Oh, the sun's coming up. ...weird for the sun to be coming up and not match felt dawn but probably the days are extremely wonky durations here.

"Happy dawn! I can help you uncover your room's windows if you'd like."

"Yes, thank you."

It's pretty straightforward.

"And this is how you use your curtains and blinds. You might want them for sleep. I use an eyeshade sometimes if it's bright enough and I'm sure we can rustle up one of those for you as well if you'd like."

"That may be useful, I've taken a night shift before but the fort didn't have windows."

"Sure thing."

The view outside Blai's window is nice, if you like buildings and snow.

The eyeshade is a bit like a blindfold, but instead of being a uniform strip of cloth that you tie every time, it has padded cloth in the front and a thin stretchy bit in the back.

He is not a huge fan of it after giving it a try.

In that case Kevin can give it back to the person whose spare eyeshade it was.

Chris would like another meeting with Blai at his convenience.

Of course.

"So, it seems likely that the archmages aren't going to pick you up for the convention."

"They are at minimum delayed and most likely have decided they can do without me," he agrees.

"You should probably plan as if you're going to be on or near Earth indefinitely, and I was thinking now might be a good time to talk about that."

"Yes. What sorts of planning strike you, an Earthling, as most urgent for me to do?"

"Thinking about the basics of an introduction to the global stage. Getting ready to fly in an airplane, children manage it but it's good to know what to expect. Taking advantage of your last chance to be around people whom nobody's had much opportunity to filter for you-related reasons. And probably some unknown unknowns."

"I have never previously been introduced to a global stage. What do you mean by unknown unknowns?"

"Things which we haven't thought of which will turn out to be important."

"Is there a way to prepare for those?"

"Probably not, but we can try? You can do exercises like imagining yourself next year and checking what problems you picture yourself having, occasionally that helps a bit."

"I do not know very much about what my life will be like next year."

"That makes sense. I mostly mentioned for completionism."

"So, the government has concluded that it's not possible to keep you secret in the long run given that you don't strongly prefer it, dozens of people who don't work for one of the parts of the government that's good at keeping secrets know about you, and such. We thus haven't been trying. People have pre-registered research about created water, people have discussed you on their blogs without your face or name, our government does know who you are and what you look like. The Acts aren't available to the general public yet."

"You could say 'well, I would like to only be more public about my existence once I have already gone to the United States, because doing a long bunch of international travel while being a celebrity sounds difficult'. You could also say 'I want to publicly announce my existence now, so that I can get started on accepting interviews from interested journalists and such, and get things done with faster'. You might want something else also."

"What does it mean to pre-register research about created water? - I have not interacted with journalism even on my own planet. And I don't know what international travel here is like without, let alone with, uh, celebrity status."

"They have not gotten to the point of formally publishing everything but they have told other scientists what they're thinking about, to make it harder for them to be dishonest in the future."

"International travel in this case will involve flying in an airplane from Scott-Amundsen station to McMurdo station, then from McMurdo to New Zealand, then from New Zealand to the United States. McMurdo station is a lot like this one, but larger and with more people and more buildings, and it's on the coast. You'll probably spend a few hours or days there. There's more stuff there, like hills, if you want to climb any for fun, but I get the impression you might not."

"An airplane is a large machine that flies hundreds of miles per hour. There will be a pilot and co-pilot, whose jobs are to operate the plane. You will get a chair to sit in, with a seatbelt, so that when the airplane shakes you don't get too shaken. When the plane takes off, it will move so quickly that you will feel like you are being pushed backwards a little bit, the way you feel pushed down most of the time. It's possible that the motion of the plane will make you want to vomit. There are drugs that can mitigate that, but they can make people feel sleepy. Some people also find that ginger helps, or looking out a window, or eating lighter meals before the flight. If you do need to vomit, there will be bags for vomiting into. On short flights, it's good to stay in your seat with your seatbelt on the whole time. On longer flights, there will be points where the pilot thinks the plane is moving smoothly enough that it's safe to get up if you need to. There will be a small toilet on the plane and those times are good for using it. If you are traveling with enough stuff, you won't be able to keep it all near you while you fly and the airplane operators will want to put it in a different section of the plane, but I don't know if you have enough stuff for that."

"When you get to New Zealand, you'll arrive at an airport, which is a place where airplanes take off and land. The government of New Zealand will probably ask for information on you being allowed to be there before you leave the airport, and whether you're carrying anything you aren't supposed to. The United States has gotten permission from New Zealand for you to be there for a bit and there are papers we'll show them about it. I don't think anything you came here with is stuff you're not allowed to bring to New Zealand, but we can go over that more when it's closer. If you want to carry your mace on your person that will require special permission, which you might be able to get."

"Once you leave the airport, it'll be green and warm and sunny. People will speak English, like you've been practicing. A lot of people spend some time in New Zealand before they go to the United States, and you could be one of them if you wanted to. You could possibly get permission to stay indefinitely, honestly, you're very special, but we'd prefer you come to the United States. If you wanted to do that, the United States government might offer you a hotel room, or they might prefer you stay somewhere else, I don't know. It would have more space than here. If you choose to spend some time in New Zealand, you could do things like go to local restaurants or warm beaches or forests or museums."

"When you leave New Zealand, it might be on a big commercial flight, or you might be offered a more private flight, I don't know. If they don't offer a private flight and you don't ask for one, then you'll go to a big airport, with a lot of people. Again, carrying your mace would require special permission. You'll go through more checkpoints where they check what stuff you're carrying and whether you have a ticket for the airplane and such. And then you'll be on a long airplane flight – you could have someone such as me accompany you for all this, probably, I'll be less busy once I'm not on Scott-Amundsen Station. The big commercial flight would probably have hundreds of people on it, and you'd probably get a special larger seat in the front of the airplane, and they'd serve meals. Once you arrive in the US, it'll be a different time of day than it is in New Zealand. The government officials at the airport will want to check that you have permission to enter the United States, and what stuff you have. And then you might have another flight to DC from wherever you arrive, but it would be much shorter and the time difference would be less significant."

"I do not necessarily have to have my mace on my person if the risk that anything will attack me is low enough but I would mislike its being lost, it's magic and I can't replace it. Same with the chainmail. I would appreciate your company on this journey if you are not needed elsewhere."

