Exhuming Mahveen (i.e. learning she cannot be interrogated) would put an end to the project of exploring the portal, so Tanya now has an interest in the wizard being found alive despite bearing something of a grudge against her. Actually - "you've probably considered this already, but Mahveen's estate could be sued for her tower attacking us and almost killing Djed. And for kidnapping me. And for the portal itself, assuming having or building one without reporting that is a crime." If it isn't it really ought to be! It's like setting out to redraw the national borders from your basement! "I assume she has some legal entity to initiate proceedings against, since it was funding the defensive action by your team. I don't know if that would gain any information or incentivize her to come out of hiding, since the government has already seized her tower." But it might gain Tanya more money as one of the victims of her crimes, with the government conveniently drawing off any anger or retaliation by the wizard herself.

"She's currently wanted on suspicion of kidnapping, reckless endangerment, high treason, and being an apocalypse cultist. All of her assets are or will be seized, her bank accounts have been frozen, and everywhere with a bilateral extradition agreement will be notified shortly. This does not cover everywhere she could be right now, but it does cover everywhere on this planet if we include polities where rendition does not require permission." Legally speaking, of course, they're still going about it Lawfully. "You and Djed can file suit, but if you win a trial in absentia you'll still need to wait for the courts to liquidate her property… I worry the most likely scenario is that she has died, that being the usual fate of apocalypse cultists, and the portal is broken still, in which case our best chance of reaching Earth is to scry for one of your experts and collaborate on a tuning fork. If that does not work, I do not have any convenient alternatives. The government is unlikely to commit to the endeavor even with your testimony."

There are polities without an extradition treaty that let you go in and grab your own citizens? Tanya hasn't encountered such an arrangement before; it requires the other state to place a lot of trust in the ability of the Osirian foreign services to operate legally and safely on their territory! Maybe that's the balance that results when locating and apprehending a teleporting wizard can be too expensive for a foreign state where the fugitive is hiding but hasn't committed any crimes. Still, it's a very impressive signal of Golarion's trust in either the fairness and professionalism or the raw power projection of Osirion.

And they're labeling her an 'apocalypse cultist'? Wow, they must really want to make an example out of her. You'd think high treason is enough of a charge for any punishment that's at all legal! ...wait. Why does a spurious charge mean she's likely dead?

They're accusing her of plotting to bring about the end of days. (For religious reasons, because doing that for any other reason would strain credulity.) What if they mean that literally? As in: if she had made a stable portal to Abaddon, or to Earth, that might have caused the literal end of days. Because they have one of those on call, don't they. Sitting in Absalom, so nobody forgets.

In other words, Nazir is telling her that Abadar decided trade with Earth should not be established, and when Mahveen is found she will likely be quietly executed (this may have already happened). They don't want to say so publicly to Germania's effective representative (for some political reason Tanya isn't going to guess), or maybe they want to maintain their public stance that trade is to be welcomed, but all attempts to contact Earth are going to fail, either outright or by setting absurd requirements like having Earth experts make a 'tuning fork' for a magic tradition they had never heard of.

Message received loud and clear! Tanya will not do anything to contact Earth on her own (not that she can), or anything about the project that Nazir doesn't suggest.

"Understood. What do I need to do to facilitate this? ...also, I was going to rent housing for the next month and look for a language tutor; would I possibly need to live in Shiman-Sekh or another location for this project? I can fly there but it would be wasteful to make that a daily commute." She's already committed to buying a Share Language in Sothis, which is more expensive than housing and a tutor put together, but that's no reason to dig the hole any deeper.

"Sothis is fine. If the government has urgent need of you in the near future it will be to confirm that you aren't from Abaddon – humans are a minority there, it is not Earth by a different name. The only way being near the portal would help is if you learn something that could be used to fix it."

She would know if she had been raised in a cage as livestock. Unless Abaddon has free-range humans? Do souls taste better if you stain them with the sins of war first? There's a disturbing thought.

"As far as the country goes, I… have not thought very much about which cities would most appeal to an immigrant such as yourself. Sothis has strong rule of law, but Absalom and Katapesh are more cosmopolitan and nearby. If you have preferences they can be accommodated. Either way, we should rent time on a crystal ball so you can make contact with your superiors, although that can wait until after we incorporate and decide how to split the expenses and responsibilities."

"I don't see how I could learn anything new about the portal. Unless Djed does and chooses to contact me directly, I suppose. I do have some questions" and concerns "about the country, but first - are you proposing a corporation privately owned by us, or are you acting as a representative of the Pharaoh or of Abadar? Or the bank's investment arm, I suppose. I'm not clear to what extent the government permits or wants private people to try to contact Earth directly at this stage." Even if it's a fiction, Tanya needs to know what part to play!

