Tanya can fly! Where is she flying?!

Standard protocol for a suddenly unfamiliar, presumed hostile sky: maximum mental speedup, maximum acceleration with random juking, illusory decoys flying out and an illusion making her look like a patch of sky which will maybe fool a novice mage for a second. What other mana signatures are there?

There are already dozens of people in the air, though none of them are moving at more than a tiny fraction of Tanya's current velocity and most of them are below two hundred feet in altitude. Every single one of them is aglow with magic, along with a few patches of seemingly-empty space. At maximum mental speedup, it's almost as if they're frozen in time, not yet having reacted to either Tanya's arrival or whatever caused it.

Another set of mana signatures are on the ground, in what appears to be a good old-fashioned melee. Humanoid figures armed with both active spells and a variety of bladed weapons are in the process of murdering one another in the midst of a series of low stone buildings and grassy strips, though if anything they're moving even more slowly than the aerial fighters.

The last mana signature is the tower itself, which is glowing ominously and buzzing like a honeybee. In addition to the aforementioned weirdness there is now a cloud of gas the color and consistency of split pea soup leaking out of holes in the mortar near the base.

None of that makes any sense. She doesn't recognize any of the spells! The fliers are too slow and the low-ranked mages on the ground are... using swords? Maybe they have a better mage blade based on a sword, but where are their guns?

Those are background, almost non-verbal thoughts. If none of them are reacting to her she'll focus on getting high up and far away from this fight.

This poses something of a conundrum. All of the other side effects of tearing down the warding on this tower are exactly the kind of uninspired, poorly thought-out traps a human wizard might think to set: Glyphs of Warding that unleash summoned monsters and Slows into the same area at the same time; evocation that lashes out without the slightest attempt to target anything useful; the really dangerous spells like Cloudkill and Symbols hidden behind decaying barriers, as if to offer the attackers a reasonable chance at escape.

The entity fleeing from the scene is not like that. A called creature with flight speed faster than a dragon and multiple Quickened illusions to cover its tracks as it leaves the scene suggests the influence of someone who knew what they were doing. It could be going anywhere to do anything, at this point, and at the rate it's moving there isn't much time to react.

Ymohrglas has a few seconds of Greater Invisibility left before he needs to retreat and recalculate, which means acting fast is better than acting carefully. He picks out the real creature among the illusions, swivels around to get a clear shot, and breathes lightning.

Tanya is of course keeping track of the (terrifyingly close-by) illusioned magical signature. When it starts casting something in her general direction, she dodges the hell out of the way. And when that something materializes in an actually-dangerous-looking miniature lightning bolt (her shield can't stop electricity!!) she responds by flying away even faster, while shooting back.

Her machine gun fires fourteen bullets a second on full auto. She can't cast explosive spells on them that quickly, of course, so over half are relative 'duds' that with luck will still serve to confuse the enemy as he tries to dodge. At this range, though, even dodged explosions should have some effect on their shield. As a bonus, they'll create smoke that will hopefully help her escape to a more reasonable range.

Her body won't thank her for pulling eight gees for a few seconds, but it will thank her for staying alive and that's what matters.

Dragons are remarkably hard to kill. They can fly fast and react faster, deflect most attacks off their scales and ignore all but the most ferocious nonmagical blows. They are born with innate magic and sorcery both, and grow into their power with only the passage of time. They are animated with even more life force than even their imposing size would naively suggest. Ymohrglas is additionally under a wide array of defensive spells, which for the next few minutes at least will render him even tougher than that.

However, despite the astonishing acuity of his senses, it is tautologically impossible to hear supersonic objects before they arrive, which means Ymohrglas is still in the process of closing his mouth and reorienting when a stream of explosive bullets disintegrates his right arm and a large chunk of his torso.

To all other observers, the already quite loud battlefield is overwhelmed by a deafening series of explosions. A moment later, most of a blue reptile the size of an elephant materializes on the roof of a nearby building.

This produces a total rout. About two-thirds of the airborne fighters turn tail and flee in every direction, their illusions moving with them to screen their retreat. The same goes for the men on the ground, although a small contingent of them will start scaling the building towards the body as soon as it appears.

Tanya has no idea what to make of the enormous flying blue lizard (??) she apparently just killed (???) but she does know the the most important fact about this situation, which is that she is getting away.

Five minutes later, Tanya is ten thousand feet up and ten kilometers sideways in a random direction, and has no idea where she is or how she came to be there. The last thing she remembers is being on a routine flight. Her orb's recordings show a clean cut, complete with a sudden loss of altitude, which makes absolutely no sense. The magic she recorded during the abortive fight makes no sense to her either. She can't raise anyone on the radio (not that it can reach that far). 

She appears not to be pursued, at least not by aerial mages.

What does the land below look like, apart from 'unfamiliar'?

She's just passed over ten kilometers of agricultural land. Long shallow lakes dug into pleasing geometric patterns visible only from above spiral outwards from the semi-urban cluster of buildings she originated at, and between them are narrow plots of cropland filled with indistinguishable green smudges. Some of the lakes have boats on them, barges with enough floor space to be visible even from a great height, but if there are any buildings down there they aren't quite large enough to stand out against the rich black soil.

At this point, she's reached the end. Before her is a subtropical desert that stretches out to the horizon in all directions below a cloudless sky. There are no roads nor tracks leading to or from this place.

The only desert she's been to is outside Turus on the Southern Continent, and Ildoa is a mountainous country. 

Was this enemy action even directed at her? There were definitely people fighting each other there and one of them might have shot at her on instinct. (And left behind the elephant-sized body of a blue lizard that definitely shouldn't be able to fly? It wasn't magical and it served no apparent purpose. Tanya is very confused right now.)

Are there any magical signatures within a few kilometers? If not, she'll try descending and asking the nearest locals where she is. This isn't very safe, but she really doesn't have any better ideas! (In theory, starting from anywhere on Earth she could fly towards the magnetic north until she recognizes something, but it could take days.)

The only magical signatures she's seen in the past five minutes are the boats. Not all of them, only most, but beyond a certain size and build quality they tend to have some magic about them. Apart from that, the land is nonmagical. At lower altitudes she can see small buildings made from adobe the same color as the soil, and even a few people who aren't cowering inside of them – at this distance the thunder was audible but attenuated, and some farmers have more important things to worry about than loud noises coming from a long way off. The weeds won't pull themselves, most of the time.

Tanya can't immediately recall a use of magic specific to ships but she'll stay far away from those for now.

She'll head towards the closest (and most isolated) building or person she can see. (Zooming in to see from a few kilometers away is easy, but she does need to know where to look.) Land just out of sight under an illusion, and then walk in. This won't fool anyone suspicious (she is, after all, wearing a uniform and visibly armed) but it can't hurt. All she needs is to establish a common language and ask what the nearest city is called. She'll be out of there at the first sign of danger or approaching magic.

The nearest person is hard at work pulling weeds growing in the cracks of a cement water channel. He's either an unusually mature-looking child or an adult man with an endocrine disorder; it's hard to tell while he's kneeling but he can't be much more than three feet tall.

Tanya's arrival doesn't immediately disturb him. It's weird for a foreigner to be out in the fields, but it's not totally unprecedented either, and why should he assume the worst?

"Good day." She starts out in (badly accented) Ildoan, for whatever that's worth.

This warrants a confused look and a quick response in a language that might be related to Coptic. It's followed by a much slower sentence, once he notices her failure to follow along, and then by what is clearly an attempt to speak a different third language which she also does not understand. When that doesn't work, he will make a gesture that realistically could mean anything and start walking away from the edge of the desert.

Tanya has never heard Coptic in her life. She didn't pick up any local languages in Turus, either. She will try the other languages she knows: Germanian, Francois, English, Russy... Not that she knows of any hot deserts in any of those countries. What on Earth is going on?

...she'll follow him. Carefully and very on alert.

While accompanied by a native, nobody pays Tanya a second glance. Most of the people they see are perfectly ordinary foreigners – they wear loose clothing in strange fashion, but it's the sort of dress that keeps the sun off bare skin and lets wind and water through on rough days, perfectly utilitarian fare. Many of them have the same condition as Tanya's guide, whatever that might be, though given they all live in the same farming village it could be an inherited trait.

The person he's taking her to clinches it: she is simultaneously an elderly woman and much shorter than Tanya. Does Tanya happen to speak Mwangi, Undermwangi, Kelish, Mzunu, Ocotan, or Taldane?

Did she somehow end up in a pygmy village? But they're not black...

In any case: no! She does not recognize any of these languages! Given the amount of languages and the total lack of overlap, she might well be in the southern hemisphere!

Tanya creates an illusion of a world map. She is lost, can they please point out where in the world she is? This is objectively a very silly question but, well.

The younger man backs away hastily from the person who has turned out to be a sorcerer, though not so far or fast as to be impolite.

The older woman is less impressed. Most adventurers out in the far reaches of Shiman-Sekh are locals paid to deal with the dire crocodiles and gnoll raiders. Foreign adventurers from far north of the Inner Sea come here exclusively for the giant godsforsaken rock that Khemet I insisted on digging out of the sand where it belongs. If this one embarked on that quest without a guide or a common tongue with the nearest city, more fool her. The local midwife doesn't prepare Share Language unless she has a day's notice.