"Anything? I really doubt you're going to be attacked by an animal in an airplane or airport. The only risk there is that a human would try to kill you, and if that somehow did happen they'd probably try to do it at range with a firearm. You can maybe wear the chainmail except when you're going through security checkpoints, if you want, I could ask about it. And once flights are going the government should be able to arrange to fly in my replacement as soon as possible so I can leave early with you."

"...are security checkpoints not a relatively obvious place where someone might attempt to attack me with a firearm if I will predictably be unarmored?"

"Security checkpoints have other people with firearms right there running the checkpoint."

"And these are to be presumed incorruptible and also highly observant?"

"I would in fact expect them to not take bribes to let someone kill you. That's the sort of thing that leads to serious consequences. And at least some of them are observant. I also don't think your chainmail would help that much with a firearm, honestly, though I don't know what its magic does."

"It makes it a little better at being armor, is all. Why would it not help with a firearm?"

"Firearms accelerate bullets to very high speeds which would break the rings, I think? When we have a connection to the outside world again I can look into it. We manufacture chainmail, sometimes people who are only worried about stabbings or shark bites use it, but we don't issue it to soldiers and we would if it helped."

"The rings break before I do, is the idea. It is quite heavy and if you have - technological equivalents of Mage Armor - then of course that would be preferable."

"We have armor designed for people being shot at and could have a set shipped to you when things open up, but the most effective stuff is still heavy."

"Maybe it's worth shooting at both of them on some sort of dummy target at some point. In any event, I would be surprised if it were of no help at all and do not want to lose the only magic armor on the planet."

"I'm not arguing otherwise. It's very nice."

"Should I be deriving, from your general attitude here, that it is not likely that reports of my existence have already alerted powerful interests capable of deploying assassins? Because on my planet that would be something I would have to worry about if I were somehow this unique."

"I would expect the other major countries to prefer you alive, to the extent that they believe you exist as opposed to the more plausible theory that a group of isolated people has gone mad or decided to collectively lie. We are not currently having a great power war or so far as I can tell about to have one, if that's relevant. If you appear key to decisively winning a future great power war that might change. As it stands I think major powers are much more likely to prefer spying on you or luring you to their side or kidnapping you and any threats to your life are more likely to be crazy people. I'm not an expert, though."

"Understood. In that case I can carry the armor in my bag."

"There might actually also be issues with your holy symbol in an airport, seeing as how it looks like you could stab someone with it. I think there are some people who are commanded to carry knives by their religion and it's possible there might be some kind of exception, I don't know."

"...it won't help that in an emergency I can use a different blade, will it."

"Is there a minimum length or sharpness requirement?"

"I think insofar as it's not sharp enough to theoretically function as a weapon it has to be more symbologically accurate, but I have not interrogated an expert."

"What would be more symbologically accurate? We could maybe make something."

"This one is pretty close, I believe, but the cover of the nice copy of the Acts has a more precise rendering. I do not actually think I am religiously required to carry a holy symbol at all, in the sense that if, for example, I were lawfully surrendering and whoever was taking me prisoner wanted me without the ability to cast spells, I could hand it over; does that mean that the religious exception does not apply to me?"

"I actually don't know the details of the policy, I'm just guessing one exists to some extent because there's a religion that tells people to carry knives, which I also don't know the details of. Is cutting a flat piece of plastic in the shape on the cover of the Acts and then having someone paint it worth a try? The M&M players have painted miniatures, they might have an appropriate paint set and if not we can figure something else out."

"It is worth trying, though obviously plastic has not been invented on Golarion so as far as I know it has literally never been tried."

"Is Iomedae otherwise picky about materials?"

"Again, I haven't interrogated an expert. I don't think so."

"Well, if it fails then we still have a cool necklace."

Nod.

"Should I go over what to do if you encounter large scary wildlife like bears or wolves or should we skip that because you can avoid it if you stay in cities? …I guess sometimes coyotes are in cities, we maybe should discuss that. It's not important to international politics but you sounded sort of concerned earlier."

"If there is some particular thing I should do in case of encountering bears or wolves that isn't 'kill the bears or wolves' yes. Also I don't know what a coyote looks like."

"It isn't 'kill the bears or wolves or coyotes'. Coyotes are a lot like wolves, if you see what might be a wolf it might also be a coyote. If they pose an immediate danger to human lives, or they've killed a human, then go ahead and kill one. But they usually don't do that. We, uh. For a while we killed large predators when it was convenient and it turns out it's possible to do it too much, and then, for one example, you get too many deer and the deer get sick. So now a lot of the large predators are in nature preserves like national parks that are specifically supposed to have them. And when they do kill humans it often involves scenarios where people were feeding them or getting super close to them or such even though we tell people not to do that."

"I will not feed a wolf, bear, or coyote, nor disobey guidelines on whether to approach them that seem meant to include me. People don't eat the deer?"

"People sometimes eat the deer but I think the demand for hunting deer is lower than the oversupply, or maybe the hunting permit system is too strict? I don't know. And the sick enough deer aren't safe to eat."

"There's a spell for that."

"If you personally would like to make some diseased deer edible you can but you're the only spellcaster we know of on the planet."

"It doesn't seem a good use of me but if clerics were to start being commoner."

"Ah, okay. Probably if clerics become commoner we'll want to encourage them to work in hospitals, we haven't called on you for healing much but in a big city a lot of people get injured in a day."

"Yes, but people have a limited number of channels a day. I'm below average at that but the normal number is still only three. You want someone staffing the - hospital - at any given moment, but a given person's shift might be short."

"I could imagine someone doing this as a hobby or out of particular care for some rural community but if someone was trying to feed the hungry or resolve ecological problems they could probably do so more efficiently."

"If you say so."

Chris shrugs and has a glance at his phone.

"Oh, the Mazes & Minotaurs players say they don't have a paint set, it's the Aegis Fantasy Tactics players who have a plastic-appropriate paint set, and they want to know if you want to look at the paint colors or if they should just go with, uh, Chrysomallos and Selenite Silver and Zorba Red, the first of which I'm assuming is a gold paint."

"Maybe I should look at the colors."

Chris makes some clicking noises with his mouth and does some typing.

"They can bring the paint set to dinner and you can have a look then?"

"Sounds good."

"Great. Anyway, we were going to discuss publicity."

"Yes. I'm not likely to generate novel and usable ideas on my own with this little background in the topic or the Earth-specific manifestation."

"There's a lot to be said for waiting. I think the main question here is whether you are in a massive hurry to get people to seriously read the Acts."

