"Is that so?" she says. "Where are you from, then? Does it differ from Golarion in fundamental ways – the strength of gravity, perhaps. or the ease of using magic?"

They can read people's thoughts?!

... later. Tanya tries to compose herself.

"I'm from the nation Germania on a planet we call Earth." That is presumably not helpful, and it's going through the translation spell besides. "We're not in contact with Golarion or any other planets, and humans are the only sapient species. ...I say 'human', but I suppose it's possible that I merely look the same as Golarion's humans and there's some biological difference we haven't found yet."

"The strength of gravity on Golarion is the same or almost the same as on Earth. I have a spell that interacts with gravity, which incidentally lets me measure its strength, and it's the same as I'd expect at this latitude to within one part in a thousand. ...on Earth the gravity differs between the poles and the equator, about half a percent's worth." If you know Tanya is from another planet, the only reason to ask if it has the same gravity is that you know most (all?) populated worlds are Earths. But she'll let Setareh say it instead of prejudicing the investigation.

"And I haven't noticed anything different about my magic but I don't have any special instruments for measuring that." Magic didn't exist on Tanya's first Earth. Does this one have different underlying laws of magic and not just different technology? Tanya's lucky that her spells are working as designed!

"You're from the planet Earth?" Setareh asks sharply. "Earth is a sphere with a finite area, large enough for at least two countries?"

That would be quite something. How would a calling spell bring someone to Golarion from another planet on the Material Plane? Unless Earth isn't on the Material Plane at all…

"And you say that humans are the only sapient species – was this always the case, or were there other sapient species in Earth's past which have since gone extinct?"

"Earth is approximately a sphere." What else would it be? Is she hedging against mistranslation? "One of several orbiting a star, in a galaxy of other similar stars. With a large moon orbiting Earth. The constellations in the night sky are different, obviously." Tanya hasn't seen the local moon yet, if there is one.

"Humans are the only sapient species now. There was another, closely related species, that went extinct tens of thousands of years ago, long before recorded history; we found their skeletons and artifacts. So it's possible that there were others that went extinct long enough ago that none of their tools or artifacts survived."

If she didn't before then she does now! If this isn't an elaborate joke at her expense it's a fascinating mystery waiting to be solved.

"I accept. I'll prepare my spells now; come back in an hour and I'll find you someone. Bring the device responsible for the calling, if it still exists."

"It was presumably in the wizard's tower in Shiman-Sekh. The owner hasn't been heard from in years, and now the tower has been damaged so the device, if one existed, might have been damaged or destroyed too. Iomedae, do you know if there's a prospect of identifying and recovering it if it's still there? I also want to find out whether the spell will send me back, eventually or conditionally, and what the trigger is if any. The 'how' is important in case it could be repeated, in either direction."

"Unlikely. In the event that it was not damaged by… everything else, I cannot imagine such an item had more than one charge. We can arrange for a Teleport to Mahveen's tower if the outsider so desires but they should not expect anything useful there. I am most hopeful for an investigation of your person to yield the answer."

"Understood. I'll talk to you soon." And she leaves to prepare her spells for the day.

Iomedae gives Tanya an inscrutable look, then shakes her head.

"Does coffee constitute breakfast for you? There is a café near here we can wait at."

"Coffee is an essential part of a proper breakfast," Tanya confirms. "Well, some people prefer tea and I don't mean to disparage them" unless it's Commonwealth black tea with milk in it, "but I'm glad to have found myself in a coffee culture." What a considerate host! Of course they're buttering Tanya up for the prospect of trade with Earth, but she is allowed to appreciate their efforts! Ah, the diplomat's life is so much better than the soldier's.

It's close enough that Iomedae isn't going to burn another Fly on getting there. She doesn't need sight to know what's going on in her environment, but it looks like Tanya does, so she'll light the way if Tanya doesn't do it first.

Tanya, who claims to be from another planet. A planet with cats and coffee and humans, but no halflings or dragons. How is this possible? Iomedae considers some theories.

0. Tanya is wrong. This preserves the original theory at the cost of being even more absurd: a mage who can fly two miles straight up is perfectly capable of noticing that the horizon exists. Even the most elaborate hoax couldn't convince her of this, unless it was perpetrated by a malicious deity for no discernible reason. That's probably not what's going on.
1. Earth is a planet located on another plane. Iomedae has heard stories about planets like this, but it wouldn't have a sun, moon, and stars like a planet on the Material Plane – even in the Maelstrom, a false galaxy could only persist for so long unless it were illusory. It does make the malicious deity theory slightly more plausible, though.
2. 'Earth' is the endonym of another planet in Golarion's solar system. Admittedly this rules out every planet Iomedae can think of, all of which are populated by at least one species other than humans, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It could be one of Bretheda's moons (but didn't Tanya say Earth has a moon? Would that make it a moonmoon?) or a distant world that has yet to be discovered. It is just barely conceivable that Mahveen came across a doorway to another world and built her tower around the artifact, where it misfired during the attack and grabbed some hapless bystander unfortunate enough to be in the blast radius on the far side.
3. Earth is from another solar system deep in the Dark Tapestry, and Tanya was transported bodily to Golarion by some unfathomably powerful spell or magic item capable of crossing the gulf between stars in an instant. But who could have made such a thing, and why would there be humans on the other end?

Hmm.

"Do you know how old civilization is on Earth?" Iomedae asks. "How far back do your written records go? Do they speak of your earliest cities and states?"

"I'm not a historian so I'm probably wrong about a lot of details." Because the details she remembers mostly come from her original Earth, not the second one. "I think writing was invented around five thousand years ago? Cities existed for - a few thousand years before that, probably. I think agriculture was invented around ten thousand years ago, and before that humans were much fewer and less - sedentary, they lived off the land. What about Golarion?"

