She's doing magic research at the same time with an Unseen Servant to write for her; it's the default, these days, because he mostly looks at his display and it's very boring. She leaves a note of where she left off and stops.

Mhalir stares at the display for a long moment, waiting for the numbers to settle and resolve. 

"The spell says highly probable," he says finally. "I think this one is worth checking."

They've checked two other worlds, both of which turned out to be boring false positives - or so it looked when jumped to look, anyway - but on their last trip back he refined the search-aspect further with Aroden, and the confidence is a lot higher on this one. "Jump coordinates..." He reads them off. 

If he's a you or Aroden he might be dangerous to drop on unexpectedly.

<That is why I gave coordinates to land quite far away from the planet itself. Even if we startle him, he ought not be able to react instantly, and so both of us would have time to think.> 

The pilot enters the coordinates; the ship jumps.

The sun they're approaching is brighter than the surrounding stars, but only moderately so; they're in the far outer reaches of the system, with a long approach ahead to the planet or planets in the habitable zone. 

Mhalir watches the sensor data closely. Huh. No sign of satellites, or any orbital infrastructure, or any visible reaction to their arrival. 

"Transmit the standard recorded message," he says to the comms officer. Not that he's particularly expecting it to be received, or answered, but it's still worth trying. 

(The standard message doesn't say anything about their search for alternate-world version of himself and Aroden, just that they're interstellar visitors, arriving peacefully.) 

They transmit the message.

"No visible ships or stations," his lieutenant reports a moment later. "Readout on the planets coming...now..."

There are five planets and a handful of smaller icy planetoids in wide eccentric orbits. Two gas giants, one cold rocky planet, one planet close to and tidally locked with the sun - and one planet roughly in the habitable zone, showing the blue-and-green pattern of continents and oceans. One large continent, a handful of smaller ones. 

No sign of lights visible from space on the dark side. 

The requisite time passes, and no answer to their message arrives. 

Mhalir is confused. 

He doesn't really know what they're looking for, he reminds himself, and even the civilization on Golarion wouldn't have replied to a radio message. 

The large continent is turning into night, and - maybe those are flickers of artificial lighting? It's not that clearly, nowhere near the level of the industrial civilization seen on Earth or other worlds, but there's something there. 

A you before Seerow arrived wouldn't've been able to reply at all, either. But both worlds would be, in different ways, dangerous to land on blindly...

"Do you want us to go in closer?" says the pilot.

"I want us to enter orbit, cloaked; I want sensor data on the main continent."

His eyes are fixed on the display; Still no sign of any orbital infrastructure, but there's definitely something down there. Significantly more than would have been visible of the Yeerk civilization from space, before Seerow's arrival... 

It takes a while to reach the planet from here, if you're not jumping. It grows in the viewscreens as they glide in and enter an orbit.

There are cities down there. Small to medium-sized, by Earth standards, dimmer than modern cities and the pattern of lighting is off - more concentrated in small local clusters - but still far more visible from space than preindustrial cities ought to be. 

- also there are areas that are less visible than they should be, somehow? As though particular areas are blurred out and muted. 

"Magic sensors, please," Mhalir says quietly. Those ones aren't on by default, because they burn a lot of energy, but it seems especially relevant now. 

It takes a minute.

" - yep. The lights are magic, some magic - shielding, I think, it's got to be..."

Mhalir stares hard at the screen displaying the shipboard version of Detect Magic. It...doesn't really match how Golarion cities look to these sensors, but it's obviously magic of some sort. So - more like Golarion than like Earth, or like the Yeerk homeworld, but not exactly analogous to any of those... 

Still no sign of anything else in orbit, or that the civilization below has remarked on their presence at all. 

"We will stay in orbit overnight and observe," he says. "If there are no major updates, we will select a place to land tomorrow." 

<Carissa, you can have your body now.> And he relinquishes control. 

She pulls out her item-enchanting work, but distractedly. I wanna learn their magic.

<I am very curious to learn what kind of magic they have! It looks different to you too, no?> 

I can't see anything from here with my spells. It looks weird on the sensor reading but I don't remember what exactly Golarion looked like. Even if they have the same underlying physics of magic they'll have very different techniques, though, ancient Golarion civilizations did...

<True.> Mhalir is wishing, right now, that this could be purely a trip about learning magic from other worlds. It's not not about that, but - well, all the complicated political messiness of Cheliax is waiting for them back on Golarion, and he doubts that any version of his or Aroden's story would have avoided that sort of complication on their own end. 

He retreats into his own thoughts, letting Carissa work on her magic item enchanting. 

She's nervous. Meeting Mhalir was terrifying and involved getting kidnapped and meeting Aroden was terrifying and involved getting kidnapped and - she's not totally sure what they have in common aside from the being terrifying and kidnapping people. And hating Hell.

And she's curious, because some other way to do magic, not that it is likely to work out like that. Things never do.

Mhalir is also nervous, though his anxiety is less pinned down on any specific bad outcome. He doesn't know what to expect, except...well, if it's true that different versions of him and his story repeat in different worlds, and there's an alternate version of him here, then there's probably also an alternate version of the war. It's been a major facet of both his and Aroden's lives that they face powerful enemies. 

It's not productive to chew on that just yet, though, when they have so little data to build on; all he can do is ask his staff to watch especially for signs of warfare on the planet, though he doesn't know what a war here would even look like, their tech level doesn't seem that analogous either to the Yeerk and Andalite civilizations or to Golarion. 

Rather than ruminating pointlessly, he tries to distract himself by observing Carissa's magic work, and eventually it's time for them to sleep. 

The planet below is quiescent, even as the main continent turns toward daylight. They can get a little more detail on the surface infrastructure; there are some roads, and some cities located along rivers, hinting that water is a means of transport. It's hard to tell from here where separate countries, if they exist, begin and end; it's not like there are lines drawn on the planet itself. If there are wartime activities, they're not at a scale visible from space, except for what might be defensive shielding.

...The largest structure on the entire planet, it turns out, is in the centre of the most thoroughly magical area, and also one of the spots under some sort of magical shield. The shielding doesn't entirely hide it from view, the way Yeerk ship cloaking works; it has some kind of blurring effect, making it impossible to locate from any specific angle, but sensor coverage from multiple angles can be combined, processing with the ship computers, and formed into an estimate of what's on the other side. Some sort of enormous multi-spired tower, rivalling the height of Earth's tallest buildings.