"I would not say I'm in a massive hurry, no."

"All right. Then we wait, and hopefully we can get you all the way to the US before too many random people figure out who you are."

Chris tilts his head. "We maybe want to make a few extra holy symbols, assuming it's not a symbol of office that we shouldn't use, to create a bit more ambiguity if necessary."

"It would be a little weird to wear a symbol without being empowered because it would cause people to think you could cast spells and they might attempt to go to you for that purpose but it is not otherwise a problem or unheard of for someone to - hm. For someone who is broadly speaking on Iomedae's side to wear Her symbol. It would be a bit troubling for someone who did not find themselves to be one of Her allies to do it, though I think against this much backdrop of ignorance it would not be a serious problem."

"From what I've heard she sounds pretty neat and I'm sure other people here feel similarly. Your call if that's adequate. We can probably find someone on base with stronger feelings. You could also lend someone the clothes you came here wearing, it'd be a bit blatant but we're not aiming to confuse smart people here."

"I am not attached to the clothes at all, they are not magic."

"Well, we'll get someone else to wear them for the trip, then."

Nod. "What other things should I be deciding about now?"

"Whether to work on languages that aren't English? It's the most common second language and any government should have someone who speaks it, but I could imagine you wanting to branch out. How you want to publish the Acts when you do publish. What to tell people who want to worship Iomedae. And plans for basic cultural acclimation, I have some suggestions there."

"I would like more competence in English before I see about another. What do you mean by 'how' - what nuances are there besides making it available for someone who does a print run and sells the books. Are people who want to worship Her likely to ask questions or do I need to come up with some non-question-based thing to say?... Certainly I will hear your suggestions."

"Are you going to try to get copyright and get a share of profit from the books? And yes, people who want to worship her will have questions."

"...I didn't write them. Is there some other purpose to copyright?"

"You helped with an English translation! Also, some authors do a thing where they tell the publisher that they wrote the book and tell the reader that fairies gave them the manuscript or such. Admittedly I've only seen this in children's stories that get shelved with other fiction, and the book still gets listed as fiction on the copyright page, so it would probably undercut your credibility terribly."

"Well, I don't want to do that. Is... the uptake on the Acts likely to depend much on whether I copyright the translation?"

"If you let anyone copy the translation for free it will probably get more uptake."

"Then I will let anyone copy the translation for fr- will they do it accurately?"

"Probably someone will make an inaccurate copy while claiming it's the original translation but they probably won't print and sell it, and if they do I think that constitutes impersonating you or something."

"And this is regardless of whether I allow accurate copies to be freely distributed? Then I will allow that."

"I'd expect so. And people are definitely going to make derivative works while not impersonating you, the original is poetic and people are probably going to try to figure out how to make it be poetry in English. If you put the work out there completely free then people might sell their attempts at that, if they're good."

"...if they mistranslate something and misrepresentations of what the Acts say circulate that would be bad. Is that... avoidable."

"It is possible that if you sought copyright on the translation you could interfere with that route of misinterpretations circulating but misinterpretations are definitely going to circulate."

"Will it decrease the total volume of heretical misinterpretations at all."

"I don't know."

"Well, I certainly don't either but that is the main problem here."

Chris makes a face.

"You could say that we Earthlings specialize in misinterpreting things, in ways which get called heresy in religious contexts. It would not actually be true, but if you looked at our religious history there would be an awful lot of evidence for it."

Sigh. "There are probably plenty of heresies on Golarion also but this is one of the many things wrong with the place."

"It's possible you could go for some complex scheme where anyone can print an exact copy but people are supposed to only print and sell derivative versions with your specific approval, I don't know. Though it might take a lot of your time to approve things unless you can train someone enough to delegate the task to them, and catching every violation of copyright law isn't generally the government's priority, there's murderers and terrorists and such."

"I suppose with no magic powers around heresy is not normally a serious matter."

"Yes. It's … frankly, if you start talking about heresy seriously, a lot of people will bristle like you're trying to control them, and they'll be reminded of historic instances of people being tortured over it. You might want to only use more generic terms like 'misinformation'."

"I can say misinformation instead, though frankly one of the most serious possible sorts of misinformation would be any that encouraged torture."

Chris nods.

"I'm not actually a PR strategist, you'll eventually want one of those."

"...how does one identify a good 'PR strategist'."

"I don't know. The joke answer is, of course, 'very carefully'. Reviewing their past work?"

"How does one do it when one is new to a language and culture and could not confidently distinguish things that were well-regarded from things that were spoken of under censorious regimes, or sarcastically, or damned with faint praise?"

"I still don't know. Tell the government you want one, you believe in their ability to do well and not just hire the lowest bidder or a personal favorite. Interview the candidates with a truth spell, ask them about themselves and their competitors, they probably have opinions about each other. This is pure speculation, I don't actually know. You want to remember any sane country should be happy to have you, but I don't know how often you really want to bring it up, if you mention it a lot people might assume it's just cheap talk."

"Understood. ...what will the actual procedure be for leaving the United States if some other country seems like it would be more hospitable after consideration?"

"For you, showing up at an embassy might be fine since you'll end up being incredibly famous and there are embassies in DC, but it might be more desirable to contact someone in their governments. …there's got to be intermediate options between showing up at an embassy and asking for an appointment and using the contact pages that are on their websites to send them a letter but I don't actually know what those options look like exactly. And then, presumably, whatever route you go with, they say yes and they give you documentation and you travel there probably by airplane. The US isn't generally supposed to stop you from leaving, if they do that and it's not because you've committed a serious crime the country you decided to go to will make a fuss."

"Interesting. All right. What else should I know?"

"I was going to suggest that for acculturation you should watch some videos of true stories set on Earth and then any time anything looks confusing we pause to answer questions. There's one about kids in a poorer area of a major American city on a chess team from a few years back, you might like that."

"That sounds like a good idea. Does it have the words at the bottom of the rectangle, they help me get used to the spelling."

"It has an option for that that we can turn on."

Then he will happily watch the movie.

Brooklyn Castle is set in a region with notably taller buildings than Scott-Amundsen Station.

The school being focused on is, apparently, number 318. It's co-educational but has a fairly narrow age range of children. The players live with their families, who tend to encourage them to do well in school and at chess, sometimes fairly strongly.

