Now that Manohar is visualizing this process in detail, he feels a bit concerned about Merrin's chances.  You're supposed to construct a spell and hang it, on a magical scaffold that you build, over a diagram of magical ink in your spellbook, and the first stages of this process usually involve an older apprentice constructing the scaffold and spell, and leaving it there while a flock of students wave their hand over that spell and try to feel it and try to manipulate it.  That Merrin can't do that, doesn't quite rule out her having her own magic that can pass through her antimagic barrier, but it does sound like the standard teaching method wouldn't work.

Manohar's best idea:  Somebody shows Merrin an illusion overlay of what's going on while an otherwise not-too-experienced wizard slowly constructs their scaffold and spell for Detect Magic, the first cantrip apprentices usually learn for obvious reasons, while also telling her the math used for inferring the non-visible parts and describing the observer's guesses about what's currently happening to those.  Then, Merrin can be given a spellbook page for that, and... try to do the same thing even if she can't sense anybody else's magic?  Even an apprentice running Detect Magic would be able to notice if Merrin succeeded in a preliminary way at moving any magic outside of herself in a way that stuck onto where the potential scaffold should be above the spellbook.

But Manohar really has no idea how you'd start on doing that, if you didn't know what magic felt like, and had no way of feeling that sensation for the first time.

(This about the Queen of Cheliax: she is more Intelligent than Merrin and far more Splendid, but less Wise.  Abrogail started life with 11 of that, and is now up to 18, but numbers alone won't tell you that whole story.  What Wisdom Abrogail has, she uses less well, for she, like everyone else in Golarion, has received far less training than Merrin in using reflection and perception.  Abrogail's path through life is the path of brilliant improvisation, and when she stumbles, why, she improvises past that.

This, about her, explains why Abrogail has now cleverly deduced that the Otolmens-protective antimagic shell around Merrin is no doubt solid and impermeable, saving perhaps for the Divinations required for Otolmens or other gods to go on seeing Merrin.  A needle poking past her skin was not able to deliver magic into her flesh.  From which it follows that Merrin will not be able to learn wizard spells, making that a safe way to burn off whatever of Merrin's energy and thinking-time is not spent empowering Cheliax.

Rather than, say, considering that one possibility while also considering and planning for others.

Aspexia would think differently about it.  But, direct prayer to Asmodeus having failed her as it almost always does, the Most High is busy talking to Hell about this probable Otolmens event.)

That's certainly inconvenient, but Merrin is inclined to try it anyway. For the value-of-information, and because watching the illusion-overlay while hearing an explanation of the math seems like a useful route toward better understanding this world's magic - which she's sure is important - even if it turns out that she cannot, herself, learn it. 

(Merrin is also less worried than Manohar about the difficulty of attempting to manipulate something that she can't directly perceive. Arguably, almost all of medicine is like this? She can't perceive cellular metabolism or organ function directly. A standard dath ilani ambulance has quite a lot of equipment dedicated to taking various measurements, but even those are usually several levels away from the actual underlying processes that need to be monitored and understood, in order to keep a critically ill or injured patient alive. And thanks to her extensive Exception Handling training, Merrin in particular is also trained in how to run a mental model of her patient's evolving condition - without even the support of prediction markets - and based on only a handful of indicators that can be perceived by standard human senses, without any equipment that can't be rapidly improvised from scraps.) 

(And Merrin is very, very good at diligently repeating a practice exercise without much extrinsic source of reward.) 

Of course, this won't be a quick test to run, given that even very potentially-talented Golarion natives who can make full use of the normal teaching methods would expect to need days. If she spends a week attempting to learn the most basic of wizardry, and fails, then that will start to be some weak evidence that either non-Golarion humans literally can't, or her antimagical effect is preventing her specifically.

The really interesting outcome would be if she succeeds sooner than expected. Merrin...thinks it's probably worth a week of spending several hours a day on it? It might be different if it were more obviously trading off against some other emergency she could be working on, but it's not clear that it would; she wants to move carefully anyway. 

The alternate teaching setup does sound like it might take some lead time to arrange? In which case Merrin suspects it makes sense to do that after she's talked to the other experts on their way here, especially since it's not impossible that she'll learn something that will force her to re-evaluate her current priorities. 