"At least four thousand years ago, and probably long before that, Golarion was visited by an alien race called the alghollthu. They came from an ancient watery world in the Dark Tapestry^†, and they colonized Golarion's oceans while dragons still ruled the world. The first and greatest human civilization, the Azlanti Empire, was born from a partnership between human apprentices and alghollthu masters. Azlant was proverbially glorious and decadent, but it was ultimately destroyed by the same ones who raised it up. The reason is unclear – the last emperor claimed they struck with no warning, but his writings are our primary source and his description of events may be selective – but the alghollthus decided to call down a meteor large enough to scour the world clean. The resulting impact destroyed the Azlanti continent and blotted out the sun for generations. Written history is conventionally held to begin three thousand seven hundred and twenty years ago, when the dust settled and the descendants of the survivors planted the first crops in the sunlight again. Much of what we have today is remembered or recovered from before Earthfall, and even that is only a fraction of what was lost."

^† 'Dark Tapestry' is an idiomatic term for outer space beyond the solar system.

A spacefaring race, let alone an interstellar one, can move big things in space. They can, therefore, call in an orbital bombardment scaled to your entire continent. They could end life on the planet, and might have done it if they weren't also leaving on it. Presumably they can still do it today.

None of this is in retrospective surprising; it is entailed by spacefaring technology, Tanya simply hadn't gotten around to having this thought yet. Teleports seem harmless (except for assassinations) but even if your spaceships teleport around you can also teleport asteroids. Orbital velocity and Isaac Newton will do the rest. Even among puny surface-bound humans, who needs artillery when you can just teleport a big enough rock into the right trajectory?

Another thought Tanya hadn't gotten around to thinking: being one of hundreds of sapient species means very likely not being the dominant species anymore. Maybe she should have sided with the dragons she's thrown her lot with the local humans. For now. She is definitely not going to assume anything whatsoever about local politics, or do anything that can be interpreted as being on behalf of Germania while out of contact.

"That sounds terrible," she says once she has somewhat regained her composure. (This is a vapid sort of comment but she can't just say nothing.)

"It was a great tragedy," says Iomedae. "It was also partially unexpected. The alghollthus worked to arrange this attack in utter secrecy, but they could not maintain the veil for long. We know that the emperor pleaded with the aliens to see reason until the very end, and that Azlant's mightiest heroes took to rooting out alghollthu strongholds with fire and sword, and that many of their mages joined a coalition to slow down or deflect the meteor, which might have averted the very worst of outcomes. But Old Azlant was also expansionist, and it maintained colonies all over the world – and elsewhere. I believe, when the end was nigh, that the Azlanti unlocked every door, threw open every gate, and evacuated as many people as possible. We do not know the fate of their extraterritorial colonies, but because Plane Shift ceased to work on Golarion until the end of the Age of Anguish, many of them would have also collapsed after losing contact with the motherland."

Desperate people will try anything to stave off destruction. It's not exactly surprising that fire and swords lost to at-will orbital bombardment. (You can't even use fire when your enemies live in the sea!)

If none of those colonies reestablished contact with Golarion in the thousands of years since, then either they all perished or they had the good sense not to let the alghollthus to know they didn't. The humans here are strictly subservient. How independent they are in practice remains to be seen - wait. "Is Abadar an alghollthu?"

"… almost certainly not? Alghollthus are, not a hive mind, but they share memories like liquids poured over into new vessels, and all of them want the same things, so they cooperate with one another as easily as breathing. I suppose Abadar could be a renegade who rejected their philosophy of subjugation and subterfuge for one of, uh, mutual cooperation between peers and shared prosperity, before his rise to power… no, they were never one and the same. They are fierce enemies even today, and Abadar is among those who attempted to deflect the meteor and prevent Earthfall."

Iomedae is one hundred percent confident that someone would have told her if Abadar was an ascended alghollthu. There is just no way. It's farcical.

A naturally cooperative and unified species! A civilization that cannot ever war upon itself! Did they try to uplift humanity, only to be faced with ineradicable human nature? Tanya laments the chance that didn't bring her to work for an organization staffed by alghollthus. Alas, she doesn't have any spells that would let her breathe underwater.

What is the local coffee like?

For one copper apiece, she can get a cup of frothy black coffee poured from a long-handled copper pot – sugar is optional, as is the row of other spices in pots on the counter that customers can request, none of which are recognizable other than the rock salt. It doesn't taste like arabica or robusta but some secret third coffee species – a good one, judging by the taste. The coffee beans have been pulverized to the consistency of dust, and some of it is still floating in the coffee as she drinks it.

The café is currently empty apart from the two of them, the owner, and a pair of elderly men playing a board game in the corner. Some things never change.

Tanya normally gets her coffee with her morning report, but she used to go to a cafe when she was in War College. Ah, this brings back memories... It was so peaceful in comparison to the years since. She will definitely make sure to reacquire this civilian habit.

She prefers her coffee well filtered and with cream besides the sugar, but she can definitely work with this. The coffee itself really is good! And not just in the sense that it's definitely real coffee and not the ersatz stuff they sometimes had to drink on the eastern front!

Now, any good coffee requires sweets, or at least biscuits. What is on offer?

There are a few different pastries for sale, but hopefully Tanya likes dates because there's only one option for the filling! They're all made from flour that tastes like semolina and have a gritty, crumbly texture. Slightly stale; could use more sugar. There's also regular bread, so fresh it still has steam wafting off the surface and going for twice as much as the pastries.