There's what might be computers in the classrooms, but notably bulkier. The chess players sometimes have devices with numbers of some kind by the boards. There are buses and trains and rolling suitcases.

People are often concerned with finances. It's possible to get scholarships from chess which pay for higher education, and people want those. The school receives a budget that has been relevant to the chess program but is facing budget cuts.

The children in the movie often dress in similar styles to many of the adults at the base, but the ratios of ethnicities differ. There is some discussion of how, as chess lacks subjective components, bias on the basis of ethnicity and gender will not prevent a skilled player from winning. One of the players wants to be the first 'chess master' of her ethnicity and gender.

He wants to know if this implies at least 317 other schools in this jurisdiction or if the numbers are not assigned consecutively. Are these parents all implied to be married, is that a representative proportion? What should he be inferring about the socioeconomics of the families from their houses and apparel? Are the bigger computers better at things? Are the devices like hourglasses or stopwatches? What should he be inferring about people's socioeconomics from their use of trains and buses? Who puts money into chess scholarships? How are budgets for the schools allocated and what benefits to the budget allocators or their employers are expected to accrue from education of this kind? Are there similarly-situated competitive endeavors that suffer from subjective judgments disadvantaging the foreign-born children or the girls?

He's not sure if they're numbered consecutively but it would not be shocking if there were at least 317 other schools in the city, it's a big city.

Chris has some reasonable speculation on the marital status of parents based on having seen the movie and not just trailers and reviews.

The families are mostly not that wealthy (for people in the US) and home size and furnishings are more suggestive of this than clothing is, at least to his eyes, someone with a better sense of fashion would reach more conclusions based on the clothing but he does not have that strong a sense of it.

The bigger computers are not better at things, they are older. Space does allow for more parts that do computer tasks but the actual reason these are larger is because they are from an era where doing the same task required larger parts.

Scholarships are, uh, probably funded by organizations which receive funding from rich people who particularly want to offer scholarships to some particular type of child.

School budgets come from tax revenue. Usually some of this is taxes on property in the school district, and some of this is from more general taxes like income tax, and that gets split up more broadly. The federal government spends some money on schools, and so does the state government and the city government. Usually this gets resolved by people's elected officials but sometimes there are direct ballot measures that everyone votes on about it.

The government expects to benefit from children being educated because people who are educated often make better decisions and do better work and thus produce more tax revenue and require less support. Also, most people have been to public school and would prefer that it keeps existing for their kids, though of course many people who don't have school-age kids or who send them to private school or homeschool them would like to pay lower taxes since they personally aren't directly benefiting from the system right this moment.

Many of the children who look different from Chris are not actually foreign-born. The people who were historically native to the land which became the US are a small minority these days and plausibly do not appear in the movie. People who look like Chris had ancestors come over from one continent, plausibly a few centuries ago. People who look like the kid running for class president had ancestors come over from a different continent, plausibly also a few centuries ago, but… this is a difficult subject. The US used to practice slavery and the slaves were generally people kidnapped from that continent. They abolished it over a century ago but there was still formal legal discrimination for a while after, and they got rid of that too but there's still wealth differences and biases and such.

There are definitely competitive endeavors in which those biases show up. Arts, for instance. He's heard there used to be cases where people would suddenly start thinking women's musical performances were better when all the performers auditioned behind opaque barriers.

Enslaving humans is not very economical on Golarion because there are halflings who eat less than half as much and can given adequate tools do most of the same work, and there are orcs who eat what a human does but are a lot stronger for it. He supposes part-orcs are somewhat discriminated against in a lot of situations though they seem like basically normal people in the context of being Worldwound soldiers. ...is "there are still wealth differences" meant to be a mark of shame, Blai is not sure how you could possibly change that, people pass on wealth to their children.

Well, see, it's kind of embarrassing because the US is supposed to be a place where anyone could rise to greatness and your personal qualities matter more than whom your parents are. The ideal version is that parents do some amount of passing on wealth but whether you end up getting opportunities to earn a huge amount of money is based more around how good at things you personally are, and the wealth difference from historic stuff becomes smaller over time and would ideally be negligible by now.

Huh. He's used to, like, ancient noble families with lots of accumulated wealth in magic items and stuff, but it is different here.

Accumulated wealth looks more like investments and businesses, and wealthy kids get sent to expensive private schools and offered various opportunities to pursue their interests while poorer kids sometimes spend time after school looking after siblings or doing paid work. Inheriting a business is a very large advantage but it is perhaps not the same as inheriting a magic sword in a world where you need to get into swordfights.

Most people don't get into swordfights, most people are farmers, but a magic sword is a leg up if you are going into a sword-oriented profession. Since nobody here is learning to be a wizard what are they learning at their expensive schools or by pursuing their interests that is so remunerative?

"Medicine, law, engineering, that sort of thing."

Huh.

Anyway he learns a lot from the movie including a couple of things from pausing to stare at various board states.

That's great. They can do it again with several other chess movies in the future.

(Back on the mainland, someone is buying a bunch of DVDs. It's perfectly reasonable to have compressed backup versions of your own DVDs and now there is a DVD collection belonging to the Antarctic program in case the very principled alien ever asks.)

"Also, I'm not sure how helpful this would actually be, but if you want to tour the warehouses or the power plant or see the kitchen in use we can make that happen."

"I suppose now that you mention it I am accustomed to knowing more about how the food around me is made."

Then he can watch people cook.

The heating mechanism for the cooktop isn't obvious. Pans go on top of some kind of glassy black surface and water sure does boil but there's no visible flame. The oven has thick wires in it which do glow but there's still no flames.

People handle salt and cinnamon without significantly more care than they use when handling flour.

The somewhat fluffy flat bread ('pancakes') that gets served in the 'mornings' sometimes has its batter made entirely by mixing a single powder ('pancake mix') from a bucket with water. The weird scrambled eggs are also a powder mixed with water.

Fruits and vegetables, on the other hand, tend to come from bags of frozen produce whose contents are basically recognizable.

The stove is probably magic electric.

Maybe it's not real cinnamon; certainly it is not in full sticks you could light for a spell.

That explains why the eggs are so weird, though they are still Not Worldwound Stew.

"The stove's electric, yeah. I think they do use real cinnamon, if we got you sticks would that help you? And when it's summer we'll get fresh eggs. They reserve the early batches of fresh food for the people who were here in winter."

"I'm not powerful enough to cast Commune and have been advised not to do it without training I don't have even if I come by the ability, that's just my association with cinnamon."