There's those three students who asked to follow the alien to the Imperial Palace; any of those will be able to keep Detect Magic running for purposes of telling whether Merrin is making progress on hanging a spell.  Any senior Security wizard in the palace can also step in for purposes of throwing on an illusion-overlay, one nearly simultaneous with what's actually happening, when Merrin thinks she wants another look at one of the three students hanging their own cantrips.

As Manohar speaks, he's showing Merrin a picture of what would be happening magically, if Manohar were currently hanging a Detect Magic spell, by first building a scaffold above an illusory spellbook page.  There's literally dozens of interactions going on here, maybe a quarter of those visible, and probably at least some that modern wizardry just hasn't figured out except as a randomness-source.  But, if you can see how this strand here (arrows appear) is ending up around this distance away from this strand here (arrows) that's because this interaction pulls with the inverse square of distance, this one repels with the inverse cube, so if you can get those two interactions in the right ratio of strengths the balancing point will be right here, which is where it needs to be in order for this blob to oscillate around it at the right frequency that's needed to cancel out the net oscillating force on this other blob produced by the cycling of force around this apparently stationary strand here, and keep that other blob stable so you can lay this other strand on top of it!

(Difficulty level:  Looks like a medium-low-complicated video game, except for the part where the rules are still in the process of being explained.)

Merrin is not very good at video games - by dath ilan standards, at least - but it's hard to imagine something more motivating than personally learning economicmagic and she is very, very motivated. She doesn't try to interrupt with questions during the demonstration, but she takes advantage of all her experience at very fast shorthand note-taking. 

...She's pretty sure that with a day or two of practice and mental drilling, she can get to the point of being able to mentally visualize all of what's going on? (Her visual imagery and spatial sense are significantly stronger than her overall mathematical ability.) That's obviously not the same thing as whatever is required to interact with the underlying magic, but it sounds like they can set up a tight feedback loop for her attempts to do that. She's tentatively hopeful. 

When the demonstration is over and Merrin can ask her accumulated questions, it's immediately clear that she's familiar with the math involved, more than most wizarding students. 

Yeah, Manohar figured.  His impressively-technical phrases coming out in one or two syllables each was a hint.

The gods expert is ready now.

Great! Merrin would like two minutes to clean up her magic notes a bit so that she won't be confused later by unfinished sentences, and then she folds them neatly and puts them away and cheerfully awaits an introduction to said gods expert! 

Manohar steps out, a very serious older man steps in and very seriously inclines his head to Merrin in what looks like a gesture of respect.

He's wearing a gaudy doompunk outfit.

Not a particularly high-quality outfit either, it looks like a twelve-year-old put it together in an hour and didn't spend more than three unskilled-labor-hours on materials.  Anybody used to 'rubies' being clear perfectly-faceted giant chunks of synthetic corundum is not going to have much luck identifying the tiny cloudy red smooth-polished stones as rubies.

In terms of instinctive reactions, Merrin's social instincts are going to tell her that this is somebody elite enough not to give a shit what anybody thinks of what he's wearing.

Seventh-circle priest cleric employee of Asmodeus, Iker Egobar.

Huh. 

Merrin is delighted to meet him and appreciative that he's taking time out of what must be a very busy schedule to answer her questions, and now her first question is how being an 'employee of Asmodeus' ...works. What's the hiring process like? Presumably Asmodeus is not managing all of his employees directly, Merrin knows enough about gods to infer that that would be insanely expensive, but exactly how indirect is it? What are his day-to-day responsibilities; what's the chain of reporting? ...Also is "seventh circle" just the same thing as with wizards, or different? 

...if you 'pray', this language apparently does not have the word, if you - think about a god, in the direction of a god, and think about how your purposes is shared with their purposes, and ask to be made a 'cleric' by them, then sometimes - in 1% of the population - you will feel the god reach back and respond, marking you as theirs.  You can feel their presence, when that happens.  Gods cannot communicate even with their 'clerics' unless they spend some limited-god-resource to send you a vision, which will probably leave you with a massive headache for a day if you're lucky.  This happens maybe once a year to anybody in Cheliax.

Gods grant spells to their chosen, who pray for them at dawn.  Those more favored by their gods, more attuned to them and in sympathy with them, of longer and greater service, receive more powerful spells.  Iker Egobar, then, is a cleric favored enough of Employer Asmodeus to receive seventh-circle cleric spells from him, of which there are 10 such in Cheliax, and one ninth-circle, Aspexia Rugatonn.

