"...do you mean the remaining legacy slaves are from non-human, longer lived races?" That sounds like the plan to wait them out is working, unless there are many non-human slaves and they live for several centuries.

"Yes, they are, which is why— greetings, shepherd!"

They have been joined by a pregnant woman who might be nineteen or twenty years old, wearing dark robes and silver jewelry. She looks at Iomedae the way one might look at a bug that survived being intentionally stepped on, and doesn't seem interested in acknowledging Tanya's existence.

"Greetings," she hisses. "You need water?"

"If you're not too busy with the little ones," Iomedae says, while directing one of them to spin in circles with the lights.

Whatever calculation is going on in the pregnant woman's mind takes a few moments to conclude, but when it does she approaches the basin and casts a spell. A torrent of water appears from literally nowhere in the space between her outstretched hands, mostly landing in the receptacle but with enough force to splash out and hit the floor.

...what an obvious solution to the lack of plumbing. Just teleport water in!

(But surely not every house has a mage who can teleport? This old fortress might have been built around an assumption of being staffed by mages. Or something happened to the plumbing and they didn't bother to fix it, since they do have a mage; presumably they can teleport waste away from the septic tanks...)

Tanya has no idea what the social or interpersonal drama is about, so she's going to do her best to stay out and hope this 'shepherd' (caretaker of children, presumably) mage doesn't associate it with her. This does make it awkward to thank her... well, she probably won't do anything worse than continuing to ignore her? "Thank you," Tanya says.

(Why did they go to a daycare worker for water? Is Iomedae going to pay her or something? Tanya feels it would be better to ask Iomedae once they're back outside.)

The children who still have their noses pressed against Tanya's shield like visitors at the zoo think this is the coolest thing ever! They will follow the shepherd around as she goes around refilling things with water, which is apparently a major function of this place because it's filled with all sorts of furniture for that exact purpose. She acknowledges Tanya's thanks with a nod but seems to have decided on not interacting with either of them any further. There is a lot of water being distributed, always in increments of around two gallons.

Iomedae will fill up her waterskin, and a second waterskin in case Tanya doesn't have one (where was she keeping these? It is unclear), and then drink some of the first one and refill it again.

"What else are you looking for in the short term, after you have a place to stay?" she asks.

(Why have lots of mismatched containers instead of one or two big ones? How are they filtering the source? Is this really more efficient than fixing the plumbing?)

Tanya has water bottles! Although given the givens, maybe she should accept the extra waterskin too. And she wants to dump some water on herself before she goes back out; she was worried about dirtying the floor, but the 'shepherd' already splashed water around, so apparently it's fine in this room?

"Do you mind if I pick your brain about it for a bit? It's hard to make any plans without knowing anything about this world." Tanya is slightly less enthusiastic about it now, after whatever that was between Iomedae and the other mage, but since Iomedae is very graciously volunteering her time to help Tanya out she certainly won't turn down her advice, even if she might want another source later.

"Ask anything you like."

Now, what does Tanya need to know most urgently? What things are definitely different from the rest of Creation?

"This planet is called Golarion, third from the sun. I don't have a world atlas on my person, but a book would answer geography questions better than I. The number of countries is… disputed. The current year is 1928 AR, but Osirion switched to Absalom Reckoning during the reign of Khemet II as part of a trade agreement with Taldor and the legacy calendar hasn't been fully phased out, so you might still hear people saying the year is four thousand something. One year is 365 days, unless it's 366, that happens every fourth year. There are hundreds of sapient races on Golarion; most are shaped like humans, and humans are the most common of those, but there are sapient non-humanoids as well – if you enjoy hunting, you will need to learn which animals are prey and which are people. Ah, is any of this helpful to you?"

"It's helpful, thank you. Perhaps not immediately useful, but it - reinforces some theories." Namely, that Being X is a terrible hack and all worlds are fundamentally Earths. This one even got the year right! Which means this is a kind of Egypt after all, despite the weird maps?

"Nazir thought it possible that the spell that brought me here will also send me back shortly. If it does, would I carry with me anything near me, just as I appeared here with my gear? If so, it suggests I should spend potentially all my wealth quickly on the things that would be most valuable to carry - books about science and technology and magic we don't have, and working examples of the same - that I can reasonably resell later if this doesn't happen. And that would fit in my backpack. Including anything that, if I take it back, would help establish ongoing communications between our worlds. He said something about a fork; that's not a spell we have so I'm not sure about the details. ...I said books but without the translation spell I wouldn't be able to read them; does that also come in a form that can be activated later, and recharged?"

