’t. It doesn’t stop me from knowing they’re lying, though.”
“Any progress on translation of the books?”
“No, sir. Well, this one looks like it’s about chess, it’s got the diagrams, and this one is probably poetry if I had to guess. But if it is a conlang invented for obfuscation then that’s probably misleading, right.”
“Go talk to him and see what he has to say for himself.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sometime after Blai is done preparing spells, a man—an officer, from the look of his uniform—enters the brig and opens Blai’s cell door.
“Come with me.”
"Some time" is enough time to have a chess set halfway to created on the floor of the cell. "Comprehend Languages," says Blai, but he can kinda guess and he gets up and waits for informative gestures.
Where’d he get the chess set? Probably not the priority right now.
He leads Blai to the interrogation room they set up for the Canterbury people. He takes a small round capsule from a container on the table and swallows it, and his pupils widen briefly and then narrow again.
“Who are you, who do you work for, and how did you get on this ship?”
He doesn’t recognize any of those words. Why is the subject trying to shake hands? It’s weird but he’ll accept the handshake in the interest of building rapport, which is less important to his interrogation style than it is to some people’s, but is still generally valuable.
“What the fuck?” he says, in Taldane. He didn’t really mean to say it in Taldane but it came out that way.
"I apologize for not having been able to warn you. Is this spell not commonplace here? I think I must be from very far away, if this is a ship it's very different from any I've heard of."
“Spells aren’t real.” The language he’s speaking insists otherwise. “—well, they’re not real here. Where…are you from? Are you actually human or are you just choosing to look that way?”
"I am a human cleric of Iomedae from Cheliax. Which is on the continent of Avistan. ...on the planet Golarion."
Possibly both he and this guy are insane, but, one, if he is, then dealing with that is someone else’s job; two, enough impossible things have happened already that it seems worth investigating the possibility that they aren’t.
“We don’t know of any planet called that. I’m guessing that, if we’re both in our right minds, you’re in fact farther from home than you knew it was possible to be, if you’ve never seen a spaceship before.”
“…you’re currently aboard the Donnager, a warship of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, under the command of Captain Theresa Yao,” he adds, because it is actually legally obligatory, if he might not already know. “You are a prisoner on suspicion of illegally infiltrating this ship, though if you did not do so intentionally, you have not committed any crime and will be released as soon as is feasible. Did you in fact intend to board the Donnager?”
"No, I was traveling on foot across Cheliax and was attacked by a monster of a species unfamiliar to me which appears to have teleported me here. A space ship? It goes... between planets? Stars?"
“Between planets—it could also get between stars, in theory, but it’s against the laws of physics as we understand them for anything to travel to any but the nearest stars in less than a human lifespan. That’s one of a number of reasons why your story is impossible from our perspective, but it probably is the most prominent one—what is a cleric and who or what is Iomedae?”
"Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of victory over evil and triage. A cleric is someone empowered by a god to perform magic, like the spell I just used - there are other kinds of spellcasters on Golarion and relatively speaking we're specialized in healing and support but if you don't have any casters here I'm not sure how meaningful that is."
“Gods, like spells, are something we have the concept of but are mostly agreed not to be real or at least not to have visible effects on the world.” Though it’s not impossible for there to be aliens with sufficiently advanced technology and bizarrely familiar tastes who kidnapped some humans to another planet sometime in prehistory, it’s just insane—
“Shit!” he says, this time not in Taldane.
“The ship is under attack,” he says to Blai. (This is in Taldane.) “You need to follow me.”
That would be to a room with some strange-looking chairs, into which are strapped the other people Blai saw in the holding cells earlier.
“This man claims to be from another star system and to have magical powers,” he tells the other five. “I’m not sure if that’s true but he did arrive on the ship without any physically plausible mechanism, and I also now have the otherwise unexplained ability to speak his language, which even our computers didn’t recognize.”
“Almost certainly, but if I’m not then it seems helpful to have one of you also speak his language, if you’re up for having sufficiently advanced alien technology insert knowledge directly into your brain.”
“If you have another of the language spell you should cast it on her,” he tells Blai, pointing out Naomi.
"Very well," says Blai, "Share Language," and he pokes her hand. "That was my second of two; I'll be able to do it again tomorrow and it does last all day."