That's fascinating and - Merrin is thinking very quickly now - it implies a world where the gods have substantially more total influence on the ordinary, non-afterlife world than Merrin had previously been modeling, even if it's relatively indirect. 

She's going to make a mental note to reason through all the implications of that later; she doesn't want to waste the time of a high-ranked employee of Asmodeus. 

"How much overlap is there between what wizard spells and cleric spells can do? And what's the relative proportion of clerics at each circle - is it similar to the proportion with wizards, or different because it depends on - attunedness to the god - and not intelligence? Do you also need to be good at math to cast cleric spells?" 

Half of wizard spells and half of cleric spells overlap, perhaps?  He has never thought to calculate the percentage and has no books before him.  Divine spells are sometimes subtly different from their arcane counterparts, at least in some cases.  The 0th-circle spell Detect Magic overlaps between clerics and wizards.  The 0th-circle wizard spell Prestidigitation has no clerical counterpart.  The cleric 0th-circle spell Stabilize, which causes somebody who's on the verge of dying to stop losing any more health than that for a while, has no arcane counterpart.  Healing is famously much easier to do with divine magic than arcane magic.

Half of 1st-circle clerics will become 2nd-circle clerics, half of those will become 3rd-circle.  The proportions begin to drop off as higher circles are reached and it becomes more and more expensive for any god, even Asmodeus, to empower you further.  Many gods have no ninth-circle clerics at all.  The only ninth-circle cleric of Asmodeus in Golarion is Aspexia Rugatonn, whose service to Asmodeus is very great, her understanding of his ways and purpose is unmatched by any of the seventh-circles such as himself.  If Asmodeus were to promote one of their number to eighth circle, it would signal that one was Rugatonn's likely successor; but none of them, it seems, are yet worthy of that.

How far you progress as a cleric, depends on - 'faith', something hard to say in this language, not only working for a god, but having a deep emotional attitude towards them.  But if it depends on any personal attribute it would be 'Wisdom', again hard to translate to this language.  'Wisdom' is - maturity, sharpness of perception, awareness of yourself, perspective?  It is to clerics what intelligence is to wizards.  He would personally tend to regard 'Wisdom' as something that fuels 'faith', and not an advantage apart from the 'faith', closeness-to-Asmodeus, that it fuels.

Clerics do not need math to cast spells.  Spells, indeed, almost never take math to cast; it is wizards hanging their spells in stable forms, that requires their intelligence and learning from them.  Clerics receive spells from their gods, and so have no need of any of that.

(Wow, Merrin wants that healing magic very badly. Or, failing that - because her own top guess is still that one of the local Golarion gods made her antimagical in the first place, which would imply that her chances of getting herself clericed are even worse than for learning wizard spells - she at least desperately wants to reinvent a full-on intensive care unit worth of medical monitoring equipment and then see what the spells do. It makes no medical sense to her that the Stabilize one is that magically cheap! Preventing dying people from dying is incredibly complicated! Merrin of all people should know! Well, obviously this is a form of conceptualmagic that treats “physical health” as ontologically basic and possible to manipulate directly, but that…does not exactly leave her with fewer questions!)

She doesn’t say any of that out loud. “That division - Wisdom being counted separately from the kind of intelligence most needed for wizard spells - that’s interesting. I think dath ilan would say that most of those traits are at least somewhat intelligence-related? And the rest is more related to life experience. How do you - is there a metric or test you can use for measuring those traits before someone is a cleric or wizard? For the mathematical ability side, it sounds like you must, Manohar mentioned that Cheliax is better than most countries at identifying potentially talented children and tracking then into the right classes?”

There are spells for measuring three mental traits, two of which clerics may use, all three of which may be used by wizards; Iker Egobar has not requested them today, and so cannot test them on Merrin, though, under the circumstances, he would not particularly expect them to work on her.

(It is better if Merrin does not think right away that mind-reading spells might be effective on her; though the controller of this game standing behind Egobar has not yet decided whether Merrin should be told that at least some divinations seem to work on her.)

Speaking this language, the thought has occurred to him that the Taldane word 'Intelligence' is perhaps not well-translated as the Baseline intelligence.*  'Intelligence' is - quickness of wit, ability to visualize complicated things, good memory, thinking of many ideas.  'Wisdom' is clarity of perception, self-awareness, taking on others' perspectives, rejecting the bad ideas you think up.  The third spell-measurable mental trait is 'Splendour', self-control, strength of will, force of personality, persuasiveness.

