"The classroom contained students, two men on the stage one of whom later identified himself as Sythen, and a - magical apparatus I cannot identify. When I entered it seemed to contain a mist, which a few seconds later parted to reveal Major Weiss, who addressed me - entirely realistically in voice and mannerisms, and of course speaking Germanian. My immediate assumption was that Sythen, having heard of me, had managed to either scry Weiss or actually teleport or, uh, summon him here. I demanded an explanation, warned him that kidnapping a member of the Germanian military would have severe repercussions, and demanded Weiss be released. Sythen, with Professor Lorelei's support, pointed out that the other man made some - error of magical procedure - but claimed we were safe. Professor Lorelei was then the first to claim it was not Weiss but a demon who should not be trusted."

"I asked Weiss for an authentication code and he gave the correct response. Professor Lorelei then said the demon could read it from my mind. Note the pattern of explanations being presented only after the fact. Professor Lorelei then told me not to think of military secrets, but did not elaborate that matters outside conscious thought could also be picked up. Sythen then said it was a demon 'bound' and serving him, that he wanted it to challenge people by stimulating a fear of death." Which as far as Tanya is concerned makes him responsible for anything the demon does. People are free to take risks, but where was the 'live fire range - exercise in progress - KEEP OUT' notice on the door?!

"I realized I could not distinguish between the possibilities that it was the real Weiss; that it was a demon reading my mind, with or without Sythen's direct involvement; or even that it was Weiss possessed by the demon. And if it was the real Weiss, I could not free him by force without endangering him, since he could not use his own magic. Before leaving, I ordered Weiss to surrender his weapons to me rather than his captors. He produced them, and then Sythen used magic to fly them over to me, which might have copied or substituted them in the process since I can't analyze local magic. The items I actually received were, as I said earlier, a visually perfect copy of my orb which however did not respond to my magic, and a very obviously wrong copy of the pistol. My pistol has a relatively recent innovation called a slide, which instead of being a separate part was fused to the body; it could only be made by someone who never saw the pistol fired. It's a mistake someone who copies objects by sight but misses moving parts would make; does thought-reading give visual impressions?"

"That was also the first moment Weiss did something inauthentic; he drew the pistol with the wrong arm." She demonstrates. "Sythen then claimed they were illusions. And then Weiss apparently slipped and responded to something Sythen had said in Osirian. If they had cast Share Language on him I expect he'd notice and comment on it, it's - hard to miss. As I left Weiss called out after me that he'd spread computation orbs all over the world by next week, dropping the act. I'm mostly convinced he was a demon who read my thoughts and noticed I didn't believe it anymore. But I would appreciate a thorough confirmation. Even if it were a demon, I'd like to know if this enables Sythen - and anyone else in the audience and that they talk to - to scry and talk to the real Weiss, and more people from there, so that contact between Golarion and Earth is now effectively free for all."

"As I said, I haven't consciously thought of Weiss since yesterday. He also mentioned a city which we were in recently, which I had not thought of at the time. If 'closely related matters' covers that, I don't think I fully understand yet what it excludes."

This story is copied down verbatim in flowing Osirian script that looks like it was typeset by a computer, with no interruptions from start to finish other than the occasional intense stare. It doesn't directly contradict Nazir's version of events, but it does raise questions.

"Right, and for your edification: some Nethysians are so indifferent to risk as to appear insane, and most Nethysians are abnormally risk-tolerant by normal standards. This is a trait Nethys finds valuable in his followers. Several people in this story made assumptions about your level of competence based on your bearing and appearance which went unquestioned; I predict that Lorelei mistook your ability to kill demons in a fight as a proxy for your ability to reason through their duplicity, for example. I will convey to you whether your colleague has been abducted once I've spoken to the faculty, but I would appreciate your recording as corroboration. Detect Thoughts can give visual impressions, but the nature of a thought is highly idiosyncratic. Were I reading your mind right this second, I might be able to reproduce a slide based on the amount of recall you needed to form a sentence about one, but it's no sure thing. If you really want to know, buy a copy of the spell and read a few minds— with consent; mind reading is a crime and we can prosecute it. Or have someone weaker than you try it, see if you can spot how it works when it's less advanced.