"Ah, okay."

"It does also smell nice and some people have the superstition that that's why it's useful in the spell, that gods want to smell it and require assistance in this for some reason, but it's just a spell component."

"Huh. Earthlings burn incense too, sometimes for religious reasons, but it's usually specialized sticks or such."

"Maybe there used to be clerics here and some vestiges of the practices survived?"

"Maybe? What do your gods think about animal sacrifices? Some religions did those. Some also did human sacrifices but I assume Iomedae wouldn't like that."

"I'm not aware of any spells that call for animal or human sacrifice but there are non-spell practices that do, and there's... animating the undead, though you can do that with a corpse that died in an unrelated fashion. - it's Evil."

"It certainly doesn't sound good."

"Which is why I'm not going to demonstrate. But it's the sort of reason someone might have for going around killing people for magical effects. Wizards can also do that."

"The lack of demonstration is appreciated." Chris laughs awkwardly.

"...I literally can't cast Evil spells, clerics can't prepare or cast against their god's alignment."

"Makes sense, I suppose."

At dinner some people have a paint collection. They took a silver and a gold and a bright red paint out of the bag, but have other paints in the bag.

"Those colors look about right."

"That's great. You could join the game if you want, we've got a spare set of Ubasti figures and they're a fairly straightforward faction."

"...I do not know the rules of the game."

"You could learn if you wanted? It's a wargame, pieces represent units and move around a battlefield and attack each other and we roll dice to figure out details of how that goes."

"...huh. All right." He will attempt to learn this game.

In that case someone will grab a rulebook (they don't seem to have concerns about using color-printed books at the table with food) and he can be lectured during dinner.

There's a lot of rules. Distance gets measured with a measuring tape. Factions have turns for taking actions and there's actions any faction can take and then some factions get special actions – the main special gimmick the Ubasti have is just getting extra actions at predictable times, though. Visibility matters, but units can 'see through' allied units, and whenever Blai wants to play his first game they'll probably simulate a big open field.

(The rulebook has various illustrations. There's silvery humanoids, and giant ants, and bronze constructs, and so forth. The armor and weapons tend to look worse than those Blai may be used to, and nobody has a crossbow.)

He will puzzle his way through the rulebook first without and then with a Comprehend Languages and ask clarifying questions.

They will enthusiastically answer clarifying questions with occasional digressions into reminiscing about past sessions of play.

And then he will attempt to wargame!

…they can get together a session now but it'll be a bit short, they usually have a weekly meetup and their next one a few days from now after lunch.

He doesn't want to interrupt their regular meeting with his amateurishness, a practice run now will solidify the contents of the rulebook. But of course if it's not convenient he can wait.

Reasonable. In that case Blai's Ubasti can fight these animate blood-drinking trees who mysteriously have terrible operational security and tend to leak explanations of their strategy.

Well that shouldn't be too hard then??

Ah, but will it really be that easy if they can sometimes heal by damaging his units and figuring out archer volleys is complicated?

It will if he can find this out by mysteriously easy intelligence gathering instead of empirically!

Well, the Ubasti have probably been in similar fights before and probably expected the vampiric regeneration in general terms.

Blai wins! His opponent offers him a handshake and says he's picking up the game pretty well.

"Is it - poor form - to attend to opsec more than that?"

"No, no. It's just there can be a lot of stuff happening in the game, so for your first time playing I wanted to be clear on what was going on and why."

"Oh, I see. I think it will be more interesting with more hidden information but if not all of it is supposed to be hidden that makes sense."

"In general, you're supposed to know what the units are in principle capable of, but not what your opponent wants to do with them at any given time, or how well-supplied they are, or such."

"That makes sense. Though sometimes you could introduce a new unit with surprise capabilities to simulate that situation."

"I'm not sure how you'd do that fairly."

"Well, you'd take turns at it, if nothing else."

"Could be fun but probably you should try the game as it was designed first."

"Oh, certainly."

Soon enough Blai has a painted plastic holy symbol to try.

This works, though he does still prefer the one he made with the tiny dagger and the gold wire.

That's fine, but it's good to have something that will definitely go through airport security.

As expected, Aegis Fantasy Tactics is more interesting when people aren't explaining all their strategic goals and Blai has to guess.

Yay! He is new to the game and does not know Earth military history lessons at all but he has done Approximately This professionally for twenty years.

He seems like the kind of person who is going to be busy when he gets to the mainland but there's a bunch of gaming groups there that he could join. …also one of the guys he's played against today thinks it'd be cool to support a real god, who's about good stuff and doesn't send people to hell or have petty interpersonal drama, does that mean he can wear an Iomedae symbol to help confuse potential bad actors at the airport? It would be kind of an Iomedan thing to do, right, take on a bit of personal risk in case of threats in order to protect someone?

It would be a fairly Iomedaean thing to do, yes, and Blai is willing to have him on wearing-a-holy-symbol duty if he wants to volunteer for this.

Great! There is, uh, no replacement Blai on the entire planet, which is a nerve-wracking state of affairs, really. Hopefully he won't chicken out.

(That's a figure of speech referring to cowardice.)

It gets brighter. The chairs and tables in the dining hall are rearranged. The wargaming group cancels a session for 'mighty mouse' despite there being no signs of any mice. Someone wearing a fairly unimpressive vine garland says that Blai can also have one if he wants, since they're cleaning out the greenhouse.

Blai would like to know what a mighty mouse is (does "mighty" mean "dire", for example). He does not need a garland.

"'Mighty mouse' is our spring cleaning – we call the usual shared cleaning tasks 'house mouse' and then this is, I guess, more metaphorical mouse. The summer crew is larger and busier so it's good to have things in good order before they arrive."

"Oh, I see. I still don't have Prestidigitation working in that application, is there something I should do anyway?"

"If you're up for hanging around while I clean that helps some. If you'd like to join in we can have you, uh, move furniture and mop floors, that's probably straightforward and not too hard to learn. We'll manage without you if you'd rather not, though. Soon we'll be re-smoothing the skiway and that's going to involve volunteers placing a bunch of flags along over 2 miles of ice, if you'd like to join in on that or give people Endure Elements for it that would be much appreciated."

"I can place flags and do Endures. I don't see how it would be helpful to loiter while you clean, so much as - merely not diverting you entirely from it."

"The default plan is, I think, to divert me entirely."