"And if that doesn't happen - I'm not sure how long to wait - then I'll need to learn much more about this world before deciding what to do. I'm lucky that I don't need to urgently find a job, as I don't really know where to start. Something I know or can do might be valuable here, but I hesitate to say even that because I've already seen many things we don't know how to accomplish with magic - teleportation, extradimensional spaces, telepathy, mental knowledge transfer - I don't know what societies shaped by all this look like. Of course I'll start learning while I'm waiting; it's just that my money might be temporarily stored in valuable objects, and unavailable for any other purpose."

"Called outsiders return with everything they brought and their payment. I have never heard of one delaying the end of the Call to go shopping. I think they are either from a place much wealthier than here or not the type of entity that shops, most of the time. We should find a wizard^† and ask. For reading, I know there is a hat or helmet that lets the wearer read any language, if we can find someone selling it. It needs no expertise or charging." Iomedae foresees an emergency shopping trip to Absalom in the near future. "There is no such thing for Sending; you would need some skill with that spell's tradition, or else be skilled in operating any magic item, to use such an item on your own. I don't know anything about tuning fork creation, but if you have wizards back home they may be able to create one with just a description of the process, and from there we could copy the design and come to you."

Iomedae does not want to tell Tanya to become an adventurer. It's a high-value career, and it makes good use of the talents Tanya has already shown, but it's a horrible thing to recommend to someone who barely knows what they're getting into. There has to be something else!

"What else can your magic do? What else can you do? Surely there are problems other than dragons that people will pay you to solve."

^† '[One who is] too smart', a subtype of mage with a strong intellectual understanding of magical theory.

"Presumably they negotiate the payment they want so they don't need to go shopping later. I was never offered payment, or an opportunity to turn this down." She perks up. "Can I sue the tower's owner for kidnapping?"

"We have scientists studying magic and engineers (*) making our magic items," (casting implements has no specific translation) "but I don't know how far they'd get with written instructions from a completely different tradition, not only of magic but of other physical sciences. I'll buy a copy of any reference and encyclopedic works I can find, but they'd need to be in some compact form, I can't carry a library in my backpack... At least the reading problem is solvable, and the magic hat itself could be valuable to study."

"My world's magic can do - almost any physical effect, in theory, and new spells keep being invented or refined. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of spells used in industrial chemistry and manufacture. I don't know about most of them, and it's a rapidly developing field. The spells I have are those useful to a military aerial mage in our current doctrine. Weapons and shields aside, I can fly - ceiling of twelve thousand feet, though it's tiring to stay higher than eight, and with a maximum speed of eight hundred - um." Her knowledge of Osiriani is informing her that it has a word for 'foot' but not 'meter' or 'second'. They must use a different-length foot, too, it's good she caught herself. "This is a meter" (she shows one in an illusion). "I can fly at an altitude of 2400 meters, up to 3600 in emergencies. And a maximum speed of 220 meters per this time unit." Illusion of a one-second metronome. "The speed limit is due to drag, I spend more power the faster I'm flying."

"I can make illusions, as you've seen. If they're of things I'm imagining then they're limited by my ability to visualize, but I can also record what I'm seeing in the moment and reproduce it later more exactly than my own memory would allow. Aerial mages were originally used as observers; to that end I have an optical magnification spell" - she makes a small one to demonstrate - "up to a thousand-fold magnification. To benefit from that much you need good visibility conditions, of course. And know where to aim it; if a target isn't itself using detectable magic, I don't have any spells that would let me find it. This might be useful for mapping or some other aerial observation, if you haven't solved that class of problems yet. It can also be used as an optical microscope."

"Aside from that, I can produce directional light stronger than an illusion, make mirrors... The light can be -" no word for infrared?? "an emission of invisible heat, I can't find the right word for some reason..." What else. Her so-called speed-up spells (drugs synthesized and decomposed by magic directly in her brain) can't be used on other people, or at least she doesn't know how to make the orb do that. "I have a weak healing spell for emergencies, it speeds up natural healing and helps disinfect wounds. I have a short-range radio unit. You don't seem to be using radio transmissions, is it all magical communications or something else? Ah, I'm sorry, radio is signalling via the same force as light and heat but even longer waves than heat. I don't know the technical terms in this language." Did she get a defective translation spell or do these people have a completely different theory of physics? Magic detection is presumably not useful, she can't do any actual analysis on their unfamiliar spells and her orb can't compete with a proper magic radar (†) anyway.

