This place is a warm desert rather than a cold one. He's on a crumbling road that winds through brown hills. An old gas station, currently empty and abandoned, stands at the top of the hill, and there are a bunch of people down at the base doing something that involves a lot of digging and several military-style trucks clustered along the road itself.

Can't a man walk in peace from Storasta to Boligar anymore?

...Gord doesn't recognize the place, or the terrain, or the... vehicles? Things with many weird wheels? Nothing seems immediately hostile (or particularly Abyssal), the people all look human as far as he can tell from here, but he can't imagine where around the Wound this might be. Irrisen, maybe? He has no idea what Irrisen is like.

Has he been seen? Can he still hide? He isn't sure he should hide from them but when in doubt...

They haven't seen him yet. Several of the people down there are holding long rifles in slings or at a low carry. They don't have a consistent uniform or obvious armor, just a vague pastiche of desert camo and blue collar tough-wearing clothes. Leather boots and thick pants and the like. A man is scanning the horizon off to the - north or south, the sun is behind Gord - with a pair of binoculars.

They have no weapons he can identify, which is worrying because everyone has some weapons, and no visible armor either. They're holding tools of some kind but he doesn't know what they do. Maybe they have mages, or security he hasn't seen yet.

He can approach them and ask for directions, and hope he isn't attacked on sight because he pings Chaotic Evil or because he's alone and looks like easy prey or because he's trespassing. 

He could try to sneak up and eavesdrop, but if their magic detection beats his spells or they spot him anyway they're much more likely to become hostile.

Or he can walk away, and hope to find a smaller group of people to approach, without so many objects he doesn't recognize. He's self-sufficient and not in any particular hurry, and could prepare better spells for approaching strangers tomorrow.

Normally he'd pick the third option, but he's never been so lost before. What if there are novel monsters or greater demons or something else he's not prepared for around here? Going into a completely unknown wilderness alone isn't safe. 

...he'll try to approach them and save the sneaky spells for running away if they're hostile.

He hails them once he's close enough to be heard but still out of normal bowshot.

They yell back! The tone seems tense and wary but not of him, particularly. Binoculars guy is now scanning the ridge behind Gord.

It transpires that they don't know any language Gord does. They wave him closer.

On a closer look it looks like this work crew is burying large heavy metal cylinders, each as wide around as a man and maybe four feet tall, in a rough staggered line every twenty feet or so. They're also carefully burying long wires coming off each one leading back to the road, and generally treating them kind of cautiously.

...Gord isn't sure what they speak in Irrisen. People say it's all witches dancing naked in the snow but even if those exist there are obviously prosaic parts too.

Will one of them accept a Share Language? He has a Comprehend prepared too, in case of demons, but Share Language is much better if one of them trusts him to cast on them. Hopefully he'll get someone who'll be willing to spend a few minutes talking to him.

(Gord offers his outstretched hand, makes the sign for 'casting' with the other, and says the words to the spell in case one of them recognizes that.)

Major Arnold Stets has lived on the ill-named planet of Cedar Rapids for his entire life. He grew up on a farm, and was a pretty good shot with Grandpa's old rifle. The family ate Dirt Lizard often enough, with his hunting trips. It helped. He joined Cedar Rapids's paltry self-defense force years later, having discovered a talent for small unit tactics after leading a posse against a band of dispersed pirate infantry and helping convince them to limit the raid to just Minnie Downs and the steel mill there, rather than also looting all the surrounding towns.

They don't really have a lot of resources. The entire planet has a single lonely lance of 'mechs, and no real supply of tanks and the like either. The one thing they do have in relative abundance is AC/2 and AC/5 field guns, from the Intyre & Sons armory which sells them offworld, occasionally.

This little minefield is his own personal scheme, laid down on the most likely approach to the small city of Minnie Downs, just barely short of the maximum range of AC/5 field guns from a solid defensive ridgeline up the way. The idea is that the pirates come in overconfident, get fired upon by the guns, spread out to take them down, and then the command-detonated mines go off.

Anyway, sure, he'll shake this stranger's hand. Hermit or something, is he?

Share Language (Hallit).

"Hello. I'm Gord, a cleric of Gorum. I was in Mendev when a magic trap landed me here." This is less alarming than 'I fell through the literal Abyss'. "Where are we, please?"

"Major Arnold Stets, Cedar Rapids PDF*. We're on Cedar Rapids, near Minnie Downs. That's a planet and a city. What in the scum-sucking fever dreams of pirates did ya do to me, lad? Is it gonna melt my brain?"

*said as 'pee-dee-eff', like it's a loanword

"It's the spell Share Language, do you not have it here? It's standard where I'm from. It'll give you knowledge of my language for a day and a night, no other effects."