The floating map is… well, she has seen a globe before, but not recently enough to immediately place anything on this one. She approaches, squinting, and after a moment indicates a spot somewhere in the Sahara near the geographic center of Egypt.

Huh! Tanya - is a bit surprised, apparently, even though any other possible answer would have been just as surprising.

She discards the map illusion and tries to convey her thanks in pantomime. She doesn't have any local currency, obviously, but she only took a little of their time, so this probably counts under general hospitality to wayfarers.

And then she steps out of the house and flies north. She has at least half a day's flying ahead of her, and will need to stay far from any possible magic radars (i.e. cities, military bases and ships). Unfortunately, the whole point of magic radars is that they out-range aerial mages, so she can't guarantee not being detected... Although they probably haven't upgraded their radars yet out here. In the worst case, she can fly higher and faster than any pursuing mage as long as they don't manage to surround her; she just needs to be on the lookout for planes.

At cruising speed it'll take half an hour to reach the coast. The erg in this direction is nothing but gold and red sand dunes that sit frozen on the earth, without the slightest hint of vegetation or habitation. If there are surveillance stations out here they're beyond visual range, and nothing along the way happens to trigger a radar warning.

The coast itself is inhabited, albeit sparsely. There are a few tiny fishing villages along the beaches surrounded by enough patchy grassland to support grazing animals. Out in the sea, the odd groupings of rocks large enough to pose a danger to nearby ships are politely occupied by tall marble lighthouses. Westbound at high speed, it's visually apparent when the desert transitions from arid to semiarid, with rockier terrain pockmarked by arroyos and relatively green plant life culminating in windswept cliffs and larger settlements.

Thirty minutes later along the coast is the first statue. The figure of a man standing over two hundred feet tall has been carved into the limestone precipice, the top of his elaborate headdress sitting just below the edge and his feet resting in the sea with the waterline up to his ankles. The cliffside has been reworked into a flat plane, making the region stand out as obviously artificial even at a great distance, but this enormous expenditure of additional time and effort serves no apparent practical purpose other than to provide the giant statue with a clean visual backdrop.

Tanya doesn't remember ever hearing about this statue. That's unsurprising; her historical and cultural education in this world is sadly deficient outside of the subjects the nuns thought suitable to little girls, and since she joined the army she spent all her study time on technical topics, so she's basically cheating using her first life's knowledge.

Anyway, she has much bigger concerns to unproductively mull over. Namely: how on Earth was she teleported to Egypt? Why her, why here, why in the middle of a fight that didn't seem to involve her except for a single mage that created a short-range lightning discharge (?) and also a huge dead blue lizard (???) 

The lizard could be a papier-mache mockup hidden under the invisibility illusion until she shot it and the caster. A modified flight spell could have kept it up in the air. This is not an explanation, in the sense that Tanya doesn't feel any less confused, but it's something somebody could do, which only leaves the question of why they'd do it. Tanya can't answer that question without knowing what the surrounding fight was about, and she's not about to linger here long enough to try to find out.

The mage holding the lizard could have attacked her with electricity on reflex. Maybe they were just as surprised by her sudden appearance. The unexplained bit is the electricity itself; firstly because Tanya hasn't heard of such a spell and it seems like it should go through a shield; and secondly, because how can you point electricity at a point in midair and not have it go to ground? Well, she doesn't have an actual tool to measure such things; presumably the spell forced it to a given point after which it did ground itself, and the latter step didn't happen to be visible because by then the energy had been distributed over a wide area and atmospheric conditions interfered or something. Electric discharge is instantaneous, so you only see the parts that were momentarily bright enough to form an afterimage on your retina. There, that's explained, and she'll dutifully report to Intelligence about the interesting new combat spell being used in Egypt.

It must be part of their ground-mage doctrine; the Empire has only recently begun the process of conscripting C-grade mages as heavy infantry, and has them direct their magic to shields and strength reinforcements instead of short-range attacks, but the tradeoff with enchanted bullets is a live discussion. Tanya has no idea who is fighting whom, though. The Empire never pushed the Commonwealth colonial border, and it has long since entirely evacuated its remaining forces from the Southern Continent.

That leaves one obvious and crucial impossibility, which is that Tanya was (for lack of a better name) teleported. 

She has never heard of it as even a theoretical possibility. If a spell existed that instantaneously moved people and things, it would revolutionize - well, everything. Tanya's mind spins just considering the obvious possibilities. And if someone did invent such a thing, why reveal its existence by using it on her? (Without killing or capturing her in the process?) Even if the rest of her unit was taken out in similar fashion, she's on her way back home to report!

Her orb recorded many different entirely unfamiliar magical spells at the fight. That shouldn't be possible. Even aside from everything else, it would represent a colossal failure on behalf of Imperial Intelligence.

Tanya will go home and find the rest of her unit alive and well hand over the recording to someone more qualified to deal with this headache. She wouldn't wish this on Visha's friend in Intelligence, so it might be Dr Schugel again... well, that's daydreaming. On she flies.

It turns out to be a whole range of statues, spaced just far enough apart that handful at most would be visible at a time from sea level. They're not not Egyptian in style – every single one of them is equipped with the extremely recognizable crook and flail iconography, either held in hand or tied to a belt – but the quality of the faces in particular is stunningly accurate, as if the subjects had posed nicely for the artists to complete their work. The procession goes on for kilometers, dozens and dozens of statues peering sightlessly out into the void.

There are also what look like people lounging on the convenient horizontal components of the sculptures, though if any of them can even notice Tanya as she passes, they don't seem to be trying to get her attention. To the naked eye they look a bit like immobile dark spots on the lighter sandstone.  None of them have any magical signature.

She'll fly a bit farther out to sea just to be sure. And zoom in on one of the dark spots with an optical-spell lens, out of a habit of situation-awareness and simple curiosity.

It is an avian humanoid, though the resemblance to a bird of prey extends beyond the wings growing from its scapulae to talons on its digits and yellowish scales on its extremities. It's lying naked on the ground, eyes closed as it bakes gently in the midday desert sunshine, but nearby is a pile of stained rags and what might be an unstrung shortbow or spear-thrower. On the next ledge over are a few more engaged in the same activity, plus two younger ones alternating between throwing a small rock back and forth and running in circles. They sit at the uncanny midpoint between abject poverty and feral existence.

They climbed all the way onto the statues (presumably there are internal stairways she can't see) in... wing costumes? Truly, folk traditions cannot be comprehended, only cataloged. (Tanya judges them for letting children run around on a platform without railings, though.)

Presumably they know better than to let themselves get heatstroke, lying on hot stone in the midday sun.

As she contemplates this, a perfectly comprehensible voice whispers directly in her ear.

"Thank you for your assistance! Your share of the reward comes to sixteen thousand four hundred gold scarabs. Would you prefer cash or bank transfer?"

This is accompanied by the spontaneous appearance of a singular point of magic (otherwise invisible) ten feet away from her head.

Evasive maneuvers!!! The sudden magic signature is thoroughly exploded!!!

It doesn't attempt evasive maneuvers of its own, and the reason why becomes apparent: it's not attached to anything physical. The disembodied magical signature ignores everything thrown at it, like an illusion rather than a heavily shielded target, but it only follows Tanya at a comparatively sedate pace.

At the sound of the explosions, almost all of the people on the rocks take flight – nonmagical flight, that is. They are definitely flying by making use of their biological wings, in the manner of birds rather than aerial mages dressed like birds. All of them are flying away from Tanya's general direction, except for the ones that for one reason or another cannot fly, and those take to cowering behind what passes for cover on the statues.

It's moving at a very slow approximately-constant speed, so she can and does get away, but she has no idea what the fuck it is. How did it suddenly appear? Where is the caster? What is it doing? There was something like an illusion of sound (another thing thought impossible!!) and it said some nonsense but she really wasn't listening at the time! 

She powers the strongest optical spell she can hold for a few minutes and will release it immediately if anything else like that happens. The magical signature is falling far behind and she'd rather keep this in reserve than blast it and its vicinity.

She has decoys out and an invisibility illusion, discarded the lens the moment she was attacked, and doesn't know or care what the people on the cliff are doing.

It continues to trundle after her without the slightest bit of acceleration, and soon it disappears into the distance behind her without having done anything else that she can detect.

The remainder of the statues are barren. Everyone has either heard her coming or gotten the metaphorical memo. The statues number in the low hundreds total, and at the far end the cliffs slope down once more into an enormous marshy delta that looks like it was last occupied by civilization at least a century ago. There are the angular remains of razed buildings and uninhabited cities, but no signs of people anywhere. It's too large to see the source of the river feeding the delta, but it must be coming from somewhere far inland.

If Tanya remembers her maps of the Southern Continent well enough, she may notice the absence of the Gulf of Syrtis.

Tanya remembers the local geography very well! She fought a campaign here just last year, and half of that consisted of chasing enemy mages around the desert. But they never went east to Egypt (*) and that's where she must be now; there's no other large delta on this coast. That also explains why she never heard of those statues. 