"Well, I can improve on that, then, and move furniture too."

"Sounds like a plan."

Plenty of furniture involves metal even when one could imagine perfectly good furniture of the type being made out of wood except for a few screws. A lot of it folds.

Kevin's cleaning tasks seem to also involve organizing collections of miscellaneous items and using a loud device that removes dust from the floor by unclear means.

Folding furniture is interesting! The loud device is abstractly interesting but mostly loud.

It's good that furniture is interesting because there's a lot of it.

Also, placing flags is cold (less so with Endures) and there are specific placement rules.

He is competent to go out in the cold and follow rules there. It is among the things he is most competent to do.

Nobody else here has quite as much experience with it as he does, but there are no significant incentives to place flags incorrectly, so the parts of the task not done by Blai still go smoothly.

Great. Anything else need doing outside while they've got Endures?

Yes, but not by Blai.

Fair enough. He will go back in then.

The sun continues to rise, but the overcast weather makes it less dramatic than it could be.

The first flight that briefly stops at the base is going to be any week now, depending on weather conditions.

Maybe tomorrow! …or not.

Does Blai have any way of forecasting or controlling the weather? Does he want to see the plane? The first flight isn't going to take passengers out but it might be nice to see an airplane before flying in one.

That's very considerate, he would like to see the plane. He does not have a way to get useful amounts of information on the weather affecting the plane.

After multiple cancellations there is: A plane!

It's red with black accents and a white underside, and has skis instead of feet. It's plausibly around the size of an old or ancient dragon. If Blai stood on top of it in the center a channel could reach from the nose to the tail and only barely miss the wingtips.

It comes in fast and needs nearly the entire length of ice road that Blai helped with flags for to come to a stop.

An impressive beast. ...machine.

People do come out of it from a door that would be kind of weird for a beast to have.

"We can stick around for refueling and takeoff if you like or just head in now, your call."

"I would like to watch it take off."

"Got it."

The plane has hoses connected and disconnected and items swapped and then takes off. It's pretty loud. The wings don't flap, but there are spinning bits in front of the wings.

"What makes it so noisy?" Blai inquires.

"Well, the propellers – those are the spinning bits you saw on the outside – have to move really quickly for the plane to fly, so that's loud, and then there's systems for powering the propellers, which are also loud."

"Why is the system for powering the propellers also loud?"

"You know, I'm not completely sure just off the top of my head? How about we head in and check the encyclopedia and see if we got any deliveries."

Blai nods agreeably.

One of the kitchen staffers is distributing fruit. They've got apples and oranges and bananas.

Fruit! Real fruit not conjured not frozen!

He would like an orange please.

Even the peel smells really nice.

…Blai is here, he should do his job.

"They brought enough fruit for everyone to have one, do you know what you'd like?"

"I'd enjoy an apple."

Then an apple he shall receive.

"So, fruit first or looking up the engine first?"

"Fruit can be first." Chomp.

Kevin's orange-eating process, at least this time, seems to involve licking his fingers and plate and then gnawing at the outsides of the orange peels.

That's... weird... but okay.

And then he'll clear his plate and wash hands and get the computer.

"The plane we just saw is a little plane called a 'Twin Otter' – that's just a model name, no real otters involved. It has what are called 'turboprop' engines. In a turboprop engine, air comes in and gets compressed and gets mixed with fuel, which burns, and spins things while it does that – there's stuff going on with gears."

"Is 'twin' also just chosen to be a meaningless name?"

"I'd guess it's because there's precisely two of the same kind of engine?"

"I see."

"Technically it looks like the full name is 'de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter', where 'De Havilland Canada' is the company name, DHC is the initials, the six probably means something to the company, and then there are different versions of pretty much the same plane and you can also differentiate those with even more name, like, some of them are designed to be able to land on water. You probably don't need to know this for any of your goals though."

"How many planes are there in the world?"

"You know, that's a good question but I'm not sure I can answer it with just the encyclopedia. The United States Air Force is said to be the largest air force it has a bit over five thousand planes? The air travel company with the most airplanes is American Airlines with around a thousand. If we add up the encyclopedia's list of how many planes the biggest ten companies in the world have that's a bit over seven thousand. But there's also lots of smaller companies, and other air forces."

"So, thousands but probably not hundreds of thousands. Thank you."

"You're welcome. I'm curious why you asked, you often don't seem that interested in this sort of thing."

"It just seemed like having such - specific and decomposable names for types of planes might indicate something surprising about how numerous they are."

"Ah, okay."

Chris would like another meeting with Blai about transit logistics.

Of course.

"So, first of all, I have been told that there is plenty of money for you to return to New Zealand or McMurdo later if you'd like, and my attempts to propose a tourism agenda you haven't even expressed interest in on the basis that it's a limited opportunity you might regret missing later are unjustified."

"When you say 'there is' plenty of money who has this and what is their mandate in spending it?"

"The United States Government, and I suspect this is coming from a budget for making weird unexpected opportunities go smoothly."

Nod.

"Relatedly, once we get to New Zealand we won't be going on a commercial plane, we'll be going on a military plane, so we're not going to go through airport security or such."

"Does that obviate the plan to have a decoy?"

"I believe so."

"Any other changes it implies?"

"You can wear the armor and your holy symbol with the knife if you want, I'd expect."

"Oh good."

"Also, I think we should maybe go over what to expect from flying a bit more and figure out if you'll need any help packing."

"I don't have a lot of things and they all fit in my bag."

"Okay. So, very rarely, sometimes things go wrong during a plane flight. There's less than two accidents per million commercial flights. Technically, the statistics for military flights can be worse, but that's because military flights sometimes go through war zones, which we won't be doing. That said, it's still worth knowing what to do in the event of an accident."

"Airplanes tend to fly up high, where the air is too thin to give you all the things you need from air, even if you're used to somewhat thin air. Normally, the airplane operates such that the air is thicker on the inside than the outside. Sometimes this stops working, and in that case there are supposed to be masks with extra air to put on your face so you can breathe, but if you see the mask, you need to put it on right away, or else you might run out of air before you can do whatever else you want to do. With me so far?"

"...I might want to have Air Bubble prepared that day. But I understand."

"That sounds great, though I will say we have a recurring issue where flight scheduling isn't certain until the plane is actually here, so you'll probably need to prepare it for several days if you want to definitely have it on the day of your flight. Does Iomedae also grant anti-nausea spells?"