"Usurpation of title is no longer outlawed in Osirion, but my advice is to use whichever appellation Abadarans take in your homeland rather than any of the local ones if you feel the need to advertise. There are international differences in character; people will respect that. 'Cicerone' has the connotation that you were educated in Osirion, Katapesh, or Thuvia.

"Regarding the tower and Germania… I don't help to set foreign policy, but the pharaoh won't act to create or destroy a monopoly unless it's in the national interest. In some cultures, 'in the national interest' has various secondary meanings, but in Osirion it means 'in the national interest'. Supposing that your Weiss allows the Scrying and reaches a mutually satisfactory agreement, voluntarily summoning people to Osirion is exactly as legal for anyone else as it is for you. Sign here please; any mark is fine."

Why would Lorelei think she knew anything about Tanya's (in)ability to kill demons in a fight? Tanya has fought exactly one demon and comprehensively failed to kill it, but Lorelei shouldn't have known about that! Even if she acquired some general knowledge through her domain ability, aerial mages have never been fielded against demons before! Did Lorelei (correctly) assume Tanya couldn't kill a demon because she uses drugs?

Accepting the assumption for a moment, though - Lorelei took Tanya into a classroom with a hostile demon. If Tanya could parse local spells, she would have recognized the demon as such (or, at least, as not being Weiss); she would have recognized the spell reading her mind. She would then have used lethal force in self-defense, killing the demon and perhaps Sythen. Lorelei possibly facilitated the encounter; she definitely did not immediately try to defuse the situation, by telling Tanya it was a demon or Sythen to stand down or by acting directly against the mind-reading or the illusion of being Weiss.

This is an insane plan - Lorelei could not have been sure Tanya would back down without violence, and she was in danger herself even as a bystander - but Nethysians are abnormally risk-tolerant (what a wonderful phrase!). However, Lorelei is still rational; her behavior only makes sense if she did have a reason to expect Tanya not to shoot, and Phēl deduced this.

(Why did Nazir send her unaccompanied to a university full of abnormal people, some of whom appear outright insane - from a standpoint of national security, at least - for something as mundane as new employee training? Was this some kind of hazing?)

"I can't read the statement at the moment," Tanya points out. (Is Phēl seriously testing whether Tanya will sign a piece of paper she cannot read?) "Can you give me a Share Language that works in the Dome? Or perhaps a regular one, if there's no reason for me to stay after this; we'll have to step out anyway for me to show you my recording. And I certainly didn't mean that I should be given any kind of monopoly on contact! Only that I am naturally interested in learning the practical implications." Actually, Nazir's original plan had been for the scryers to contact General Zettour based on an illusion provided by Tanya! "I understand that anyone who saw the illusion of Weiss can now contact him by scrying, and if the demon read my thoughts he could enable contact with any number of other people... Well, I suppose that's blown." They still have an advantage, in that Weiss wouldn't react well to invisible strangers telepathying him out of the blue, but they need to hurry. What if the demon tries contacting someone from Ildoa or the States? What if he manages to contact the Russy, on the basis that they are Germania's sworn enemies? Is an image of the Secretary-General, printed in the newspaper or hanging over an altar fireplace in a Russy homestead, enough to enable scrying? What if someone tries scrying the crucified Jesus and gets Being X on the line?

"...I just realized that, if an illusion of my memory of seeing a faithful image of someone would be enough to scry them, that would include many world leaders outside Germania. And while it may well be in someone's personal interest, or Osirian national interest, to open talks with many nations including those presently hostile to Germania, there is one which is inimical to free civilization and it would be a terrible idea to enable them further by trading them novel magic or technology."

What kind of world leader has no way to deal with Scrying attacks? How consequential you are as a politician is almost linearly anticorrelated with how much effort it would take for someone like Razmir to kidnap you. Although— no, establishing remote contact is much easier, and Phēl can only imagine how embarrassing it would be to accidentally think about the House of Thrune in front of a telepath who'd never heard of Cheliax. You could warn them, afterwards, but what if they (quite reasonably) didn't believe the country was a province of Hell?

"I can impress upon them the importance of not recklessly bargaining with foreign mages and monarchs." The wizards, that is. The demon is already slated to be petrified and shipped to another plane as soon as it outlives its usefulness. "What makes this particular country especially worthy of censure? Is it too pervasively evil to be saved, or should we consider it another of the many ongoing humanitarian crises and encourage some amount of philanthropy aimed towards evacuating or liberating the place?"