(Gulf? What gulf? There's no gulf for a thousand kilometers west of the Nile.)

It is a little puzzling that she's only now crossing the Nile delta; she must have started in the farthest Eastern corner of Egypt. Well, she's on her way now, and she has much bigger issues to consider.

The Nile delta might well have a ruined city, but she's quite sure it's also supposed to have some intact ones. Any of those in sight? She will of course make a wide detour, but one of them ought to be on the shore and visible from some distance off.

(*) A/N: YS does not mention the name of Egypt or Cairo; we will be using our names.

It's nothing but arid marsh as far as the eye can see. There were probably multiple cities here at some point, judging by the number of quarried rocks poking out of the muck and the amount of land that looks like it might've once been drained, but the passage of years and the instability of the ground have slowly dragged them under. The only buildings that rise more than a few feet off the ground are the peaks of sunken pyramids and towers. If Cairo or Alexandria are hereabouts, they're not close enough for Tanya to see them or get pinged by ground radar. She can pass the entire delta without incident.

This is honestly weird and confusing, and Tanya really doesn't need any more confusion in her life right now. She can't think of anywhere else in the world that would has a desert with a northern seashore, a large river delta, and Pharaonic statues and pyramids. ...sunken pyramids? 

...if she sees any more people she'll stop to ask them where she is again, but for now all she can do is keep flying west along the shore.

After another twenty minutes of flight is the first actual city she's encountered since arriving, though it's detectable well before then from the number of magical signatures active within it. A series of massive terraces ornamented with gardens and buildings descends gracefully into a harbor filled with three-masted sailing ships, each of which is roughly as magical as the barges Tanya encountered earlier. One of the ships is in the process of leaving the harbor eastbound. There are no roads, railways, or other obvious ways to enter or leave this city without flying or sailing, nor is there any outlying farmland. It's just a city built into a steep, mountainous shore near an exceptionally good-looking natural harbor.

There continues to be an eerie level of radio silence, despite all the people going about their lives eight thousand feet below her.

This city is sort of taking up Alexandria's place on the map, even if it has cliffs instead of delta lowlands.

There are many excellent reasons it can't be Alexandria, except they're all also reasons it can't be any other city either. Alexandria should have a radio station! And steamships and railways!

Even more troubling is the fact that Tanya doesn't recognize any of these magical signatures. She's far from being an expert on industrial uses of magic but her orb does have civilian spells cataloged, to distinguish them from military ones (and to enable targeting factories). Egypt is ruled by the Commonwealth and there would surely be some commonality. Whatever this is, it doesn't feel - natural. And an aerial mage learns to trusts their instincts about unfamiliar magical signatures.

She won't approach this city which is full of unfamiliar magic. But once it's out of sight, if she can spot a ship that doesn't have detectable magic on it, she'll try approaching it. (Who stations mages on sailhips? Someone who doesn't even have steam paddlers, apparently!) Even a local cargo hauler left over from the sailship era will have maps. 

If all the ships are magical, she supposes she'll just keep flying. The coast from the eastern corner of the sea to Turus is less than three thousand kilometers, and she'll see places she's actually been long before then. Any minute now, in fact?

Every ship larger than a dinghy reads as magical. All of them have one active spell in common; the remainder are subtly different from ship to ship. If she watches carefully, Tanya might notice them occasionally wink out, only to replaced just moments later.

Following the city which is probably not Alexandria is an enormous stretch of inhospitable terrain. Nobody could possibly live here if they tried – the ground is exposed bedrock that rises and falls jaggedly before plunging into the sea, too steep to retain soil and too uneven to build roads over. Farther inland is yet more featureless desert.

Even more inexplicably, this place is also bursting with mage activity. There's at least one active magical effect every few kilometers, sometimes two or three emanating from the same location. Most are either below the ground, inside caves, under overhangs, or otherwise obscured from view, but others are on the surface or over the water and correspond to something that is just barely visible from a great height. They look like tiny glimmering dots.

Is this a secret Commonwealth project? There wouldn't normally be any Imperial mages here. (But that doesn't explain the weird ships...)

Can she see anything useful if she zooms on the various magical signatures with a 1000x magnification lens? Without going anywhere near them herself, of course.

The ones visible above ground tend to be people crossing the desert on foot. They wear similar clothes as the men and women who live in the oasis, traveling in groups of three to six humans and one or two camels. Most of them aren't following any visible path, nor are they drawing wagons, but in every group there's at least one leading the way with a curved sword already drawn.

Over the water, the magical signature nearest Tanya is emanating from another massive winged lizard. It's clearly not the same species as the first one – the scales are the color of reflective brass rather than any natural pigment, it's quite a bit smaller, and the horns are arranged differently – but it might be of the same genus. How many families of hexapodal reptiles can there be? It's also using a spell; the same spell as most of the humans wandering in the desert, in fact, and some of the mages in the city she just passed. If she watches for a moment as it flies low over the ocean it will suddenly dive into the water at speed and emerge a moment later with a mouthful of fish.

This isn't Egypt, is it.

There may be sailships in Alexandria still, but there are also steamships and railways.

People may walk the Sahara with a cooling spell but they bear pistols, not swords.

Magical sea-serpents don't exist. 

Sudden teleports also don't exist. But sudden death is an everyday occurrence.

Being X, you bloody-minded hack. You couldn't even bother to reincarnate me properly this time?

Supposing she is right, what then?

She is stuck in an unfamiliar world, with ubiquitous and unfamiliar magic. She killed someone (something?) the moment she arrived and presumably made some enemies. She doesn't know any local languages, or anything about the political situation. On the upside, she does have her orb and rifle.

...no, if this is another Earth then she probably does speak some local language. That woman recognized the globe and this area's physical geography does match Egypt. She just needs to go to Europe or North America (or Japan). 

It feels wrong that a (provisional) total change in perspective doesn't actually change her immediate plans, but she can't think of a better option. In any case, best to stay away from the country where she participated in a firefight.

She will continue on her way, but be even more paranoid about not approaching any magical signatures. At least now she doesn't have a reason not to cross from Turus into Ildoa; maybe people will speak something intelligible there.

At first it looked like there were two casualties, which is an astoundingly fortunate death toll for a team defending against an attacking dragon. There is a sense in which the target itself was responsible for this outcome, but their contract only requires them to drive it off by any means necessary – the bounty from its death is just the cherry on top. All that's left is for the pharaoh to offer a below-market Raise Dead or two and it will have gone more smoothly than he could've possibly imagined.

That assessment changed once the gas dissipated and the rest of the bodies appeared. Nazir doesn't recognize any of them from experience or descriptions he's heard, but Hurayra is adamant that the furry corpses are agathions, and the piles of homogeneous meat could be chaos beasts if they could've been anything at all. The bodies are still there five minutes later when the last of the raiders have been chased off and the dragon's body has been secured, which means they were not summoned but called.

In addition to this fiasco being responsible for an unknown number of true final deaths, it raises questions about the one that got away. If the creature that killed the dragon was called to Golarion, it could have instructions beyond defending the tower that required it to leave. Perhaps it has been ordered to go somewhere else on some unrelated errand. It might need to go there quite urgently, or it might be of a disposition to fly with lightning speed at all time. It could've killed the dragon simply for standing in its way. They don't know what alignment it has.

Ideally they would inspect the trap to find the answers to their questions, but what remains of it is currently shielded by multiple feet of stone that is both emitting green smoke and slowly developing a thick layer of ice. Their hazard pay is good but not that good. Nazir's wizards get into a heated argument over how long the calling could theoretically last, with possibilities ranging from 'six seconds' to 'indefinitely'. This interval does not fill anyone with confidence.

Before they jump to conclusions, Nazir would like to know if the called monster could conceivably be looking for its payment before it goes home. Is that within the realm of possibility?

 No.

 Yes.

 No.

 Definitely not, that's how Planar Ally works but not Planar Binding, and anyways you have to pay up front.

 That can't be true! How else could there be so many legends about great wizards calling genies and demons to do their bidding only to swindle them afterwards?

 They have to agree first, that's when you trick them, and the spell enforces the bargain. It's why all the legends about wizards swindling genies and demons into doing their bidding are cautionary tales.

 Planar Ally could potentially work that way, but wizards can't prepare those spells so why even bring it up?

 Well, maybe she's one of those Nethysian clerics who call themselves wizards!

The debate continues for several minutes without producing enlightenment, and eventually everyone with Detect Magic prepared is distracted by the lure of the smoking wizard tower and picks a spot that any normal person would think too close in order to observe. Nazir and his lieutenants mull over the information they have, conscious of the fact that the clock is ticking.

The only thing they can agree on is that they don't have enough information. They don't know if it's an elemental, outsider, or something else. They don't know where it went or why. They don't know if they can leave it be or if it needs to be Banished before it's too late.

The first order of business is therefore to try and land Scrying on it. They don't have any professional diviners to hand, but Hurayra has one prepared and was looking in the right direction to see the target on the way out, and between them can easily conjure enough water for a scrying pool. Everyone with even a scrap of relevant experience will watch carefully, and as soon as the spell connects, Faris will send a Message asking whether it's looking for its money before it gets out of the sensor's range. Everyone else will get a good look at it from close range, and between them they might be able to figure out what they're dealing with.

