He's trained them out of it. He used to get a Restoration or a Heal afterwards, every time, but he's gotten so used to the sensation that it barely impairs him anymore. Better to save the spells for when they're actually needed.

"The alien you spoke of is now a first-circle cleric of Abadar," he says, as calmly as though it had never happened. "I am disinclined to interpret this as cause for additional concern, nor will I neglect to undertake any precautions which are now underway. Does this development surprise you?"

Was that a divine revelation? Nobody else here seems even remotely interested – is that because they've been ordered to ignore it, or because the pharaoh receives them so frequently it's not worth commenting on?

"She was… characteristically interested in trade, when I spoke to her…" she ventures. "Very calculating, very Lawful Neutral. We did not discuss religion; I suspect she was not an Abadaran before, and indeed may not have known Abadar by that name before coming to Golarion. No, I am not surprised."

She considers bringing up her theory that Tanya is an arcanist and also maybe an alien lich, before deciding against it. If that were true, or at least if it were true and important, Abadar would have mentioned it to Khemet.

That's a relief. If this Tanya von Degurechaff has the disposition to be a cleric of Abadar, then the decision to overrule his advisors and not proactively Banish her from this plane of existence is unlikely to be a colossal mistake.

Khemet III manages a genuine smile. "That's good to hear. Now, since we know the full dimensions of the building, we can plan the number of Divinations needed to probe for weaknesses…"

The mark over Tanya's head fades to nothing within a few minutes, but some of the people who notice it while she's on the way out offer friendly or respectful gestures.

The glittery castle is in the same place where she last saw it. It is not, however, in the same shape. Several of the towers have assumed new heights and angles, the color scheme has shifted into an more neon spectrum, and there's a new area of the roof made from an undulating ochre jelly that almost seems to be alive. It also may have changed its footprint, ever so slightly, to occupy more of the waterfront along the canal.

The main road that passes from the city through the outlying area comes to a dead stop against a side wall, gradually narrowing until it is exactly wide enough to fit a single small door. What appears to be the main entrance, complete with banners waving over a raised portcullis, faces an empty field in a back lot behind a tavern. A third entrance sits atop a raised platform unreachable except by flight, which stylistically almost looks like a helicopter landing pad, and is currently in use by a humanoid riding a winged horse after coming in for a landing. If there is any other way to get inside, it has been cleverly disguised (there are several other exterior doors that have been rendered invisible, and at least one patch of wall that appears to be made from real but highly magical matter).

That place is crawling with magic. (Tanya notices the invisible doors, in the sense that she notices there are some apparent doorframes that lack doors and also have a magical signature on them.)

She would like to land on the landing pad, but she wasn't actually invited to do so and it might well be reserved for some purpose. The whole thing probably isn't meant to look mysterious to the people who live here! But that still doesn't tell her which entrance to use. Can she see any other people going in or out, or see into the building through one of the doors?

Both of the ground-level entrances see some traffic, but mostly the larger one. The done thing is to enter the tavern from the street while dressed in standard Osirian clothing, then emerge from the back wearing a set of black, white, or black-and-white robes before going inside. The one person Tanya sees using the normal entrance comes right back out ten seconds later looking more confused than Tanya feels.

Through the transparent portals, the interior is filled with nothing but bookshelves. They're clustered together enough that they could all be on the back wall of a single library, assuming that library spanned at least five stories and contained millions of volumes. One of them is has a reading nook, wherein several berobed teenagers appear to have spotted Tanya outside and have taken to pointing and whispering among themselves.

This must be the Osirian national library. And the large entrance is being used by... librarians, or scholars? If nobody besides the people in black and white robes are going in, it's probably not the public entrance...

Tanya is going to ask inside the side-building that looks like a tavern.

A sign out front proclaims this establishment to be Dodderidge's. The inside does resemble a tavern, but all of the tables are empty and the barkeep is a scarecrow. Unlike the Pathfinder Society, Tanya is only slightly younger than the other people passing through, and with her new Osirian wardrobe she doesn't even stand out all that much. The acolytes passing through take off their outerwear cloaks to reveal the black and white robes underneath, deliver an ironic compliment to the scarecrow, and walk directly through a red brick wall into the yard. It's obviously illusory, going by its magical signature, but after watching someone blithely walk into it Tanya can instinctively recognize it as something unreal. The wall is both there and not there, like one of the visual illusions in artwork where the image pops out of the random brushstrokes in stark relief if stare at it long enough, but in reverse. It takes some mental effort to recognize the effect, but once it's demonstrated (at least for this particular wall) it's impossible to see it any other way.

Two of the acolytes traveling together are discussing someone who recently had a magical accident that turned his hands into claws, which one of them thinks is awesome (obviously) but hasn't been reversed by any of their seniors yet, and if he goes much longer without the ability to write he might start running into academic problems. The other speculates that having sharp claws instead of hands might be problematic for other reasons. Both of them snicker before walking into the brick wall and disappearing.

