The Boneyard is presumably not described as a bunch of coppiced trees, looking out into less cultivated forest in one direction and a field of potatoes in the other.

It is not! She is confused about that! Did she - teleport? Spontaneously? That's not a thing. 

She stands there for a minute trying to calm down about being attacked by a demon in her study and maybe dead. Probably not dead. It would be easier to calm down if she were more sure, in either direction. 

Then she should - head off towards the potato field, if there's a field there are some farmers and she can ask them where she is.

The farmer isn't out right now. It's cloudy, and while she's walking it starts raining pretty hard; she can make out a blurry farmhouse through the weather. Ten minutes of tromping through rain and potatoes sees her to it.

She is pretty sure it doesn't rain in the Boneyard.

She knocks.

Somebody calls back in an unfamiliar language and doesn't come to the door right away. The house is made of logs, the windows are shuttered, the roof is wood shingle, there's a couple of outbuildings and a big draft horse of a breed she doesn't recognize and what's probably a chicken coop.

Presently the occupant comes to the door; he's a big healthy-looking fellow, dark skinned and black haired. He says something that continues to be in an unfamiliar language.

She has Tongues, she uses it in the evenings mostly, but - "Do you know any Taldane?"

Foreign foreign foreign?

Yeah, fine. She casts Tongues. Steps back and gestures at herself so as to hopefully be minimally scary. "Sorry," she says six seconds later. "I got here in some kind of magical accident and I don't know where I am."

"...hoo boy," is his response. "Uh... yikes. This is... my farm... the round is called Snakeseye."

"The...round?"

"The round," he repeats, slowly and clearly. "That we're on."

"I'm sorry. I don't know what that word means. It might be the translation spell. Is a round an...island? A county?"

"Your translation spell," he repeats incredulously. "The round is the ball of rock flying through the sky. Snakeseye is a colony of Ivory."

"We're on a floating island?" The other interpretation is that by 'round' he means planet but how would one of those be a colony of another, you couldn't possibly administer it -

"It's not an island, this round doesn't have any big lakes."

"Okay. Sorry. A big floating - rock. That is a colony of ...another place that is also a round? Or a place that is something else?"

"Ivory is the name of the round and also the country."

In the Elemental Plane of Air there are occasional floating rocks? Not that it makes a lot more sense for her to be in the Elemental Plane of Air than anywhere else but at least the physics is known to be the kind that would support this setup. 

"Are there any places that you know of that are not rounds, or on rounds?"

"...ships," he says exasperatedly. "I guess once I read a reasonably diverting short story about a couple rounds crashing into each other and not being very round after that."

- nod. "I...think I am very far from home. May I stay here until the storm passes? I can do mending, and light that doesn't burn any oil, and I could do horses to help in the fields, in the morning, if you have fields that need horses to work them."

"You can... do horses? What, make them? It's enough work feeding this one, not worth it to get the fields plowed sooner. You can come in but don't make any sudden moves, all right, I don't know what-all you're like but I have a guess." He steps aside. "I'll find some old clothes that could use patches if you're offering."

"Yeah, sure. You don't have to feed magic horses, they only last a little part of a day." She comes in. 

"Oh, well, if they're magic," he says, rolling his eyes and shutting the door behind her. He gestures her into a wooden chair at the kitchen table. It thunders outside. He goes and rummages in a cupboard and comes up with a coat, frayed at the hem and torn at the elbow, and a pair of socks worn out at the heels.

She casts Mending. It's a cantrip. She's supposed to do laundry and mending for her unit, laundry and mending and loyalty checks and she can use them for enchantment practice.

He drops a needle and thread on the table too without looking very closely and turns back to what he was working on before, now - apparently he has a batch of cottage cheese in progress. The door opens and in comes a teenage boy, also dark but slighter. He lets himself in and drops a wet basket full of eggs on the table. "Who's this?" he asks.

"Didn't give her name. Might have, ah, skipped that step," mutters her host, like he's euphemizing something rude.

"Oh my."

"She said she'd do the mending while keeping out of the rain."

"All right, I did like that coat. Hey there, I'm Cachion, that's Dayr."

"I'm Carissa." She would love to understand whatever the subtext is but she has only one Detect Thoughts unused and might need it more. She Mends the socks too.

"Nice t- what did you just do to that sock?"

"I Mended it. I'm a wizard. I have Tongues up, too, I got here in some kind of magical accident and I don't speak your language normally." She mends the other sock.

Cachion stares. Dayr looks over his shoulder from his cheesing. "What's she done with it -"

"It's - look -"

Dayr looks.

"How'd you do that?"

So they have never seen magic before. It's - weird that he thought nothing of it, earlier - he thought she was lying? Deluded? Why would you have no magic but delusions of magic, magic is really hard and doesn't seem at all like something you'd have delusions about if the real thing didn't exist -

"I am a wizard. In the land that I am from, called Cheliax, promising students are taught arcane magic, the art of bending the world to your will, and I am a very weak wizard by the standards of my people but I am one." She is not a very weak wizard by any standard in the world but she had been assuming that casting Tongues revealed a lower bound on her capabilities that was, in fact, pretty much the whole of her capabilities and if that's not the case she can maybe conceal most of them. "I take it there are no wizards here?"

"You don't look that old," says Cachion.

"There are no wizards here," confirms Dayr, picking up a mended sock and squinting at it.

"I'm twenty-five." Six years of school, six years of military service, then you can consider whether you're most of service in some other way. "What do you mean that I don't look old? Would you be less surprised I could do this if I looked old?"

"- you said you weren't a very good wizard by the standards of your people," says Cachion.

"You don't look twenty-five to me," says Dayr.

"I was assuming they count by physical age," says Cachion, "and actually she's seven or eight - oh, or - are you not a very good wizard because you're in fact twenty five, made as a child and not very well specified for being a wizard -"

"It has been twenty five years since the year that I was born and I do not understand what other things I might mean by that, that's how age is counted by all people where I am from."

"Since you were born? What, do wizards grow baby people in cows?" says Dayr.

"In cows? No, in, uh, women." Gesture. 

"That's worse!" cries Dayr. "You can cast spells and you're supposed to grow people on top of that! What a waste!"

"Can you not be a wizard if you aren't born?" asks Cachion.

"How do people here - start existing? Are you all constructs?"

"...we're people," says Cachion. "People... make people? Like, Dayr made me, and Tashte made him but he's dead now..."

"What steps does this involve. Do you - build them out of clay and then - well, you can't have a wizard animate it -"

"...it doesn't involve a lot of steps," says Cachion.

"I mean, it does if you want it done right, I spent a while thinking you up," says Dayr. "But neither of us is going to make another one right here and now so you can watch."

"Do you pray for people and then they just show up?"

"See," says Dayr, "not knowing basic things like where people come from or what a round is is why I thought you were somebody's malicious pet project, before I saw the spell."

"It's not prayer," says Cachion. "It's just deciding how the person should be and - don't you make anyone either just to try it, though, you obviously don't know what you're doing."

"It can be done accidentally just by being curious how it works?"

"You won't do it by accident," says Cachion.

"A well-made person won't, who knows what somebody who was grown in a woman will have as a personal foible," says Dayr.

"So in this world, people are made by - thinking them up - what sort of traits can you give them? Do they always have free will?"

"...as opposed to what?" asks Cachion.

"In my world, where people are born, they have free will, which makes them - disobedient, and foolish, and willful and proud and not very good instruments of our gods, generally."

"...I don't think anybody's trying to make people who are instru-"

"Somebody's probably trying it somewhere," says Dayr.

"All right, someone's probably trying to make instruments of some sort of god, I guess, and we don't know how their state of the art is, but it's not usual to make people disobedient and foolish."

"State of the art? Are some things harder to make your people be than other things?"

"Not really, but you have to know what you're doing," says Cachion. "It's like how paintings got better after perspective was invented."

She has no idea what that means. "I see. What are the laws around making people? Do you need permission from your government?"

"This isn't a proleround," says Dayr. "You just can't be a shit about it. You don't have to run everybody by a board."

"Do you - own the people you make? Do you assume responsibility for them?"

"No, I don't own him," says Dayr. "If you're not good enough at making people who want to stick around you deserve to have them run off on you." Cachion pecks him on the cheek. "You can't make people who're going to - commit crimes, or who can't walk or are dying or really want you to eat them for dinner, none of that. There might be special laws if you want to make a child but nobody does that."

"And probably no one would even think of making a person who can get pregnant with arbitrary people, since that is not a good way to make people at all. Can you make copies of yourself? Or copies of yourself with one thing changed?"

"You can try," says Dayr. "But you have to have it all in mind, and can miss something."

"Has anyone written a book, or does anyone offer a class, about how it works?"

"There's books, yeah," says Dayr. "Maybe in cities there's classes."

"Thank you. I promise I will not try to make any inadequate people and I will go learn about it before I try it at all. But I think that it is - very good, and I am very excited to learn of it."