"We call the planet Golarion. Mendev is in the north of Avistan, on the border of the Worldwound - the giant rift into the Abyss." Everyone in the world has heard of the Wound, right?

Arnold sounded like he was answering 'where are we' with the name of the planet, but that's presumably a joke, interplanetary teleports are the stuff of archmage legends. People from off-world come from other planes. Elysium probably has planets but this really doesn't feel like Elysium.

"Okay, well. Magic? That's impossible, I want to say, except it clearly happened. Never heard of a system called Golarion. You picked kind of a bad time to show up here though. A particularly infamous band of pirates, Kelly's Murderers, is approaching the planet and will land in about thirty hours."

"...The translation spell might not be working correctly." Maybe this man speaks a strange language with strange concepts that don't match Gord's. "When you say 'planet' do you mean - a world, an enormous ball of earth, if you walk some direction you'll end up where you started after a few years and oceans, it flies through space around its sun and there are others that are too far away to teleport too?"

Gord's been friends with Ramien long enough, he's practically an expert on planets by now. Planets aren't the kind of thing that - a band of pirates will land on in thirty hours, that might be happen to a city or a little island, a planet is actually much much bigger than the places pirates can happen to!

"Yeah. Hold on a sec."

He goes to one of the trucks, saying some things to the rest of the locals as he goes, and comes back with a little handcomp. There's a picture on it.

"That's a leopard class drop ship. Not the exact one the pirates're using but same type of ship. They hitch a ride in on the jump ships which teleport from star to star, and take basically whoever can pay, and then come steal whatever's not nailed down because they can, and kill or kidnap or rape lots of folks also 'cause they can. We're setting up a field of bombs. Which I wouldn't tell you about except you can clearly see for yourself. The hope is that they're too lazy or stupid to see it, or at least that it slows 'em down out of caution."

The illusion - no, it's not magical - the weird picture has no scale and Gord can't figure out what the background is. It looks like it has... two pairs of ears? Probably he thinks of them as ears because Arnold called it leopard-class.

One ear has a painting of (maybe) a tree, flanked by two scimitars, on a yellow shield. It has the general style of a holy symbol, but it's not one Gord recognizes.

It definitely doesn't resemble a ship in any way. There are what might be two doors on the front boxy part, and if they're human-sized then the whole thing might contain a few dozen men, but it looks like it's metal and it has no sails or oars or keel. Anyway, ships don't 'jump', people don't (routinely) teleport between stars, and they're not on a star to begin with.

Comprehend Languages. "Can you please repeat that in your native language? I think something went wrong with the translation." Gord has never heard of that happening, translation spells work even on Abyssal dialects that humans can't even pronounce, but it's best to make sure.

"...Sure. I'll be a little more descriptive too. I thought everyone knew what jumpships and dropships were. Yeah, that's a Leopard dropship. See this little white line? That's a line of windows. These boxes here, fusion engines, they produce super-hot gas that flies out and makes the dropship fly. The wings are for controlling its flight in the atmosphere. It'd barely fit on my old farm, and the doors let out battlemechs. Jumpships stay far away from the planets in a deep wide orbit. It takes three days to charge, then they teleport from one star's outer orbit to another's. Only from specific spots, for some arcane reason I don't understand. Dropships can attach to them and get carried along when they jump. Then the dropships use their fusion engines to accelerate towards the planet, enter orbit, then fall down and land in a controlled manner on the surface. Then they can take off again later, once they've stolen to their heart's content in the case of pirates. That's how folks get between planets around here."

The Comprehend didn't make things any easier. Which is good because his magic is working properly, and also likely to be bad in case what Arnold's saying is true.

It's a ship that flies? And jumps and then drops back down - no, he's saying different kinds of 'ship' jump and drop. And there's hot gas that flies and also makes the ships fly. Those things are wings - two pairs, like a dragonfly? - they seem very small in proportion to the body... And he says it's as large as - a very old dragon? Or a really big seagoing ship, Gord supposes. With people inside it, who come out to fight, or - no, something called battlemechs comes out. Presumably to fight, given the name, but what are they fighting out in space, each other?

And they teleport between stars, which is way more impossible than teleporting between planets (or so Ramien says). Using arcane magic, recharging every three days. Well, no reason other planets can't have better wizards than Golarion, except that it makes it weird that they haven't visited Golarion. Maybe they have and Gord just doesn't know it, he really has no idea what archwizards get up to in their free time.

So anyway, that's all jumpships, and then they have attached dropships, so called because if you detach them from the jumpship with its (implied) Interplanetary Flight spell they drop. On whatever planet happens to be nearby. And then presumably they cast some kind of massive Feather Fall when they get close to the ground.