"There is Remove Sickness at first circle. It will last less than an hour."

"If you have room for it, one for takeoff and one for landing might not be amiss, those are times when flights are particularly turbulent."

Nod.

"If there is a really serious problem, the kind that's very rare, the plane may make an emergency landing in the water or a field or such. If it does this, we will need to leave the plane immediately, because once it lands in conditions like that it's likely to start burning or sinking. The usual advice for this is to not stop to grab personal possessions. We really don't want you to lose your spell page, so if you could tuck it under your shirt or such so that grabbing it won't take any time in this scenario, that would be nice. We can put it in a watertight bag or such. If we do a water landing, there will probably be time for you to put on a flotation vest – that's a vest full of air – first, and the plane will probably release inflatable rafts. If you get out of a plane after an emergency landing you should not go back in for other people. …Unless the pilot thinks it's a good idea for some reason, I suppose."

"I can prepare a Communal Water Walk... Will the vest work even if I am wearing my armor? Why should I not go back in for other people?"

"I don't know if the usual vest will work, but we can weigh you in and out of armor and tell them to have something around that will. Regarding you not going back in: a plane situation can get worse fast, and you in particular staying alive is high-priority."

"The armor weighs forty pounds. The gambeson probably picks up a lot of weight if I go underwater."

"We can weigh you soaking wet? Or you can take it off on the plane."

"Well, it's magic, so I'd rather not lose it, even if it's of lesser interest to other people than the spellbook page."

"I would expect it to be possible to rig up a better flotation device for your use case, it's not like we need to cheaply fit a hundred of them under everyone's chairs. And maybe get you a better gambeson, if that's of interest."

"I am not attached to mine."

"All right. I'll pass that along. Oh, and it might make sense to bring the second-circle repair spell you mentioned, just in case?"

"...the plane we saw was too big for me to land a Make Whole on it."

"Oh. What are the constraints on that spell?"

"It can handle a lot more than a Mending and scales with power like most things do, in this case by volume. I might be able to make it work on one of the trucks, I'm not sure because I don't have a lot of practice eyeballing that; the plane was too large by a long shot."

"Can it target a specific region of a larger machine, or no?"

"If it's not - integrally attached, I expect. You might have to disconnect and reinstall something."

"Hmm. Might still be good to have as an option, I don't know."

"Understood."

"That's everything I wanted to bring up, but if you have any questions ask away."

"How tight will the schedule be, if I see something confusing will I have an opportunity to inquire about it or should I proceed regardless?"

"There will be time for you to ask quick questions but probably not enough for us to have an entire long sit-down discussion. Oh, also. As with the last flight, timing depends on weather conditions. We announce when a flight departs for the base, but sometimes even after a flight departs it has to turn around for safety. The first passenger flight through here should bring in my replacement, and we'll see if it can also bring in a replacement gambeson for you, and then hopefully we'll take the flight after that."

"Understood. I don't think I have further questions."

"Great."

When it comes, the first flight in fact brings Chris's replacement, a resupply of fresh food, and a gambeson, red with white trim and made from strange fabrics.

It's lovely, does it also fit?

Pretty much exactly as well as his other one does, since it's built to measurements from it.

Great. And if it's a little thinner or anything like that then at least the armor's magic and will resize.

It is a bit squeakier but not noticeably so when one is also wearing chainmail.

Maybe it'll break in and stop squeaking after he's worn it more, and at any rate he is not generally trying to be sneaky.

The base now has more fresh fruit and a round of better-looking scrambled eggs for "winterovers only" (a group which apparently includes Blai), some new people, and a more available Chris again.

Blai likes scrambled eggs!

These ones don't taste weird!

Yay!

This is the part where they wait a lot for the weather to improve. This is a thing he is qualified to do, just like going out in the cold to follow rules there.

It is perhaps not what other people are highly qualified in, they seem pretty dismayed by cancelled flights.

Relatedly, Blai has been invited to movie showings and to come have drinks, none of which Chris would actually recommend. None of this actually has any bearing on the airplane situation but people get prone to halfway believing false things.

Blai is familiar with the concept of alcohol and does not generally partake! He started trading away his alcohol ration for extra dried fruit almost immediately upon being deployed to the Wound! If everybody is very bored they could have a Tears to Wine party instead?

"The, er, theory is that if they're hungover and flying would be unpleasant then it's more likely to occur, I don't know if Tears to Wine does that."

"...no, it does not do that."

"There's a reason I'm not actually suggesting you go and I don't think you should actually switch away from your flight spell list for this."

Blai nods. He will watch some movies, though, they're decent for English practice and cultural exposure.

This one has not been selected for being about chess or any modern country and instead has a green guy as the protagonist. It also maybe has something weird instead of actors.

That's really weird! Also the green guy has an odd accent Blai hasn't heard other examples of, which is hard to follow. The baseline nonviolence level between the human civilization and the adjacent monsters is also really weird. They wanted to use the swamp for something and did not kill the ogre to get it uncontested? They wanted rid of all the creatures and they just... moved them? The princess rescue plot and its subversion land fine though.

Well, it's good that some of it translates.

He's maybe slightly uncomfortable about the entire concept of a romance plot but not in a way where anyone should be able to tell.

In addition to Blai being Chelish, he's also in a dark room with people looking at a screen. Nobody notices.

Great, all according to plan.

Unfortunately it turns out that watching a movie does not actually summon good weather conditions and the next flight turns around before reaching the Pole.

"We call that a 'boomerang', referring to a thrown tool designed to return to the thrower, I don't know if Golarion has those."

"I don't know about everything that Golarion has, but I haven't heard of it."

"They don't require any of our recent technological developments so I wouldn't be surprised if Golarion had them. You will not have any practical reason to use one but if you decide you would like one to play with you can get one later."

"What is the boomerang meant to accomplish?"

"I think historically they've been used for hunting."

"Huh. There are weapons that return when thrown by magic..."

"I think a boomerang just interacts with the air correctly, people just carve them out of wood. But if it's secretly magic I suppose we wouldn't know, we can see if you detect magic on one sometime."

"Certainly. Are there other plausibly magical things?"

"Plausible to whom? I've been assuming that you've looked at anything that seemed plausibly magic to you on the base already by now."

"Nothing on the base is magical unless it's hidden away."

"In general serious people who've thought about it don't tend to think things are magic."