It's not an amazing plan, but no one else has a better one, so it's the one they go with. Can anyone figure out what their mysterious dragon-killer is?

It appears to be a humanoid, possibly a small human woman or even a child. Pale skin, blonde hair, blue eyes. However, appearances can be deceiving.

It is dressed in a green jacket and pants, a round helmet that doesn't cover its face and a pair of large goggles. It is carrying a large pack over its shoulders and holding something in both hands. (The well-traveled among them may identify a distant family resemblance to the musket featured on the flag of Alkenstar, if it were cut in half and the missing barrel added as a second handle underneath.)

It will immediately become clear that the target is still flying at ludicrous speed, as it leaves the range of the Scrying in a tiny fraction of a round. (One-seventieth of a second, if they have a way of measuring this.) The Message lands, but there is no reply.

About half a second later, they will see and hear a series of explosions similar to those that killed Ymohrglas.

The target does not return to within range of the Scrying while it lasts.

None of them are undisciplined enough to flinch at loud noises emanating from a scrying pool, but this is still enough to warrant some puzzled expressions.

Fourteen milliseconds of exposure is not long enough for most people to memorize a face, but those gathered to watch are more eagle-eyed than average and manage to agree on the broad strokes: humanoid body plan, pale skin and hair, neotenic features, green clothes. The finer details are reduced to indistinct retinal smears. Getting away from the scrying sensor so quickly is inconvenient but does provide a very high lower bound for how fast it's going.

Faris confirms that the Message landed but has no response other than the noise. Detect Chaos and Detect Evil also show nothing, so the wizards transition to Detect Magic in the hopes of glimpsing and deciphering the lingering spell auras it left in its wake.

"It was aiming at my sensor," Hurayra says thoughtfully. "Shots passed directly through the sight. Perhaps it sought to dispel an attack?"

Detect Magic reports an aura of strong magic, the kind that will last for up to an hour. The school is Universal.

"… is there a known Wish incantation for moving a thousand times faster than Overland Flight?" Faris asks nervously.

They narrow it down to three options. The first, based on its physical appearance and behavior, is that the trap summoned an exotic type of azata hailing from deep in the Elysian wilderness. The second, proposed by Hurayra, is that it called one of the lords among the fair folk in a comely guise and set it to whatever strange task such a creature might deign to complete for a wizard. The third, and in Nazir's opinion the most likely, is that they still don't know what's going on and need to rectify that as soon as possible. The creature didn't respond to a Message, so it's time to escalate.

"Secure the dragon's corpse," he orders, and goes to find whichever magistrate used a Wand of Sending to get help with the dragon earlier that morning.

And shortly thereafter, a perfectly comprehensible message of foreign origin will interject into Tanya's stream of consciousness.

Thank you once again for your assistance! We can pay you in cash or by check, or via remittance if your financial institution is reachable.

This is not accompanied by any detectable magic in her vicinity, though it does come with what feels like the ability to compose a terse reply if she cares to do so.

She was only acting in self-defense and is not to blame for killing the blue lizard -

She doesn't (can't afford to) take sides in local conflicts she knows nothing about -

Money is necessary to establish herself in a new world, without a common language she has no way to earn money -

There might be people speaking one of her languages in Europe -

These people can track her down repeatedly and are already speaking Germanian!

...

She was going to (have to) contact locals anyway. It might as well be the ones who want to pay her. (Unless they actually want to ambush her for revenge, but then they'd only offer cash.) She was going to take a leap of faith anyway and this might as well be it.

Cash would be best. My bank is not reachable. Will you contact me again? Should I return to the location of the firefight?

And then the mental feeling that she can reply by thinking cuts out, as does the magical signature of the spell that appeared around her head.

This was incredibly stressful! Tanya obviously wasn't going to shoot at her own head but that only made it worse! If a mage lands a spell directly on you, you're dead. Which is further proof these people don't want her dead. If they can target her with spells from who knows how far away, and the spells enable telepathy, she might as well throw all her preconceptions of what's possible out of the window. The scientific study of magic on Earth began less than a century ago and the engineers will be the first to tell you they have no idea what's theoretically impossible. 

...but she was able to make a difference in a fight, if only by appearing unexpectedly in just the wrong spot. That doesn't sound like her magic is necessarily entirely obsolete by local standards. Then again, if the lizards are merely trained animals (?) whose natural prey is fish, killing one isn't anything to boast of. In fact she doesn't even know that's the assistance they meant! All she can do now, though, is talk to them. At least she knows she can talk to them.

It takes just over ten minutes to receive a reply.

Please return here if possible. Authorizing the release of thousands of gold scarabs will be difficult otherwise. Further contact is possible if warranted but expensive.

Understood. I'm on my way back. She can't think of anything more to say that can't wait a few hours, or at least she fails to think of anything within three seconds.

Tanya doesn't want to risk flying straight back; something could happen to blow her off course and lose her way. Someone could attack her; she might unintentionally enter restricted airspace. She'll follow the presumed-safe path back. And she doesn't want to arrive too tired, so she'll slow down a bit. (It's fine to keep your debtors waiting, right?)

Sixteen second-circle clerics are gathered in Shiman-Sekh's temple of Pharasma, one of the few buildings in the city with a Forbiddance around it. Seven clerics of Abadar, six clerics of Pharasma, and three clerics of Irori sit in neat rows on the floor like seminary students, looking confused by the situation but unwilling to argue. There are an additional six clerics who aren't Lawful Neutral waiting outside as backup, plus one person who isn't exactly a cleric but might be close enough to count.

A bank employee carrying a sack goes around the room in silence handing out scrolls, then leaves without comment.

Nazir takes stock of the situation. None of them have anything useful prepared, so this yet another emergency expense that will probably sit on his balance sheet until his insurers notice and raise his premium. Urgh.

"How many of you have cast Augury before?"

Only a few hands go up. Typical.

"The quality of an Augury result depends on how well-specified the question is in your mind. You must hold the course of action in your mind with as much fidelity as possible, for the entire duration of the casting, without allowing outside concerns to sway your view of the situation. When you cast it, the scenario you will envision is this." He clears his throat. "There is a human man named Abtin Mekht who lives in the Black Dome of Sothis. At this time, on this day, he will be in the Old City. To the best of my knowledge, he is the only person in Osirion who meets that description. I will use this wand to cast Sending, targeting Abtin Mekht, with the following message: 'Scorpion black, humanoid shape, unknown origin, seven up, very fast. Unclear intentions but polite thus far. Killed a blue dragon in one round. Shiman-Soth, now.'

"You will not, while casting Augury, consider the implications of this exercise, only those facts which you expect to directly observe. I will indicate you in pairs. One will cast Augury as I have described, five minutes after I begin casting Sending, while the other will cast Augury at the same time while considering the scenario in which I do not complete the spell and nothing further is done. Any questions?"

"What's your name?" asks one of the Irorans.

"I am Nazir."

There are a few more questions, and Nazir ends up repeating the planned Sending phrase a few times. Then he starts casting Sending.

Both clerics get Nothing.

He's going to repeat this every ten minutes until he starts getting Something rather than Nothing.

Nothing & Nothing.

Nothing & Nothing.

Nothing & Nothing.

Nothing & Nothing.

Nothing & Nothing.

…

It is not beneath Abadar's priests to fervently pray for a hastily-made transaction to be worth the price.

…

Nothing & Nothing.

Nothing & Weal.

Nothing & Weal.

No strike team, then.

"Your assistance is no longer required," he informs the gathered clerics. "If you wish to offer help regardless, I suggest prayer."

Then he leaves to finish his own preparations.

Two hours and change after receiving the last message, Tanya arrives back where she started. What does she observe, from ten thousand feet up and illusioned to look like a patch of sky?

The barges on the long lotus-petal canals are still the only sign of mages at work on the way in. After that is the city, which is comparable in size to the one she already passed. With the benefit of not being in a hurry, it's possible to see the stone channels for directing water into the canals that are built between the streets, implying that this place is built on the site of an oasis larger than any on Earth, or perhaps on an aquifer large enough to produce all the water she's seen thus far. There certainly aren't any rivers feeding into it.

The tower near the site of her arrival is now encased in a massive block of ice, with dark shadows swimming under the surface. It's extremely magical, and everyone seems to have evacuated the area. The building that the blue lizard fell onto is still covered in fresh blood but the lizard itself has been hauled over half a mile down the road to a different city square, leaving a trail of viscera that nobody has bothered to clean up yet. In that square is the only outdoor gathering of people in the entire city, some of whom have magical signatures active.

The rest of the city is similar to the one she saw out west, in terms of architectural style making use of sandstone and fondness for public gardens.

At least nobody seems to be mourning and/or burying the dead lizard.

It's... really not clear who contacted her. If people here speak Germanian, though, she can just land and ask.

She'll be detected anyway; she's presumably being detected right now. Illusions don't do anything when there are this many mages around and there's no fight to distract them. She might as well approach the gathering near the dead lizard.

Tanya dismisses her illusion and flies down at a courteously slow speed (that is, giving everyone plenty of time to react and slowing down well in advance of the ground). Is anyone going to approach her or does she need to guess who to talk to?