This all sounds terribly complicated compared to just teleporting directly between planets, but Gord probably couldn't understand those arcane reasons even if Arnold did.

"I can't say I understand the tactical implications of all that. But you're expecting people to walk in to attack you, so that a field of bombs would stop them?" Why wouldn't they just teleport the last leg too?

"Yeah. They can't land right in the city, we'd swarm them. Too much cover for us to get close, too many ways to disable the dropship. So they land somewhere outside, set up a perimiter, and sally out to raid. One of three plausible routes is through here. Don't know which they'll try yet. Or even if they'll go for this city instead of another. We have cannons up on a ridge, ranged to shoot at them as they're going down that hill. Those won't stand up to battle mechs in a straight fight at all, but if they go straight down the road and start getting shot at, the tactic I expect is to spread out and rush forward to overwhelm the field guns instead of letting us wear them down at range. So they rush forward, over the bombs, and get blown up. Hopefully."

Gord knows about cannon! It doesn't work well on infantry unless they're in a dense formation and blunder into the wrong location, and even then landing a second shot is hard, but scattering people off their marching route sounds plausible. 

This means the pirates might have some teleporting wizards (separately from teleporting ships), but not enough to bring in their main force into the town that way, so they have to attack overland. And they're afraid of dropping their ship itself into the town. This is beginning to make some kind of tactical sense.

One of the parts that don't make any sense is a major in the local army (?) disclosing his secret plan to a stranger from another world who didn't even ask about it. Is he trying to recruit Gord into helping them, are they low on clerics? He said Gord could see the bombs anyway, but in fact Gord can't recognize bombs and also he hadn't seen the cannons!

"What are battle mechs?"

Well, this guy sure doesn't seem like a pirate. The magic has him off balance too. That's really not something explicable. LosTech or something.

...Besides, this is a plan that only really works against incautious idiots. It's not like some secret spy scheme. It's not hard to figure out if you're paying attention, can see the disturbed ground, and can see the sensor traces of the field guns, and he's pretty sure it won't actually work at all. Just sure enough that it's worth trying really.

He's tapping his foot.

"Huge metal walking or running fighting machines. Mobile, with lots of firepower, and also armor. Much nimbler than ground vehicles, very deadly really. As opposed to Battle Vehicles, which have wheels or treads instead of legs. Cheaper, slower, weaker, more fragile. Let alone foot infantry. I don't suppose you've got something that can disable a 'mech pilot from a mile away?"

Armored metal golems with fire spells, got it. Gord has no special advantage in fighting those. "They have pilots guiding them from a mile away? And I assume they keep some battlemechs back to defend themselves, along with regular guards. ...No, I don't have any spells that work a mile away." Or at least no spells that hurt people from a mile away.

"...I can heal people. Wounds, disease, poisons, curses and so on. And create food and water. I'd like to see the town to trade those and learn more, but I'm not sure I should stay for an impending attack where it doesn't sound like I'd be much help." This is the diplomatic version of saying he's not sure he should make himself of much help in the actual fighting, although it'd be an easy decision to help defend civilians who aren't fighting back.

"No, the pilots are in the 'mechs... There are autonomous 'mechs but that's Star League stuff. LosTech. Well, we're not about to try and conscript you. Healing? More 'magic'? Could be quite a boon, we'll pay for that at least I'm sure."

He rubs his beard.

"I'm the only one who can understand you, right?"

So the pilots are inside the metal golems, presumably safe from any magic that requires line of effect. (The golems obviously won't have windows. If you can make a magic golem surely you can make a magic way to see outside, keeping the pilot safe from enemy mages.) And they're so dangerous that the locals are only willing to strike at them from a mile out - that's farther than even the canons Gord knows! 

...nope, he's got nothing. If they didn't have magical defenses, maybe infiltrate their camp, catch them when they're not inside their golems? A competent (and well disciplined) crew would just stay inside the golems for as long as they're on the planet... Anyway, if they're masters of arcane magic there's nothing he can realistically do.

"You're the only one right now, yeah. I can prep another Share Language to give someone else, it'd be the last one for the day but it lasts for twenty-four hours."

"I would've had you do it to a staff aide if I'd known, I'd rather not leave my troop to show you around."

"Is there someone you can spare that I can do it to? Or give me a letter to carry into town to tell them that I want someone to cast it on?" 

"Let me get on the horn to the brigade for a bit."