"Outside magic and the military, I have experience as a human resources manager, but I can't imagine working here without a lot of retraining. It depends intimately on company culture - and actual culture - and on the relevant laws. Having since commanded military units of up to a thousand people, I'm afraid management technique does not generalize well across different kinds of organizations."

Honestly, if any of Tanya's magic abilities is competitive here, the best way to capitalize on that would be to teach more people to make and use Earth-style casting implements. Even if her particular spells aren't valuable, the overall technology might be. But she's not in the least qualified to do that, and reverse engineering her orb - would be very difficult on Earth but she has no idea how to judge it here, which is another reason not to mention the possibility right away! And she doesn't know what kind of attention she might draw to herself. If computation orbs turn out to be anywhere near as groundbreaking as they were on Earth they would make her subject to geopolitics, and she does not need that kind of excitement in her life.

(*) Incredibly smart. Also, make things and people explode in the name of progress. Sadly, Osiriani does not seem to have a word for 'mad scientist/engineer' other than mages and chemists.

(†) So-called by analogy with normal radars, these large ground-based detection units are in fact passive. However, they use magic for their own operation, which allows them to be detected and targeted.

Iomedae listens intently to Tanya's explanation, only interrupting to comment that Tanya's metronome is ticking five or six times faster than a round, which she will indicate by snapping her fingers in time. One round is approximately how long it takes to cast most spells.

2400 meters is a mile and a half, she thinks, which is higher than most birds fly but not as high as vultures and air elementals prefer. The atmosphere thins out as you rise, but a healthy person won't be more than slightly inconvenienced at that height. 3600 meters is close to the threshold where almost everyone needs magical assistance to breathe. That part makes sense – it's the speed that's unbelievable. 500 miles an hour?! If Tanya exaggerates by an order of magnitude she is merely the fastest woman alive! 500 miles an hour, limited by drag?!?! What an incredible spell!

The rest of her kit, illusions and heat rays, are interesting but not as fundamentally astonishing, except for the fact that they also run on Universal magic. Iomedae is the furthest thing from a wizard, but even she knows that this is not how magic works. Flight is Transmutation, heat rays are Evocation, illusions are Illusion, healing is Conjuration. This sounds suspiciously like Wish-based magic – maybe Tanya learned her craft from the genies, or is geniekin herself. Iomedae would not have guessed that based on her appearance, but she claims to have had a career before joining the military, which means she cannot possibly be as old as she looks. Perhaps she could be an adventurer after all? With a pair of Eyes of the Eagle and a diviner acting as a spotter she would be a terror in a fight.

Some of the other comments are confusing. Tanya asks whether Golarion has mastered aerial mapmaking and observation, and in the same breath refers to esoteric facts about heat and light that Iomedae has never heard of before. She takes a moment to organize her thoughts.

"We communicate over long distances with magic," she says, once Tanya finishes. "Sending and Scrying are the two most common methods, but Scrying in particular is useful because it can be cast out of crystal balls repeatedly without practice. Crystal balls are too expensive to use in the field, but cities usually have several to facilitate communication. If you can't afford to rent one you use the post, and if you can pay for better you hire a teleporter. All of what you say is fascinating, but I must ask if you are a sorcerer – born with the gift – or if your magic was learned or given. And, forgive me if this is impertinent, but how old are you?"

Although Iomedae doesn't know it, Tanya is the fastest woman alive (on Earth), a dubious honor she owes to flying Dr. Schugel's supersonic V-1 rocket. However, she is not the fastest woman on Golarion; that honor goes to the person who teleported 500 miles in six seconds.

(Does it take six seconds to cast most spells? Tanya has no idea what civilian spells are actually like, and they're typically operated by class-C mages, so as far as she knows that's true on Earth as well.)

"It's commonly assumed that mages are born that way but we can't actually test for it before children can understand and follow instructions, so I suppose there's an outside chance it works some other way. It's only modestly heritable, you need population-level statistics to notice. ...and of course mages then need to study and practice for months or years to learn to cast specific spells, usefully and reliably. We certainly have no way to 'gift' magical ability, are you implying you do?" These people don't seem to all be mages, maybe they haven't figured out how to scale it yet? This still implies everyone rich or important is a mage, but it might not matter much if non-mages can use spells in item form.