The great peacemaker Khemet III, backed by teleports and the alghollthu, recognizing the ongoing humanitarian crisis of communist rule (not to mention total-war opportunistic conquest at the cost of millions of lives) and evacuating-or-liberating the entire Russy Federation is a truly glorious image. If Tanya can somehow achieve this, her arrival on Golarion will truly and indisputably be a great stroke of good fortune! It barely even matters in comparison if Osirion or the Unified States conquer Germania; even General Zettour couldn't plan to have the Federation liberated! In promoting this, Tanya is acting in the highest interests of the Germanian state and nation!

Which means her response is of the highest importance. Unfortunately, Tanya is still not a diplomat!!! A single mistake here could cost everything! This isn't something she can punt upwards by saying a military officer shouldn't comment on politics; she needs to actually convince Phēl to act quickly in order to stop insane Nethysian demons from contacting the Federation! Tanya is very much aware that Communism has a long history of making converts among supposedly intelligent people (as long as they don't have to live with it). They will trot out the usual story about the legal equality of women and ethnic minorities, workers' rights, universal education and healthcare and an absolute social safety net, and conveniently omit all of the gratuitous slaughter and communism along the way.

"They follow an insane ideology. It calls for the abolition of private enterprise, property, transactions and money. Also of separate nations; their official goal is world conquest. They forbid even peaceful dissent or discussion. The current regime came to power some decades ago in a bloody revolution, followed by a much bloodier civil war, the secession and sometimes reconquest of outlying provinces, and the systematic enslavement or execution of entire classes of people - that is, everyone occupying a certain social or economic role that was to be eliminated, without individual accusation or trial. Ever since they've been fomenting similar revolutions in every other country their partisans can reach. I believe many of the people can be saved, no matter how indoctrinated the last generation, but the system has to be dismantled first. ...needless to say, they do not allow emigration. Or free travel and reporting by foreigners, or by their own people for that matter." What else do normal people care about? "They suppressed the established churches, too; priests were one of the eliminated 'classes'." As were mages, but if she mentions that she'll sound partisan.

'Priests were one of the eliminated classes' would sound partisan, if it weren't a necessary precondition for the abolition of money. Phēl has never explicitly though about what it would take to incite an Abadaran holy war, but a nation where no one is free to labor or trade with even the pretence of freedom because they're all directly enslaved by the throne could do it. A large and mature nation at that, to have provinces that have rebelled and later reintegrated. It's too much to be the work of a single entity – even a conqueror worm or a charnel god can't Dominate an entire country on their own – but perhaps a particularly competent cabal could pull it off? Or, maybe this is one of those airborne fungal infections that turns people into quasi-zombies at the behest of some mastermind? Phēl will reserve judgement on this one, it's not provably impossible.

It does sound completely unbelievable— and yet, Tanya believes it. She must know how much this sounds like propaganda. Any country that suppresses its own dissidents and restricts emigration is up to something, but unreliable news reporting just gives their geopolitical enemies the opportunity to spread uncontested rumors. 'They have abandoned all modern social structures and returned to living as ancient savages did in small tribes' is the sort of thing people might uncritically accept if they're not paying attention. If she's confident in her assessment, she ought to know more, right?

"That sounds like an abhorrent place to live. I can't imagine… do you know how this country sustains itself, in the absence of commerce? Are there unusually influential, smart, or mighty champions of this ideology? Does the ideology itself empower its adherents?"

"They run a command economy," Tanya says with distaste. "Very inefficient, of course, unable to properly measure its own performance or to self-correct... And they collectivized all the farms. Some farmers supported the revolution because thought they'd get more land at the expense of wealthy landholders, but once the new regime was established they forced everyone to work big shared plots of land according to state instructions. They claim it's more efficient, but it eliminates the individual farmer's positive incentive to work hard so only negative incentives are left... I think industry is similar."

Wait. Abadar is running a command economy! If Tanya bad-mouths it she'll be dismissed at best or, far worse, make Phēl think the Federation is a natural ally for Osirion!!!

"I'm sure a command economy can work well... in theory," she recovers smoothly (*). "If the people on top are entirely intelligent, and benevolent, and very well informed. Their managers are none of these; the results speak for themselves." And she'd better quit while she's ahead. Hopefully.