Most of the people on the ground studiously ignore her arrival. There's a small group of entities that resemble animals on two legs lined up against a wall who become agitated as she touches down, though they're too restrained to do anything more than whine pitifully. The rest are still absorbed in tasks ranging from cleaning their weapons to filling out paperwork (a job that seems to have been delegated entirely to the mages). The dead lizard's mouth has been tied shut with a length of cord, and its wings have been hacked off and left to sit on the road next to it.

One person does approach her. He has no magical signature, unless Tanya happens to be able to see through his Nondetection, in which case he is positively loaded with magic. He has Tongues, of course, but also Eagle's Splendor and Visualization of the Mind and Bestow Insight and Heroism and Moment of Greatness and Guidance.

He has an elaborate papyrus scroll, and after he makes eye contact with Tanya he begins to pull a spell directly out of the paper with his bare hands, already formed most of the way into the complex shape needed to cast it.

Are the... entities... lined up against the wall animals used in fighting by the losing side, like the lizard, that were captured? Or are they possibly prisoners, i.e. people? Tanya doesn't want to make any assumptions.

Also, what's a Nondetection? Tanya isn't using Divinations, she's just seeing magic, and there sure are a lot of powerful spells on that man but she has no idea what any of them do, or that one of them is supposed to be hiding the rest! That's not how you shield magic emissions!

Whatever he's doing with the paper is... concerning... but she already knows they can land a spell on her remotely. Maybe this spell is also related to communications somehow? She'll have to risk it. Her instincts are screaming at her not to do it, but the mark of intelligence and rationality is the ability to adapt and tell your instincts to shut up.

Tanya lets him cast the spell. While powering her shield to the absolute maximum and speeding up her mind a little bit beyond safe limits.

Her shield isn't going to accomplish much, because the target of this spell is him.

(Nazir did briefly consider going hot with Detect Anxieties and Detect Desires, with the theory being that she had let the Scrying land and therefore might not have the Will to match her destructive potential, but ultimately decided against it. He is not the type of adventurer who can smooth over a social faux pas like a recent acquaintance noticing that you've been preemptively reading their mind; if he were he wouldn't have needed the buff stack.)

Cultural Adaptation is not especially likely to work under these circumstances. As the casting focus he's using a slip of paper with the two responses from the Sendings transliterated onto the page, which in principle might qualify as a document authored by a member of the culture he intends to emulate. On the one hand, this is an extraordinarily dubious proposition. On the other hand, he is a sixth-circle cleric with a practical magical education – casting a first-circle spell under less-than-ideal circumstances isn't an impossible ask. And on the mage hand, given how much he's spent on making this go well, it's only a small imposition.

So, does it work?

…you know what, sure. Nazir is now an honorary member of the culture that exists inside the mind of Tanya Degurechaff.

That worked???

— no, casting a spell that targets yourself and then making a face about it suggests that you've accidentally injured yourself and are in need of assistance, he needs to have a normal expression so everyone knows this was the expected outcome.

The spell did nothing visible. Did he contact someone else?

"Hello. Can you understand me?" She knows her speech sounds a little bit odd while her mind is sped up.

"Yes, and if you don't have the ability to make yourself understood regardless of the speaker's language then you are relying on mine."

The words coming out of his mouth are not Germanian. Tanya can make out the isolated sounds without difficulty, but the semantic meaning of his speech lands even while void of syntax.

"Again, your assistance is appreciated. If you claim sole responsibility for the death of the blue dragon Ymohrglas, you are entitled to the full sixteen thousand four hundred gold scarabs of his bounty."

A brief pause.

"Scarabs are one ounce coins made from twenty-two karat gold. We have other currencies in stock but by weight and by value they are mostly made of gold."

....she already knew they had telepathy magic, but this time she can't sense any magic being done to herself!

The alternative is, what, universal translation magic that doesn't even need to know anything about the target language? That's absurd. Besides, she isn't getting translated Germanian, she's getting some weird kind of nonverbal meaning that she didn't know her brain could do! What the fuck!

If everyone (or even anyone) here can affect her mind without her even detecting the spell, she is absolutely defenseless. Tanya will be very, very friendly and nonthreatening towards these people.

Next order of business: the enormous blue lizard was apparently a 'dragon', which the spell kindly informs her is 1) a sapient person 2) enormously powerful compared to humans. ...well, presumably that's compared to non-mage unarmed humans, which, fair enough, but: a person?! She managed to kill someone important in her first five seconds on another world?! 

"I killed.... him, in self-defense. He attacked me first. But if there was a bounty on his head" (who puts out individual bounties in this day and age?) "then I will claim it." That is how much gold? Is gold just cheaper here? "Obviously I can't carry that much in coins; if you don't use higher-denomination banknotes, can I have most of it in a bank draft or equivalent? I'm not familiar with your banking system and I don't have a local bank account yet." Does he in fact realize she's from another world? It's an objectively ridiculous idea, but she doesn't know what his other hypotheses might be for a clearly non-local mage appearing out of nowhere. Maybe he'll clue her in before she has to decide how much to reveal; once she has money she can approach other people (if she can identify someone else telepathic), or at least talk to him in private. But that means she can't introduce herself by her rank yet, so -

She eases back on her mental acceleration (it's not good to keep it up for too long). "Ah, apologies. I am Tanya von Degurechaff."

With his Sense Motive boosted into the stratosphere, Nazir can tell that Tanya von Degurechaff is being completely sincere… unless she's bluffing him over the top, you can never rule that out, but no use dwelling on it unless she trips up and gives the game away. There's something subtly wrong in the way she talks, but it goes away as soon as she introduces herself. Maybe she used a diplomacy spell of her own? He'll have to ask one of his wizards later. Nazir doesn't have Detect Magic going on himself, he didn't prepare it today and he doesn't need to be distracted by looking at auras right now.

Up close she looks like a normal young woman. The clothing is unusual, but that's about it. Disguised? Do azatas and fey have different preferences in methods or form? He wishes he'd thought to ask.

He can also see that she's nervous and trying to hide it. There's a straightforward explanation for this: unlike summoned monsters, called monsters die if they are killed. The fact that she's choosing to compensate by being friendly and nonthreatening is the second-luckiest thing that's happened all day. It shouldn't surprise him that someone so familiar with the banking system would be civilized by default, but you can never be too cautious with these things.

"I am Hej Nazir. Proportionate self-defense is perfectly legal in Osirion. Ymohrglas' heirs and estate may seek damages in court, but the case would be facially ridiculous unless they asserted you tried to kill him in his sleep, and there are tens of witnesses to the fight who will testify otherwise if necessary. You are in no danger here."

Hopefully that will put her at ease.

"The bounty was not on him specifically, it will be paid out of a fund that covers dragons engaging in unlawful behavior. We have several types of financial instrument that are more easily portable than gold, but if your bank cannot be reached you may need to open a local account or accept payment in kind. Banking services are typically free for customers with more than a certain amount of funds deposited; I don't remember the exact threshold but you would qualify. We do also have higher denominations of coinage, but nothing that would reduce the mass of the currency by more than a factor of thirty."

Oh, good. ...there's such a general concern of (powerful!) dragons breaking the law that the politicians were moved to pay out private actors who can stop them before the police arrives? Well, it's none of her concern, and neither is whatever the fight was originally about, not really.

Tanya needs advice on banking. How easy is it to open an account while being a literal undocumented alien, even if she shows up with half a ton of gold in hand? How easy or cheap is it to transfer to another country or institution? Who accepts these bank's cheques? What is her legal status (separately from killing a dragon in self-defense), her legal obligations if any (does she pay taxes? ...on the bounty?) and where can she buy information and tutoring?

"May I ask what your role here is? And I would appreciate speaking to you more privately."

"I coordinated and lead the rapid response force you see around you. It's not my primary line of work, but there's a premium on defending high density areas against severe monster attacks and it's a prosocial use of our time. And the pharaoh would lose his job if he didn't pay on time, so the pay is consistent." This last part is not a joke, but he is smiling nonetheless. "If we must speak privately, there is a secured room nearby we can use."

Under ordinary circumstances isolating oneself with a powerful outsider is the height of folly, but the most recent Augury was less than half an hour ago. He'll chance it. Nazir leads Tanya to a building one block over, through the lobby into the back, down the stairs to the basement, and finally to a door that has nothing behind it but an undulating wall of black fog. He walks through without hesitating and disappears.

That sounds much more organized and state-sanctioned than 'bounty on law-breaking dragons'! He might be the equivalent of police special forces?

And that sure is a magical privacy effect. Tanya pokes it experimentally and, if nothing happens, shrugs and floats through after him. She didn't actually mean he couldn't invite a few trusted associates along but she'll take it.

Nothing happens; if she looks back once inside she will notice that the blackness is one-way and the hallway outside is still visible. The interior is a featureless cube apart from a circle of stools nailed to the floor, lit by a campfire in the center that emits no smoke or heat.

"This room will block magical espionage from remote locations and eavesdropping from outside, but not tailgating. I don't believe we were followed by stealth, but if you have reason to think otherwise…?"

