Vanyel considers using that time to contact Savil, but that sounds like a longer (and maybe fraught) conversation, so he'll help with the chicken experiments first. 

The chickens do not like being in the floating space of stars, but nothing tries to kill them at all. Eventually Mahdi Polymorphs one into a human to check if there are traps that spring specifically on humans; unfortunately he's unable to test this, as entering the demiplane cancels the Polymorph. 

(Chickens turned into humans are in poor control of their limbs and rather horrifying). 

Vanyel, again, is shocked and amazed by the spell being a thing! "I should probably stop being surprised at some point, but wow I would not expect that to work." 

"Does turning a chicken into a human seem harder than turning a human into a chicken?"

"...Yes? Er, I mean, less so when I take into account that you weren't making the chickens smarter or anything, that's really the part that seems harder. Mostly I think it just doesn't feel like it should work? Even though I know your magic is different." 

"Huh. Yeah, you can't make them smarter that way - it can be done, making animals persistently intelligent, but I don't think anyone alive knows how - and if did work that way it'd be an Evil thing to do, making a person with a temporary spell.

Anyway, we're not going to be able to check if it murders people without sending one. Do you want to go, Hagan -"

"Yeah, I think I will."

Vanyel can't think of anything he can do to help, here, since any magic shielding he put on Hagan would disappear as soon as he entered the no-magic area. 

Yep, they'll have to explore through entirely mundane means. He's very cheerful about it; it's not often that you run into a problem that isn't best solved by standing very far away while some magic happens. He ties a rope around himself and goes through into the room. 

"I seem not to be dead," he calls out after a minute. "Pull me back out?"

He remains not dead pulled back out, and the next time goes in for longer. He experimentally determines that if you wander too far off to the left of the plane you come back in from the right, and same for the top and the bottom.

"And behind the door there's something. A - table, it looks like? It has some stuff written on it -"

"In Ancient Osirian?"

"You know me, I can't read."

"Could you take some pen and paper in there and try to draw it, and bring it back? That's not magic, so the anti-magic field shouldn't block it." He's not sure why Hagan can't read but it seems very rude to ask. 

"Yeah." He acquires pen and paper and goes off to do that. It takes a while. 

"You haven't died on us, have you?"

"It's just really intricate and there's a lot of it and I don't know how much precision is important."

"Is there anything else?"

"Pretty sure the table is the only thing in the whole space, and it's pretty big."

"What's the writing in -"

"Looks like silver. Very shiny." 

And he eventually comes back with six sheets of paper covered in hieroglyphics. 

" - I can prepare a spell in the morning that'll let us read it, at least." 

"Are we done down here for the night?"

"Van was gonna petition his King, right -"

"Oh, right." Sigh. He gets up and heads for the crystal ball. "I guess I can try for Randi directly, he has some Mindspeech." 

He lets the spell tug him along again. 

( - the Osirians exchange astonished glances with each other.)

The spell tugs and focuses and - Randi is in a conference room with - most of the Senior Circle, looks like.