"If I understand you correctly, you don't have a non-magical method of remote communications, and the magical one is too expensive for routine use?" Perfect. An valuable industry Tanya can help develop! Cheap communications are vital to trade, governance and every other aspect of society! And since they already have an expensive method, introducing radio won't upend warfare, so she won't be making herself a target by doing it! "I may be able to help with that."

However, Tanya has just committed a blunder. She can't explain how it is that she has management experience from before her army service, and it will be awkward if she actually makes it back to Germania and this offhand comment ever comes up. Well, she can't really explain how it is that she enlisted in the military academy at the tender age of seven and successfully became an officer at nine, either. Since she is visibly a teenager at best, she might as well imply that she is much older than she looks. She doesn't want to lie outright, though, and she can't claim her private records are classified without sounding like some kind of human test subject - ah. Drat. She has already entered her age in the bank's forms! Which Iomedae presumably wasn't reading over her shoulder, but.

"I'm fourteen." Please don't ask any further questions and forget about the HR comment?

There is no good reason to ask 'how long have you been fourteen' because if it turns out that Tanya is a vampire or got lost in the First World for a thousand years that never happened or was created by the spell in the tower this morning with holes already worn in her socks, it'll come out sooner or later. Iomedae will let it pass without comment. For now.

"Sorcery is heritable, and easy to spot once it comes in, but anyone who can marshal the magic into the right form with their own cunning can learn wizardry. They are the same thing underneath, implemented in different ways. I do not have the knack for it; wizards spend years learning how to multiply numbers diagonally and talk in riddles about shapes, it's all Iblydosi to me. There are people with both sorcery and wizardry but it's a rare path, they both take dedication to master and you'd be better off focusing on one or the other unless you know something the rest of us don't. If you were not born a sorcerer and are not smart enough to be a wizard you can always ask to be empowered. That works with…" gods, demigods, quasi deities, godlings, outer gods, proto-gods, familiar spirits, mythic spirits, ancestral spirits, astral spirits, natural spirits, phantoms, eidolons, the vast powers of nature and of righteousness, the small powers of the Impossible Kingdoms and Tian Xia, the many more she's never heard of, "… there are a lot of ways. Abadar, Pharasma and Nethys are the most common in Osirion. That is where the shepherd gets her water; the spell is from Pharasma."

"If I gave you a business idea, you should talk to Nazir about it, but yes, the lesser crystal balls cost maybe fifty thousand scarabs. I am also curious about your optical microscopes, your radios, your healing magic, and this business of heat and light being the same force. Those all have potential."

"You're implying sorcerers don't need any training because they have - an instinctive ability to cast some spells?" That sounds like a very reasonable thing to have evolved! It's more surprising that not everyone is a sorcerer by now! "Our mages are more like your wizards; we need the born potential and the rigorous training. It doesn't include much math because, while the spells themselves need it, devices were invented to handle the calculations. That's when the magic revolution really took off." So their wizards are like Earth mages, except even harder to train and correspondingly more highly-paid professionals. And a few have an inborn talent for casting some spells and take the easier path to become a sort of savant without the training to use more spells than they were happened to be born with.

Meanwhile... "Abadar and the rest can give other people magic? Is that like making a magical item anyone can use?" Technically, Tanya is using a magical item (?) created by Germanian engineers. She's not sure what implications this has, if magical items exist anyway; presumably it has some different tradeoffs. The possibly weirder part is that only a few people can 'grant' this magic - maybe they own the extremely capital-expensive that make it work. "Do they do it for many people?"

"The microscopes are the same magnification, used to see very small things instead of distant ones. Useful in biology and medicine, probably some kinds of manufacturing... Of course, having just one microscope that only I can power isn't very useful. The healing spell variant I have is for field use; it disinfects wounds with" - sulfanilamide - "a chemical compound it synthesizes, and accelerates natural healing, focusing on clotting and so on. It's meant to get you alive to a real hospital, not to properly heal your wounds, it's not a miracle cure. The medic mages in the hospital have much better spells, but I don't." Specialization pays off; aerial mages are very few but the army still can't afford to send them all to medical school. "I don't expect either will be useful as a service, unless you don't have microscopes of this level of magnification yet and could use it for novel research."