(*) Absent someone with an amount of skill points in Sense Motive beyond first level.

command economy n. an economy in which production, prices and incomes are decided and fixed by the central government

"… no doubt."

Tanya has engaged in hasty self-correction, subtype 'I have accidentally revealed my personal opinions on a divisive subject at an inopportune moment and wish for everyone to turn a blind eye'. That's fine, Phēl hasn't been treating this as a meeting with a fellow diplomat and won't hold it against her.

That doesn't mean it can't be mined for information! The concept of a command economy sounds fully deranged, from the perspective of the laity, but documented controversies between senior clerics have covered an impressive number of bizarre and counterintuitive topics. Arguing that markets could be profitably dismantled and replaced with the unvarnished dicta of someone-or-other is the sort of thing that might have been first proposed by one of the more dubious archbankers – Cicerone Tomer, maybe – and with that questionable philosophical pedigree escaped the brand of unspeakable heresy. Tanya clearly thinks it's a terrible idea, but she's worried about offending her newfound coreligionists. Phēl, meanwhile, doesn't even have enough context to assess whether that worry is reasonable. Tanya will have to figure that one out on her own.

"There are extractive tyrannies on this planet as well, so the concept is familiar. Altruistic heroes looking to undermine them almost always exploit their inability to pay attention to everything at once, namely by assisting refugees in reaching asylum. Even the Dark Triune, who have at times asserted Zon-Kuthon's ownership of every soul born in Nidal and could crush anyone standing in their way, can't actually enforce this claim nine times out of ten. But if this country has undergone such profound self-destruction without toppling, then it's hard to measure the extent of their intelligence networks or the dominance of their champions. Even brief visits could be unexpectedly risky. Do you have a sense of whether this information ought to be suppressed until we have better guidance, or do you think a careful adventuring party ought to be safe while canvassing outlying settlements?"

Certainly, it can be heroic to help Russy refugees reach asylum. The people who helped Lieutenant Serebryakov's family flee the disintegrating Russy Empire not only risked their own lives to save others but also welcomed excellent human resources into Germania and the broader family of civilized nations! It's just, also, utterly ineffective in addressing the source of the problem or reducing its scale unless you can bite off a whole country's worth of refugees like the Empire has, which they can't hold and will lose sometime next year. And even at the height of its power, the Empire could hardly evacuate everyone between the Warthe and the Dnjepr west! Fifty million people, give or take - entirely impossible to move, to settle, to feed.

There is no room for heroics in Tanya von Degurechaff's army or her conception of Realpolitik.

Leaving individual heroics aside, Phēl is reacting entirely correctly. Osirion needs much better intelligence before deciding on a policy. Should they act swiftly to secure it, or be slow and cautious? Should they risk their own agents to acquire it, or let private subcontractors (perhaps like Nazir's team, if he did not also work for the government) take a shot?

Unfortunately, the right policy for Osirion also happens to be the wrong policy for one Tanya von Degurechaff. A team sent to the outlying settlements of the Russy Federation will find them presently occupied by the very Germanian Army whose officer denounced the commies. In a land that has seen the front lines of total war move back and forth for two years, many will conceive of the preceding peace as better no matter who was in charge; many tales of apparent atrocities by all sides will be told, whether real or manufactured or simply mistaken.

And if they ask anyone else? Ildoa, the Republic, the Commonwealth, even that supposed bastion of freedom the States? They will be told that the (reformed! hardly evil at all!) Russy Federation is bravely fighting the (actually at fault here!) Germanian Empire, while they all naturally deplore war and so in the interests of peace they are helping the Federation win it. Really you should cut those people some slack, it will surely be totally fine if they conquer half of Europe. Why, just look at all these glowing reviews of the workers' paradise they have built that our Paper of Record has been printing! On the other hand, just imagine if Germania were to win despite everything...

What's that you say? You've been to Moskva and it doesn't look like Paradise? That's because those devils from the 203rd raided it!! It's because the Germanian defensive counter invasion forced all able-bodied men to be conscripted and sent to die at the labour camps front! Why, naturally we would have told you the same two years ago; are you implying we'd change our very morals because of politics? How absurd. Just look at the newspaper archives; our correspondent's unstinting praise of Comrade Dzhugashvili had won journalistic awards well before the current war!