"I have no specific reason to think so, and I'm not detecting any other magical signatures besides us and the black-fog effect. I don't know what non-magically-stealthy espionage exists here and might be available on short notice." Electronic surveillance, for one. Bugs planted ahead of time, since this is a permanent secure meeting area. "It's still much better than speaking in public."

"I believe I've arrived here from another world. I don't know much about this one, so I don't know if that's an unbelievable or alarming statement to you. And I don't know what that fight was about, and whether my appearance made any sense to you at the time. I don't know how it happened, although I have theories, and I don't know how to return home either. I expect to use my... unexpected new wealth to hire consultants or tutors to help me adjust, if I am to live here, but I don't even have a basis for choosing a country other than being here at present, whereever 'here' is. Does this raise any immediate legal or other issues?"

"I would be very surprised if you did not arrive here from another world. There are spells for moving creatures across the gulf between worlds, one of which may have been built into the tower as a defensive measure. When you left, we assumed you had been assigned some other mission and acted quickly to ensure you got paid." That's not even a lie. "However, if you don't know how you got here or how to return home then my explanation is flawed. Any spell it could've plausibly been would've tied your presence here to the duration of a bargain between the caster and the subject. Even involuntary subjects have the option to refuse service if they feel slighted," unless they're coerced but that doesn't seem relevant right now, "so if you didn't make an agreement with a mage I find myself more confused than before."

There is one spell for calling monsters that works instantly, lasts indefinitely, and does not require a bargain, but the idea that the tower cast Gate blind and nabbed an unsuspecting target that happened to be capable of killing a dragon is such a bizarre hypothetical it's only barely worth consideration.

"This country is called Osirion. I am not a lawyer, but I strongly doubt there are any legal ramifications to your being here. The pharaoh is aware that incidents like this happen on occasion and I've never heard of anyone being arrested for immigration fraud after a summoning accident. There are some species that are very powerful and universally hostile, such that it is both legal and encouraged to kill them immediately whenever possible, but it is unlikely that you are one of them."

...by other worlds he presumably means other planets, not other versions of the planet Earth! Well, that's the really bizarre part of her story and she doesn't have to go into it yet. The really important part is that they have an interplanetary transportation spell (a magic starship?) and also multiple other inhabited planets to travel to!! Tanya mentally downgrades her expectation of this Earth being like the other two another few notches.

"That's good to hear. I definitely don't remember anyone talking to me about it; I was just - suddenly here, and surrounded by unfamiliar magic. Does that mean your civilization can send me or others back? My world doesn't have such a spell, or contact with any other planets." Earth and/or Germania might not thank her for introducing a planetful of new, powerful states with unknown intentions, but in the long run contact tends to make people richer. In any case, it's not as if she can stop him from thinking the same thing. Can they even locate Earth? She can show them a star map, but it's the sky as seen from Earth, not a set of galactic coordinates or anything like that.

"In any event, I asked to speak to you privately not because of any specific fears but because of unknown unknowns. I don't know if there's a reason for me to keep my off-world origin a secret, but it seemed possible there might be one."

"Your best chance at going home is for the spell that brought you here to run down its duration and send you back. There is a different, more common spell for opening a static portal between worlds, but it requires a focus unique to the destination."

He takes a (nonmagical) implement out of his pocket and offers it to Tanya for inspection. It looks like a tuning fork made of an unidentifiable bluish metal, both prongs etched with an intricate pattern that makes her eyes swim if she stares at it for too long.

"If you do not know the specification for your homeworld's tuning fork, the spell cannot send you there."

And that's if she's from another plane! If she's from another planet, it might just be impossible without a Miracle. But how would she have gotten here from another planet?

"As for your origins, many aliens are well-integrated in polite society, but it's strongly correlated with a long tradition of trade and transit between worlds. Interactions with visitors from more distant worlds have gone… poorly, in the past. If you can pass yourself off as a human for the time being, that would be best."

Well, that's discouraging. "I would have liked to say I am human, but your words imply I don't pass for one... You appear human to me, for what it's worth." Do they just not have blond, light-skinned people in this Earth's Europe? Tanya remembers reading once that all humans were dark-skinned ancestrally. "And I have no idea how the - fork - works, because as I said we don't have an interworld transit spell. If you think I'm being actively kept here by a spell with a limited duration can you estimate the duration, or disrupt the spell somehow?" Did she not die after all?

Nazir considers this. The only outsiders with strong ties to their identity in life are petitioners, and no petitioner is as dangerous as this woman. He does have good reason to believe she's not a succubus (Hurayra would've ordered the men to fire if Glimpse of Truth showed him in danger), but there are other outsiders with the means and motive to carry on a charade.

Could she be a real human? It's not impossible. There are cities in the outer planes inhabited by mortals— she's not from Awaiting-Consumption, he hopes, but perhaps from another plane? And humans are interfertile with some outsiders, so who's to say what civilizations and martial traditions might exist in wider Creation?

(This, if anything, is even more evidence that she can't be from another planet. Humans are from Golarion, and the farther away you get from Golarion the less human the aliens look. This is true of every species from the material plane he knows of, unless you believe the things people say about Baba Yaga.)

Better to be humble and conciliatory. "You also appear to be human to me, I just didn't want to assume. The cost and complexity of such a spell goes up exponentially if it's open-ended, such that lasting for longer than a few days is improbable. At that point it's more likely to be stuck waiting for you to complete a particular action. If we could examine the device that called you we might be able to say more, but trying right now would be unsafe. I would also prefer not to hurl magic-cancellation at it, since the tower may have some functional response to that."

He didn't want to assume that, what, she was a human and not a dragon or one of those winged people? ...maybe he can't analyze her spells any more than she can his and thinks she might be under an illusion.

She should be polite and conciliatory to secure his cooperation. "Allow me to fully introduce myself. Lt. Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff, of the 203rd aerial mage battalion of the Germanian Imperial Army. Although I don't expect that to mean anything to you, and I'm certainly not here representing my country. We call ourselves humans, but that might not be any more informative than calling our world 'Earth'; I don't know how your telepathic communication translates names. Can you tell me more about that tower, and the... device you think may have brought me here?"

The way Tongues works is complicated, but one limit of its usefulness as a translation spell is that their conversation can be no more informative than it would have been if Tanya shared Nazir's fluency in Osiriani. This is why proper nouns come through unaltered, and why Nazir can tell that 'Erde' is the name of a place rather than a synonym for 'soil', but no more than that. Even with Cultural Adaptation aggressively steering him away from conversational minefields, he has no personal experience with Tanya's homeworld, and thus the word is delivered without further intension.

He thinks frantically of whether he knows this place. There is no plane or demiplane or divine domain going by that name. Is there a planet deep in the Dark Tapestry called Earth? Not that he's heard of (because he has only heard of it by the Russy name Земля, and then only in passing). Oh well, unfortunate but unsurprising. It's probably the name of a subplanar region far, far away from this part of the material.

"No, those names mean nothing to me. Welcome to Golarion, earthling." Like his own name, 'Golarion' comes with no translation.

"The tower is a… the spell would…" Wow, apparently this requires more context. Backing up a bit: "Not all powerful mages^† are affiliated with the state. The requisite knowledge and devices to operate at one's full potential can also come from professional associations, secret societies, criminal organizations, fraternities, inheritances, and self-cultivation in extreme cases. Every society I am familiar with therefore makes some practical concessions to their own mages. In this case, the tower was the domicile and laboratory of a local wizard who hasn't been seen in fifteen years, and it was presumably rigged to kill invaders. Such towers are proverbially unassailable while inhabited, but fifteen years was evidently enough time for Ymohrglas to decide the owner was either dead or not coming back. The device is most likely a magic item that casts some variant of Planar Ally or Planar Binding when triggered. I don't know if a more academic description would be useful to you, one of my men might have more details."

^†The most expansive possible term for anyone who can use magic.

That's not surprising, since Earth hasn't in fact been contacted by Golarion, but she had to ask.

The local (civilian) mages can become rich and powerful individuals. They buy or build expensive casting implements (and presumably other required material inputs) that enable them to grow their wealth. Being (deservedly) paranoid about theft, they rig their home / factory / lab with deadly counter-intrusion measures. Nazir pointed out this is legal, presumably because other people aren't allowed to set lethal traps against trespassers. 

Mages being individually powerful, rather than working for powerful industrial concerns who own the expensive capital of casting implements, is a balance that's probably worse for the economy. It might be better for individual and workers' rights, but more likely mages form a small elite that concentrates wealth without benefiting others as much. Well, so it goes. Tanya doesn't know if she's relevantly a mage here, since she comes from a completely different magical tradition and definitely can't build her own casting implements, but maybe she can learn to use the local ones? She is talented with magic, and she's still very young, so a career as a local-style mage might be in the cards for her.

"So your response force was defending the tower from the dragon? Do you work for the government of Osirion or was it a private security contract?"

"I work for Abadar – the pharaoh also works for Abadar, to be clear, but this was a private security contract with the municipality. Osirion maintains a standing army for territorial defense, but most internal law enforcement tasks more dangerous than arresting mundane criminals are farmed out."

Tanya is happy to take up Nazir's time with general information questions for as long as he'll let her!