"Well, wizards are also very exciting," says Cachion.

"Yes. Wizard magic is very useful. I might take apprentices. I just want to learn more about the world first."

"The nearest real town on Snakeseye is Windtower," says Cachion, "they'll have books."

"Where are all you wizards from?" wonders Dayr.

"My homeland is called Cheliax. It is a prosperous and beautiful country, in the service of Asmodeus, greatest of the gods, and it trains all its children who have the potential to be wizards."

"It must be awful having to have everyone be children. Not just children! Babies!" says Dayr. "That much take up so much of everyone's time."

"It used to, but now the church has daycares. I think it still takes a lot of time. I do not have any personally."

"Any... time?" asks Cachion.

"Any children. You conceive them by having sex in a particular way so if you avoid that they won't happen spontaneously or anything."

"...you're not contagious, are you?" asks Dayr.

"I do not expect that other people will start being able to have children if they were not made that way in the first place. And even if somehow it did I would only expect it to affect - do you have the concept of male and female, here -"

"Yes. We're men but wouldn't want to introduce you to any women if you might be catching," says Dayr.

"If you have a way to check I guess it'd be better to check but I would be surprised if it were - contagious. Some people in our world can't have children because the machinery has something wrong or they broke it and it doesn't grow back or anything."

"I don't think there's a good way to check," says Cachion.

"Well. I wouldn't worry about it. What's Windtower like?"

"It's the main harbor on the round. Busy place, lots of stuff coming and going," Dayr says.

"Harbor for - flying ships that fly between rounds?"

"If you want to call it that."

"What do people usually call it?"

"Sailing."

This feels like odd behavior from the translation spell but maybe that's to be expected when it's working in such an unfamiliar context. "I see. How do most people make a living, in the city?"

"Trading for stuff, I imagine. In Windtower. In a real city they probably... drive carriages, run restaurants, that sort of thing."

Nod. "And what gods are worshipped here?"

"Oh, 'round here we're mostly Celebratory Animists. Some of the neighbor countries do the gods thing more but we've never gone," says Cachion.

"What is a Celebratory Animist?"

"I'm no missionary," says Dayr. "It's, oh, remembering to look at the world like it exists in its own right. And all its pieces. LIke, when I was making Cachion, I was thinking about what I wanted but also what the farm wanted, in a person to take over when I'm gone, and not just the whole farm but the chickens and the horse and the trees and the crops."

"It's 'Celebratory' because we split off from a kind of animism that didn't believe in holidays," clarifies Cachion. "About a lifetime back there was a schism."

"Huh. Do you know what afterlife Celebratory Animists mostly get?"

"The understanding is we melt back into the universe but it's not heretical to figure you get reincarnated when someone makes someone like you, some people try for that on purpose to get dead people back," says Cachion.

"- I see."

"I think that's silly," says Dayr, shaking his head. "If I tried making Tashte all over again that would be, well, for one thing what if someone beat me to it and he wasn't around to reincarnate, what then, I'd be expecting Tashte and have Cachion instead, not healthy. Sometimes I talk to him, usually when I'm chopping wood, but he could be anywhere by now."

"Tashte is someone you know who died? Of old age?"

"Tashte made me," Dayr says. "He was one of the first settlers on Snakeseye, came over from Wheatround to start the farm and made me to help out with it."

Dissolved back into the universe. It's so - empty and pointless - "My condolences." She's going to have to reinvent scrying, so she can check if they're right and for some of them there's no afterlife - if they don't have scrying they wouldn't know for sure - it'd be so much easier if she at least had Locate Object or Clairvoyance but she doesn't, she's starting from nothing - damn it -

"He lived a full life," says Dayr. "But thanks."

She is distracted, now, trying to think how she can reinvent enough magic to do anything useful. Wizards on their own were rarely that impressive, in ancient times, it took people to learn from or make work for you - well, she could make some of herself but less upset about potentially dying in a magic explosion, speed it up that way -

She doesn't say anything for a little while.

They look at each other, and at her. Cachion eventually puts away the socks and shrugs on the coat.

She pulls herself together. "I am sorry to have inconvenienced you. My translation spell will stop working in a little while; is there anything else I should know before that happens?"

"Uh - which way Windtower is, I guess. You go towards Mikeo's place, the blue farmhouse that way - from there you'll be able to see the road, once it's not raining - and you go to the road, turn left, keep going, when it's not obvious which fork is the main road follow the deeper wagon ruts," says Cachion.

"Since it's magic, not darning, can you fix stuff besides clothes?" wonders Dayr.

"Yes. I need all the pieces and it takes a lot of time if things are badly damaged."

With this information they can find her more stuff to fix. Gear for the horse, a wagon wheel, a knife with a bent tip.

She will hang out and quietly mend things and cast Detect Thoughts when they're not looking and before Tongues runs out so she can find out whether there's anything important they're not saying.

Cachion is thinking that he wishes she would go away so he and Dayr could have sex but it would be unkind to turn her out into the rain. He's considering, now that his coat is fixed, going out into the rain himself and visiting Mikeo and having sex with her instead, but it'd be a long walk and she has pigs so her place is going to be very muddy. Dayr is eating some of his cottage cheese, with herbs sprinkled on it, and thinking Tashte would have been fascinated by the magic but he's not himself sure what questions to ask.

That's reassuringly not very threatening. They probably don't know how dangerous she is or isn't (she isn't) and are being sensible about the uncertainty. 

Tongues wears off. She listens for the rain to lessen and finishes the mending.

The rain lasts another four hours. They give her dinner - potatoes and cottage cheese and a couple poached eggs - and send her on her way when the weather clears.

When she steps outside into the sunny day, it may be notable that there are two suns in the sky, one bigger than the other, and also a lot of moon-like things, perhaps other rounds, hanging overhead at assorted distances.

She can't think how it'd work but she doesn't know a lot of astronomy or anything. She walks towards the house they said to walk towards, and then to the road from there, thinking.

Probably the first thing to do is to figure out whether Asmodeus is already aware of, and free to act in, this world. She assumes not. Why would you work through flawed free-willed people if you could instead make better ones? But she should check, and learn of all the local gods and figure out how not to be interfered with, and then she should make a suitable cleric of Asmodeus. She has cousins who are, so she thinks she'll be able to do it, once she understands how making people is done at all. And then - summon devils and ask for the situation to be brought to the attention of someone appropriate, presumably.

In the meantime she should get her story straight. She was created with an aptitude for spellcasting, seven or eight years ago - people must usually be made as teenagers - on a round a ways away from here, but her teacher died in a magic accident and she decided to explore a little before she figured out what to do next. She can mindread the first person she tells, see which parts don't go over quite right.

Is there night here? Are the suns at all inclined to set or anything?

The suns move across the sky; so do the rounds. A new round rises.

Well, that's really annoying. The ground is also going to be wet and sleeping on it is going to be unpleasant so she'll - put that off, walk for as long as she can stand it, hope the ground dries a little or she sees a decent place to sleep. Or reaches the city, but probably it's a long way.

Eventually she's walking in a drier place where the storm didn't hit.

Okay. She should try to sleep, then, in broad daylight - the Worldwound is like that sometimes, but there at least your fortress has walls and you have blankets -

- and in the morning when she has some spells prepared she can make faster progress to the city, talk to some more people and make sure her impression of this place is approximately right -

It takes a long time to fall asleep even though she's exhausted. She manages eventually.

While she is sleeping someone attempts to make off with some of her belongings.

Wow what the fuck she doesn't even have that many belongings, just what she's wearing, and she is absolutely prepared to kill someone over her spellbook. She - wishes she had a knife, if you don't have magic you should at least have a knife, she should have grabbed a sharp rock or something. Instead she kicks wildly at whoever touched her.

The person dodges the kick, though not especially nimbly. She has a knife, and pulls it out.

If she had Fireball then in a minute she would have a knife. As it stands, probably she should run. She does that.

The thief chases her but not far. She's down just the notepad that was in her left pocket.

Stupidstupidstupid to think probably no one'd bother her. She never really wanted combat magic. She wants it very badly right now. She wants the thief to be on fire, and also dead. She runs until she cannot run any farther and stops less out of a conscious decision than because her legs stop listening. She feels dizzy. Probably all the running. 

She needs to sleep in order to have magic. Until she has magic she can't talk to anybody to ask to sleep in their houses or anything. Once she has magic she can - once she has magic maybe it's worth the risk to try stuffing her lightning cantrip into a higher level slot - 

She is so lucky that the thief didn't think to slit her throat first, which is what they obviously should have done -

She's not going to get back to sleep. No magic today. She will have to spend it coming up with a plan. Probably no food, since she can't talk to anyone, probably no shelter, for the same reason....

Can you make a person who is you, except they speak the local language?

Probably she'll get it wrong. They said you have to know what you're doing, to not get it wrong. But - but right now there's no one to watch her back, no one to carry on if she fails, and she isn't really sure that with no ability to speak the local language she can arrange any kind of accommodations that could make tomorrow go any better than that. 