Even honest and well-meaning people rarely assign fault where it belongs. In other words, no matter who they talk to, the only things they'll hear while a war is going on will be determined by the universal rule that everyone hates their enemies and thinks they are evil. Obviously Germania is right and knew the Federation is evil long before the war started, but Tanya doesn't have a time machine to prove it. Besides, to a disinterested third party it is the present that matters. Are the Silberian peasants suffering because they were forced to work collective farms, no more free than their ancestors who were serfs, casually tortured and killed for speaking out of line or respecting their ancestors' religion? Or are they suffering because all able-bodied men were sent to the front (where they promptly died due to colossal incompetence), in a war the Federation started and refuses to end? Is that better or worse than being sent to slave-labour camps (a common way station before the front)? And does it matter who is actually at fault here, to a peaceful country like Osirion that should want above all to stay out of the whole bloody mess?

Right now, all Tanya can do is state the truth. That is, the part of the truth that doesn't unfairly make her or Germania look bad and still works as an answer to Phēl's question.

"I expect you'll need to use a lot of magic - to teleport in and out, translation, illusions, any active defenses. This runs some risk of being detected by a mage, who would immediately flag your magic as very unusual and therefore of potential interest. Individual mages can only really analyze magic within a few kilometers at best, but ground installations dedicated to detecting enemy mages can cover a much greater radius. They would quickly report you up the chain; how quickly a response can be mobilized of course varies enormously. Radar is expensive and relatively immobile, so only cities, borders and other sites of interests are routinely protected, but those are also where you'd learn the most."

"Your two biggest advantages are teleports and mind-affecting magic like thought-reading. Nobody on Earth has them, and even more importantly nobody suspects they exist or is prepared to counter them. Incidentally, you should consider the costs of revealing those capabilities; it's a card that can only be played once. Apart from that, it means you can easily and safely capture and interrogate people, including specific well-informed targets. If, that is, you're willing to kidnap strangers and seriously endanger their lives; if their absence is noticed and they're questioned, or are foolish enough to report the truth, they will certainly wish it had never happened. Or they might just conclude they'd gone mad. ...I suppose you can address that by overwriting their memories afterwards, but if you want to canvas whole populations and not just a few high-value individuals, I'm not sure how you'd keep it from being noticed. Of course I don't know nearly enough about the magic available to you, so maybe you see an obvious solution."

"On the other hand, if you're not willing to coerce or mindread people, they are unlikely to be willing to talk to you. Most of them are afraid to criticize the government - the lives it has them lead, the ideology it forces on them - sometimes even to their friends. Why would they talk to suspicious strangers? How could you make them trust you? I suppose you could walk around reading people's random thoughts and ready to teleport out if you're spotted... What, specifically, are you hoping for these scouting parties to learn or confirm?"

"Mind-reading is not in routine use for espionage," Phēl observes dryly. "The spell that makes the target believe you're their best friend is easier, more reliable, and lasts for hours instead of minutes. Similarly, if an asset needs to covertly disappear for a few days their absence can easily be covered with a body double. I would like to say that my office is capable of not overplaying its hand, but that's part of what we'd be looking to confirm – personally detecting magic at a range of more than thirty-seven meters is extremely difficult, for example, which means no one will foresee the danger of being picked up by a diviner from over the horizon unless I warn them to use Nondetection at all times… or perhaps Illusions can't fool this long-distance detection spell and infiltrators will have to learn the language and use mundane disguises. That may be an appropriate use of government resources, depending on the level of risk it poses to Osirian citizens.

"Assuming we could, I would want to know the organizational structure of this country's internal security force, their priorities and response times, their champions and political allegiances, and whether it's feasible to establish a counterintelligence program before the secret gets out. I suppose we might also want to know how brittle the regime is, how many persons of interest are soft targets, whether the newer religions and cults are particularly concerning, general cultural information that might be useful for negotiations, and which of the usual strategies for relocating civilians are applicable. Consider a raiding party that conspires with a local alderman and his retinue to bring everyone to the town square, stuff them all into Bags of Holding, and Teleport the entire settlement out in one pass. Is this logistically and geographically possible? Are lone holdouts worth pursuing? Will state security notice and intervene? How long does it take for news of this to reach the central government, and how will they respond?"