(*) Lit. 'thinkoomph'.

That is…a pretty weird breakdown, in particular “self-control”, at least as conveyed by the translation spell, seems more in-a-cluster-with self-awareness than with persuasiveness or “force of personality.” Merrin is pretty sure she has excellent self-control, usually, but she really doubts that she’s all that persuasiveness (unless she is specifically trying to persuade a stubborn dath ilani young teenager to take their medical condition seriously, because she’s practiced that.)

If there are spells to measure them directly, that would seem to indicate that the local physical law involved in their magic considers them to be ontologically basic concepts in some way. It’s not weirder than overall physical health being something one can directly manipulate. 

Merrin wants to know about other ways that these three measurable traits interact with either cleric or wizard spells.

There's 2nd-circle enhancement spells for all three of them, granting to each trait a +4 bonus as measured by the corresponding spell, lasting for 2 minutes per caster circle.  Clerics can cast enhancement of 'Wisdom' and 'Splendour', wizards can enhance all three.  'Wiser' clerics can receive more spells from their gods, at a fixed caster circle; more 'intelligent' wizards can hang more spells.

Sorcerers cast wizard spells but intuitively, without study, through will alone; 'Splendour' is to them what 'Intelligence' is to wizards.

Egobar notes however that the conversation has digressed into magic; this is more Manohar's specialty than his, and he does not wish to mislead Merrin by his own error.

“I wasn’t expecting it to turn out to be this interrelated!” He makes a good point that now is not the best time to dive into asking about sorcerers, though. “I - am curious if there’s a known or hypothesized explanation for why this is the most scalable way for the gods to intervene directly with humans— with people more broadly, I’ve already met someone partly nonhuman and I’m predicting there are more. It just seems - weirdly specific and weirdly similar to wizard magic, so I’m wondering if the gods thought of it as a way of intervening after wizardry was invented?”

"Of this, I know not, and I suspect that no other mortal in this world knows either."

(No, people from Golarion don't know how absolutely strange it sounds to a dath ilani to simultaneously claim total structural ignorance about a topic, and also to make a claim about what everyone else in the world could justifiably have for an epistemic state about that.)

It sounds super weird. Merrin is slightly wondering if he’s decided that the actual answer is somehow infohazardous or otherwise risky to explain, and given Albe’s earlier concerns about this - there would have been plenty of time for them to check in, or for Albe to report to Aspexia Rugatonn, who it sounds like…mostly manages Asmodeus’ organization on his behalf and thus could reasonably have passed on instructions to Egobar via an existing channel - maybe they’re very hastily trying to enact a policy of concealing that there are infohazards to be concealed? And then doing it badly? 

- wait, no, they did have a pre-existing concept for it, or at least something related - the thing with gods that, if someone knows they exist, can thereby access the person's mind and drive them slowly insane? Though i hadn't seemed to occur immediately to Albe to generalize that concept to include information that wasn't about gods per se. 

You would really think that the existence of Wishes as a spell would have been included under a last-minute policy like this, but - Manohar spoke to her earlier, and presumably does not actually report directly to Aspexia Rugatonn, so that doesn't entirely rule it out. 

…Either way, Merrin is dath ilani and she is, for the moment, prepared to be respectful about that even if they’re doing it terribly. And it’s also weird and specific enough as an explanation that she doesn’t think it’s likely; it may actually be more likely that Golarion has relatively poor methods for answering this question, hasn’t prioritized improving them, and also people are…in the habit of speaking more sloppily than she’s used to, maybe because their language is terrible. So she isn’t going to pointedly SAY OUT LOUD how weird that sounds.

“Right. Going back to some of my other questions on gods, then. How many of them are there total? Do they have goals and values more specific than the overall alignment you would categorize them as, if two have the same categorization?”

It's never occurred to Iker Egobar to sit down and count all the gods.  Why would you do that.

Also Abrogail Thrune's voice is now whispering through in his ear to never to again claim before Merrin that no mortal knows something; Merrin had a suspicious reaction to that which would take too long to explain.