- probably first she should at least try finding somewhere to stay without speaking the local language. 

Are there any farmhouses around that look larger than the one where she was an imposition?

That one over there looks pretty big, and is also made mostly of stone instead of wood. Somebody's out in the field right now, harvesting a crop of bright berries.

She will limp over and look pathetic and see if she is offered accommodations. She does not expect this to work at all but as long as he doesn't randomly kill her she won't be worse off.

The person in the field tries talking to her, and when this doesn't work directs her to the big house. At the door an old woman lets her in and also tries talking to her and when that doesn't work she calls a teenage boy and when he can't talk to her either they're all pretty confused.

Yup! Sorry! 

They sit her down by the fireplace and give her some day-old bread and confer amongst themselves.

Probably it was in fact reasonable and not stupid to do this plan before trying the plan where she makes a person but they might murder her and that would suck. She eats her day-old bread and tries to look like she will not be any trouble. 

Probably people kill each other all the time, in a world where you can just make new ones as trivially as you'd like. There is no reason at all not to, if you don't immediately see anything they can do for you. 

She does Dancing Lights. Just makes them float in the air at eye level. See, that's kinda interesting, maybe worth not murdering her. 

They are all very curious about the dancing lights! They watch them and go ooh and squint at her trying to figure out how she's doing it.

If they murder her they can't just make a new one who can do this! 

(She said something and moved her hands when she cast the spell, but now that she's done so she can direct them with her thoughts.)

There are apparently at least four people in the house on top of the one with the berries and now they are all here watching the lights go hither and thither.

After a minute she catches the magic and casts the spell again. The lights can also come together in a vaguely humanoid form, look.

They think this is highly entertaining. The teenager tries copying the gesture and the word and gets it wrong. The old woman bustles off and gets her a fruit-filled handpie.

That doesn't seem like something you'd give to someone who you are planning to murder at all. 

She says thank you, though they won't understand her. 

She can keep doing the spell for a while as long as she keeps catching it when it ends.

They are not infinitely entertained by it, but she has a rotation of the large group of people who live in this farmhouse throughout the day and somebody drags his knitting in so he can watch while he works on a poncho.

It is not ideal to have a bunch more people knowing she has magic but it's better than being murdered in her sleep. When she gets tired she stops, folds her hands, doesn't do much of anything. 

They are puzzled, trade guesses in their language, eventually somebody offers her an afghan and a pillow but it would seem they haven't a spare room.

That's fine! She tries to express being very grateful.

The old lady pats her on the knee. The house isn't quiet, but nobody rifles through her pockets while she sleeps.

She doesn't sleep well, exactly, but eventually she has slept well enough.

She starts preparing spells. Still doesn't have any good combat spells but - she can get a horse, she can get Tongues a couple of times, she can detect thoughts. She doesn't see how to throw more power at the cantrip Jolt but it might be dangerous enough anyway, against random civilians.

She casts Detect Thoughts as soon as she's finished.

Somebody is watching her prepare spells and wondering what language the book is in, it looks very fancy. There's somebody outside training a puppy who isn't thinking about her at all. Somebody in the kitchen kneading bread, wondering if she's an entertainer normally who got split up from her troupe and how she does the lights. Some people beyond that wall are having a foursome but only one of them is thinking about her.

Okay. Safe, for now. 

She casts Tongues and turns to the person who is watching her prepare spells. "Thank you so much for the place to stay. I was sleeping outside when I was attacked by a robber with a knife and then I got lost."

"I thought you couldn't talk Soskat," he says, puzzled and kind of suspicious.

Sigh. She doesn't really want to go through this again but, well, here they are. "I have a spell for it but it only works for a little while. I didn't have it yesterday."

"I told her you were a mage!" he says triumphantly. "I didn't know there were real ones but then you did magic, so I told her - and she said no such thing - and I said how many mages would you have to see, before you'd know they were real, huh, eleven or something, who ignores ten and is like 'ah yes' after eleven - and I was right."

" - yeah, you were, good for you. Magic's hard, in lots of places I think they just haven't learned how to - make people who can do it. Even where I'm from most people can't."

"How do you make somebody who can do it?"

"I haven't done it yet personally but they have to be very clever, good at math and at visualizing things in space and at thinking ahead five steps and holding lots of things in your memory."

"That doesn't sound that complicated..."

These people are so powerful and the church of Asmodeus here will be so valuable. "Well, then I don't know why there aren't more wizards here. As far as I know that's all there is to it."

"Maybe there's a secret your maker didn't explain to you," he says dubiously. "Maybe they were concentrating so hard on making you smart and mathy they weren't sure you'd do everything else they wanted? And they wanted to keep it to themselves?"

"Hmmm, could be. I guess I won't know for sure until I try to do it myself. Or try to teach someone smart and mathy, maybe I should do that first. - maker's dead. Magic accident, about a year ago." She still has Detect Thoughts up so she can see how the cover story goes over.

"...you're not going to have a magic accident and blow up our house, are you?"

"No, no, absolutely not. Trying to invent new spells can be dangerous but I have never done it because I don't like doing dangerous things. Using existing spells is perfectly safe."

"Okay..." He's kind of worried she's lying so they won't kick her out of the house, which they prefer not-blown-up, but he's not going to unilaterally kick her out on this suspicion. "What spells exist?"

"Uh, I know the one for the lights, and one for flavoring food or warming it up or cooling it down, and I can clean clothes and mend things and make a magic horse to ride."

"What kind of flavors?" he wonders. "What's magic about the horse? ...and how come you walked here?"

"Didn't have a magic horse prepared. I have to set up my spells after getting a good night of sleep and I hadn't slept well for a couple of days so I was mostly out."

"Oh. Did you sleep okay in the chair?"

"Well enough, I guess. I was very tired."

"We don't have a bed spare, we wound up making Haroly early and Janta's still alive."

Right, that's the kind of thing that would make sense. "I understand. I probably want to go on, anyway, I was trying to reach Windtower."

"Oh, you're nearly there, you can get there by the time you want lunch if a magic horse is like a normal one. Do you want breakfast? I can get you something nice if you'll mend things, otherwise it's just bread and berries but the berries're real fresh."

"I would be happy to mend things in exchange for breakfast."

Things to mend are various clothes and shoes and an axe and a chipped mug and a ripped book. Breakfast is bread and yogurt and berries and eggs fried with mushrooms and assorted vegetables and a couple little fish, smoked and dried.

Her appetite is a bit off right now, but she tries to eat everything, she doesn't know when she'll eat next. She mends their clothes and shoes and axe and mug and book, which takes about an hour in total, by which time Tongues has worn off. She tries to mime 'grateful' and then head out.

The farmers bid her a cheery goodbye! Presumably!

It's not raining now but there are some clouds she can see high in the sky, obscuring a sun, that might be descending.

She should not hate this place. This place is good. It is better than Cheliax, which has no choice but to make people the old-fashioned way. Yes, this place has no reason at all to keep people alive if they're useless, since there's no cost at all to replacing them with better ones, but that is good. The important thing is that the world can be fixed, can be filled with people who don't have anything wrong with them and don't need to be dismantled into pieces once they're dead. 

It sucks for the people who are not like that, but - Asmodeus takes everyone. Even the most worthless ones, even if the reason why is not very clear to her and even if the usable pieces of you are very small, if you're very useless. Asmodeus will want her even if he has a billion better things. Especially if she gets him them that's not how it works. There's no reward except that billions of people who are already right and don't need fixing will exist. Which is enough. 

She makes her horse and rides for the city.

Windtower fades into view as the farms get denser and eventually turn into town. There are towers, of a sort, just three and four stories tall, dominated by broad staircases up and down which people carry crates of things to the floating sailboat-things. The sailboat-things are fully enclosed capsules with sails sticking out all over them.

Huh.

She has one more Tongues. She is not sure if these people use money.

Is there anything that looks like it might be an inn?

There are buildings of about the right size and composition and stable-having-ness to be inns, several of them.

She will cast Tongues and go up to one of them. "Hi. I am looking for a place to stay for a couple of days. I don't have money but I can do smokeless indoor lights -" a dancing light, this time moving with her hand so it looks like something she's holding - "and I can do carpentry and mending and things."

"How d'you that?" asks the innkeeper, watching the light with her head swiveling left and right.

"It's magic. Most people can't do it but my maker could and I can."

"How come I never heard of it?"

"I'm from pretty far away."

"What sail'd you come in on?"

"I didn't. I used magic."

"What brings you to Snakeseye?"

"I'm exploring the world. Only I got robbed on the side of the road, a day ago, so -" Empty hands, shrug.

"Hunh. Well, you can mend some sheets and blankets and I can give you the littlest room."

"Thank you very much. Also my language magic only works for about an hour a day, I'll understand you the rest of the time but I won't be able to answer."

"Anything else you have to say, then?"