There are also unknown unknowns, and the possibility that Tanya is just flat out wrong. Being truthful is not the same as being correct.

So Phēl does work for some kind of Osirian intelligence agency; that explains why she hasn't introduced herself with a title or office (or agency affiliation). It presumably isn't her real name, or face, voice or species for that matter. 

Intelligence services on Golarion (and probably the police, and everyone else who's legally allowed to?) operate by overwriting the minds of their targets to trust and cooperate with the investigators. This follows from being able to overwrite minds, and is really a much more civilized way of doing things than threats and physical coercion; when coercion is the nature of the game, it is better to reach the goal gently and (hopefully) reversibly.

Has Tanya's mind been overwritten to trust and cooperate with Phēl? Quite possibly! She thinks she'd notice it happening, but then her memories of it could be erased. Either way it wouldn't help anything to ask. She knew the stakes when she went to the palace for help, and they justify the risk.

"I can test magic detection against your defenses, once I'm outside the Dome. I can't tell what the spells are doing, but recognizing and tracking a signature is easy. The radar works on the same principle. Our best mages can learn to suppress mana emissions, but not perfectly and not while casting many powerful spells; I don't know if it would transfer."

"If you extract a whole community its disappearance will be noticed eventually, but that could mean hours or many days, and the first people to notice might not do anything useful with the information. If you deliberately target the most remote and out-of-touch communities you can find, it could easily be weeks, although the people there are unlikely to know much about the rest of the country; ideally you'd want to pick up some representatives of the central government... Since you're cooperating with the locals in this scenario, they would know best. Logistically, it is certainly possible for one or several villages if all you want is to collect information; when the authorities notice the disappearance they won't have a clue how it happened or a way to track you directly if you teleport far away. I don't know what their government would do, or even what it can do, once it becomes aware of the phenomenon. The risk to Osirian citizens, at present, is only that one of them could try to contact the enemy! If they give them information about Golarion or, worse, a way to contact it themselves or travel here, all bets are off." Can we get this meeting back on the track of stopping the functionally-insane Nethysians before discussing long-term spying and humanitarian efforts?

"Evacuating the population at scale would require, at minimum, somewhere to put them all - land, housing, food and work for up to a hundred million people. And you'd be picking up all the true believers and their - existing social structures, along the way. They do have a cult of personality of their current ruler; they don't call it religion but it's similar in many respects... It seems much easier to liberate their lands and keep the people where they are, but then I'm a soldier and think in those terms - and I still don't know your capabilities. For detailed information on the enemy's internal security, and everything else really, you should approach Germanian intelligence. If Osirion formally contacts Germania, I believe sharing intelligence is something friendly countries can do without having to reveal anything about their own operations. As a soldier, most of what I know myself pertains to their army." Please talk to the people whose actual job it is to be blamed for interplanetary diplomatic incidents such as 'Osirion decides to side with the Federation'.

One hundred million people. Great. 'Nidal if it were the size of Lung Wa at the zenith of its power and armed with unknown magic', she says. The usual Andoran trick of putting refugees to work clearing forests and creating arable land to live off probably isn't going to cut it at that scale, unless they're tough enough in aggregate to take on the harshest unsettled regions of the Mwangi Expanse. Hopefully this Germanian intelligence group has plans for eventually winning the war, so Phēl can satisfy the government's ethical obligations as easily as pointing volunteers in the right direction. On the bright side, at least their cults are cults of personality and not cults of Nocticula or Ahriman. Once the peons are free to return to normal, righteous religious practices, everything will sort itself out in due time.

And yes, it's probably time to take this back behind the wall. "Thank you for your cooperation. I think it's in our best interests to avoid contacting this country, or any others, until we have a clearer understanding of what that entails. Diplomatic ramifications aside, the existence of a continent-spanning magical surveillance network built for wartime mage hunting will give even the most enthusiastic Nethysians pause." Because they'll want to figure out how to foil it first, not because they respect boundaries, but it's the result that matters. "You are, of course, free to do as you please in this regard. Before I leave, will you show me your recording of today's events?"