"Privately owned. There is a strong presumption that laws should only prohibit activities that are hazardous to the public, and as we know that Earth is not Abaddon, we are allowed to bear the risk in hope of reward. I could secure a loan if necessary, but our personal funds should suffice for the crystal ball time. Once we start financing a tuning fork it may be necessary to come up with a different funding scheme, but at that point we should have more information for potential investors."

If the Pharaoh's national security advisors were really unconvinced that Earth isn't Abaddon, private citizens would obviously be prohibited from trying to contact it, so they're really not meant to succeed. After all, trying to contact Earth-maybe-Abaddon is what they're charging Mahveen with!

That's all well and good, but Tanya doesn't want to put her own money into staging a fiction for public consumption! "What is needed to make a tuning fork? Information about Earth which we'd get by talking to people there?"

Is Nazir implying the fork would be created here, not on Earth? In that case it's up to him to make it fail convincingly.

"Yes. It's a nonmagical process, no particular qualifications necessary other than the requisite knowledge. Crystal ball time is worth rationing, so the most efficient way is to establish contact, read off the instructions, then call back at a later date once the measurements have been made." He doesn't know himself how it works, but he does know the specifications for a tuning fork are numerical. He only owns a handful of tuning forks himself, but he has a reference text for all of the common ones. "The price for this depends on how long it takes to communicate the information; could be as low as a minute or two or as long as the full hour."

"I don't know what fields of knowledge would be applicable but if you tell me what's needed I might be able to confirm that the instructions can be specified briefly in terms Germanian scientists would understand and measured by them. I don't expect to be able to rule it out unless it obviously involves a field of knowledge Earth definitely knows nothing about, like telepathy. We'll need to prepare the message anyway, and I'll need to think about the best and quickest way to make them trust me, since this is completely unprecedented from their perspective. What would the communications look like, more telepathy? How much does it cost for how long?"

"Scrying through a crystal ball uses Message for conversations. It sounds like someone whispering in your ear. Pricing is a few hundred scarabs an hour but we can cut it down further if we optimize the content…"

He pulls out the reference text. The relevant information comes from observing fundamental constants in relatively pure samples of transition metals. Anyone with some basic chemistry knowledge and a background in signal processing can pull it off in a few weeks at most.

Tanya doesn't in fact have a background in signal processing so she can't tell for sure, but this looks surprisingly approachble? There's algebraic notation with integrals and what appears to be a Fourier transform. (She might have some difficulty writing out the Fourier transformation from memory but she can recognize it when prompted, give or take a minus sign.) Mathematics truly is the universal language.

"The math looks understandable," she reports. "I'll want to go over it carefully with someone local to make sure there is no subtle difference in notation or definitions before transmitting, but it looks promising." How do they identify substances for the chemistry part, is it as straightforward as atomic weights and molecular compositions?

It's even simpler than that: smelt the ore, weigh the mineral sample. You should have a smith do this part unless you know what you're doing – most ores are hard to identify by sight alone. The tolerances for the final density of the element are generous. Once you have the sample, bring it to a completely dark room and start bouncing spells off it (any spell will do; it also works with ambient lighting from glowing magic items and arcanoluminescent creatures). Viewing the result through Detect Magic is too blurry to be useful, you need Arcane Sight at least and ideally something stronger to get a clear answer. You can also measure the signature using nonmagical tooling, as long as you have two blocks of cerium of the same size as the sample and a way to read the output in the dark. The mathematics are a tedious process of signal decomposition looking for common factors. There's one specific frequency across all the transition metals (it's particularly strong in zinc and mercury for some reason, so start with those two) that varies based on where you are. Follow the rest of these esoteric instructions to create a fork, tune it to that frequency and hey presto, you've got yourself a Plane Shift to wherever that frequency came from!

"Good idea," Nazir says. It can never hurt to confirm your understanding. "Once you have an estimate of how long the message will take, we can book a time slot. There are no specific duration breakpoints for pricing but under ten minutes will get us into a single slot, so aim for that length if you can. The messenger can talk fast, so the limiting factor will be the recipient, particularly if they aren't expecting this… it might make sense to book two castings, one to get attention and a second one to transmit the instructions, if you don't think you can convince any of your colleagues in time. For two on the same day, better to take the second slot in a different city to minimize the odds of schedule collision. Stretching it out over multiple days is easier to finance but could be problematic for the Germanians, if you think they're less likely to act if there's a delay."