"Is there a bookstore in town? And what are the local laws?"

"There's a bookstore, it's got the yellow and red sign, two streets that way bear left. Only oddball law here is that we don't allow alcohol within Windtower, you get it out past the river or past the circle road depending which direction you're going before you crack a bottle. Everything else is your basic no assault no murder no sausage no armies with cancer no theft no arson sorts of things."

Several of those make no sense but she is trying to seem less foreign than she is and the books might explain it. "Thank you. I will stay out of trouble." 

And she wants to get to the bookstore while she's still got Tongues so she heads out. 

There's a red and yellow sign! And a lot of books.

Tongues won't cover the books but she also has Comprehend Languages. At least she didn't get grabbed for this before the Worldwound tour, she'd have been utterly useless and it would probably have taken her a month even to learn that she's atrocious at learning foreign languages. 

She casts Comprehend Languages, goes into the bookshop. "Hi. I do book binding repair, do you have any work for me?"

"Huh, do you bring your own materials?" asks the proprietor, a little old man.

"Yes. Good as new or you don't have to pay me."

"And how much do I pay you if it is as good as new?"

"How much do you sell the books for?"

"Depends on the book. They're all marked."

"Half what they're listed at."

He sucks his teeth a bit. "I can sell most of them damaged for that much, sooner or later."

"A quarter?"

"I'll try you on one for that and see if you're going to give me a hack job and argue about how good as new it is," he decides, and he shows her into a back room and fishes a book out of a box with a cracked spine and a scratch across the leather cover and a few pages creased like they were stepped on. "You don't look like you're carrying much, there."

She pats her spellbook in her front pocket. "I have what I need. I'll call you when it's done?"

"Trade secrets?" he asks.

"Yes."

He looks around, maybe assessing how much damage she could do if she started wrecking things instead of fixing them, and then goes back into the main shop without a quarrel.

She mends the book. ...and then reads it, because why not. What is it about.

It's a religious text! It includes various scripts and rituals for attempting communion with the souls of various things such as weather systems, fields, forests, wells, rivers, and animals. It has a reference chart of when all the major Celebratory Animist holidays are, though the timing is vague and counted by the senatorial sleep cycle on Central Ivory and the book is pretty sure your chickens will not mind if you are a bit early or late to give them holiday treats and of course if your town/round/household celebrates at a certain time it makes sense to celebrate with them.

She's heard of druids but this seems entirely different than that. She - doesn't have spare paper to take notes anymore, stupid thief - tries to memorize as much of the rituals as possible - 

- and after about thirty minutes brings the book out front to the proprietor. "Is this all right?"

"That was fast," he says, looking the book over, opening it, flipping through. "...wow. Are you planning to set up in Windtower? People don't knock over my displays and then trample the books often enough for me to have steady work for you." But he rummages in his till for a quarter of the book's list price.

"I should hope not! No, I'm just passing through, but I was robbed two nights ago and I want to build some savings up before I leave. I can do what you do have."

He can set her up with some more trampled and otherwise maltreated books.

She will spend the rest of the day in his back room, mending them and then reading them. Are any of them about how making-people works?

She fixes novels, poems, short stories, a text on gardening, a book of sailing knots, and, yes, Make Your Helpmate Right.

How does she make her helpmate right.

The book advises her to go to someone good at portraiture, give a description, iterate on a few sketches, and have an image to contemplate so you don't wind up realizing that actually that combination of individually attractive features isn't nice all together, or something. It recommends taking lots of time, and writing down everything that comes to mind about how she'd like her helpmate to be, and pretending she has ALREADY MADE this person JUST AROUND THE CORNER and seeing if she has a last minute panic over forgetting to include something. It reminds her that people drift over time, but they especially do so if their initial specifications are not very well thought out, or are in tension with each other - it's hard to make someone both very tidy and completely unbothered by you being a slob and also have that person eager to do lots of things besides clean up after you which would compete with that for time, because inevitably they're going to have the thought "I'd have more time to paint if you weren't leaving your dishes everywhere" or "I guess you can't reasonably complain if I don't do the dishes either, it isn't like you do them", so you should pick at most two of those traits. Here is a list of disabilities that you should have in mind to not include because if you don't have that in mind they may be filled in at random; any space you don't specify will be filled in at random.

People liking singing and sex is technically optional but they are both free ways to pass the time so probably unless for some reason you can't abide them yourself you will want them included (though if you're part of a long line of people denied these harmless amusements you could take the opportunity to break the cycle). This, like all other things you mean them to spend their time on, you will want to trouble to make them good at. It is easier to make someone good at something if you understand how the skill works. You don't have to be good at it, but you should be able to distinguish good and bad results and have an idea of how you'd learn it if you were going to. Languages are pretty easy to add but if you're not making your person very smart they will soon get rusty at ones they don't use.

Your person will not by default start with fake memories - this is understood to be correct, it's bad to be delusional - but will also not by default start with any particular opinions about the situation they are in, or you, or being naked, and if you let those fill in at random you are likely to get "startled, embarrassed, possibly resentful", and you probably instead want "calm, delighted to meet you, kind of turned on" or something like that. You cannot copy a personality outright by reference to a person; you have to actually describe the personality, in your mind or on paper, and if you are wrong about exactly what traits underly what you like about yourself or whoever else you feel moved to copy, it won't turn out how you hope. You can sort of mentally prioritize, so if you think that your preexisting friend is polite because they care about people and actually they are polite because they fall back on having predetermined scripts for how to behave, you can kind of try harder on "polite" than on "cares about people" and get "polite" with a random but consonant-with-the-rest-of-the-personality-selectors underlying reason. Or the other way around, and possibly get someone brusque and awkward but caring.

There's an entire chapter about sexual compatibility and making sure your person isn't jealous of whoever else you're sleeping with. There's a bit about having compatible aesthetic tastes, which assumes you're going to be singing duets all day, and about how to make sure they have the repertoire you have in mind. There is a section on how much you can given current understandings successfully max out various desirable traits ranging from general strength and stamina (this doesn't seem to exceed what you'd expect from a swordfighter type of the caliber palling around with third- or fourth-level casters, though it does outdo random Golarion peasants) to how little sleep they need (this book pegs it at four hours; some people can manage on less but this must rely on some other factor that isn't yet understood).

Huh. Okay. 

- of course everybody mostly makes people to have sex with, how unsurprising. She feels substantially reassured, because probably if people can make people to have sex with then they're not particularly going to bother strangers about it.

She thinks that the ideal cleric of Asmodeus wouldn't want to have sex, here on this planet where it's not necessary to make more clerics of Asmodeus. They would also not enjoy singing. They would enjoy - research, probably, because they need to figure out agricultural productivity so they don't all have to spend most of their time farming, and prayer, and learning and obeying the will of Asmodeus. And growing in their own capabilities so as to be better be of service. And they'd be relatively easy to get along with, so long as that didn't contradict the will of Asmodeus - it doesn't do any good to have a group of people who are constantly having internal drama - 

She needs to buy a replacement notepad, so she can take notes on all this. 

She casts her second Tongues of the day and piles up all the books and carries them out to the proprietor. 

He looks them over, whistles, pays her for the work.

"Can you point me to a stationery store?"

"Letters to write? Down the way," he points, "next to the place with the pig on a spit out front."

That reminds her that she is hungry. Whatever. It won't kill her. Ink and paper first, and then she can look for a place that appears to be serving food.

The stationery store will sell her ink and paper. The place next door has a whole pig on a spit and carves bits of it off for the patrons to be formed into sandwiches.

Sure, sounds good. She wonders whether you can make animals or just people. ...also whether the people have to be humans. Maybe she should really be trying to make a devil, here?

She hurries back to the inn before the spell wears off and asks how much the smallest room will be if she can actually pay with money, she made a little today.

She can afford the room and all-she-can-eat bread and gruel and soup for a few days with that much.

She doesn't have a great way to earn more, and she might want to buy a book on person-making, she probably can't get away with sitting in the back room reading them if she's not mending them. She'll go with cleaning and mending like she promised she would, and buy food separately when she can afford it.  

She thinks about her person, while she cleans. They'll speak the language, so she won't have to burn all her spell slots on that. They'll be happy when they learn about Hell, instead of scared and sad and flinchy about it - and they can just start out knowing, actually - 

- it's probably reasonable to make them like her, since they'll have to work together, but it can be only-if-it-doesn't-contradict-anything-else, in case liking her makes it harder to serve Asmodeus since Asmodeus doesn't care about her, or something. She still doesn't quite understand how it all works. 

Maybe the thing you actually want to do is make someone better than you at making-people. But it seems hard to make people better than you at things you don't fully understand, so that's not much of a solution. 

When she has cleaned the place she retreats to her room and takes notes by her dancing lights until she's tired enough to sleep.

The curtains are good and thick so she can have darkness to sleep by even in the constant shifting day. (Actually, when she wakes up, it's sunless and dark for about twenty minutes.)