So they will spy on them before establishing contact. This may be the right move from Osirion's perspective; their magical abilities will let them run circles around any Earthly intelligence agency for the next few years. However, it's likely to paint Germania - and Tanya personally! - in a terrible light as soon as they find out that Germania is at war with the Federation. Even if the fact itself doesn't reflect poorly on them, Tanya withholding it will. And it definitely isn't classified, so she'll have no excuse for avoiding making a reasoned decision instead of just doing what's easiest. Besides, she already told Nazir they're at war with Ildoa and he didn't take it too badly. Anyway, it's not as if they can censure her for her nation's decisions (let alone the Federation's, and they started the war!), and speaking now will save trouble down the road... probably.

"I find myself in a difficult position," she says honestly. "First contact between worlds is a momentous occasion; as a soldier my duty is to Germania, but of course I have no wish to harm Osirion either. I have not lied to you, or anyone else here, and I haven't tried to deliberately mislead you, but any picture I paint will be misleading almost by necessity because I must omit so many details, and our worlds are very different." Honestly, Tanya is still surprised by the similarities! Why are there humans on both planets to begin with? "Naturally, you will go see Earth for yourself; I do not wish you to conclude that I could have given you better guidance and chose not to. Hopefully, we - or you - will contact official representatives of Germania quickly enough to render this moot, but if necessary you can call on me to provide a more detailed briefing."

"I should clarify that Germania is, in fact, at war with the Russy Federation, the nation I've been speaking of. They attacked us two years ago, without provocation and with no casus belli or war aims other than wanting to conquer and subjugate us just as they want to conquer everyone else. For our part we would be very pleased if the war ended, at least in a way that wouldn't leave us in a weaker position for another attack by them a year later, although a return to the previous borders would mean the Russy reconquest of some areas whose population - at least in part - is happy to see them gone. I'm not saying this as an official representative of the Germanian Empire, as I certainly have no authority to do so, but it is my best understanding of my nation's interests and diplomatic posture. In any case, you have my word that I would have said the same things about the great and exceptional harms done and danger posed by the Federation if you had asked me before the present war."

"...and I will gladly show you my recording, once we are outside the Dome and I can use magic again. And the Share Language situation is resolved." Tanya feels she has maybe repeated this too many times and something's wrong with her understanding of local social niceties? Is Phēl trying to cue her to leave the room? "We can test local defenses against remote magic detection too, if you wish."

It's nice to have confirmation that there's a war, but thinking about this is clearly stressing her out (although she's doing a good job of hiding it). Phēl would like to hear more about this awful godless empire that declares war against its blameless neighbors, who bravely fight to liberate the oppressed citizens of the nation that attacked them, but they can move on to less sordid topics— like paperwork, or whose magic wins in a head-to-head contest.

The Share Language situation resolves itself: as soon as they're out from the weird magic barrier, Tanya can once again read and write Osirian. It looks like the spell was never undone, only suppressed? Regardless, as far as she can tell it's the only foreign spell acting on her at the moment.

Tanya can have the transcription of her statement to read and sign while Phēl rounds up some of the guards for a stealth test. It's a good translation, more verbose than saying the same thing in Osirian to begin with but otherwise capturing the meaning perfectly. There are margin notes on word choices – the name 'Earth' is transliterated rather than written as one of the synonyms for 'ground', a 'lieutenant colonel' outranks a 'major' despite the names implying the opposite, the second word in 'computation orb' is the same as the second word in 'crystal ball' even though this is not the case in Germanian – and a blank space at the bottom, dated to the winter of 1928 AR.

Tanya will sign this statement! In Germanian, and then in Osirian script, spelling her name the way she did at the bank. (Luckily, she has the bank's open draft with her to remind her how that works.)

...is she supposed to fill in the exact date and time? She doesn't actually know the date, it hadn't come up. Well, it was probably on the paperwork when she opened a bank account, but she doesn't remember it. She'll just ask Phēl when she gets back.

Aaah, the sweet relief of her spells coming back online. Rationally, she knows very well they don't make her nearly as safe here as they would on Earth, but the instinctive feeling is very hard to shake. It's the difference between being armored in several centimeters of solid steel plate and going out in public stark naked.

Late in the afternoon on the seventh of Calistril, if that means anything to her.

"We have Nondetection, Misdirection, and Greater Magic Aura," she says, gesturing to the two guards following behind. "That's not every spell for hiding from diviners, but it's what most of us have to work with. I don't believe we have a lead-lined box out here; if you happen to know whether lead is an effective shield I'll take your word for it."