"The radios and the heat and light are all based on the same scientific theory. The language-knowledge doesn't seem to contain the words for it, maybe your scientists model things differently." Or maybe Iomedae is uneducated, but that seems unlikely and would be rude to suggest. "Visible light can come in different colors. A prism separates daylight into those colors" - illusion illustration - "so do the raindrops that make a rainbow. This natural order of the colors corresponds to a property of colored light, which we call frequency; red is low frequency and violet is high. Some animals - possibly some sentient races, here - can see colors of higher or lower frequency than humans can, but not by very much. Heat is light in a range below red in frequency. That's radiated heat, which you can feel from a distance, not the heat of an actually hot object that you feel when you touch it, that doesn't depend on light. The sun emits visible light and also higher frequency light - which causes sunburn - and lower frequency heat." Tanya isn't sure how to prove any of this. Weren't there devices that shifted the frequency of light? She's coming up blank, though.

"Radio is the name for an even lower frequency range of light than heat. There isn't much of it in nature, and nothing already uses it for vision. It's also not as obscured by clouds and fog as visible light, although enough solid material still blocks it. Radios are devices - normally nonmagical - that can emit and receive radio-frequency light to communicate over distances of tens of kilometers, a hundred or more if you put a powerful transmitter on a tall tower. My own radio is meant for talking to the other mages I'm flying with and ground-based control, and air traffic controllers. It's not very powerful, and it's partly magical which makes it more complex but is needed for miniaturization. I can probably build a toy nonmagical radio that would serve as a - motivating example but wouldn't be good enough for real use, that was a school exercise. To build a real one I'd definitely need an engineer to work with, and I'm not sure how much I happen to remember or even know about all the details." Tanya has seen broken and disassembled radios being repaired. Back when she was starting out as an artillery observer mages had to carry actual heavy radios in their packs, one radio-man per squad. She wasn't trained to field-repair radios, only to use them, but maybe she can remember enough details to get somewhere if she works with an actual engineer? "If you can build it, though, it doesn't use any very expensive components."

Mages from Germania are all sorcerers, but they need to do math to get their spells working, and it sounds like that wasn't very widespread or useful before the invention of a 'device to handle the calculations'. They must all be arcanists, which is an unsurprising thing to hear of happening in a wealthy army that can afford to train them because arcanists are ridiculous.

"Wizards keep the fruits of their labor in spellbooks – they are literal books, most of the time, but they are designed to move the magic precisely onto the scaffold using special inks. I can do this for my spells using only my mind – it feels like 'wanting it' to happen when I do it, but other sorcerers describe it differently. Stabilizing the spell is the hard part; once on the scaffold, casting it is easy. Anyone can learn to do that part in an hour. Spellbooks are not magic items, they can be created using no magic at all, but real magic items use the same sorts of materials to… artificially stabilize and trigger an entrained spell like a full person, I suppose."

Is casting spells out of an item anything like being a cleric? Iomedae has never thought about this before. She lifts one of the waterskins with Telekinesis to check. It feels like using a magic ring.

"Granted magic is different from magic items," she reports. "It is not like 'wanting it', it is like 'understanding it', I am told. It is very common, but they only do it for aligned people and there are a lot of limitations that I don't understand. Pharasma is very powerful, and she wants to protect infants and mothers, but she does not empower every midwife in the world as one of her own, and I do not know if this is because she cannot, or does not want to, or does want to but faces other considerations."

Tanya's healing spell sounds confusing and underpowered relative to what her world's specialists can do. Unless it's an improvement over channeling positive energy, it probably won't work as a career. The microscope spell, on the other hand, is intriguing. "I don't know how strong the strongest lenses are, but they definitely do not magnify anything a thousandfold. Researchers would pay you for your microscope magic; more if you can sell them the spell itself. There must be mysteries left unsolved, if you know them to have been uncovered by your own world's microscopes. I am not the person to talk to about light frequency, but mages who specialize in illusion research have a great deal of interest in rainbows, so they too would likely pay to hear you speak on the subject."

"Radios are unlike anything we have," she admits. "Is the idea that each person would have a radio, or each house, or each firm that can afford one? It is hard to tell if they would be a world-changing invention for all or merely extremely useful."