She should not hate this place, that's just incorrect, this place is better than home. 

Are there any other bookstores? Is there a temple to something other than the worship of gardens and rainstorms and birds?

There is only one bookstore in Windtower. There are two temples, one for the dominant gardens/rainstorms/birds thing (it's currently decorated for Fish Festival and some people have strings of paper fish trailing from their sleeves) and one small shrine for the minority non-Celebratory animists which is very severely architected and not decorated at all, fishily or otherwise.

Normally it is forbidden to go to a place of worship dedicated to a lesser god but, well, no one can punish her for it here, and she will presumably be punished for it when she dies but it has never seemed to her like there's a lot of point in trying to reduce punishment when you die, it will take however long it takes to find whatever bits of her are worthy and it's worth encouraging them to grow, of course, to constitute as much of her as possible, but it doesn't really matter how much cruft there is on top, or at least she can't see how it would. 

She casts Tongues and walks in.

The little shrine is being swept by an old woman in a gray robe. "Welcome," she says when Carissa walks in. There are some more people, mostly old, kneeling on the floor at various low tables. Most of the little tables are vacant.

She nods to the woman. Are there holy texts or anything? 

There are calligraphic scrolls on the walls. Nobody's reading a book and if there are any they're not prominently shelved.

She does Comprehend Languages, tries to read the scrolls.

They are hard to read but say things like The round under me and The suns above and The water of life and The warm hearth.

Okay. 

She leaves without even pretending to pray.

What kind of pathetic god recycles or maybe dissolves your soul when you die and doesn't grant anyone any spells. And can't have much competition, or it would be losing. 

She goes back to the bookstore, this time to browse. Are there any other books about making the perfect person?

There are! There are copies of Your Successor and Person Pitfalls! and Who? (Will Care For Me When I Am Old) and Person Preparatory Steps.

Can she afford Person Preparatory Steps.

She can!

Oh good. She'll take that one and then go sit outside somewhere to read. With her back to a wall. Looking out for thieves.

Person Preparatory Steps consists mostly of checklists and sidebars about checklist items and some blank sections prefaced by questions to write your own answers out. You're supposed to fill it out and it advertises that you will not miss anything important if you complete the whole book and then have it firmly in mind while making your person.

Oh good that's a really useful thing to have. She will get started on filling out checklists for the person worthy of being a cleric of Asmodeus who Asmodeus will hopefully then choose and then figuring out how to use this place will be in more suitable hands.

She doesn't care what they look like. Maybe they can look exactly like her? Sort of inconvenient to tell them apart. Exactly like her but with black hair. She'll do a sketch next time she can see her reflection. 

The person worthy of Asmodeus is not interested in sex though they're not, like, averse to it, if it's strategically useful.

What does the person like to eat? Do they have any cute little habits? What is their favorite chore? What are they good at? Describe their style of being good at those things. What languages do they speak? What would they do if their original lifestyle were no longer feasible for some reason? Who do they know and love? Describe the way they will want to relate to those people. Check every box on this list to make sure they will not have any of these weird problems random people have. What is their name? What do they do in their spare time? How would you imagine them reacting in these 50 everyday scenarios (lover's quarrel, being cheated at the market, someone offering them ground pork, loved one not home when expected, prolonged snow-in, low on food, they get ill, a loved one gets ill...)

The person values their food being nutritionally balanced and readily available. They - if you don't come up with anything it fills it in with something random - have a cute habit of reciting from the Asmodean holy books when they're nervous. Their favorite chore is....creating water? They are good at research and at winning people over in conversation and at serving Asmodeus. They're good at research by...having a good memory, and being able to notice subtle conceptual connections between things, and having good orderly habits of mind for believing things, and enjoying writing up and explaining the things that they learned. (Should they not enjoy it? But the human motivation system runs on enjoyment and probably it's hard to make a person who doesn't use it at all and it doesn't seem actively bad). They're good at winning people over because they're good at - understanding other people and picking up on nuances of how their arguments are going over and knowing the right thing to say and truly, deeply, appreciating Asmodeus's aims, so intensely that people believe it from how they believe it. They are good at serving Asmodeus because they don't - get defensive or self-important or obsessed with human things they want more than they want to serve Asmodeus. They don't have free will. They don't get sad or reluctant about hurting other people when it's necessary, though they don't do it gratuitously.

That's a negative, not a positive description of what being good at serving Asmodeus is. 

She puzzles on that for a while. She's met some devils and they don't seem much better than her at - wanting to fix the world, wanting to serve Asmodeus - which makes her worry that she's missing something...

They understand Asmodeus. They understand his anger at how the good things in the world were replaced with worthless stupid disobedient things. They want to fix it for him. They want the world to be full of people who aren't broken.

Languages: Taldane, Infernal, the local one.

If their original lifestyle were -

- well, if Asmodeus doesn't choose the cleric, then they should want to help her figure out what went wrong. And....until chosen by Asmodeus the person should be inclined to listen to her about their goals, since the person should assume that Carissa may have fucked up at making them and knows better than them what Asmodeus wants. Once Asmodeus chooses them they'll have proof that actually the person knows better than Carissa but until then, it's important to have a contingency plan for if she makes a mistake and the person is horribly wrong.

Who do they know? Carissa. Who do they love? Asmodeus. They want to help Carissa fix the entire universe of its free will problem. They want to worship Asmodeus and be an instrument of His will. 

She checks boxes.

What is their name. Uh, Asmodia. It's a common girl's name.

What do they do in their spare time? Their duty.

She goes through scenarios.

She can finish the whole book in a day if she insists but it recommends going over it a bunch of times because your person will still be there if you make a mistake or change your mind.

Yeah, that makes sense. 

She doesn't think she'll change her mind. The only other obvious thing to try is talking to a devil first and she doesn't have summoning outsiders in her spellbook. She could try to derive it off Mount but this stands a chance of getting her killed. It'll be a safer chance to take once she has allies. And - it's not that big a deal if Asmodia comes out wrong. She'll be kinda disappointing and Carissa might have to kill her in the worst case and then maybe she'll dissolve, if that's really how it works here, which is horrifying but not worse than never having existed at all.

It will save a lot of time if she gets this right on the first try, though.

She buys dinner, and goes back to the inn, and cleans it, and rereads the book of checklists, and eventually goes to sleep.

In the morning she wakes up and slaps herself in the face. ...clothes. She forgot clothes. She should go look into how expensive it'll be to buy her person clothes.

Pretty expensive!

Figures. 

...how about a knife?

Also pretty expensive but the blacksmith has heard she can fix things and will take some of that.

Great. She's not going to pretend here that she's doing it nonmagically - it'll be really blatant, with metal. Does he have enough work for her that she can also make money for clothes?

"Depends, what happens if something isn't very good to begin with, can you fix that?"

"Not usually."

"If it's got to be fixed from broken and not fixed from slapdash I don't have that much. You probably want to be in, like, a real city. Ivory maybe."

"Do you buy passage on the ships?"

"Yeah. There's usually one bound for Ivory around any given time."

"Thank you. I'll think about it."

She should probably do it. Get perspective on this world from more angles. But everything feels so fragile, while she's here alone, as the only person who knows that better than this is possible. 

She cobbles together a holster for her knife. Goes and asks about the cost of passage to Ivory.

She can pay her passage in scutwork if she wants, but can't afford to buy passage where she doesn't work during the trip.

Sure. Fine. How long is the trip?

About two weeks, with a stop in the middle on another round.

Ugh.

It's probably worth waiting two weeks to have more context and do this right but she doesn't feel like it. She wants someone to talk to. Not that they'll be friends. 

She agrees to do scutwork for the passage. 

She reviews her checklists in the evenings. Grows to hate them. Adds to Asmodia's traits that she enjoys repetitive boring work so long as it advances the cause.

The sail to Ivory leaves in the middle of her sleep shift; she may sleep aboard so she doesn't miss it.

Sure, she'll do that.

They have her peeling and chopping vegetables and scrubbing dishes the whole way there. Also, there's no gravity.

An Unseen Servant can do that. This is not really more efficient than doing it herself but it makes her feel better, and it does free her up to reread her checklists.

(Also, that's kind of cool.)

They're all very impressed with the Unseen Servant! Can she teach them to do that? Would she like to stay aboard the Golden Hawk?

No, she would not! She could in theory teach them to do that but usually people are custom-made for it, it takes about two years to pick up otherwise.

Well, how do you make people for it?

She hasn't done it herself and there might be a trick to it she doesn't know but they should be very smart, good at visualizing things in their head and at math and at holding lots of things in working memory at once, and they should know some spells, this one's called Unseen Servant, though they'll have to make a spellbook to use them. 

The crew write that down. What are some other spells called?

Mage Armor, Feather Fall, Fly, Summon Devil, Prestidigitation, Dancing Lights...

What's a devil?

Where she's from people get an afterlife when they die. It's called Hell. Devils are the people who live there and also a thing that you can turn into, there, over time.