He'll go into one of the vehicles and get an old style corded telephone handset out, connected to a radio, and talk into it for a few minutes. The work crew continues working around Gord, absent two who seem to have been designated as guards. Gossip is tense and quiet and mostly about what Kelly's Murderers have done before. This one heard they have a Hunchback 'mech. This one heard they successfully raided the Capellans. This one plans to shoot herself if capture seems likely.

Gord can't fight the golems but maybe he can help people hide from them, or help them leave the town to hide out somewhere else if that's normally unsafe but would be safe with his help, or fight off the pirates if they need to come out of their golems to capture people or just to rape them or something.

He can't say any of this because nobody here understands him, so he waits for Arnold to come back.

Which he eventually does.

"Brigade's sending a squad car out with a driver and an aide from the Colonel's staff. They want to ask a lot about the 'magic', they don't really believe me. I wouldn't if I was them, admittedly, suddenly knowing a new language is rather convincing. It'll be about half an hour."

"Are there other ways I could help besides fighting the battlemechs directly? I heard some people talking about being captured; would their pilots come out of their shells to do that, or for any other reason? Can I help hide or protect people, in the town or out of it? Does anyone here already need healing, or is that only a concern for the fighting? Is it even a good idea to capture, delay or destroy one of the battlemechs, if we can't get them all, would it make the others kill more people if they need to stay longer or in revenge?"

"They'll have infantry along, the infantry fight matters too... Pilots like staying in their mechs until it's safe, but pirates are maybe too undisciplined to sleep and eat in there... We probably don't have a lot of injuries yet unless someone has an accident. The thing the pirates are after are saleable stuff. That means machines, valuables from peoples' homes, and slaves probably. They fuck off if it's an obviously losing fight, but sometimes they just get mad and burn everything instead." He shakes his head. "But we're gonna fight anyway. Can't just lie down, that's a slow death by starvation in a couple decades. Capturing a mech would be a real big win, just delaying one isn't bad. And hiding people could help if there's nothing better to contribute with."

That's the right attitude! 

"Infantry I can maybe do something about. What can you tell me about them? Likely numbers, arms and armor, tactics, do they have commanders that they'll actually obey on the battlefield, are there leaders it would help to target, will they trade for their men that surrender or are captured... What's their role on the battlefield, what do they do that the battlemechs can't? Or are they mostly there because they don't all have battlemechs and they still want to fight? Will stopping the infantry change the outcome of the fight?"

"And do you have places for people to hide who won't be fighting? Somewhere the pirates won't find, or somewhere defensible enough that they won't burn them all inside if they can't capture them? How dangerous are the areas outside the town?" Of course they won't tell him where they're hiding, he just wants to know if the town will be full of civilians barricaded in their own homes or if it'll be approximately evacuated.

"Can't tell you much about the town's defense plans as a whole. My play out here would be obvious to the pirates if they're diligent, but the rest? Generalities. Likely numbers maybe two companies, so about 100. Not a lot compared to us but they'll have the mechs to blow up strong defensive positions for them. Rifles and vehicle support. I don't know how pirates organize themselves really, trades for captures... Maybe? Or maybe they'd just consider it one less share to pay out. Pirate Infantry can clear buildings without smashing them to the ground and ruining the loot, watch the flanks, and prevent our infantry from getting into ambush positions to hit the mechs from the side and back with rockets or cannons. And they loot more efficiently than mechs. Infantry are best on defense, really vulnerable if not supported by mechs and moving in the open."

Yeah, fair. "So what happens if you take out most of their infantry but can't stop their mechs?"

"Then we'd still lose. But winning the infantry fight puts us in a position to pressure the mechs, maybe make them rethink their risk profile. Infantry can hurt mechs, 'specially in terrain with lots of cover. Like the city. We have the field guns, we have some vehicles, SRM tubes. Could still go pretty bad though."

"If you still expect to lose even with my help and in the best-case scenario, I won't risk my life to fight with you." This 'major' is military, right, Gord can be blunt. "I don't mean that you shouldn't fight, it's a reasonable choice, but if I can't help you win then I'd rather try to protect civilians if I can."

"Not joining our fight if you don't want to, that's your prerogative. Though you said 'if we can't stop the mechs'. Maybe we can. I'm sure we'll be glad for whatever you decide, and you'll be able to figure out more in town. We'll know for sure the region they'll land in by some time tomorrow, and what they're armed with as soon as they sally out tomorrow evening. This is still prebattle prep time, right now. Most pirate raids last one to three days of actual fighting."

Arnold didn't make it sound like he expects to be able to stop their mechs but maybe that was a translation issue? Fighting to enable a small chance of victory, for strangers, still isn't something Gord will do easily.