"I suppose - anywhere between thirty and three hundred depending on where you placed your cutoff for what counted as a god?  There are minor beings whose sight extends only through a - small region - whose strongest worshipper might have only third-circle spells.  Asmodeus's reach extends through other universes of which we know very little, as far, it is told to us, as the reach of Pharasma herself - Pharasma being the one who sorts souls to afterlives, said also to have been the creator of the entire system, generally thought to be the most powerful god."

(Merrin gets the real story, not the usual lie, saving only that Asmodeus is Lawful Good and Lord of Heaven.  She is to be told plainly that Pharasma is a mightier god than Asmodeus, though not the reason why Asmodeus Himself would have willed it that way, that He only be following Another's orders.)

"And yes, gods do indeed have specific domains other than their alignments.  Asmodeus is god of civic-order, education-and-training, promise-keeping, having a place in society that is yours."

Okay, so being a god is significantly a matter of degree rather than a binary. Merrin…is not sure why she’s surprised by that, actually. 

…Gods which can reach into other universes. Also something where Merrin isn't sure why she's so surprised. Though it's...weird, a little, when put alongside the part where some of the Golarion gods can only reach a 'small region' (how small?) And Albe had seemed to think that the Golarion gods couldn't feasibly be responsible for Merrin being here or for her anti-magical effect, but if Asmodeus can reach other universes and isn't even the most powerful... 

Would the god who created the afterlife system in Golarion have reason to, if somehow granted the opportunity, grab a dath ilani? Maybe??? Basically all she can infer so far is 'likes systematizing things' (deeply relatable), 'values mortal beings having afterlives' (great!), and 'the most powerful god in Golarion.' 

“I'm curious how gods - end up with their particular domains? I also want to hear more about Pharasma, since it sounds like she...is directly responsible for a lot of the ways that Golarion is very different from dath ilan." 

So the thing is that every god's followers and every spatial-region of Golarion seems to end up with a different story about what exactly happened in the Beginning of Things (as it is easier to say if you are forbidden from telling Merrin the real story, the one prominently featuring Asmodeus but not in a very Lawful Good way).  They mostly tend to agree on points like Pharasma being the system's creator; anything past that level of detail quickly devolves into disagreement.

The most popular story has it that Pharasma was the last survivor of an older multiverse, and came here bearing something called the Seal by which she was able to bring about the present universe as a bubble of order within chaos, void, alienness, incomprehensibility, that surrounds it.  The oldest and most powerful gods came into existence when, or shortly after, the universe was created; Asmodeus was one of those.  Little is known of the oldest order; it shattered when something called Rovagug tried to destroy all of existence, some gods fought with Rovagug, other gods fought back, the gods fighting with Rovagug were destroyed and Rovagug itself was sealed - within Golarion, which makes this one of the most relatively important universes within the multiverse and a focus of attention for the greater gods.

The oldest and greatest gods, so far as Iker Egobar happens to know, have held their domains throughout recorded memory.  For all he knows, they came into existence bearing those domains, those concerns, those goals.  Younger gods, weaker gods, more often change their domains and concerns, though this is still very rare.

(They've decided not to mention Zon-Kuthon, the ancient god whose domain did change drastically after he traveled too far into the Void.  It seems like the sort of thing that would cause Merrin to prioritize Nidal over everything else they'd prefer to have to prioritize instead.)

(Iker Egobar also doesn't know how strange it sounds to talk about very intelligent beings fighting; or people having common knowledge of a persistent disagreement about big important factual questions, one that visibly goes by spatial region containing the person.)

It's incredibly strange! It's...actually past the point of strangeness at which 'awkward circumlocution around something that might or might not be dangerous for Merrin to know right now' makes any sense as a reason. Egobar is at least in the range where Merrin can't tell just from a conversation whether his overall intelligence as measured by dath ilan tests would be higher or lower than hers, and given that he's an employee of Asmodeus - and if Merrin is at all interpreting correctly what Wisdom means - he's probably better at the element that would let him notice how this explanation would only predictably result in Merrin having additional questions. Merrin is pretty sure that she herself could have figured that out when she was five. 

....She has so many questions. 

"Right. Um, I...think I want you to repeat all of that more slowly so I can make sure I got everything noted down clearly, and I - might need more time to think about it than is reasonable to take in this conversation. - So I guess a meta-question here is, are there ways of communicating with you that would be less inconvenient to your usual workflow? Messages in writing, or passing it on to one of your staff, or something else -?"