She thought a 'pharaoh' was a head of state but evidently she was mistaken; he seems to be an executive of the private security firm, since Nazir mentioned him being responsible for payroll. It's probably like the Unified States having a 'czar of industry'. The rest isn't so clear, though. "Who is Abadar?"

Leaving dangerous security assignments to the free market can work in theory, but PMCs tend to end badly for the countries that allow them. Ownership of weapons and combat experience are best left with the army; if you have to pay them more for internal policing, that's just gaining valuable combat experience! But it sounds like the state is involved here, since he's contracted to the municipality and not the individual mage whose tower this was, so she'll reserve judgement for now. Maybe these are police special forces in all but name, with the government not being the actual employer but the role being heavily regulated.

How does she not know… Cultural Adaptation informs him that this is a question about Abadar's role in the situation rather than His person, which, fair enough. Theocracies probably aren't a very common arrangement.

"Abadar is a senior advisor to the government of Osirion and has been for over a century. He maintains a presence in most countries, usually through employees of the banks and the postal services, but Pharaoh Khemet III is the only head of state to have a direct partnership. His interests include government policy, economic development, and trade expansion – the present dynasty began when Abadar backed Khemet I's ascension to the throne. Other Abadarans are not necessarily affiliated with the state, most of us are private citizens with our own professional interests, but it does mean that Osirion will reliably pay its debts and honor its contracts."

That is so confusing! A head of state can have a partnership (or rather, the state can), but that's not the same as working for Abadar! If he's working for him in his private capacity, he really should resign that while he's the head of state. ...no, he said dynasty which means it's probably more of a feudal relationship, like a king being nominally subordinate to an emperor. But then to also frame him as a 'senior advisor' sounds like a contradiction; you're bound to perceive the 'advice' of your overlord as something closer to instructions, even if you're working for the state and aren't personally Abadar's vassal! 

Tanya isn't sure it's worth her time clearing this up, at least not right now. Nazir presumably has a limited patience, and the workings of Osirion's government at its highest level aren't really pertinent to her immediate situation. Abadar's (publicly listed) interests are all reasonable, it doesn't sound like his relationship with Osirion is an exploitative one, and she has no reason to form an opinion on him beyond that.

She needs instructions for opening a bank account, which is presumably easy, and for learning more and finding the right niche for her skills, which also sounds easy (since she has starting funds) but has the potential downside of revealing her abilities as an aerial mage and so making herself a target. Tanya doesn't actually know how much money is half a ton of gold, but she assumes it's a large sum; individual coins can only be so heavy, and these are worth one-tenth of their largest denomination. If she could earn that much money in a single attack, it implies their military licensed PMCs don't have access to weapons like hers, and every military wants to get their hands on a powerful new weapon. (Unless it's all hazard pay?) Tanya doesn't want to be a soldier, but she wants to be the target of foreign intelligence agencies even less. Nazir already knows, and will presumably tell his superiors (and anyone else he wants), so she has to address this right away.

"That sounds complex but I don't think I have to understand it immediately. Can I ask you for an assessment of my impact on today's combat? Was it simply a lucky hit, only made possible because I appeared out of nowhere at precise the right moment? The size of the bounty - and of your team - implies the task was difficult and probably dangerous."

...also, Tanya is just now realizing that Nazir and his strike force were counting on the bounty (presumably above their regular pay), and she unexpectedly deprived them of it! Considering that, Nazir is being very professional and courteous! Maybe she should offer to give them part of it, depending on his answer?

He does not actually know why Ymohrglas is dead. There were four people looking in the right direction who noticed what was going on through the illusions, and the only thing they can agree on is that Tanya needed to aim something at the dragon before it died. She definitely appeared out of nowhere at an opportune moment, though, and often that's all you need to win decisively.

"Difficult and dangerous, yes, but only because we were taken by surprise. The modal conflict between two groups with magical preparations in place is a battle between armies – you would know, I take it. In situations like this it's critical to attack a weak point that cannot be easily shielded with magic. My team has a few CQC weapons that can sap the target's ability to coordinate their limbs or respond to external stimuli—" which is a truly convoluted way of saying 'Dexterity damage' but whatever, he'll trust the spell "— in a way that dragons are uniquely vulnerable to, for creatures of their size and agility. The plan was to get close enough to magically paralyze him, though that's eliding some tactical details. Apart from that weakness they have exemplary physical and mental resilience, and a lot of standard strategies are inapplicable.

"I believe you hit him with something he wasn't expecting, though I can't say whether it worked because your timing was unexpected or because your attack circumvented some defensive measure he was counting on. We took two casualties, far better than I was expecting, if that helps you with the impact assessment." Nazir is curious, of course, but he'd much prefer to get the money into her hands before his buffs wear off.

They were taken by surprise? Tanya thought they responded to a distress call after the dragon began attacking the magically-protected tower. Presumably the dragon triggered the call and set an ambush.

They took losses and now they're probably feeling it was for nothing and wondering if they could have sat it out for the same result. Well, such are the vagaries of a soldier's life, but Tanya probably should offer them (or the fallen soldiers' families, if they're dead?) part of the prize money if she's to make a positive impression. But she has absolutely no idea how to make the offer in a culturally correct way, or even what amount would be appropriate! Offering someone money for something he regards as his already-paid-for job could be a gift that makes him like her, or makes him feel that he must reciprocate and be annoyed at the unasked-for social debt, or offended because he doesn't need tips, or who knows what!

He's not saying what exactly they saw, but if you ignore the illusions on both sides the actual attack wasn't special in any way, so she sees no reason not to tell him. "I shot him, mostly with explosive bullets. He was invisible at the time, so I don't know what proportion of them he stopped, but they all exploded and from the state of his body later at least one penetrated to explode inside it. I don't know if that tells you anything about his defenses." Maybe Nazir will have some insight such as Ymor... Ymohgr... the dragon doing something at just that moment that required dropping his shields, or that they had happened to weaken them right before Tanya attacked. "Before that, he cast a spell that looked like an electrical discharge, which I evaded; that's why I targeted him. He had several ongoing spells and I don't know what the other ones were doing, I'm not used to the local style of spells." (And probably can't get used to it because she can't change her orb's analyzer, although she can store new signatures.)

"Does not claiming the bounty mean you won't be paid for this mission, or do you have a regular paycheck regardless? I don't mean to be intrusive; the outcome was down to surprise and luck, and you took losses while I paid no cost, so I believe it would be fair to split the bounty between us." This is a gamble, but hopefully it will come across as settling an implicit debt rather than creating one, and as an offer between equals rather than a gift from a superior. Also hopefully, Tanya can parlay this into a longer association so she can get as much information from him as she can before revealing her abilities to anyone else, and make him not inclined to immediately share that information with someone else or use it against her. (Of course she'll ask what he must report to his superiors first, if it comes to that.)

(Sense Motive keyed to Tanya's culture will explain that 'I believe it would be fair' is meant to let him save face and shouldn't be taken literally, although it doesn't mean Tanya doesn't think it would be fairer that way).

How much is a quarter ton of gold coins that she's offering him? How long could she live comfortably on that amount? Tanya has no clue! It would be around 700 thousand marks, enough to set her up in comfort for life several times over. She can't guess at local prices but assuming people aren't taking money to market in a wheelbarrow, how far off can it really be?

He knows what bullets are, and he knows what explosives are. He does not know what an explosive bullet is, but 'a bullet that explodes' seems a safe guess. Cultural Adaptation informs him that Tanya's gun is special issue but far from unique in her battalion, so she didn't kill it with a Heart-Piercing Brilliant Energy Shadowshooting Gun of Explosive Bullets, which would have been his next guess. A regular gun, even a gun with exploding bullets, even a gun with some more commonplace weapon enchantments, couldn't possibly have killed a dragon in one round, even with the benefit of surprise and illusions and spells to see through invisibility – unless it was in the hands of a legendary marksman. His estimate of her threat level goes up a few more notches.

That Tanya is not boasting of this feat is to her credit, but if she doesn't already know that her performance was incredible by Golarion's standards she will soon. It seems that Earth has no dragons, from the way she describes it, so that warrants an explanation as well.

"Your exploding bullets did the job in a way that few other things could, to my knowledge. Blue dragons are masters of illusory magic; they rely on hiding from and redirecting attacks they expect will penetrate their armor, as yours did. The lightning was a breath weapon. All dragons have one, but the form depends on the color of their scales; a red one would have fire instead of lightning. Yes, a breath weapon is exactly what it sounds like. Fighting a dragon that uses their breath weapon extensively is usually a good sign; as they get older they rely more on their spells instead and that makes them much harder to predict. As it stands, we know he had the least of the spells for blocking mages from seeing through invisibility, though not any of the better ones, which means it's unlikely he had any spells for shielding against massive physical damage."

And the meaning of her offer to share the reward money is perfectly clear. It wouldn't hurt to take half – that much would be enough to top up the Raise Dead diamond fund – but they don't need it, and with what he knows now he could never honestly say that anyone else contributed much to the dragon's death. The men will have to wait until Kuthona for their annual bonus.