...

The scarecrow might be another weird person that needs to be firmly addressed in an Iomedae-like tone. On the other hand, 'take me to your master' is clearly insufficient here.

Tanya will attempt to buttonhole one of the people passing through to ask them where should go.

"… so what you want to do is to go thataway, straight inside and ignore the nice person asking if you're here to petition Nefreti Clepati. If you talk to them, best case scenario they Geas you into finding her inbox, which is probably somewhere in this country, or writing your request out in anapestic tetrameter, and then hopefully you don't end up in an infinite loop trying to find something that rhymes with 'priestess' so you can explain that you're not actually here to talk to her. Once you're past that, also ignore the topiary in the main hall – they won't do anything as long as you're not carrying any plants, but if they smell plants on you they'll pester you to feed them. Do not do that, we feed them plenty already and you shouldn't encourage them. Lecture halls are in the east wing, floors two through six, so that's where you want to go. If you go around asking for help with no idea what you're doing you'll run into Professer Leckermaul – if that happens, tell her you've actually got it figured out already and leave quickly, don't stop to chat."

 "Hear, hear," a second acolyte chimes in.

"She's perfectly friendly as long as you're not alone with her," the first one says darkly. "For a lesson on Wisdom-based spell trigger activation you'll want… Professer Lorelei, she's not busy today and she's the kind of person who takes bribes in the form of shiny objects. And she's a good teacher, if that matters to you."

 "It's not a wizard spell?"

"Nah, Abadar hands it out. Wizards wish they could cast True Appraisal. Anyways, Lorelei: second floor, east wing, near the statue of a mushroom woman sitting on a rotting log."

A university of magic, except one with people in the halls who routinely assault visitors? Either that or it's a student prank.

If it's the first thing, she is not going in there based on a couple of random students' instructions. And if it's the second (which really ought to be the case, or Nazir wouldn't have sent her here with no further instructions) then she still doesn't know where to go.

Tanya thanks them politely, flies outside, illusions herself invisible, loiters in the sky for ten minutes, flies back in and asks a completely different set of maybe-students for help.

The next maybe-student to pass through is not going to proactively warn Tanya off from doing anything stupid. If she wants direct tutoring from one of the staff her options are Professors Ding, Kvothe, Leckermaul, Lorelei, Noveda, Reed, Rogarvia, and Sythen. There could be others, those are just the ones he's confident are here and not sequestered in a laboratory or library right now. He recommends Lorelei or Rogarvia, they're the easiest to find because neither of them ever leave their lecture halls.

That sounds much more reasonable! It really must have been student humour. Really, there's no way Nazir would have sent her somewhere she might be assaulted if she just walked (well, flew) in without asking random students for advice first! He knows she has a soldier's reflexes if confronted with unfamiliar magic!

Tanya is going to fly to the east wing's second floor (assuming the student she's talking to agrees those are still the correct instructions) and ask for Professor Lorelei.

There is indeed a topiary inside the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, shaped into the form of a life-sized brachiosaurus standing in a massive terracotta pot. Its long neck sways as it surveys Tanya's entrance, but she evidently doesn't smell interesting enough to pester for food. There are also many individuals who could reasonably be described as a 'nice person', but Tanya is not going to find herself sent on a pointless Quest unless she uncharacteristically decides to ask them about someone she didn't know existed until ten minutes ago.

The Temple of the All-Seeing Eye is also bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. It's a little hard to notice until you reach the second floor, at which point it becomes clear that the main arteries branching off from the staircase are about fifty percent longer than the horizontal width of the building in either direction. Finding the statue of the mushroom woman is easy (it's closer to a woman with fungal features than a mushroom with humanoid features), and across from it is a room with a door marked with the name "L. LORELEI".

Tanya can deal the dinosaur person (by ignoring them) and the extra space (ditto). (She knows these people have space-manipulating spells! Expanding a building makes sense! Even if it confuses her sense of where she is inside it.)

She will knock politely on L. Lorelei's door.

The door is opened by another exceptionally short adult man wearing a black and white uniform – divided vertically down the middle, rather than by article of clothing. He refuses to meet Tanya's eyes as she's admitted.

It's definitely a classroom, in that it has blackboards mounted on the walls and large tables for studying at, but the room is dominated by a series of hollow glass tubes running along the bottom edges and through the walls. One of them cuts directly across the middle of the room at head height, with a second perpendicular one passing underneath it, making it awkward to get around without ducking or clambering over. There's also a large window showing a comparatively undistorted view of the outside, which is only weirder than the glass tubes in context.