Huh. And then you can summon them? Will she do it now so they can see? She can have a wake off kitchen work for it.

She does not have the spell, copying spells into your spellbook takes expensive ink and she only has a handful and it doesn't include that one.

Huh. What kind of expensive ink?

It needs to be very highly concentrated and very well-filtered for impurities and really - lasting. You're supposed to test if ink is spellbook quality by daubing the slightest bit on your finger and if you can rub it out with enough determined rubbing then it's not high quality enough.

Gosh. Anything else they need to know to make their next shipmate a wizard?

She is actually really curious whether that'll work. "Wizards can invent more spells but they've got to be really smart even for wizards, to do that."

What kinds of smart?

Seeing how magic ought to fit together is like - being able to visualize a big thousand-piece puzzle when you can only see three or four pieces at a time?

Gosh! Okay. They'll mull that over. Fortunately it should already go pretty well with the new crewmate they're working on.

Ooooh, what else are they putting in?

She can see their notes if she wants. They're doing it collaboratively, they want new people to get along with everybody on the ship. Captain gets to actually make them. They have drawn a lovely teenage girl with curly hair and freckles and an impish smile - the drawing is in black and white but someone tells Carissa she's going to be a redhead - and her name's going to be Trauni and apparently she'll be a wizard! They're setting her up for navigation, their navigator's getting old and wants to retire with one of the riggers to a colony round and do dockside shipping logistics, so they were already working on puzzle-y type intelligence and they can throw in wizarding, see if it works, make another navigator if wizarding takes up a lot of Trauni's time.

That makes sense. She admires the picture. She's really curious if the wizarding will work, someone pointed out the other day that really if it's that easy lots of people should have it and maybe there's something her maker didn't tell her about how it's done, and ever since then she's wondered but she wasn't going to make someone just to check.

Well, they're going to make Trauni anyway and if she can't wizard no harm done! They do a big circuit through Ivory colonies and she can stop by Twiceharbor in a few months to see Trauni, if she wants.

Sure!

They will have her do some magic in addition to kitchen work for the rest of the trip, so they can see how it's done and have a better shot at making Trauni good at it (and because it seems like a good idea to mend rope instead of having to buy new rope).

Sure. They won't be able to see much more than her waving her hands and saying incantations but she can try to describe what it looks like to Detect Magic, too.

Eventually they get to their midway stop, pick up a shipmate they put off there last time to let him recover from a broken leg, haul cargo around. Can her veggie-chopping magic person haul crates?

Not really; it can only lift about twenty pounds or drag a hundred. She can help with the crates herself.

She is noticeably weaker than all these people; they put her back on kitchen duty after a bit. The ship is parked above where gravity starts so it's still floaty kitchen duty.

It's actually kind of weird that they are able to stay in good shape if they're always floaty; she feels like she's losing physical conditioning already. And admittedly didn't have much to start with because she's a wizard. She will hang out in the kitchen. 

She is homesick. She is aware that this is stupid but even though this place is objectively better than home it's objectively better kind of the way Hell is objectively better? It's less livable for broken humans, which is directly related to how it is good.

Everybody else seems fine, aside from being weirdly cheery about how they will dissolve into nothingness or be reused. Maybe being reused isn't any worse than being stripped away to your useful core and people are just fine with whatever they were brought up to expect, but it feels so much more tragic. Everything good about Carissa will last forever. These people hope that maybe someone kind of like them will exist someday and the same soul will be stapled to them when they do.

She adds that Asmodia should like this place, should see it as good and full of potential, and should want to make sure that its people do not dissolve.

The ship collects more crates and passengers and makes for Ivory.

Ivory, she can see as they sail toward it, is half ocean, full of rivers.

Maybe when she has made a research team one of them can figure out whether the way things work here has any interesting implications about the laws of the universe or which plane they're in or something like that.

Asmodia doesn't need that skillset in particular.

She gets quizzed about wizardry, and gets better at working in the zero-gravity kitchen, and they land at Twiceharbor, which indeed has both sail-towers and a marina, and set her off.

The city of Twiceharbor is urban; the buildings don't get up to zero-gravity height except for the ones that have docks, but there's lots of them and they're close together. It covers a good few percent of the round all by itself.

Churches to anything other than the rainstorms/birds thing? Bookstores? Blacksmiths?

She can find, beyond all the animist shrines, a Temple to All-Seeing Yrond, a Church of the Nine, and a Monastery of Universal Prayer. There are bookstores, there are blacksmiths.

She wants to know more about how those gods handle the afterlife situation, and she wants to make enough money to buy a second set of clothes, and she wants to get a different making-people book and confirm it lines up more or less with the advice in her existing making-people book.

All-Seeing Yrond is understood to gather up the essence of each dying person and allow it into a world of eternal joy and reunion. The Nine, incompatibly, are supposed to divvy up all the souls between them - farmers, soldiers, craftspeople, thinkers, artists, sailors, laborers, "fodder", and "strays" each have separate destinations, though sometimes they are said to have points of overlap. The Monastery of Universal Prayer is agnostic on the question but assumes that since prayer might help no matter what the deal is you might want to pay people to pray for you a lot and that's what they do.

The blacksmiths have things to mend. The bookstores have books, in a wider selection than Windtower. She can get a copy of The Greatest Project or New Generations or Population in Practice.

The Greatest Project sounds promising. 

She needs scrying so badly. It's not just that she can check the afterlife question; she could also scry people in Cheliax and communicate with them. Probably it'll make sense to make a less risk-averse copy well suited to dangerous magical research. Or maybe you can make people who already know spells, in which case this will be trivial and also she'll swiftly be useless (and what happens when she dies? Doesn't matter, she should try to do her duty anyway.)

The Greatest Project wants her to think about how all of her traits are because of how she was made, isn't that really something? Wow! Has she ever looked at her own notes from her maker? Talked to them about how they were thinking about it at the time? It's really instructive. Anyway, when getting ready to make your own person you want to think carefully about how all the parts of a personality, such as your own, interlock and support or pull on each other. You want a mutually supportive personality instead of one that will be under tension and juke unpredictably when faced with real life. Here are some case studies. Getting the right physical shape isn't hard, but often people want someone who is capable and independent but submissive and obedient, and that's hard! It's not impossible but you won't land on it by chance. You need to get really deep into all the moving parts and think how the gears might lock up. Here is some information about how people drift when they're allowed to start as very small children, even babies! Boy do those end up all over the place! Let's think about why that might work that way and what implications it has for making adults like normal.

The part about personalities that - stick - makes sense. She thinks not having free will helps with that? But in case it doesn't help enough she tries to pull together why the parts of Asmodia - come from underlying traits, instead of just being all of the most useful traits for a person to have. 

Maybe Asmodia - derives satisfaction from intellectual things, not physical ones; her state and the state of the world are interesting information, and useful, they're how she'll shape the world, but they're not intrinsically motivating the way that service to Asmodeus and better understanding of Asmodeus and progress towards a perfected world are interesting. That's why she doesn't care about food or sex except instrumentally; the things that speak to her soul are bigger. But - there's an obvious failure mode here, she's met people who fell into it, caught in an endless cycle of apparent insight and epiphany, never really accomplishing anything, so - 

She chews over it for a while. She wishes she could talk to an actual priest. Carissa is mostly devoted to Asmodeus because otherwise she will get crushed like a bug - or, apparently, dissolve and cease existing - and this is not a threatening state of affairs. Asmodeus knows that humans are weak and pathetic. Asmodeus will use the bits he can no matter how contemptible he considers her motives - but it doesn't seem quite right for being a priest of his. 

Maybe Asmodia feels, sometimes, when she's accomplished something really meaningful for her cause, a glimpse of what a valuable life is like, what Asmodeus cares about, and she's driven by that, by wanting to serve it and hoping to feel a bit more of it. Is that the right kind of underlying personality? It feels - closer. It's not a grab-bag of traits. 

She reads the books and tries to make money faster than she spends it so she can save up for clothes.

She doesn't have much trouble getting money; she has rare skills and in a big city lots of people have things they want magically fixed once word gets around. She does get a lot of questions about how wizards are made, though. She has an outfit's worth in a week of concerted work even accounting for the price of her inn.

She tells anyone who asks what she knows about how to make wizards, with the caveat that she hasn't done it and doesn't know if her instructions suffice. If it works will mean she has less of an advantage but she knows a lot more spells than she tells them about and she wants to know whether making people who know spells well enough to write them in a spellbook works. If it does it might make sense to see if she can make an extraordinarily powerful wizard with Gate who can get home from here.

Once she has saved up for enough money for a pair of clothes in her size she buys them. Can she pay for access to a mirror so she can visualize herself properly?

Yep, she can look in a mirror in a clothing store.