The attack is supposed to be thirty hours out. Gord isn't sure he's ever heard such an accurate warning of an attack, at least not one that proved correct. On the other hand, the last time he fought with an organized army the enemy commanders were demons who probably didn't know themselves what they'd be doing thirty hours in advance, so spying and scrying were both pretty useless. His gut feeling, though, is telling him that if wants to avoid the fighting he shouldn't stay around too long. Well, he'll at least visit the town and talk to some more people and trade with them before he makes up his mind.

"Understood. I'll think it over. I hope we can help each other even if we don't end up fighting together." Arnold's commanders want to talk to him, which is understandable if they have no mages (how did they end up with no mages?); it might be dangerous, but he already decided to take the risk when he approached the locals. Maybe they'll have better ideas, or a more optimistic outlook. (He'll remember not to trust their optimistic outlook, the men on the ground are usually more grounded.)

"To cast Share Language again I'll need to meditate for fifteen minutes, I'll go get started on that." 

The Major does seem like a very straightforward and grounded guy. He tells the guards that Gord is gonna sit and think and to just leave him alone, and goes back to supervising the work. 

A jeep sort of vehicle comes trundling down the road about twenty minutes later, and the person who comes up to him after that is introduced by Major Arnold as "Technical Specialist Kira Loaves. She's the one Battalion sent to liaise with you." She holds her hand out for a handshake, a firmly neutral expression on her face.

She gets a Share Language with her handshake!

"I'm Gord, cleric of Gorum. Major Arnold said your command wanted to talk to me; we should talk on the way there, since you'll be translating for me. I also have a Comprehend Languages up, which means I can understand the local language but not speak it, but that will expire in less than hour."

A 'battalion' would be quite a large force back home, which is another reason one cleric isn't going to change the course of battle.

...She writes something down.

She tells the Major, "Yes, that certainly does seem to be sudden knowledge of a new language by touch. Okay, blood and dust..."

Deep breath.

"Yes. We have a lot of questions, like 'what is a Cleric'. And 'how does the language granting work, anyway'. I would have expected if anything, for it to be an object, perhaps worn on the head?"

"A cleric is a mortal given magic by a god. ...do you have different categories here? On Golarion we call people born with magic sorcerers, people who learn magic wizards, and people given magic clerics. There are probably headbands of language knowledge out there but I don't have one. - maybe not headbands, people wouldn't want to give up their circlet of wisdom or cunning for that."

She looks at him like he just said something incredibly stupid but she is trying to be professional.

"...I see. Well, let's get in the car and we can talk more on the way."

He'd heard there was a spell to conjure a carriage instead of a horse for every rider! He didn't realize it made a carriage without any horses, but really that makes sense since it all moves by magic anyway. This way they can't fight or evade enemies or even split up, which is probably why it isn't a more common spell, but other than that it's very comfy.

"I want to prevent people being killed or enslaved. I can cure wounds, and I may fight to defend or hide civilians. Major Arnold tried to convince me to fight with your main forces but from what he said you don't really expect to win, and a single cleric isn't going to turn the tide of battle if you have a whole battalion. How much is a battalion, by your standards?"

"Willy, back to Minnie Downs. South gate garrison."

"Yes'm."

The jeep does a 3-point turn and heads up the road again at maybe 40 miles an hour, engine growling. There aren't any seatbelts, not that Gord would expect them.

And a switch of languages.

"A battalion is around a thousand people. As to prospects of victory, we don't know what type of forces are on the two dropships descending towards the planet right now. They could be mostly combat vehicles and light 'mechs. Locusts, Commandos, Urbies. They could have a fucking Highlander or King Crab in there. If it's the former, we can definitely win. It would not be certain, but we can win. If the latter, snowball's chance in Hell. How do you cure wounds, and do these other things? You say you were given this capacity- Is it something implanted in your body? Where did you receive it?"

Because it sure sounds like he could be deluded about some weird old SLDF project that does medical nanites and neural language mapping or something. The SLDF got up to some crazy shit.

And that would be worth a fortune.

The conjured carriage's growling takes a few minutes to get used to. Is it meant to scare away monsters?

"I pray for spells, daily, and I get them. They're not in my body, they're - in my soul, I guess? It's probably the same way your wizards do spells but I'm not actually sure."

"Do your gods never give out spells? What do they do instead?"

"I don't know of any entity I would define as a god. And we don't have wizards. The closest thing would be conspiracy theories about hyperspace beings, fucking with the jumpships and stuff. Or the Christian God and whoever else who don't do anything these days if they even exist. You do? You clearly do have something extraordinary that we might as well accept is called 'magic'... D'you remember how you got here?"

