It feels a little closer to how the gods see Golarion. Part of something much, much vaster.

He's not sure he can get the parallax right on distant skyscrapers, just yet.  He can try that after, if he can maintain concentration.

So now that the starfield apparently works, let's start zooming out.

Not all dath ilani, but more than half, know how to find their way back to dath ilan, if they get lost somewhere inside their galaxy with an extremely fast FTL spaceship, and they know how to find their way back to the Local Galaxy if they're stranded on a larger scale than that.  It's just a cool thing to know how to do.

Keltham has seen enough Zoomout Videos for his illusion of it to be realistic, if the illusion makes it look realistic to him.  He'll run it at a speed where it takes him about two minutes to get to the Local Visible Volume.

"How do they know," Meritxell whispers, very very quietly, half to herself.

Well obviously as soon as you could you'd send your civilization off into the stars, because you could, because there could be Civilization there too - 

Otolmens does not recognize ANY of that and while PARTS of it have reasonable and consistent implied mechanics parts of it do NOT and how would a bunch of mortals get a view of things on THAT scale if they can't CATCH and BACK-INFER FROM incoming photons intercepted well above the atmosphere like She can?

Also that is extremely LARGE for a universe.  It keeps ON zooming out.  Otolmens is glad SHE is not the one who has to MAINTAIN all that.

...why is so much of it MISSING?  That's not GOOD.

Wait.  Is that supposed to be the COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND.   The cosmic microwave background does NOT look like that.  A universe would need to grow VERY ODDLY for a cosmic microwave background to end up looking like THAT.

This person comes from a VERY BROKEN UNIVERSE and its version of Otolmens is either DEAD or VERY SAD and none of this is making Otolmens any LESS WORRIED.

(Good enough to look realistic to Keltham is, perhaps, not quite realitistic.)

"Those slices are missing," Keltham says once the image stops at the end, the famous hourglass shape of what's visible, good he's able to maintain concentration while talking, "because they're obscured by the 'galaxy' around dath ilan.  Where a 'galaxy' is a spiral structure of stars.  The 'galaxy' that dath ilan is inside blocks our view out.  We can't see through our 'galaxy' to the side directions, only out of the top and bottom, if we're trying to see something very very far away."

"So this is all of the universe that we can see using 'telescopes' in 'orbit', high enough up to be far far out of the atmosphere that makes distant stars hard to see from the ground."

"Are we one of those stars," Meritxell says, just as quietly, not sure at all if Keltham was answering her earlier or just talking.

"Golarion's sun?  Probably not.  I'll explain later, don't want to lose concentration."

Keltham starts the zoom-in, now, going faster than on the zoom-out.

As the view goes past the Fourth Planet, Keltham says, "This is the furthest that people from Civilization have ever traveled and survived."  Certain others will be picked up eventually; the odds on saving their True Lives are not ninety-seven percent, but they're over fifty percent, and in a planet of a billion people, somebody will think that's an acceptable risk.

The return journey past the Moon shows, in just a tiny glimpse, a lit section in darkness.  "The Moon colony."

When the view reaches dath ilan, it shows the sun-side, and the view dives in, as the video usually does, to the City of Default.

You can see this particular city starting well above the atmosphere, though you wouldn't see much detail yet from that height even if this illusion was finer than a Silent Image can be.

She doesn't know what Dis would look like from the air. Probably it'd be cool. Probably it wouldn't be that cool.

They're now closer to the ground, going slower.  Things don't look far away, just small, and there's no sense of scale.  There's an island of metal blocks in the center of the image, and then beyond that some kind of grid laid on the ground, but you can't see the fine details of what's inside the grid.

The image is zooming in on the metal blocks in the center.

Maybe those tiny reflective rectangles now visible on the huge metal blocks are glass windows?  If that's true, these metal buildings are something like a hundred stories tall.

Well, this makes sense, because wizards build tall towers, and Nefreti Clepati specifically made a point of building hers slightly taller than the Black Dome, never mind how impossible that was, and probably a richer Civilization would be full of individual people having a tower-measuring contest, and the results would be very tall.

The image seems to be favoring one particular huge metal building.

It goes to one of the windows.

They're inside somebody's house.

In what seems like a very nice, very large, elegantly decorated office.  It's lit by multiple brilliant sconces to something approaching the light of a sunny day.

Within, what's probably meant to be Keltham, seen from behind, is sitting in a chair - it's probably a chair? - and doing something weird with his fingers to something that isn't going to make much more sense if you've never seen a chording keyboard-mouse before.

In front of him is a... flat thingy?

Then the flat thingy shows dath ilan, seen from space, and starts zooming out.

"'Computer.'  Connected to all the rest of Civilization, talk to somebody on the other side of the world, read most books in existence."

Carissa feels like she is being seduced, but seduced to what? This is already what's she's trying to build. And betraying Cheliax wouldn't build it, just prove to Hell that it is not compatible with Asmodeus's ultimate victory.

The view shifts away from Keltham in his chair, goes through a doorway, down a hallway with other open doorways.  They get a glimpse of Keltham's library, his random treasures room, his bathroom larger than many townsfolk's entire homes, complete with vast bathtub, his bedroom - that's probably a bed? - one rather incomprehensible and slightly disturbing glimpse of a dath ilani cuddleroom - a room clearly meant for receiving guests.

"My house module.  It's relatively large for somebody my age, by dath ilani standards, but I spent less money on my hobbies than most people.  It took sixty-seven days per year out of my labor to rent the module, plus twenty-one days per year for the location in Default.  I considered it worth it to not have to figure out how to fit all my stuff and activities into anywhere smaller -"

Keltham loses it.

Just the image, to be clear.  He's not breaking down in tears.  His voice only slightly cracked there.

"How long do you think it'll take from here."

"Hundred years, two hundred?  Or maybe fifty, if you go faster once you get going, because of all the things you can do with magic on top of everything we could do without it."

Ione doesn't have any approved dialogue that matches what she's feeling right now, so she just quietly goes over to where Keltham is standing and sits down next to his feet.  She'll get approval on some of her changed plans later.

No, there's one thing that alterIone absolutely says.  If she doesn't say it, that's suspicious.

"When you leave Golarion, I want to go with you."

"Noted."

"We can talk about that later, sometime."

Carissa suppresses a flicker of annoyance with Ione, notices she's been doing that a lot lately, contemplates how much of that annoyance is jealousy, and decides to figure this out later, maybe with Owl's Wisdom up. 

"Let's do it in forty," she says. 

"While taking Oathdays off at least once a month," says Gregoria, since apparently there's a deficit of people who'll say that sort of thing.

"It's not like digging ditches.  It doesn't necessarily go faster as you work longer hours or take fewer days off, any more than you can save time in the long run by not eating."  (Spoken by someone who's had all info about Rings of Sustenance carefully removed from his environment.)

"Speaking of which, I should get some food," and if they can tell he's also taking a moment to recover, good on their inferential capacities.