"I'm more unsure about the experimental apparatus... I'll need to identify which element 'cerium' is in terms scientists on Earth can understand without any misunderstandings, and which spells can be used. It says here 'any spell' but that might be too generous, or rely on a technical understanding of what magic counts as a spell. If one of my spells qualifies that would solve the issue." Does her newfound knowledge of Osirian come with a systematic understanding of the elements, ordering them by atomic mass (relative to some well-known element) or some other mostly-unique property? Do these properties in fact hold across planets, since they're measured empirically? Tanya's first Earth taught the periodic table using a very simple model of atomic number, protons and neutrons and orbitals, but her second Earth doesn't (at least not in military academy entrance examinations of the year 1922).

"Assuming I contact my commander, who is a member of the general staff and is well positioned both to confirm my identity and to act immediately on the communications, it still depends on what we catch him doing, he may need some time to excuse himself. And the instructions may not end up fitting in a single session, or they might generate follow-up questions from the people assigned to carry them out. More importantly, if the experiment looks benign my commander can have it carried out on his own authority, but he - and whoever he then reports to - may well need more convincing to tell us the result on the subsequent contact. From their perspective, they'd be giving a planet full of alien species access to Earth, without a fixed entry point like a portal which could be policed. All they'd have to go on would be my word, without even being able to see me, and an advanced alien society that captured me could learn what I know by other means - such as possessing me, though Earth doesn't know that in particular is possible - or by plain coercion. It would be a momentous and entirely unprecedented decision to make, and I honestly have no idea which way it'll go or how long it would take, or what information they'd ask for or accept that would convince them. Maybe they can come up with something, because I haven't."

Her newfound knowledge of Osirian does come with a systematic understanding of the elements… just not the ones on the periodic table. If she needs to know what it means for an invisible stalker to be an 'air' elemental, though, Share Language has her back.

Her failure to immediately recognize it is a bad sign for the plan to import better refining technology and thereby become multi-millionaires. It's all right, expecting them to be more advanced than Golarion at everything was perhaps overly optimistic.

"Cerium is a soft metal, gray when stored in oil but off-white when exposed to air. If you strike it with a knife it releases sparks. It's one of the metals that can store a magical charge indefinitely – spellsilvers, they're called. Every magic item in the world uses at least this much spellsilver, often more." He indicates a tiny quantity with his index finger and thumb. "It's mined from a type of yellowish-brown sand from the bottom of the ocean by merfolk, and purified by, ah, dissolving and un-dissolving the sand in boiling water. Millions of times. It takes years of work to produce even that much. If all of this is news to you… well, maybe other Germanians have encountered it; my understanding is that it's useless for anything other than crafting magic items. But it's the most valuable industrial feedstock in the world by an enormous margin, and no one in the last four thousand years has learned of a better way to extract it."

The more you know!

"If you want to contact your general staff first to determine what conditions make this acceptable, by all means. We can evaluate later whether your native magical detection ability is enough to isolate the frequency, or if we need to teach Germania how to purify spellsilvers. It's a significantly less momentous decision on our part."

"I'm not a chemist! My lack of knowledge doesn't indicate anything about what's known on Earth. The only question is how to explain to them which element is meant, in case there's any doubt. I can't simply tell them what you just told me because we don't have - well, merfolk, to start with. There are fewer than one hundred, uh, pure materials - I can't find the exact word, the kinds of matter that aren't made out of any other kinds - and not all of them are metals. Knowing its density and melting temperature and so on should be enough to identify the right one, assuming it's found on Earth at all." Tanya has a great faith in the ability of Germanian science to purify metals well in advance of any industrial use of them. 

"If each contact session costs us only a few hundred scarabs per hour, we can afford several without having to optimize them down to the minute." Tanya hopes the planned charade involves contact failing quickly rather than her running out of money trying to make it work! "It will probably help not come across as urgently pressuring them into starting an experiment right away. ...and if they decline, there might still be viable trade in industrially valuable information over scries." If you permit the conversation to reach that point, it's on you to police which technology Abadar is willing to either share or import.

The material properties of spellsilver are in the Order of Numbers, as part of the section on the Law of One Price. He can find and read them off for Tanya (density of 6.1–9.9 g/mL, melts at 800–1650°C, drawn to magnets but not magnetic, highly malleable, softer than cheese) without compulsively reciting the highlights of the debate between the sages as to whether a loaf of bread in one city is the 'same good' as an identical loaf of bread in a different city.

"Is there any reason we shouldn't do this now?" he asks.

Can a single substance have such a wide range of melting temperatures or densities? You'd think not, but consider carbon: diamonds are 60% more dense than graphite. Can metals do that? Who knows! Tanya is emphatically not a chemist and is absolutely not going to inject herself into this discourse.

"I'd like a little time to figure out the optimal message, but an hour should be enough. Going by when I arrived there's only a small difference in local time between us and Germania, so in another hour or two we can rely on him being awake even if I'm slightly off."

Then they're going to visit a crystal ball company.