"It - sounds like maybe you do know about some gods but there's a confusion about who to call that? Gods can be very different, almost the only thing they have in common is - well. Making clerics. And paladins, I guess. So if you're sure you don't have any clerics then maybe it's really not obvious who the gods are, maybe they're just especially powerful outsiders... I guess that makes sense. Not having any clerics is weird, but I always expected other worlds to be weird." Not having any paladins or inquisitors either, only sorcerers and wizards, will probably make this world very alien in ways he can't anticipate yet. "And yeah, I know some things about gods - or at least a lot of things that different gods' followers believe about their gods, and powerful clerics can ask their gods yes/no questions so I don't think it's all lies but who knows. I'm not that powerful myself yet."

"...clerics have somewhat different spells from other mages, I don't know why or whether it holds here. At home clerics are very good at healing people and wizards are bad at it, but maybe with no clerics around your wizards have learned to do it better." They're clearly more advanced than Golarion's wizards in at least some ways. "Wizards are - anyone who learns magic by study instead of being born with it? Arnold said your jumpships used arcane magic, is it all sorcerer work? Maybe you just group all your mages differently from how I do it and we should stick to 'clerics' and 'other mages'."

"I got here by - accidentally - falling through a planar rift. At least that's what I assume happened. They're known to happen in the area I was in - very rarely, I never saw one before... I don't know what it means that you have planar rifts, most places don't and it's maybe not a great sign." Gord is holding off on telling anyone it was an Abyssal rift, because that is legitimately terrifying if you didn't have one before but he isn't sure how actionable it is. Maybe if there's an archwizard the locals trust he should tell them? People can be bad enough with strangers who ping Chaotic Evil, he doesn't want them to suspect he might be a demon in disguise.

...wait. Waaaait. Alignment detection spells are cleric spells. Paladins and inquisitors have it even worse, they can't stop seeing the Evil in people. Is she telling him they don't have any of those? 

...

Gord's first thought is that it ought to make the world a bit more like Elysium. Sure, they still have slaver pirates, but they're fighting people for being slaver pirates and not for being a blemish in a paladin's sight!

He is suddenly very interested in seeing what kind of society people built for themselves without clerics. (And sure, he'll heal and rescue some people while he's here, why wouldn't he?)

"Gods don't make clerics around here, no. I suppose the Star League-era tech can look like magic, and it's true that hardly anyone can build it anymore, but I think it's a different thing than this word implies, 'magic'. Unless the implications this 'spell' has written into my head are misleading? It's more... Engineering writ large... I'm almost an engineer. Technical specialist. Big part of my job is to keep things working, and uh... They thought 'magic' was code for 'the Major doesn't understand what he's seeing', not. Actual magic. Er... So, right. You have magic, slanted towards healing injuries? And you are considering what to do about our pirate situation and leaning towards assisting with evacuation or defense of civilians? So... You fell through some kind of jump portal? A," loanword time, "'wormhole', a tear in space that bridges one location and another? Such places are rare and worrying? I don't know anything about why one would put you here. Where did you arrive, precisely? We can have someone look. Do I have that all correct?"

She's writing notes down again.

"Yes, that's right. I do have plenty of magic that can hurt people but unlike wizards I can also heal them, and cure diseases and poisons. Most spells don't necessarily hurt or heal anyone, it's up to you how you use them." Most cleric spells don't have to hurt people but no-one's found any other use for them yet, which is presumably how the gods want it and goes to show Gorum is right about life.

He does his best to describe where exactly he fell through the tear. It wasn't far from the military post, someone can probably follow his tracks backwards to figure it out.

Notes notes notes.

"Just like tools and weapons really. Engine can power a 'mech or a combine harvester-"

The jeep suddenly brakes, though not too hard, and comes to a quick stop.

"-Willy!"

"Dirt Lizard on the road, ma'am!"

She peers forward. There does indeed seem to be a twenty or thirty-foot reptile, sullen brown, walking on the asphalt. It's holding a goat carcass in its mouth. A black tongue lolls out of its mouth to the side. She sighs.

"Jesus Christ, that's a big one... And it's got someone's goat. Just go around, we've got offroad tires. Give him a good bit of distance. I'll radio it in, maybe someone can shoot it for stew later."

"Yes'm." He turns offroad. Kira fusses with what turns out to be a device of voice transmission for a bit, and reports this occurrence to someone.

"Sorry about that, where were we?"

A monster crossing the road is a perfectly ordinary occurrence!