At the front of the room is what can only be described as a gigantic fishbowl. At the bottom is a motionless woman lying half-buried in the sand, eyes closed, hair drifting in an invisible current.

Um.

Did the students seriously send her to talk to an... underwater person? Tanya can't breathe or talk underwater!

...no, no, the rest of the classroom is in the air and so the professor must have a spell for talking with people outside. That makes sense. Everything makes sense.

The man at the entrance might not want to look her in the eyes but she still needs to question him. Quietly, in case the Professor is napping. "Hello. I'm looking for Professor Lorelei, but she isn't expecting me. Is that her? ...can I interrupt her?"

He looks intensely uncomfortable at being addressed by a mage but will not avoid a direct question.

"… yes. Make plenty of noise… she's not a light sleeper…"

"And she is alright with her sleep being disturbed?" Tanya double-checks. It's a classroom, not a private office, but there's no class being held! "I mean - are these her reception hours?" Interrupting her sleep is unlikely to grant Tanya a favorable audience, even aside from reputational costs. This isn't the army, where everyone can be expected to be available without notice.

"… no one ever hesitates. It's not… normal… to sleep for so long, every day… I think she's used to it…"

Oh gods this is mortifying. Why is she still talking to him? Does she not like that answer? Why is she still flying???

She's talking to him because he's standing at the door letting people in! Why else is he there if not as some kind of usher who can answer questions?

And she is still flying because she needs to get over the tubes and approach the fishbowl personbowl tank at the front of the classroom. Where she will knock on the glass politely, and then try addressing the Professor progressively more loudly. If that doesn't work she can get more creative, but her options in between 'a little noise' and 'a LOT of noise' are a bit limited. (She can't risk breaking the glass, so rapping on it with a hard object is probably ill-advised. She does have a couple of blank pistol cartridges, but that seems a bit excessive, presumably the student body isn't that loud.)

Acoustic impedance is a property of matter that measures how efficiently sound energy is transmitted between media, equal to the density of the medium multiplied by the speed of sound. The closer the two impedance values match, the less energy is reflected away at the boundary.

Water has an acoustic impedance of about 1.5×10⁶ kg / m² ⋅ s. Living creatures, being mostly made of water, also have an acoustic impedance of about 1.5×10⁶ kg / m² ⋅ s, which means very little of the sound wave's energy is reflected away from living bodies in their path. This fact is barely noticeable for a submerged human, possessed as they are of ears that don't work very well underwater, but for an aquatic creature with specialized organs for hearing sounds in their natural environment, tapping on the aquarium glass is truly fucking annoying.

Hmm. Maybe the noise will stop on its own.

…

No, someone is talking to her. Ugh.

The woman at the bottom of the fishtank rises up, and up, and up some more. As the sand falls away it becomes clear that she is a classically-defined mermaid, with pastel pink hair and a rainbow-scaled tail as thick as her torso still mostly buried in the sand. It's long enough to propel her to the top while still resting comfortably on the bottom of her enclosure, which is tall enough to give her an imposing view of the classroom, and would probably make talking face-to-face difficult with anyone who can't fly.

She breaks the surface and yawns while stretching, which is perhaps somewhat gauche given that the only thing she's wearing is a headband identical to Nazir's. Rivulets of water dribble out of her mouth as some hidden biological mechanism pumps the water out of her thoracic organs. She looks wretchedly tired.

"Hello there," she mumbles in poorly-accented Osirian. "I'm Professor Lorelei. I don't think we've met, miss?"

Osirian culture is very progressive on the issue of female modesty, which is a good sign! ...except wait, no, there was the whole female enslavement thing? That has very unfortunate implications, but the guide said mages were exempt! Tanya will try to reserve judgement.

"Hello, Professor. My name is Tanya von Degurechaff. I'm sorry for disturbing your rest; some students recommended talking to you and the usher said it was fine..." Professor Lorelei looks like she flew missions every day for a week on four hours of sleep a night, but she's not human so maybe it just seems that way? It's not Tanya's concern, though, beyond that she wants to be polite and create a good impression. If she hadn't wanted to be disturbed she presumably has a more private place to sleep in. She is regretting not bringing a cup of coffee as a gift, or whatever the equivalent for mermaids is.

(Yes, she's a mermaid. Named or at least going by 'Lorelei'. This planet clearly has something to do with Earth but Tanya is growing afraid to ask. If they can establish contact with (an) actual Earth it will obviate the issue, i.e. make it somebody else's problem.)

"I was granted magic by Abadar earlier today and I need tutoring in using wands." Better not to say 'urgently' up front. "I'm already a mage in a foreign tradition, I don't know how much of it will transfer. I have a wand of the spell True Appraisal with forty-seven charges to practice with. Would you be willing to tutor me, in exchange for some of the remaining charges in the wand or some other consideration?"