Iomedae orders her own coffee with one of the unidentifiable spices in it and uses Prestidigitation to get it boiling again before taking a drink.

"The old Osirian calendar counts years from Earthfall," she adds as an afterthought. "Absalom Reckoning begins with the founding of Absalom, on the site where the meteor came to rest. The most consequential rock in the world."

Fresh bread and figs are a novel combination that turns out to work quite well! With a spread this could be turned into a bigger meal. (Tanya can of course heat her coffee when it cools down; the real miracle of Prestidigitation is cooling things.)

The meteor was so large that it didn't burn up entirely? No wonder it caused a miniature ice age. And now it stands as an eternal reminder, an implicit threat of what might happen if you step so far out of line that the rock is again teleported a hundred miles up. Absalom must be the center of Alghollthu rule on Golarion.

Note to self: do not under any circumstances make the people with orbital bombardment think Germania is doing something they disapprove of!!! Except - whatever it is they don't like, probably someone on Earth is doing it? Hopefully they won't actually care because they don't live there, but it might be produent not to immediately import spacefaring technology to Earth. Hopefully the teleports available to the local humans are still alright for export - oh. Now the earlier talk of 'multilateral export control treaties' on information makes more sense. What a way to ruin the mood, now she can't enjoy the rest of her coffee in peace. She'll ask Nazir about the treaties later; he seems more likely than Iomedae to know if it's really wise to ignore them rather than sign up to them. 

...she was worried about thought-reading earlier, but now that she's had time to think there's a much more innocuous explanation: cats can't talk - well, cat-like mouths probably can't talk, not human languages anyway - but they have telepathic spells here! Thought-reading is probably like that. That still leaves Tanya unable to communicate with any local cat-people, but this presumably applies to all non-mages here, so hopefully it'll be fine?

Tanya still doesn't understand what's going on, what magic or other technology exists and what the results of that are, never mind the hundreds of sapient alien species. She doesn't feel like she can predict what happens next, at the most basic level, and so she can't control it very well either. But she thinks she's starting to get the vague outline of a picture.

"You said there are hundreds of sapient species here. Are they originally from hundreds of different planets? How many planets is Golarion in contact with today?"

"Most originated on Golarion, or at least have been here for so long that their true origin is forgotten. 'In contact with' may be a misleading description; the elves of Kyonin maintain close ties to the elvish nations on Castrovel, but they are secretive about such matters. Many believe that Golarionite elves are outcasts and exiles – they are not. Their decision to return to Golarion after Earthfall was calculated. There are several races common to both Akiton and Golarion, but the doorway to Akiton was old when Azlant was young, so whether the lizardfolk and the girallons originate here or there is moot. Triaxians born during the seasonal transition find Golarion tolerable, but the last transitional period was centuries ago… ongoing communication is expensive. You should expect to see most influence of other planets in the form of scions from previous migrations. If you want to know how many planets Golarion has ever been in contact with, there are eleven in this solar system, and dozens of moons, and at least seven from the Dark Tapestry."

She doesn't need a pastry, but she'll buy one anyways just for the experience. If the manager is unhappy with her being in his shop he's doing an excellent job of hiding it, and she feels that's worth a few copper to encourage on the margin.

"Earth is the only place I have heard of with only one sapient species. And that species is humanity, unless you differ from men in a way too subtle to see. Are you sure that Earth has never made contact with other planets, even in the distant past?"

How do so many sapient species even arise on the same planet? Wouldn't one of them evolve long enough before the others to not admit any competitors? Did they all exist in a preindustrial, prescientific state for millions of years until the alghollthus came along? Are they all related to each other and if so what does that say about the theory of common descent on Earth?

Wait, she just implied - "so every other planet Golarion has been in contact with also had multiple indigenous sapient species?" And Earth the one odd one out? "I don't know how we'd prove Earth was never contacted by aliens, if they deliberately left no sign of it. There's no evidence of it today, at least nothing that doesn't have other, simpler and more plausible explanations. We don't even know if there's life on the other planets of our solar system - well, we know there probably isn't on some of them... We don't have a way to travel to them," not on this Earth anyway, and Tanya is suddenly much less certain they'd find the same things her first homeworld did.

"Every planet," Iomedae confirms. "Reaching other planets by traversing the space between is… very hard even by the standards of very hard things. Legendary heroes from Castrovel and Verces built a series of linked doorways on multiple planets and used them to explore the solar system, accounting for much of our interaction. I am wondering if there was such a doorway between Earth and Golarion, predating both Osirion and Germania by millennia. All portals were closed by Earthfall, but before then it may have been the bridge that explains why humans are to be found on both…"

This is the weirdest conversation that has ever taken place in his café. Thank the gods that only the regulars are here to witness it.

If your customers don't talk about the god-king secretly being an evil monster, ancient aliens traveling here from another planet to build the pyramids, cats being telepathic and putting cream in your coffee, you're doing it wrong. Have you tried using more coffee?