"So you're a sorcerer, born a mage and with an instinct for using it... and you have granted magic? Because, as a sorcerer, you can't easily learn all the spells you'd like to use?" That makes sense. "Does this Pharasma - and Abadar and the others - publish their policies, or requirements for applicants?" It seems very odd not to know why a (presumably very powerful and influential) actor is granting magic to some people but not others. Tanya wonders if it's frowned upon to ask about Iomedae's own interview. If granted magic is 'very common' compared to the smartest however-many percent of the population, then this society might have an insane amount of mages compared to Earth! ...There aren't that many people using magic in the city, though. Maybe they're mostly C or D-class mages who can't do much that's useful? Granting D-class magic to a big chunk of the population would still be a pretty big deal; Tanya expects someone would find a profitable use for it eventually.

Tanya is a bit confused by the rest of it. "Wizards use books as an - external memory aid, writing down information about spells. And they need to do the hard part, the mathematics, using the book as a reference, before actually casting it later? That sounds very limiting. How do they adjust the spell while it's ongoing?" It probably isn't important, but she doesn't understand how you'd do magic that way.

"I can't sell or teach anyone any spells, because -" should she tell her about her computation orb? She has already implied it exists, but if Iomedae hasn't realized it (yet) then she'd be giving away her biggest vulnerability. On the other hand, 'can you teach others your spells?' is an obvious question that Tanya can't avoid forever. (Also, computation orbs are very obvious when you look at Earth mages casting spells.) "...because of technical limitations." It's at least not something to discuss openly in public where anyone could overhear. "Also, they are proprietary and classified information of the Germanian army, although that rule obviously wasn't made with this situation in mind," which is a nice excuse whichever way she wants to go.

"I don't know what specific problems were solved by high-magnification optical microscopes. The first microscopes enabled all sorts of discoveries, but they were much weaker. Radios are very useful for governments and many other organizations, and easily pay for themselves, but they can also be used similarly to newspapers, broadcasting publicly to everyone with a receiver - news, weather forecasts or warnings, prices and other market information, educational material, entertainment like music... Once you build out the system, using it all the time is relatively cheap. This is usually subsidized by governments in the public interest, or rich private interests who want their opinions or claims heard. The public buys receivers because they want to hear the news, or whoever is broadcasting can subsidize receivers in public spaces, civic buildings and so on. Because of the huge market, manufacture should improve until eventually they're cheap enough for people to buy one for their home without further subsidies."

"Only a little granted magic, just enough to make me hard to kill. My sorcery is more flexible."

Why are the children demanding to be splashed with water? Is that fun? It might be fun. She will use Telekinesis to launch water out of the basin at them.

This is extremely popular with four-year-olds, and elicits an angry choking noise from the shepherd.

Time to leave. Iomedae will drop a fistful of silver into a collection box on the way out.

"There are places to train for it, for Abadar and Pharasma and Nethys. They're popular and respectable— well, Abadar and Pharasma are respectable. Nethys has a reputation outside Osirion for being more interested in the pursuit of knowledge than its consequences." Is that a polite enough warning? "If you already have the habits of mind and action that would make you a good candidate for one in particular, I think you can just ask. Apart from personality and alignment, it is usually good to be very wise – that is, to be careful and reflective and hard to deceive, both because this is valuable itself and because wisdom makes it easier to 'understand' the magic."

It's still obscenely hot outside, but with a belly full of water and wet clothes it's much more tolerable.

"When you cast a spell it hooks into your mind, and that lets you adjust… do you want to try it? I will loan you a magic item, if you promise to return it."

Abadar patronizes the head of state, bank, and other government-adjacent functions, Pharasma empowers the midwifes, and Nethys the mad engineers researchers? This feels like an odd combination but Tanya isn't sure what wouldn't, and presumably it's not a complete picture.

"I'm certainly interested in trying, but doesn't that require more training? Or pose any danger? Of course I promise to return it when you ask."

"Not for this one." Iomedae wrestles a ring of small rubies set in intertwined silver tendrils off her index finger and hands it to Tanya. "This is a Ring of Telekinesis. When you wear it, say 'Iomedae' and the spell will emerge. Then use your hand to finish it, like this." She demonstrates the motion. "You might need to try once or twice to get it down, but it's not hard. And no, there's nothing special about the command word, it's just a name the creator used. The actual incantation for Telekinesis is much longer."

Tanya saw what was presumably the same spell used by Iomedae earlier; it looked harmless enough. Sure, she'll try the ring on. What happens when she says 'Iomedae', before she makes the gesture? Is there magic and what is it doing?

(It's a bit odd for Iomedae to have to say her own name every time she wants to cast the spell, but there might be a cultural reason behind it. Or, perhaps whoever she commissioned the ring from absent-mindedly set it to use the customer's name.)