It doesn’t verify the whole story, because ‘instantly transferring knowledge of an entire language’ is something you could plausibly do with strong nanotech and ‘FTL travel’ is not. Still, it’s the sort of thing that tempts her to throw out all her models of reality, not just the ones that were actually violated.
”Strap in,” she tells Blai, directing him to an empty crash couch. “Uh, have you ever been on a spaceship before?”
"No, my planet doesn't have them, only the kind of ship that goes on the water." He will attempt to copy their belt configurations.
The belts are designed to be easy to put on very quickly in an emergency; they're not complicated.
"Okay, well, in space there isn't any gravity. You feel yourself as having weight because the ship is accelerating—smoothly towards its destination, under normal circumstances, but in a combat situation the ship may need to change speed or direction rapidly, so we need to be strapped in."
"I don't know exactly what's going on, Mars isn't supposed to be at war with anyone, but it will probably be several hours before anything exciting happens. In space you can see enemies a long way out."
(The ship is starting to accelerate faster; Blai now feels more like his normal weight, possibly a bit more than that.)
"For the next half hour or so I can understand anyone, there's a separate spell that only works in that direction," he mentions, after he's cast a Guidance on general principle.
A railgun round piercing your ship at 2,000 kilometers per second isn’t as loud as you might expect. It doesn’t have time to deposit most of its kinetic energy, and ships’ hulls are very good at dissipating vibrations. There is a thunk, and then a whoosh, and a second or two later you might notice that where there used to be a man sitting in one of the crash couches, there is now a headless corpse, a stream of blood being drawn from its neck through the new hole in the wall into the vacuum of space. Along with, of course, all of the air in the room.
(Shed Garvey, previously ship’s medic for the ice hauler Canterbury, notices nothing at all.)
"I'm looking for one!" she shouts back, unbuckling herself and moving toward the room's small supply cabinet, back to the wall in case of sudden changes in the ship's acceleration. "I don't suppose any of your magic powers would help!"
"I can get you five minutes of air if you can use them to fix it!" He holds out his hand.
The pressure in the room hasn't dropped enough that she's suffocating without it, but it's noticeable nonetheless. She takes a deep breath and starts digging through the supply cabinet, coming up with a hard-sided binder big enough to cover the hole. The seal is far from perfect, but it blocks most of the airflow.
"That should get us, uh—" she takes out her phone and pulls up a barometer app*, runs a quick calculation—"about twenty minutes before the oxygen concentration in the room is too low to keep us conscious. Maybe longer if I can convince the ship's ventilation system to keep sending us air instead of sealing off the room—oh. Wait. How does the air magic work? Will it stop working, or stop working faster, if I do something to share it with other people?" She's found a roll of plastic tubing and is cutting it into four shorter lengths.
(*) Obviously in space your pocket everything would have barometer hardware.
"Sharing it is generally understood not to work well but will not end the spell early," says Blai. "Guidance - would you like one of those too -"
"If you think it'll help." She holds one end of each of the four tubes next to her face. "Everyone take the other end of one and try to breathe through it," she says, first in English, then in Taldane.
The three other people in the room who are still alive have all gotten out of their crash couches and are coordinating with Naomi on trying to find something more permanent to patch the hole. They are in Blai's reach, but haven't been following Naomi's conversation with him because they don't speak Taldane.
"I'm going to give them all Guidances," he reports to Naomi, "they don't have to spend them." He casts and boops them each and himself around and around.
It doesn't really feel like anything, but—
"Mars needs us alive," he says to Naomi. "We're the only ones who can tell the world that they didn't blow up the Cant." If in fact they didn't, which he still isn't fully convinced of. "They're not going to leave us to die on purpose. Forget about the ventilation system, get me intercom access."
It's a lot easier to hack than the ventilation system, because you can kill people with root access to a ship's ventilation system and you can't do that with the intercom.
"Hey dustfuckers," he says into Naomi's phone, and the entire ship hears it, "we're slowly suffocating to death in crash room 4B. If you want us to recant that statement about how you destroyed the Cant you should consider rescuing us."
Two minutes later the door slides open to reveal Lieutenant Lopez flanked by a squad of armored marines.
"Get through," he says, far too professional to sound noticeably annoyed. "The ship's losing air."