She has it all on a notebook pad in shorthand so she can hold it in her mind. None of these common human problems, looks like Carissa except with darker hair - and about five years younger, so she'll have as long a life as possible without the heightened risk of changing personality over time. No free will, that part is very important. Devoted to Asmodeus, and to the cause of building a better world where people do valuable things and prefer to do valuable things and enjoy and draw strength from doing valuable things, unlike this world where most humans care about and obsess over and squander themselves on things that don't matter unless forced or threatened into doing the valuable ones instead. Very high wisdom. Good at research, good at understanding people, easy to work with, ruthless but not sadistic, patient and tolerant of repetitive tasks, as long as they achieve a larger goal. Only pragmatic sorts of preferences about food and clothes and environs and so on. Waking up already aware of why Carissa made her, and glad to be made, and inclined to immediately inventory herself and offer her best guess about whether it worked. 

She leaves the clothing store and heads back to her rooms and -

- tries to will Asmodia into existence, just like that.

There's Asmodia.

She stands there, inert, staring straight ahead.

" - uh, hello?" Languages were on her checklist -

Asmodia does not discernibly react.

"I'm going to try to read your mind. I'll stop once I figure out why you're nonresponsive, or you can stop me by, uh, responding."

She does not respond.

Detect Thoughts?

She's not having any thoughts.

Probably you can't make people without free will. 

It's possible something else is wrong. It's possible that Carissa is bad at making people since she wasn't herself made. It's possible that she forgot something important even though she was very thorough and the books seemed to think they were comprehensive and didn't even mention this as a potential failure mode. 

But probably you can't make people without free will. At least not naively, not without knowing what is supposed to go where free will is.

She pinches Asmodia, to see if she has any reaction.

Nope.

Well, now she has a mess on her hands. If she tells people about this they'll probably be really mad at her, maybe it's illegal, making people so badly they're not people at all, and certainly she'll be under more suspicion - she could leave town but the trip was not pleasant at all and she doesn't want to make it again and she wanted to learn whether any of the people planning to make wizards succeeded -

She takes Asmodia's hand. Does Asmodia walk or is that too hard when you're a not-fully-made person.

Asmodia does not walk exactly but will rebalance if tugged.

She should figure out what she's going to do but actually instead she's going to take a couple of minutes to be full of despair.

She can, of course, still do this. This is still a very valuable resource. Even if all it can make is healthy young people with an aptitude for wizardry but no starting spells it's a valuable resource. 

But - but the thing she had been looking forward to was making people who weren't broken. Who weren't mostly stupid stuff that'd need scraping away. Who didn't do things like waste time for no reason, become obsessed with themselves at the expense of things that really matter - didn't sit in their room crying because something didn't go their way -

She can make people who are more productive and more easily managed than Chelish people but she can't make a different kind of people who Asmodeus doesn't need to remake.

That's very melodramatic. She can't do it yet. The first naive try didn't work. She doesn't even know for sure that that was the problem.

She lies there for a while. She decides what to do.

She should try again. Without the free will part. She needs to know whether that's the problem. If this time works, then she will have a co-conspirator, and it'll be easier to figure out what to do next, and all won't be lost even if she is arrested and executed or something. If this time doesn't work then she has to hide or fess up to or flee before discovery of two bodies. ...she'll just flee, she thinks. Leave the room locked and get on the next ship out. She won't be able to come back to this city but there are lots and lots of rounds, and she hates the ships but that doesn't matter.

So there is nothing to lose. She wants Asmodia. Looks like -  looks exactly like the one standing there, the looks part came out fine. Doesn't have the long list of things people sometimes have wrong with them for no reason. Devoted to Asmodeus, to the cause of building a better world where people do valuable things and prefer to do valuable things and enjoy and draw strength from doing valuable things, unlike this world where most humans care about and obsess over and squander themselves on things that don't matter unless forced or threatened into doing the valuable ones instead. Very high wisdom. Good at research, good at understanding people, easy to work with, ruthless but not sadistic, patient and tolerant of repetitive tasks, as long as they achieve a larger goal. Only pragmatic sorts of preferences about food and clothes and environs and so on.

Waking up already aware of why Carissa made her, and glad to be made, and inclined to immediately inventory herself and offer her best guess about whether it worked. 

HAS THOUGHTS. That part is very important. HAS ALL NORMAL HUMAN COMPETENCIES SUCH AS THINKING AND ACTING.

And she tries again.

Asmodia II appears. She blinks. She collects her clothes, looking thoughtful, and puts them on.

"The real test of whether I've come out all right," she says conversationally, "is of course whether our lord thinks so, so the first order of business is going to be hours of prayer unless there's some immediate matter you didn't orient me to... like that," she says, glancing at Asmodia I. "And for future reference I think you could have stood to make me with more local common knowledge, or did you attempt that and it didn't come through?"

She feels a rush of relief so strong she nearly starts crying, which would be embarrassing. "No, I didn't, I'm sorry. Next one, I guess. - uh, what happened with her is I tried you without free will and it seems like that cannot be done, at least - not naively, not the way I tried it. Our lord - might be able to explain better what it is - let me know if you need anything -"

"Perhaps without free will we... wait, until filled with the will of our lord," she says, "and he hasn't taken her up, possibly because she can't pray to attract attention. I don't need anything right now but if He doesn't want her we will need to be rid of her in some way."

" -  that makes sense." It's really nice to have someone else around who has more sense than her about this kind of thing. It's really really really nice not to be alone. And maybe once Asmodeus notices them He'll be able to use Asmodia 1 after all, which is a relief - kind of surprisingly so. She'd planned her for so long that it hurts for her to be here, now, and apparently empty. And if people without free will work fine after all...and she was having that whole crisis about it, how idiotic. It is very obviously a consequence of her not having enough faith in Asmodeus and Asmodia will be so much better at that. "If He doesn't want her I can figure something out."

"I think in the future we should look different. If I'm recognized as you, or as her, it may affect my reception if it was unlawful for you to have made her."

She's so smart and Carissa has so many feelings about this, all of which Asmodia would think are dumb because that is how she was designed, to be better than Carissa at the task ahead of them. She nods. Writes it down. Local knowledge, varied appearances.

"And I don't think there was any reason not to try to make me a wizard. People do both. I think that's it for a first pass of critique. I'll pray now but of course you must interrupt me if anything more important comes up." A small, purely social smile, and she goes and finds the most suitable place in the hotel room to kneel.

Carissa is in love.

Maybe she should mostly make people who are not distracted by dumb human things and make, like, one, who is, since she can't change herself and in hindsight has spent the last several months incredibly lonely. 

She reads through her books and takes notes and - now that the whole world isn't lost if she makes a mistake - starts sketching out some magic research. - it turns out she has also missed magic research really badly. It feels like coming alive, a little bit, to get back to work on it.

Asmodia I eventually pees on the floor.

She can use magic to clean that up.

Asmodia II is deep in prayer and does not appear to notice any of this.

Because Asmodia II is wonderful. Carissa is a proud parent. Of her second child. The first one is admittedly not her best work. She hopes Asmodia II is right and Asmodeus can still use Asmodia 1 somehow. 

She goes back to spell research.

Eventually Asmodia II says, "Did you try praying?"

"A little bit. Do you want me to try too, in case that's louder or anything?"

"Yes."

Then she will try to lose herself in - devotion, the burning desire to fix the world and make people worthy of Asmodeus in it - as loudly as she possibly can.

Eventually Asmodia II hmmms and asks Carissa to go get them something to eat and try to figure out if it was illegal to make Asmodia I (or for that matter Asmodia II herself, because Asmodia II did not begin with knowledge of how much due diligence Carissa did).

"You're legal. I will try to figure out about her."

She goes out and buys dinner and goes to the most sensible of the bookstore proprietors she was briefly employed by. "I made a mistake and I need advice."

"What kind of mistake?"

"I made a person that should've been allowed, healthy and wanted to be alive and competent and everything, but I tried to give her a trait that some people had back where I'm from, a kind of - fixedness, they change less than other people over time, we call it not having free will, and I must've done it really wrong because she's not there. Doesn't talk doesn't answer doesn't move can't walk. I pinched her a bit to see if she would pull away from pain and nothing happened."

"...people where you're from sometimes don't have free will?"

"Yeah. It used to be more common than it is now. I know it is possible only there must be a trick to it - there's nobody there, it's like when you try to Stone To Flesh a statue."

"Try to what?"

"Magic can be used to similar effect, if you make something that is not a person shaped like a person with a spell that changes the form of things but not the mind."

"Hm. I suppose you could give her to Universal Prayer and see if they can do anything for her. Making a deathly erroneous person is illegal and not eating or drinking will kill her sooner or later, but I think a judge would understand it was a mistake, and presumably you haven't tried making anyone else since you realized you were missing some information?"

"Of course not, I'm not going to attempt anything else like that until I have tracked down someone who did it safely and gotten them to explain exactly how. Maybe not even then. It was - really upsetting, waiting to meet someone and then -" Shiver. "I'll take her to Universal Prayer. Thank you."