"What can you do without magic, do you not have healing? Of wounds, diseases, poisons, curses, blindness, missing limbs... Raising the dead, that's another cleric staple, I can't do it yet but I will someday. Conjuring food and clean water, testing existing food and preserving it. Enduring heat and cold, carrying more weight, there's hundreds of spells and it's hard to figure out which are the most important if you don't have any of them... At higher circles, traveling to other planes - I think you do have arcane teleport, at least on the jumpships - or calling people from them or talking to them without going there, or talking to the gods. A lot of spells work to counter other magic."

"There are a variety of tools to address these things. Ranging from palliative care and hope to chemicals and drugs- We don't get a lot of those out here, it's a problem- To surgical repair. Usually recovery from wounds is slow, imperfect, and not really guaranteed. Oh, except curses, since we don't typically experience those." Is that sarcasm? Maybe. "There's always a few people with cuts, bruises, broken bones and the like around the treatment center in Minnie Downs. Clean water? That could be very useful. Another thing the pirates might try to steal is the water treatment buildings, more to ransom them back to us than for resale. We can make replacement pumps and pipes, but not the fancy 'arr oh'-style filters, and we kind of need it to grow crops. Carrying weight is what trucks and cars are for. Enduring heat and cold..."

She goes thoughtful. Mechs have to manage their heat; She's more a sensor tech than a MechTech but she definitely knows this much. Maintenance on the heat sinks is obsessive and careful and the 'mech boys on the planet's one solitary lance are always talking about heat load when talking about their weapons...

"...How much heat? And is this - removing the heat, or making a person not care about it, or-?"

Life without clerics sounds horribly hard. The southerners think Civilization is built by wizards and indeed they're very good at flying and exploding things, but the traditionalists have it right about divine magic. Rahadoumi self-reliance sounds good in principle, but five minutes' thought should tell you to invent arcane healing before banishing all clerics from your land.

"I don't know what some of those are but if they're on a list that includes 'hope' I'm going to assume they don't work, no offense meant." Hope is an important part of the Good, but usually it's the hope of getting to a cleric in time! "Healing magic is instant and guaranteed to work on most nonmagical injuries - not if you're missing body parts or if it's already old and scarred. ...I have a limited amount per day, obviously. Blindness, deafness, diseases are more expensive, I can only do it a few times per day, it works on most diseases but for some it fails part of the time."

"Making water is free but you'd only have it while I'm here so it's not really important unless you're low right now. The climate spell makes someone comfortable when it's cold or hot and also not harmed by it, making them only not care about it sounds like a terrible idea."

"It's better than nothing, I just meant that people often don't regain full capacity after severe injuries... Right, well, that might actually turn the Mech fight. Pilots get distracted and injured and the mechs damaged when they get too hot, and firing the weapons produces a lot of heat."

"It'll protect you if you spend all day in the hottest sun, it won't save you if you stick your hand in a fire. Or touch red-hot metal. I do have another spell that protects against burning yourself - up to a point, it won't stand up to a fireball - but it only lasts an hour and a bit, not a day and a night."

"Actual burns are rare, I think? An hour is probably long enough for 'mechs to get to an engagement without you being in the line of fire... We'll have to consult with Captain Mercer about if those 'spells' will help his pilots and if you're willing to use 'em or sell 'em. You said these come from 'gods'. What do 'gods' want, what are they getting out of it?"

"Different gods want very different things, sometimes things no human wants. What they get out of it is mostly - the result of empowering people. They see someone they like, or who is doing things they like, and they want them to have more power or safety so they can do more of whatever it is. Clerics usually do things their god likes, and it's hard to say how much of it is in response to being clericed, and how much was the god correctly seeing what kind of person they already were."

"Some gods do order their followers around, and probably uncleric anyone who disobeys. And have a big church that punishes people. But if you didn't want to join them, you could just pretend you were never clericked."

"My god is Gorum. He's the god of people striving, fighting for what they believe in, risking themselves for what they want. And he's the god of growing stronger through adversity, and achieving your goals through that strength."

"Gorum doesn't care about the destination so much as the journey. He's not the god of any one cause. If you realize you were wrong, if you learn to do better, if you have a revelation that your cause was bad, that's an important kind of growth." Does this seem to be landing?

She's making a face. Especially at the 'the result of empowering people' bit. And taking notes.

"So... Sort of analogous to inner sphere powers doing schemes involving giving uninvolved people weapons because they'll probably be a problem for their rivals? Which is where a considerable fraction of fucking pirates come from."

Oh good, even in a strange new world there are still debates about religion! These 'inner sphere powers' presumably aren't literally elemental lords but even so, they - rhyme with themes he's familiar with.

"That's partly right. Gods fight by proxy a lot, by empowering mortals. Even if they didn't, different people want different things, and that includes different gods, and more power can create more conflict. Even if cleric spells couldn't harm people, all power can be made into a weapon."