He pokes at his phone.

"Okay, the list of unsolved problems in physics is not very helpful here. We don't have a good model for predicting the exact details of how water flows in chaotic environments like rivers but if literally every river were magic you would already know this because Golarion also has rivers. There's an unexplained way of producing light by playing really really loud sounds in liquids?"

"Sometimes people think ghosts are real and haunt houses, or that fairies are real and interact with circles of mushrooms, or that various people who aren't you can heal people by conducting religious services, or such."

"Golarion has ghosts and fairies but that does not mean that Earth has," says Blai.

"It is probably not the best use of your time to go look at miscellaneous places people think are magic when you could be healing or stabilizing people and working with people to try and figure out wizard magic, but it would probably be doable."

"No, I agree. It would just be odd if boomerangs were magic and nothing else was, and you suggested they might."

"Oh. I thought you were suggesting it."

"Not at all, the enchantment I was thinking of can equally well be applied to any throwing weapon. Daggers, spears."

"Ah. We in fact don't have returning versions of those."

Nod.

As it turns out, the real secret to producing good flight conditions is to have a conversation in which both parties think the other one is proposing the hypothesis that boomerangs are magic.

Blai and Chris and some other people should board a plane.

Okay! He has mentally rehearsed this and several contingency plans over and over! He gets on the plane without further ado.

Takeoff presses him into the back of his seat, as expected. Chris dangles a weight on a string and it tilts.

"You may want to look out the window periodically, it's a pretty different view than you get from the ground."

Okay he will OH wow they are high up and getting moreso.

The ice slowly transitions from a featureless sheet to mountains.

Did anyone notify him in advance about airsickness bags?

Yes, there's an obvious one in reach and he's been told how to use it. (And ginger candy was also provided.)

He makes use of the bag and then... gingerly... assays the candy.

"I can help you get that bag sealed up for disposal, and you might want to drink a bit of water to clean out your mouth."

Blai nods and closes up the bag as directed, creates himself some water and sips it, has more candy.

"You're doing pretty well for your first flight. The long flight back to the States should be on a bigger plane, which will help with turbulence."

"That does sound better."

"I wouldn't recommend anything that would keep your attention away from the window, I hear seeing the motion helps, but we could play some recorded music or … oh, hey, someone picked up some recordings of people reading books with chess aloud."

"...I don't know if I'm good enough to hold a game in my head based on just hearing the moves named but I suppose practice would only help."

"I was thinking we could start with this history of names for chess openings, which presumably wouldn't involve keeping an entire game in your head?"

"That sounds good."

The audiobook opens with a brief anecdote about a woman overhearing her husband's cryptic phone discussions and noticing an uptick in suspiciously timed allegedly work-related travel, following him, and determining that he's playing chess. (It didn't actually happen.) The book apparently will not contain deep technical analysis. It's been written on the theory that knowing the meaning and history behind opening names will make chess more fun and memorable. It is also not intended to be encyclopedic.

The first opening they discuss is named after a Spanish priest, who also wrote an early book about chess.

Well he doesn't approve of claiming to do work travel when you are actually playing chess but no one asked him.

"The implication of that joke is that the man appeared to be having sex with people besides his wife, but ultimately wasn't."

"...I suppose lying and also straying is strictly worse than doing only one of those but it's not very funny."

"That's fair. If you'd like we can pick a different book, the foreword was by a different author than the rest of the book but it plausibly still reflects the main writer's sense of humor?"

"If we're not likely to run out, yes."

"I'm sure we can pick up more chess audiobooks before the long flight, I think someone just looked at a list of twelve books and got all of them. Including 'How to Play Chess for Children'. 'The Immortal Game' is about the origins of chess?"

"- well, it seems difficult for it to be accurate about the origins of chess since whatever its history it has to have appeared on two planets at least, but it might be interesting anyway."

"I assume it's based on our best understanding of the history of chess on Earth."

Nod.

This book also opens with someone playing chess irresponsibly, when the city they rule is under attack, but at least it doesn't frame this as a light joke?

It's not like he can't imagine being tempted but it's really such a decision.

The ruler was captured and beheaded but chess continued being popular with his successors.

Did they learn from his fatal error?

The book doesn't comment on that. It does seem to theorize that possibly he knew he was losing and would rather have gotten a chess game in before he died than not.

Hardly seems like the time if you might conceivably have fallen short of paradise but perhaps he was very sure he hadn't.

"I don't actually know the details of what people think is necessary to go to paradise in Islam."

"I suppose perhaps either he was sure that he'd made it or had been informed convincingly that it was not possible. Or he wasn't very bright, that's always also possible."

Chris shrugs.

There are many other games which were popular for a while and then died out. A long list of names which are probably not very recognizable to Blai have all played chess. The author himself became interested in chess after hearing that his great-great-grandfather was a chess master.

Is "master" a formal rank of some kind? How do you determine this if not by analyzing the topology of what spells you can cast, does it wind up more like having an archery contest or something.

"It sounds like a formal rank but I'd guess it's been defined differently by different organizations and, yes, more like an archery competition. Like how people get called 'world champion' if they win in a big international competition league."

Interesting. Blai is obviously nowhere near that good, alas.

"Anyone sensible would probably call you the world's best magic user but, well, you've seen the competition."

"I understand it not to be a contested position," he agrees.

"No serious competition, anyway. Though if I said 'magician' it would be a term shared with a lot of people who do performances designed to seem physically implausible through means like sleight of hand."

"I suppose that couldn't become popular on Golarion, considering."

"Because people can detect real magic?"

"Oh, most people can't, it would just be... the obvious assumption if someone did something that looked like magic, would be that it was."

"If someone was seemingly taking rabbits out of hats and guessing what cards people picked and turning cloth into candies and such, would that still be part of viable entertainment in Golarion?"

"I haven't... gone to a lot of entertainment shows. I suppose it would not be very much more confusing than people watching chariot races if I heard that this was popular somewhere."

"That's fair. Shall we play more of the audiobook?"

Nod.

Sometimes people see chess as a form of mental combat. There have been a surprising number of historic attempts at banning or restricting chess.

Huh. On what grounds? He can try to use the list to reconstruct whether Iomedae might hate chess.

The book unfortunately does not go into that.

Alas.

The book has a lot of chess history and, especially with all the pauses, is not over by the time the plane descends for landing.

Good thing Blai hasn't eaten anything since they took off!