"We were coming to rescue you already," he says. Now he sounds just a little bit annoyed. "I have orders to get all of you off this ship alive; follow me." He sets off at a brisk walk, just shy of a jog.
When they're halfway down the hallway the whole ship shudders and they're suddenly weightless. The lights go out for a moment before returning, much less bright.
Lopez and the marines are wearing mag boots and stay grounded; everyone else's inertia sends them flying.
Blai pops his Guidance attempting a grab for a handhold. If he manages that he'll try to catch whoever else he can reach too.
There are handles on the ceiling for this very reason! Everyone is able to get back to the "ground" (what even is up right now) fairly quickly, but there's no way they're going to continue moving forward at their previous pace.
Hopefully the reduced pace is sufficient. At least he isn't wearing armor. If... armor would even... matter in this situation. He re-guidances himself while they proceed.
"They need your mag boots," he tells his marine escort. He is not actually, in expectation, ordering them to stay here and die; even from this point there are still several things that have to go very unexpectedly wrong for the Donnager to be completely destroyed. It's just that enough things have gone unexpectedly wrong already that he has a sickening feeling about it anyway.
The marines take off their boots and each hand them to one of the evacuees.
Okay, sure, he takes off his existing boots and ties them to his belt real quick while he watches the nearest person for how to put on the weird spaceship boots.
The boots are very easy to put on—well, they're very easy to put on if you know how velcro works, but that shouldn't be that hard to pick up. You tap your heels together to activate the magnets that will hold you to the floor even in microgravity.
They reach the end of the corridor, climb a ladder, go down another short hallway, and end up in the ship's main hold, a single vast room that could contain the entirety of Worldwound Fort #11, or, more to the point, the smaller gunship that it actually does contain.
It also contains some unfamiliar troops in black armor, wearing strange visors that distort and obscure their faces, who start shooting the moment they see the evacuees. The three marines who didn't stay behind immediately respond with their own burst of fire.
Fuck. They're all going to die.
"We need to make it to that ship," he tells the group. "My men will cover you. Just keep moving."
They run for the ship, the marines shielding them with suppressive fire. No one is hurt, until—
A ricocheting bullet hits Blai in the lower leg and shatters his ankle (which he can fix instantly) and the control circuit on one of his mag boots (which he cannot).
This time there are no handles on the ceiling, because the ceiling is more than a hundred meters away.
Well, he can fix it but since he doesn't seem to need to immediately take any steps with that ankle he'll wait a bit in case he picks up other injuries or winds up in channeling range of anyone who does. While he goes flying he'll cast a Prayer in case that helps turn the firefight.
His marine escort pulls a device from his utility belt and fires off his tether, which is designed to magnetically attach to a buddy marine's armor. Unfortunately, Blai isn't wearing his armor anymore, so the tether will hit him in the chest and bounce off. With Prayer and Guidance active he can probably catch it, but it might cost him a few seconds of flailing.
It looks like the rest of the group is almost to the ship, so the firefight will be over soon one way or another.
As soon as he catches it his escort reels him in and—just carries him the rest of the distance, there's no way he's going to be able to walk it.
Someone has powered up the smaller gunship and its own guns start moving, which is enough to send most of the enemy troops diving for cover. Blai and his escort make it up the ramp and onto the ship without further ordeal.
"—full access to all systems for all persons now on board," Lieutenant Lopez is saying as Blai reaches him. He's sitting slumped against a console, an enormous bloodstain spreading across his abdomen.
The damage is somewhat less visible than someone unfamiliar with guns might be used to, but he's still pretty obviously dying.
The blood's a hint! Blai grabs his holy symbol and channels. Good thing he waited on the ankle, this is so much more efficient.
He inhales sharply as he's instantly healed from the brink of death to full health. His first thought is not really in words but is somewhere between Holy shit, there is a god! and Praise Iomedae! except that he does not, actually, currently remember Iomedae's name. It's not his first time having divine magic cast on him but healing is really a much more traditional religious experience than Share Language.
His second thought is that giving an MCRN warship to a random bunch of deserters and terrorists seemed like a reasonable and non-treasonous idea, under the circumstances, when he was definitely about to die, and now seems like it's about to make things...complicated.