"You poor thing. Do you need help carrying her? I could send my wife with you."

"Nah, if I hold onto her and walk with her she catches herself. And I want to get my things together before I bring her over, just in case the judge doesn't feel very understanding and instructs me to go away. Thank you, though."

"You're welcome. It might look better if you make a real report, after you drop her off, at one of the justice offices."

"That makes sense, thank you. I'll do that."

"Poor dear. Is there something in particular you needed her for that you'll need help with now?"

"I wanted to get started on a magic research project. It's not time sensitive or anything."

"All right. Poor dear, I'm so sorry."

"Thank you. I'll let you know how it all sorts out."

"Please do, I'll be so anxious if I don't hear, now."

She smiles at him and heads back with their dinner to her hotel room. 

Asmodia II accepts her dinner, sets about eating it efficiently, and looks at Carissa expectantly over her plate.

"He figures I should take her to the local church of vague affinity for the natural world, see if they can do anything for her, and then go to the courts and file a report about it and hope the judge takes pity. He thinks they probably will. I did promise I wasn't even thinking about making another person in light of having messed up so badly, If I were alone I'd be inclined to flee, in case the judge doesn't take it lightly, but you exist so I'm more undecided, since we don't lose everything if I die or get packed on a ship to a prison colony or something."

"I think it unlikely that they have a prison colony. Given the ability of the prisoners to make arbitrary people on demand it would be untenable. If they can't determine that you are going to operate within their rules they probably have little choice but to execute you. I'll take most of the money, get my hair wet to confuse the color, leave the building, and go wait at the marina. You wait so no one sees 'you' leave twice unless they're paying oddly close attention, bring her and make your report, and meet me there. If I haven't heard from you by the time I'd need to go to sleep, I'll book passage on a waterboat and sail somewhere else on the round where I won't be recognized and assume I need to carry on alone but won't be too far to track down if you can regroup with me later."

"Lemme write down everything I think you might need to make a wizard who knows how magic in Golarion works first, then sounds good."

Asmodia II nods. Finishes her dinner, resumes prayers.

She writes down the things she thinks you'd want to know to make someone just as useful as her if not moreso. All the spells she has ever heard of, magic theory, what is known in her world about the planes and the universe, how Cheliax works politically and religiously and in practical mundane ways in case they end up being able to interface with Asmodeus's church there, the habits of mind that are most valuable for a wizard to be good at, her personal magical notation so they can use her spellbook, magic item creation which she hasn't told anyone on this planet about - they probably want wondrous items not arms and armor like Carissa knows - 

She hands this to Asmodia II along with her spellbook. "You probably want to make them with knowledge of how to use the spellbook and then with knowledge of a handful of other spells deep enough they can write it into the spellbook from memory. I haven't memorized them like that, it's mostly only adventurers who bother, but if someone can start with it then they can start with Summon Devil which I haven't got and we can get communications with home from there."

She nods. Takes the book and cash, wets her hair and wrings it out and goes.

It is super weird that Carissa who has never gotten particularly attached to any of her hookups or coworkers has an enormous crush on a person who she literally made to be perfect and accordingly not want anything like that ever. She hangs her coat over Asmodia 1 so she'll be less of a spectacle and starts prodding her towards the church. She thinks it's the - ruthlessness, and the clarity it brings? Ruthlessness is hot and knowing exactly where you stand with someone is very reassuring.

One step at a time, through the streets to the temple.

The Monastery of Universal Prayer has a nice building with a well tended gardens and monastics singing and chanting various prayers while they garden. They wear blue robes. One comes to greet her and Asmodia I when they appear. "Welcome," he says.

"Hello." How do you manage - apologetic and nonthreatening but also someone who there is any reason at all to keep alive - "I made her. She's the first person I have made and I read four books with advice and did all of the checklists every day for two weeks and put everything on a notecard and - she's not there, something's wrong."

"- do you have any idea how it may have happened?" asks the monk, taking Asmodia's I's hand and watching how it hangs in the air if he lets go.

"I have a guess. Where I'm from there is a way some people are where they're - stickier, they change less over time. We called it the difference between having free will and not having free will. It is the only thing I had in my mind which wasn't entirely standard so it must have done it but - I have not heard of this happening."

"Why is it you wanted someone without free will?"

"In my religion it's considered better. Because you're not replacing yourself all the time with new people who're different. I was jealous when I first heard about it. She was gonna be a lot like me - I have a magic research project and I wanted a collaborator on it - so I thought she'd feel like me about it."

"She looks like you, too." He tries tugging her along. "This isn't understood to be a specialist skill where it's common?"

"No one ever warned me that I shouldn't try it though I left before I started seriously planning her."

"And your books are from here? Where are you from?"

"It's called Cheliax. It's a long way off. I've been wandering for a couple of years. I bought books the last round I was at, Snakeseye, and then more books here."

"Hrm. Well, we can pray for her, that's what we do. I don't know if it will help."

Nod. "I should - I broke the law, right - because she's not even well enough to eat -"

"I believe you that it was an accident, but, yes, I believe it still violates the law, because there's no way for a judge to be sure if it was only an accident."

Nod. 

- does she dissolve, when she dies here, if Asmodeus can't hear His cleric praying does that mean He can't collect His souls -

"How do I report it"

"I'll ask one of the nuns to go with you to the office if you don't know the way." He tugs Asmodia I in, sits her down on a bench under a tree, murmurs to a nun. The nun hustles out to join her.

Carissa nods vaguely at her.

"Would you like me to pray for you that it turns out all right?" asks the nun, ushering her down the street.

Carissa is pretty sure these people aren't even praying to a god, they're just kind of thinking hopefully in case the universe has some mechanism for detecting hopefulness and arranging coincidences on its behalf. The universe does not at all seem to have such a mechanism. 

"Yes please", she says quietly. 

She is vaguely aware that an hour ago she considered it probable this would turn out all right but right now that seems ridiculously unlikely. When you can make people with a thought, why would you keep any slightly inconvenient one breathing?

The nun murmurs a stock prayer under her breath as they go and they reach a police office. There is an old policeman sitting at a desk doing paperwork. "Problem?" he asks, looking up from his desk at them.

"I made a person. I made a mistake and she doesn't really do things. She can walk if you hold her hand and otherwise she just stands there."

"- hm." He gets out a form. "Your name?"

"Carissa Sevar."

"Spell it?"

She does.

He has no idea what to make of her alphabet and eventually digs up a chart of phonetic symbols and uses that. "Where you from?"

"It's called Cheliax. It's a long way away. I've been travelling for a couple of years. Before this I was in Snakeseye and before that I was in -" she names another round that the crew on her air-ship talked about.

The policeman wants more details - when he made her, what she wanted her for, he digresses for a bit about the whole magic thing, whether she's made people before, whether she has the notes still. He wants the notes turned in.

Yes, of course, she has them right here. They are in Taldane.

He wants to know what language that is, and if there's any part he should clip a note to as the likely problem area once they have someone who can read it.

It's Taldane and she's pretty sure it's this part right here because it's the only part that wasn't straight off the checklists. She explains about how where she's from some people don't have free will, how she always wanted that, how she thought the new person would also want that, how she'd never heard it was a specialty art to make people that way but she hadn't been considering making people when she was last in Cheliax.

"Mm-hm... I'm going to make you an appointment to talk to a risk assessor, what hours do you sleep?"

She gives them.

"Tomorrow at six-ring then. If you don't show up you'll be in real big trouble, we'll have to track you down before you can make another, understand?"

"I'll be there, I promise."

"Mm-hm. Tell me where you're staying."

She gives the hotel.

He has a few more questions, reminds her a couple times that falsifying the report will land her in deep trouble, and lets her go pending her appointment.

She goes back to the hotel and collapses into bed and shivers. She shouldn't go to the docks, yet, it'd be quite reasonable for the police to have followed her.

She thinks the police are probably not behaving like they are going to execute her? She can't think why they wouldn't but it'd be odd to let her go and set an appointment for the next day if it wasn't a test which it was possible to pass. There is an incentive argument for not killing people even if they broke a law if they reported it themselves and could've avoided doing so? But it seems like a pretty weak argument and maybe only appealing because she doesn't want to die.

She's scared, and tired, and also while it makes a lot of sense that making mindless people is illegal there's another angle from which making mindless people seems entirely fine. It doesn't hurt anybody. She feels slightly indignant about this, in some vague disconnected way. 

The nun walks her back to the hotel and then returns to her monastery. Asmodia II, as planned, does not return.

Yep. She'll figure out how to catch up tomorrow if it all works out. 

She sleeps very poorly but does not miss her appointment in the morning.

At six rings there's someone at her hotel room. "Carissa Sevar?" she asks.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I've spoken with the Universal Prayer people and they think your person can actually survive if someone puts food and water in her mouth for her. It turns out she can swallow."

"I'm very glad. - guess it makes sense, because she can walk, prompted..."

"Yes. Are you prepared to look after her?"