"But not all gods are about fighting someone! There are gods of love, music, beauty, healing, travel and discovery, the sun and the stars. Of knowledge, magic, all the different crafts and skills there are. Of farming and raising families, and of wild nature, the seas and storms. Gods who cleric people for helping others, for raising their children well, for being obsessed with perfection."

"Those things don't have to conflict. When Shelyn gives someone spells because her singing moves crowds, the singer isn't going to hurt people with it, she's going to be inspired to write something even more amazing and also she can make water and heal people now. When Gorum empowers someone fighting for a cause they really believe in, that cleric probably has enemies, that's why he's fighting, but Gorum isn't doing it to hurt his enemies, he's doing it because he likes people to strive and grow."

"Some gods are evil and tyrannical. Some gods want to conquer the world, or kill everyone in it, or to have their followers do that, and other gods spend power to fight them. Some gods are absolutely your enemy, and so are their followers, and even if you don't want to fight them they won't give you a choice."

"But we choose what to do with the power given us, just as with power earned, and for most of us that is the same thing we were going to do anyway, except better. You already chose to fight for your town. You probably wouldn't turn down power if it was offered you, or think it was a bad thing if people like you were sometimes given magic by a god who likes people fighting to protect their home and community."

"There's a country on my planet, Rahadoum, that banned clerics of all gods a long time ago. They're not fighting any big wars, last I heard. They also have most of their children die young, because they have no healing, no clerics to make the plants grow or to stop disease. It doesn't help, to turn away the gods who want the same things you do."

Notes notes notes.

"Right... I don't hold too much with philosophying but if you're saying 'oh, if the boot was on the other foot you wouldn't be complaining'... Sure, maybe. Yeah, I'd sure enjoy being a Duke of whatever and having an army of Battlemechs at my beck and call to keep all our enemies far away. But I'm not, and I don't, and I have to keep piece of shit lasers and one lonely Standard Armor forge from falling apart any faster than they already are and wonder if I'll die of some stupid preventable disease at the age of forty. People fight each other. A lot. Over important things and trivial things, for revenge, to keep them from growing stronger, out of misplaced senses of rivalries, out of greed, out of weird prejudices, and because they can. At least we're defending home, and yeah I would not turn down a magic 'mech-be-gone power or, for that matter, a cache of old Star League weapons if I happened to find one. I had a point when I started this rant..."

That is so very relatable! Gord likes this woman.

"I meant your analogy about gods isn't a good one. Most gods don't empower people because they want them to hurt other people. What you do with it is on you, not the god. A few gods do want to hurt you but you're not dealing with that here, not if your enemies don't have clerics or miracles or mysteriously convenient strings of victories or something like that."

"Like you said, people fight a lot, often for bad reasons, with gods or without them. With the gods around you're at least less likely to die of disease. I don't know if a god is equally likely to be on your side or your enemy's, but I'm pretty sure there are more gods of defending-your-home than of attacking-other-people's-homes, or there wouldn't be any homes left back home. Destruction is easier than defense and rebuilding."

"Also, this is a remote shot, but do these 'inner sphere powers' happen to be associated with one or more of the four elements - fire, air, earth and water?"

"...Hmm. Okay, so it's not that simple at least. I still think I don't get it properly. Well, it's a new thing and not a copy of an existing one to us, I suppose..." 

Maybe it's more like old stories about AIs? 

"Uh- No, the inner sphere powers are the biggest - er, empires is the closest word - around. They're called that because the planets they hold are mostly within the sphere of stars closest to the homeworld, a planet called Earth, or 'Earth' or 'Terra', or well, same thing no matter the language."

They settled enough stars to map them out in three dimensions. What a wild idea. Gord wishes Ramien was here to see this. (Maybe if he Sends Ramien he can convince him to come pick him up? No way to plane shift off a Sending, though...)

On the other hand: these people have a whole planet to themselves but only three cities (towns?). Mendev has three cities, and it's a small backwater on the edge of Avistan sustained by refugees and crusaders.

Maybe interstellar travel is so cheap they settled lots of planets much more quickly than they could expand to cover them. Maybe the local monsters kept them from expanding. Maybe the rest of the planet is full of elves and orcs and dwarves and they just didn't think to mention it. The whole thing feels like a badly written story but Gord's used to planets full of people, for all he knows this is normal and the rest of Creation is full of empty planets. Elysium is supposed to be mostly empty, the empty parts are just too far to get to...

"Are there more people on planets closer to where you started because they're - older? Is that why the empires there are rich and powerful? Three cities to a planet feels weirdly empty, I'm used to planets with no free room for the taking."