"Still no response to our comms", his officer says. "Which isn't surprising, it doesn't look like they have electricity at all."

They could try other communication methods from space, but at this point Mhalir is inclined to skip straight to taking a shuttle down and getting a closer look, and then making an informed decision on when and where, and with who, to initiate contact. 

He wishes vaguely that Aroden's spell had any more accuracy than just 'which world'. There are millions of people down there - he's not even sure of what species, yet - and he has no way of telling which of them is his alt. Though they're...more likely than most people to be in some sort of leadership position, he thinks, which narrows the search space. 

<Carissa, what do you think?> 

I bet it won't work to scry or do a Sending off 'the person who is like Mhalir' but we could at least try. 

<...Oh, yes, that is worth trying. I - cannot think of an introduction we could Send that would not be utterly baffling, but I suppose any way we try to introduce ourselves will sound implausible to them.> 

You could just explain the interplanetary visitor part and not mention the ...stories part? If they're at war they'll probably tell us about it themselves.

<That makes sense. We can attempt to scry them first, in any case, if that works it will give us more information to use in drafting a message.> 

Sure. 

And she can head over to a mirror and start a scry.

This does not work. 

Sigh. <I suppose I am not surprised.>

Me neither. Probably we want to...land far from the shielded area, ask around about what's going on? She has permanent Tongues and she loves it very much.

Golarion magic is so absurd sometimes; you can do translation with computer technology, but it's a hard problem and it won't work instantly on a new planet with a new set of languages. 

<That sounds right. Hmm - I wonder if we learn a name for someone who could be the other version of me, if it would work to address a Sending to them if and only if we are right about that part...>

Mhalir looks at the sensor map they've put together of the continent. It's large enough that landing as far as possible from the shielded area will leave them thousands of miles away, which in a preindustrial world with limited transport is likely to make it hard to learn anything about said shielding. Maybe better to be conservative at first, though, try to get a sense of these people's capabilities, gauge whether the shuttle is likely to be detected on a closer approach. Mhalir picks out a spot about fifteen hundred miles southeast of the shielding, near the southern coast, where the think they've spotted ship movements on the sensors. There's a city build near the mouth of a large river delta. They can land further out initially, in a remote area, and then approach the city if it seems safe. 

I think a Sending to a name fails if you failed to pick out a specific person, so - maybe it'd fail if you were thinking of them as possessing a important characteristic that doesn't go with that name? 

They start towards the fields outside the river delta city.

It's a hot, wet tropical climate. There are some grain or legume crops, but mostly the region seems to grow a lot of date palm and banana-like fruit, and other harder to recognize fruits, as well as some cotton-like fibre production. The local houses are built mostly of bamboo, often raised on struts, maybe as a precaution against flooding. 

The locals, where visible, look like Earth or Golarion humans, accounting for ethnic variation; the local population tends significantly darker-skinned than Carissa, with straight to wavy black hair. 

The visible level of technology, at least out here away from the city, is...not very high. In the rural area, the sensors for magic detect almost nothing, just a faint background wash of formless magical energy, with some variation in density, and occasional random spikes that are hard to associate with anything in particular. In terms of non-magical tech, there are a handful of waterwheels powering what appear to be mills, and iron or steel plows hitched to draft animals, and signs of what might or might not be a small-scale open-pit mining operation. That's about it. 

<We can fly closer to the city, I think> Mhalir says, after a while of observing very boring fields, and no sign that they've been noticed. 

They fly closer to the city. 

Is this what Golarion looked like at first, too?

<I imagine so, if you go far enough back. Civilization on Golarion is very old, though.> 

The city, when they reach it, is more interesting, though nowhere near what can be found on Golarion currently. There's a lot of riverboat traffic. Coming from upriver, it's mostly flat barges pushed along with poles or pulled by draft animals from the shore with ropes; the river is at this point very shallow. There's a port on an island further down the mouth of the delta, with water deep enough for larger oceangoing vessels to dock, where goods are transferred directly to barges and hauled to the city itself. 

The city is teeming with people, with a much wider range of ethnicities in evidence; clothing is varied as well, though it tends brightly-coloured. The houses are mostly wood or bamboo, still, but built up to three or four stories in the densest parts. There's an open-air market, stall-keepers waving away flies from their heaps of colourful produce and fresh-caught fish. 

More magic is visible to the sensors; it still looks very very weird, sort of - less discrete than Golarion spells? Many of the nicer buildings have magic sort of baked into their structure in a diffuse way. Every once in a while, a noticeable burst of magical discharge can be correlated with a human floating cargo on and off a barge, or lighting a fire to smoke fish. There are also quite a number of smaller point sources; magic items, it looks like, often worn on necklaces or bracelets. Some are recognizably similar to permanent Mage Armour and other kinds of shielding; others are much harder to interpret. 

The locals don't seem to notice the cloaked, hovering shuttle at all. 

She watches the magic intently. Maybe they're - all sorcerers? Or lots of them, anyway? And if you mostly had sorcerers then that's change how you thought about magic, too...

Any divine magic at all?

Nope. 

That seems good, on the whole.

Probably we don't want to start by explaining about Yeerks? They sound scary and it - points at what your incentives are -

<...I think not. I am not sure how much we want to explain the broader situation to people in this city, even, versus just obtain more information about this world's magic and other customs, and then re-evaluate our next steps. They are quite far away, but it might be worth asking if they know of a major war happening elsewhere, just in case they do have enough long-distance trade.> Though he's not vastly hopeful about that. 

In Golarion long ago some people were teleporters. I think. I don't know much ancient history.

<Also that. I would expect it to be more apparent in their trade logistics if they had significant numbers of teleporters, but if it is rare then it might not be. Anyway, since you will be able to speak the language, possibly we could just go in and say we are foreigners from very far away? ...And see what we can learn from Detect Thoughts as well as conversation, of course.> He looks down at what they're wearing. <I am not sure how much our clothing would stand out to them as is, if we go in without visible weapons or other technology.>