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Felip and company in Amenta
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They're fascinated! Would he like a look at the microscope display? They can copy it to a pocket everything screen like so.

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There's really rather a lot more than he expected, there; it looks like a bunch of oozes, or jellyfish, or something strange. "What am I looking at?"

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"Your blood! It's mostly like ours, let me pull up a comparison image -" Here's some Amentan blood.

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He can tell that the two images are from the same genre of art, but beyond that will need to be a good listener. "What stands out to you?"

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"Mostly that they're so similar! But it is different. Your immune cells, if that's what these are, are a different color, they're bigger, and you have more of them - having more of them might mean you've been fighting off an infection or just that you have more at baseline..." The oranges can go on about this basically as long as he's interested.

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He'll follow along gamely but hit his limit after a few minutes. They just really have to backtrack quite a bit for him to actually understand any of their sentences, or he can just nod along like a dog while they talk to each other. He also doesn't have much information to volunteer--there is illness on Golarion, but more or less than Amenta? He doesn't know. His cloak makes him more resistant to disease as one of many possible attacks, and he never really thought about how that might be working on a lower level, and he doesn't quite want to share that with the oranges or greens who might then want to confiscate it like they did his blood.

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If he'd like to move on, he said that after that he wanted scholars of magic? So, they have... fantasy authors. Some of them write quite hard fantasy! Well-thought-out well-respected fantasy! But Amenta has no magic, so the scholars of magic are not magicians, not scientists-of-magic, not anything so tested against reality. They can still bring him some, if he would like.

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Maybe they actually want... mathematicians? He thinks wizards learn lots of math, for some reason.

"The different magicians are different. Sorcerers draw power from their bloodline and have intuitive magic, but wizards learn it through study. I do not know what it means for the possibility of Amentan magic that I can still cast my spells; you may be able to have your own wizards, in time. Or it may be that whatever spark humans and the other races of Golarion have, Amentans lack. If you wish to embark on a project of importing magic to Amenta, I can assist and consult, but I lack the spellcraft to lead such a project myself, or teach apprentices as a wizard might. The scholars who could invent spellcraft from my example--those are the scholars I would meet, if they could be found."

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Can he shed any light on what kind of math?

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"I know we call them 'circles' of magic for some mathematical reason, but... beyond that, I know little."

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...maybe he should run Hepka through what he would hypothetically be telling a mathematician so they know if it is time to bring in a mathematician.

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He will explain what he knows about casting spells. It is like the explanation of the manual of arms for a firearm; perhaps useful for reverse engineering something, but it assumes you can acquire 'powder' from somewhere and doesn't tell you the elements it's made out of, let alone the proper ratio for them, and the maintenance instructions assume you have the piece in front of you, rather than that you're trying to make it from blank metal, and so it doesn't go into any detail about the critical shapes.

Half of the work wizards do is in preparing the spells in the first place, like making a grenade that they then light the fuse of in the moment. But his spells are more like they are etched into his soul, and he can simply push energy through them and they happen.

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Okay, they're going to maybe get a metrologist to come point umpteen instruments at him while he casts things to see if it registers on any of their doodads and bring in a mathematician when they have any doodad data for the mathematician to look at, if that sounds okay to him.

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It does; he'll run through most of his cantrips a few times, including Arcane Mark on objects they can investigate more deeply with their strange devices, although he won't tip his hand on Message yet. After they have some sense of what to look at, he'll cast an Enlarge Person, presumably on an Amentan volunteer.

(Now that he has thought thru the magnitude of the implications of attracting divine attention to Amenta, he is holding off on summoning monsters until it can be done more deliberately.)

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For Enlarge Person they'll have to go outside or at least in the stairwell. Does it cover clothes? Is it known to make people dizzy at all?

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Yes, both clothes and carried objects--perhaps they want to watch what happens when the objects are dropped. Also they might want to time it; he knows some wizards carry watches to time spell effects, though he just trusts his natural sense of time.

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They do want to both time it and watch what happens when the objects are dropped! One of the metrologists loads up his assistant with a bunch of things and they plan out how to spend the seconds of enlargement efficiently.

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They'll have about seven minutes, he guesses.

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It's more than that but for all they know that's the minutes being different lengths of time on the different planets. What DOES happen to dropped objects? Or picked up objects? Or picked up people?

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This spell causes instant growth of a humanoid creature, doubling its height and multiplying its weight by 8. All equipment worn or carried by a creature is similarly enlarged by the spell. Any enlarged item that leaves an enlarged creature's possession (including a projectile or thrown weapon) instantly returns to its normal size.

It is surreal, how quickly things change size; the cameras that they brought seem to not catch any frames with partially enlarged objects. An item picked up is suddenly double its size; an item dropped is suddenly back to normal.

If insufficient room is available for the desired growth, the creature attains the maximum possible size and may make a Strength check (using its increased Strength) to burst any enclosures in the process. If it fails, it is constrained without harm by the materials enclosing it—the spell cannot be used to crush a creature by increasing its size.

Somewhat stranger is the absence of changes in pressure or sound accompanying the process. They know how pistons work; they would expect real objects moving to push air out of their way, and anything moving that quickly to have created a shockwave. Instead, it seems like the air is simply replaced by the object, and then returned when the object is dropped.

 

As for picked up people--somehow, they (and their clothes) retain their size. An object held by both the test subject and another maintains the size of the first person to pick it up.

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That's SO WEIRD. What if they try to pick it up at the exact same moment? Or both touch it and then very gradually start adding more and more force to lifting it trying to match the whole time? What if someone picked up is wearing a hat, at what point of gently lifting the hat does it get big and does that point differ if the large person picks up a hat on a person they haven't picked up? Do any doodads pick up any exotic anything from the casting or the size-changing of objects? Do all these changes register normally on scales? The air pressure is seriously remaining the same the whole time - what about air concentrations of things?

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What if they try to pick it up at the exact same moment?

As their cameras can attest, the "exact same moment" is too high a bar for them to hit. 

Or both touch it and then very gradually start adding more and more force to lifting it trying to match the whole time?

This one seems like it favors not enlarging the object, but not exclusively.

What if someone picked up is wearing a hat, at what point of gently lifting the hat does it get big and does that point differ if the large person picks up a hat on a person they haven't picked up?

There does seem to be a difference, here, and seems to be psychological. As soon as they grip the brim of an unworn hat, it grows, but on gently lifting a worn hat it only grows at the point the hat seems "taken" from its wearer. (Without the wearer resisting, this happens quite quickly, and so the difference is subtle.)

Do any doodads pick up any exotic anything from the casting or the size-changing of objects?

The doodads that they have brought do not seem to register anything out of the ordinary, except for the things that are clearly out of the ordinary. This seems more like "an additional branch of physics" than it is "an existing branch acting strangely."

Do all these changes register normally on scales?

The test subject, and objects they carry, really are getting eight times heavier! It goes away as soon as the object is dropped, but--the potential for a cycle is clear.

The air pressure is seriously remaining the same the whole time - what about air concentrations of things?

It might just be the excitement, but CO2 is trending upwards, in a way that you might imagine is downstream of a giant breathing in and out at eight times standard metabolism, but that they really don't have the precision to be sure without another test.


Eight minutes is a long time in combat, but while running experiments, looking at outputs, thinking about what might possibly be going on, and running more experiments, it really isn't that much. Their test subject is back to normal and they have a wealth of data to process.

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If they can't get another run at it today they will go take that data and crunch it and hope that they can try again tomorrow.

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