"Hmmm? Your notes, leave your spare uniform. Don't interact with him further until I've briefed you, absolutely don't enchant him."

There is something - heady, terrifying, validating - about knowing Asmodeus has involved Himself. He sees it too, she thinks, even though that's absurdly prideful, to imagine they're seeing the same things at all, to imagine 'seeing' is a good word to cover the both of them. She goes and packs.

Keltham's current plan is to try reaching out to the Intrinsic-of-Keltham god, followed by Asmodeus if that doesn't work, as soon as he has the quiet and privacy to compose himself and try to arrange his thoughts into the most coherently shaped patterns he can manage, in order to maximize the apparently slight chance that he can successfully contact a god.  It may be, in some sense, unreasonable to hope that it's that simple; but probably some things will be simple for him, given his unusual knowledge base.  It's worth trying the obvious tactic before trying any less obvious ones, just so that he doesn't accidentally overcomplicate his own life and waste a lot of effort on difficult strategies that aren't actually necessary.

(Asmodeus, Abadar, Norgorber; Calistria, Nethys.)

Next, maybe spend some time trying to figure out What Happened and What It Implies About the Ontology of Greater Reality?  No, next stand up and stretch a bit.  You're supposed to stand up and stretch every so often while thinking.

Keltham tries to do that, and nearly falls over.  He ran headlong towards smoke, in freezing cold, longer and faster than he usually runs through freezing cold every day.  Ouch.

The priest raises an eyebrow at him and offers him a drink.

Ah, yes, water.  Keltham has heard of this.  It's what sane people ingest after heavy exercise.  A little beneath the dignity of someone who calls himself a Mad Investor, but, under the circumstances, Keltham will lower himself to briefly act like a sane person.

If they could communicate he could offer other drinks, but they can't.

If they could communicate Keltham could be puzzled by what was on offer and why anybody would possibly want to drink it, but they can't.

A few minutes later a person materializes in thin air and the priest rushes over to talk to them. 

That is so incredibly cool.  The logistics this civilization must have - no, wait, all this stuff is incredibly expensive, isn't it?

It should be cheaper.  That is just Keltham's personal opinion, but it is already a strongly held one.  Depending on how much math nobody here knows, he should have a look at the magic business too, not just steel.

It's a long conversation and after a couple of minutes they leave to have it in privacy. They go into a room and an odd thick fog immediately seeps out of it, ringing the room in a perfectly smooth radius.

Keltham already wants him some of that, and doesn't want it any more for seeing much less impressive applications.  Though... are they trying to hide the discussions from him... actually no, that doesn't make much sense, he doesn't have the local language.  They could discuss in front of him how to take all his stocks and eat his soul and he wouldn't know any better.

Carissa comes back a couple of minutes later, sees the fog, looks pleased about it. 

And after a few more minutes the teleporting guy comes out of the fog room and says in Baseline, "I'm Fertinan Cortess, senior summoner at the Academae in Korvosa. The Worldwound is periodically swarmed by demons, and has very few people with whom you could collaborate on inventing steel, so we want to invite you to come to Ostenso, a large port city in Cheliax which we think will be a better place for this project. You have my word that I expect you to be safer, more comfortable, better resourced and more able to pursue the goals you've told us of in Ostenso than here, and that if you hate it it's possible in Ostenso to pay for passage back here, or elsewhere. Does that sound all right?"

"So it sounds like you were warned that I'm new to this world, but maybe not about the degree to which my own world is incredibly different from this one.  Am I right about that?"

The local priest directly got a vision from Asmodeus about it which sort of sets a very high lower bound on how important it must be. They're not saying that, though. The wizard who mindread him thinks that his world has successfully figured out how to raise humans who can almost completely compensate for having free will, and think like outsiders. They're not saying that either, though. 

The right tack here is humility. "I haven't actually met people from any other worlds and I would not have trouble believing I am underestimating how different yours is."

Until this person spoke, it had not occurred to Keltham that going to some place might mean that he could not, from that place, go to other places; and the fact that somebody thinks he might need to be reassured about that is not reassuring.  It brings a lot of other things into question; too many things, in fact.