This is conceptually like a telegraph station, if sending a telegraph cost two million yen. No corporation in the country owns a crystal ball, only governments and fifth-circle item crafters with money burning a hole in their pockets. There are three in Sothis, and the nearest one is within walking distance (Nazir does not fly but his walking pace is prodigious, as though the ground were contracting under his stride). The bulk of the building is hidden underground, with the aboveground portion staffed by a clerk and just enough guards to make it clear that robbing this place will be difficult.

(There are still several attempts every year, some of them quite sophisticated.)

The way these places work is by having an operator take the target's description, cast the spell, and open the Message. You can then relay messages to the Scrying target. Tedious? Perhaps, but if you want to use the crystal ball yourself you ought to buy one. This way minimizes the risk of theft, which is the number one concern for anyone who owns an expensive magic item and doesn't have the wherewithal to personally keep it safe at all time.

(Why is Cicerone Nazir here? Can't he cast Scrying himself?)

With that in mind, who do you need to contact, and do you have:

1. A picture?
2. One of their possessions?
3. A part of their body?

...wait, no, she needs to see the target herself throughout the conversation. Tanya will be even less convincing if she can't accurately describe and react to her superior's surroundings! Also, if she's going to dictate anything it would help seeing what he actually writes. He might even want to show her something in writing. Furthermore, the conversation will be in Germanian, which the operator doesn't speak unless they have an actual translation spell, not just a language-knowledge-granting spell. Even then, it will appear suspicious if her superior will hear the operator's voice relaying her words, is there a way for her to talk to him over Message directly? How good is the guarantee of confidentiality they'd have from the operator, anyway?

"… if it's important for you to see him, this can wait for a few days until I can spare one of my men to cast Scrying." Why did they not think of this. It'll cost time but maybe they can't afford not to wait. "Message is a zero-level spell that can go through a Scrying mirror, even if you're not the caster, but unless you can duplicate it, you would need to learn… something, you would need some form of magic known to me, for me to guess what it would take for you to directly communicate, if you cannot do it yourself already."

Nazir is going to stalk out of the building while muttering to himself. Can Tanya learn wizardry? Not in any reasonable timeframe. What about the art of using magic devices? A Wand of Message could work, but wands are notoriously hard to use even for people with training. He doesn't even know how to do it himself; they would need Iomedae to cast Detect Desires to see if Tanya has a hope of ever succeeding. Imbue with Spell Ability doesn't work on Message. There are no wondrous items with Message, so commissioning one would take months and isn't even guaranteed to work. Do they need to hire someone with Vocal Alteration to impersonate Tanya on the spot? Damn, damn, damn.

Tanya didn't think of this because she thought they were going to use a crystal ball that she'd be able to see! 

"Anything is better than nothing, but if we can find a better solution it's worth waiting. We're not just losing time, we want to make a good impression on the first try. Sounding like myself and being able to react to his surroundings would both help. How would the translation work if the operator had to relay all the messages?"

"You would speak out loud in Germanian, as would your superior, and the operator would use phonetic repetition to relay everything. It would sound like someone else speaking on your behalf – probably not very well, mimicry can only go so far. There are spells that can imitate voices and mannerisms but they can rouse suspicion in people who are familiar with the subject. Even a possessed person will sound slightly off, no matter how skilled the attacker is at puppetry. If we can't get your voice to go through, we should avoid pretending that we can… I don't suppose you have a way to modify another person's voice into sounding like yours?"

"Of course I don't!" Even if Earth spells worked like that, why would she have a spell that sounds tailor-made for spies and infiltrators? "And I wouldn't want to pretend; the other side should be able to tell who's speaking at any given moment. At least phonetic repetition has a rational explanation of why it's needed!" A spell is required to transmit sound across the scry link, Tanya can't cast that spell just as she can't cast the scry itself, so an intermediary is required. The only strange thing from Earth's perspective is that the intermediary has to reproduce the sounds by speaking them instead of a more general audio-repeater spell. ...actually, the only strange thing from Earth's perspective is that Tanya can communicate with aliens at all because they 1) are mysteriously also humans and 2) have translation and knowledge-transfer spells!! Neither of those is remotely plausible and Tanya hasn't come up with any ideas of how she'd convince anyone from Earth about them. If she (or someone else on this end) can magically speak and understand every possible language the other side tries on zero notice, it's still more plausible that they have a team of linguists than a universal alien-languages zero-knowledge translation spell!!! 

Tanya wishes she could present General Zettour some subset of the situation that makes even slightly more sense and build from there. Unfortunately, the very method of communication (talk to a man because you've seen him before, no matter where he is in the universe) is already preposterous enough that she needs to be upfront about the accidental alien first contact. 

Speaking of incomprehensible alien technology... "Can't you, uh, give me the spell, the way it's done here?"