"All matter blocks magic to a degree proportional to the 2/3rd power of its density times the Sommerfeld constant (*). And lead is very dense. A narrow interposing object is less effective because some magic leaks around it, but in the theoretical ideal case of a magic source entirely surrounded by a sphere of pure lead the attenuation would be 81.4% per meter." Tanya always carries a calculator with her, nestled next to her heart. "Although in practice, people use steel to shield secret magical installations, since it's much cheaper. And work hard on not emitting much magic in the first place."

Tanya notes the guards' magic signatures carefully, and puts up an illusion showing the distance and direction to each of them. "They can cast the spells now. Or maybe walk away, if you have a shielded room you want to test. ...other than the Dome, that is; it definitely works to block my magic detection."

(*) A/N: Not our α. Arnold Sommerfeld will discover the most important physical coupling constants no matter what universe you put him in.

They can try it out in the open. Each of them gets one spell for blocking Divination, then follows it up with another Prestidigitation to check if it works.

Nondetection doesn't accomplish anything, as far as Tanya can tell. It's briefly visible when cast and doesn't obscure Phēl in the slightest. Misdirection produces a strange magical echo of the man underneath – a different man, actually, slightly taller than the mage and with a larger nose, like a ghost superimposed over flesh and blood. Unlike Nondetection, it succeeds in making him more visible to aerial mages.

Greater Magic Aura suppresses the caster's magical signature during future spells… but not Greater Magic Aura itself. It's impossible to tell what he's actively doing just by using the orb, but she can definitely tell which region of space he's occupying as easily as she did before.

Tanya dutifully reports these results. "There's definitely some interaction between our spells," she says encouragingly, "so if you work with our magic researchers I expect great advancements for both traditions." Hint, hint.

Next up: showing her record of events. It would be simplest to copy it directly, but of course they have no compatible systems. The second simplest is for Tanya to reproduce them directly as magic fields, but they don't know the Germanian aerial mage shorthand for modifying the values displayed so they don't recreate the spell's original effects or do anything else other than heating the room a bit. (*)

That leaves the visualizations used in books and with non-mage scientists. Unfortunately, there is no simple way to do this. Magic is a 6-tuple scalar field; a full representation requires twelve three-dimensional field contour maps (for positive and negative values) and a lot of zooming, panning, filtering for areas or values of interest, and all-around flying walking through the illusuons and squinting. A simplified view collapses each set of three values into a single color (which you need some experience to read) and can also shift the values to make them all positive (as long as you don't care about outliers), ending up with a total of two information-dense illusions. Add to all that an illusion showing the room itself and the locations of people as Tanya remembers them; she doesn't know what went on behind her back but the approximate locations of Sythen, Professor Lorelei and the pseudo-Weiss that she remembers each match persistent magical configurations centered on those locations (ina addition to lots of non-persistent ones).

Simplified representations do exist, for example using light intensity instead of contour maps, but they are only useful when you already know what you're looking at and don't mind e.g. discarding small values or letting the outer parts of the nap obscure the inner ones. Tanya can't even confidently identify separate overlapping spells or assign them to casters yet! She has diligently (**) recorded the whole interaction including about two minutes before they walked in the door and a minute after she left, which means there is a lot of data to go through. (Yes, that includes whatever they cast just before she arrived and just after they left.) If Phēl doesn't want to spend hours reviewing it, hopefully she can locate the interesting bits quickly? Tanya is entirely willing to spend hours to help the investigation! (As long as they send someone out to arrest and/or interview the participants before then.)

Normal aerial mages aren't trained to do all this, even when issued advanced dual-core orbs that support it, but Tanya has spent some time working for military magic R&D and she knows what researchers tend to be like.

(*) If you've recorded a spell in enough detail, obviously you can straightforwardly recreate it. How that could not be the case? The one thing mages do is adjust the magic field to spec! However, without a complete analysis and dedicated support from your computation orb you can't adjust it (say, to point here and not there, or to account for air pressure), which makes this useless in the field.

(**) That is, automatically. She set her orb to record everything in a 250 meter radius and a rolling ten-minute time window. Capturing much more than that would, unfortunately, require more storage than she has. Records of battles usually last a minute or less due to the distances involved, with mages manually saving interesting segments.