"Let me put it this way.  From my perspective, what you said implied a lot of facts entirely new to me, like, implicitly, it might not be good to trust somebody who said I'd be better resourced in Cheliax, unless they added 'you have my word', and then, you think, I ought to trust that.  You expect me to worry that if I go to Ostenso, I might not be able to get passage back; but you don't expect me to worry that tickets would be too expensive, that I couldn't find other work, or that Cheliax's equivalent of Governance wouldn't order everyone who sells transportation to not sell me a ticket.  There's this particular implied range of attempted defections against a prospective business partner, which you think I should worry about, and which you're trying to reassure me about, but that range itself is less - the word that translates in my language as 'Lawful' - compared to my world.  And right now I have not observed enough facts about this world to establish basic causal entanglement between this reality and my mind; when I wonder whether your statements are true, I have to wonder whether any place called Cheliax exists, not whether you're saying something false about Cheliax.  To the extent I have to worry about deception like that, I also have to worry that you would still be planning to defect even if you said you gave your word, because I haven't observed whatever system of incentives here makes people trustworthy when they give their words."

"My uncertainty is so wide, in fact, that I haven't thought of anything I can pragmatically do about it.  I mean, I could try to talk to the giant six-legged things inside the bubble and ask them if they're actually demons bent on destroying the world, but that doesn't actually seem smart because it's potentially dangerous and a narrow shot inside a very wide space.  So yes, fine, let's go to Ostenso, under the understanding that I am a prospective business partner trying to cooperate with Asmodeus, and your general treatment of me reflects on his reputation for reciprocating attempted cooperation; because the very smart very Lawful entity should be an anchor of sanity and good coordination if anything is; at least assuming that such any such entity as Asmodeus, or gods in general, exist.  And then I request a translation spell and a library visit, so I can read a lot of random pages in random books and start to infer back the world those pages were written in."

The man thinks about this, for about ten seconds, like it's in fact a lot of new information about something. 

"- deal," he says. And then something over his shoulder to Carissa.

Who understood none of that and has only half a guess at the flavor. "Yes, I'm coming." She takes Cortess's arm.

"Deal?  We're still operating informally under a presumption of good intentions and general attempts to repay good deeds later, or at least I hope we are.  Actual proper deals should be written down for ontological stability."  Keltham tentatively offers a hand, in case anybody wants a hand for magical reasons, which looks like it might be the case.

"I don't mean that I'm holding you to precisely what you just said," the man says. "But, sure, informally under a presumption of good intentions."

And they teleport.

They're in the summer villa of the Archduke Henderthane of Sirmium, requisitioned five minutes ago in a very rushed conversation with the Queen's personal pit fiend. It's on eighteen hundred acres, the house itself at the peak of the cliffs looking out across the Inner Sea. All the prettiest girls at the local wizard school have been dragged over and set loose in the library. 

The society that made this was poor but the person who made this was rich; labor was cheap for him, and it's very beautiful stonework. 

Okay this place is pretty.  Maybe this universe isn't as much of a dump as it looked from the Worldwound.  Keltham will probably spend a minute or two appreciating all beautiful sights in sight, especially any that don't have dath ilani counterparts, unless somebody attempts to talk to him.

No one can talk to him until the seventh circle wizard prepares and casts Share Language in any event, which takes him about ten minutes; he sits down on the nearest bench and his fingers twitch in the air as if tracking something very complicated. Carissa watches raptly. 

And then he puts his hand on Keltham's shoulder and Keltham speaks Taldane. 

Speaking a language suddenly is fairly distracting; all the words you know now map to the nearest available other words in the other language, which is not at all how people learn languages when they learn them. It has been analogized to getting onto an alligator and learning that it rides exactly like the pony you grew up riding on, but this might not be a helpful analogy if you haven't ridden any ponies or alligators. 

"There should be a library indoors; I don't know where, exactly, but the staff will," says the wizard. 

"I know Taldane!  Relative to prior expectations, this is so much higher in my preference ordering than - wait, what -"

"Oh my ass!  'Prior probability distribution' is how many syllables?  Relative to the objective targets for which Baseline was optimized, this language was not optimized along the -"

Keltham stops, concentrates, discards several false starts on Taldane sentences that balloon far out of control.

"This language isn't good at doing some things my world thinks a language should be good at.  At some later point, you should try giving somebody else my language, and test whether that makes them think better."

"Share Language only shares ones I know. Possibly you should pick up wizardry, this spell's only [two-syllable word for the complexity of the spell relative to other spells, conveying its topology and the fact that the better half of wizards could cast it and that it uses about 16% as much energy as a basic teleport]."