"Wait until the money is in your hands before you decide what to do with it," he advises. "If you still want to give to charity once you're swimming in gold, there are worthier causes than us! Shiman-Sekh will pay either way, and insurance will cover our medical costs. Your intervention might even save us some on our premiums for the year! If you believe we ought to share in your windfall, use it for something productive and think of us when you're hiring." Another pause. "But if you can't take it home with you after the spell ends, I won't say no."

'A breath weapon is exactly what it sounds like'? Tanya has no idea what it's supposed to sound like! A weapon that has something to do with the user's breath is all she's got. This just underscores that she has no idea what the local magic is capable of; it's certainly much more powerful than hers if it can find and target her a thousand kilometers away without the caster even being present. Presumably there are local defenses against this, or they'd have blown the dragon's head off from the safety of their homes, and these must be fine-tuned enough to allow through known safe spells like the communications one. Tanya's just lucky the dragon didn't try a spell that every local knows to defend against.

Dragons reliably change tactics as they age? Isn't that a massive unforced error? The telepathy makes it clear that 'older' does not in this instance mean 'frail and unable to breathe properly', but Tanya doesn't know what it does mean. She isn't actually trying to learn about dragons,  though, she has no reason to ever fight one again unless the blue one's friends want revenge, which... is actually a pretty good reason to learn about dragons, but it's still not her top priority. Nazir is telling her about dragons because he's reciprocating in kind, but he has a natural interest in analyzing this fight and she has less of one.

Two more things stand out. One is that the dragon invested in blocking people from seeing past its invisibility illusion, and this was meant to be a significant defensive measure. That's not something Tanya can even do, but why does it matter when everyone can see a magical signature where nothing is visible? Normally you use decoys, and admittedly there were many magical signatures in that fight, but none of them looked very similar to the dragon's. Tanya didn't know which one was actually dangerous to her until he attacked, but - maybe there's a local way to change your mana signatures, so they can't identify and track people reliably? Yes, that must be it. Tanya will have to remember not to rely on it either; a completely unfamiliar signature might be someone she met before in disguise. (As if her magic analysis wasn't useless enough already...)

And the other is that the dragon didn't have a way to block point-blank explosions, which - "Wasn't your plan to use some kind of CQC weapon? Why not use, uh, massive physical damage if you could get into close range? Is it that you couldn't identify which signature was the dragon and planned to use an area-effect weapon, or that you couldn't shield yourself from the backblast? Or do you mean you didn't know he had no good defenses until after the fight?" If neither they nor the dragon have a defense against explosions it might lead to this result, except that then everyone would use guns and explosives as their weapons of choice and this fight wouldn't have happened at all. Mages only do fancy things when the target is shielded! Explosive bullets are your best friend!

(No matter what her actual goals, doing a post-battle analysis is a deeply ingrained habit which is hard to shake.)

As for the money: a polite refusal from a consummate professional. And he's giving her an out! "In that case I would like to temporarily assign you and your company as the beneficiaries of the bounty, in the event the spell ends and sends me home before I change that assignment. ...but please be sure that's what happened and not that I was kidnapped or something, if I'm kidnapped the money should be used to hire a rescue team." They have a spell for finding her, right?

"That's very kind of you, and I accept. If you don't warn us that you're about to be sent home before you disappear we'll use some of the money to contact you again the same way… smart kidnappers will keep you unconscious and helpless until they're sure you can't signal for help, so if we don't hear back from you in the first hour we'll assume the worst and use the rest on a rescue mission." This is a worse deal on divination scrolls than a VIP insurance policy but if she's still here in a week she can buy one of those on her own.

He's also willing to participate in a post-battle analysis, and not just because he has the same habits as Tanya. "As for the plan, at close range we would have won immediately. Dragons are extremely vulnerable to this weapon, to the point that only ignorant or suicidally incautious ones willingly get close to anyone who might have it. Staying in the air and fighting at range with magic is more typical – and you're right, we did need to wait for him to get closer. A few of my mages can use a spell that pierces all illusions – phenomenally useful but short-acting and expensive, so we needed the right moment to strike. If we didn't have either of those, trying to overwhelm his defenses by hammering them down would be chancier. The backup plan was a spell called Command, which can briefly accomplish the same thing for a few seconds. Mine is good, maybe good enough to stop an adult dragon in its tracks, but this one might've had the Will^‡ to throw it off or a spell to block it or shields to stop us from taking his head off even while stunned… always better to use something he couldn't do anything about. If he'd refused to land out of fear and flew off to fight another day, that would've been a fine outcome as well." Dragons fly faster than humanoids with flight spells, but this one signed its death warrant the moment it invaded a city. Sooner or later, someone with a teleport lock on its lair would come to collect its scalp.

^‡Willpower, mental focus, and the ability to throw off psychoactive spells and supernatural powers like the one that found Tanya earlier.

"Am I supposed to notice that I'm about to be sent home? I suppose if I somehow recognize that, and have time and am near someone who'd pass the message, I'll say so. You're implying you can contact me if I'm back in my world? That - is a potential avenue for some kind of trade between the worlds, isn't it? I haven't had time to consider what I know that might be valuable here, but if I'm there and can consult experts then there's likely something. ...would it be possible for you to get me here again afterwards, or someone else? And for me to carry things in either direction?"

"I don't fully understand the tactics you describe. Physical damage works at all ranges. Why did the dragon need to close with you, if you were ground-bound?" Tanya imagines a dragon-sized rifle. Its wings don't look like they should support a body that size so it probably used a flight spell, but either way that thing could carry a really big machine gun, and probably a bunch of bombs and rockets too! It wouldn't even need magic to make explosive bullets! "...there are probably too many factors I'm unaware of for you to spend the time to explain them. I hope not to have to fight for my life again on this world, or at least not anytime soon."

"Trade between the worlds…" he repeats thoughtfully. An outsider who has never traveled between the planes, and the first thing she thinks of is trade? Truly, Abadar smiles on him today. "If there is no law or treaty forbidding such a thing between Earth and Golarion, I see no reason why we and everyone else shouldn't profit from our meeting. Communication alone is much easier than transit; you would need to spearhead such a project yourself, it requires some knowledge of the destination, but it can be done. We don't yet know enough about the spell that called you to say whether it's repeatable, though perhaps we could collaborate with your experts to design a tuning fork and proceed from there? Plane Shift is mostly useful for transporting people with any cargo they can carry, high value items and the like, but we do plenty of both.

"He wanted to get into the tower, so the best way to drive him off was to interpose ourselves. We aren't ground-bound, but dragons fly faster than we're capable of and have a significant maneuverability advantage in the air. But yes, if you have no other questions you need absolute privacy for, you should open a bank account and accept your reward." And leave, hopefully, but if that works he is absolutely going to try Scrying her on Earth to see if it's worth the time to open a new trading relationship. It could go either way – the freight rates that clerics get from shuttling rare minerals and magic items between the elemental planes and the material are only barely higher than commercial teleportation, to compensate for the danger, but a wholly unknown opportunity like this could be worth its weight in spellsilver.

Ah, that makes sense, they were defending a ground target and the dragon didn't want to risk destroying it while targeting them from above.

"My world isn't in contact with Golarion, so there's certainly no existing treaty on Earth prohibiting it. Communication is enough to trade valuable knowledge - science, engineering, magic formulae(*)." Tanya absolutely thinks of trade! In the unlikely event that she makes it back home (and didn't die in order to get here to begin with), exclusive trade with a source of superior technology and magic could be literally life-saving for Germania! It's transit that opens a can of worms, so it might be good that they can't (easily? cheaply?) do it unilaterally.

"I have no other pressing questions. Can you please direct me to an appropriate bank branch and tell me how to claim the bounty? I don't have any basis for choosing a particular bank, but I presume this is a reversible decision. ...and they'll need someone who has the telepathy (**) spell, and ideally would be able to further direct me to a telepathy-enabled directory of local resources so I can learn more and rent a place to stay and so on."

(*) The math behind a spell, as opposed to an instance of the spell being cast.

(**) The thing that makes information appear directly in Tanya's brain without her understanding the language he's speaking.

Whatever science and engineering can be spoken of in the same breath as new spell lore must be potent indeed. The advances made in the last century alone would turn Aroden's head! He can only imagine the value of yet another intellectual tradition added to their own.

"This building is one of Shiman-Sekh's banks." It's why he's at liberty to use their Private Sanctum. "It would serve, but I suspect the clerks will not return until tomorrow. If you're planning to hire mages or other professionals, you should take the money out in Sothis, the capital city of Osirion. They should also have better language spells, if you'd like to buy access until you can do without. The choice of location is a reversible decision, of course, but if you don't want to withdraw your entire balance and carry it yourself it takes a week or two to transfer. We'll be leaving shortly, if you'd like to come with us. I'll bring one of the dragon's scales with us and vouch for you as the slayer."

He stands up. "Just wait outside with the men, I'll see if there's anything here bound for Sothis that we can bring along." Always best to fill up extra transport capacity whenever possible.

Language spells? A better name would be no-language spells! "I can't expect to master a new spell quickly, even if I can buy the casting implement or local equivalent."

Tanya follows him outside; this part isn't secret. "How far away is Sothis, and how are you traveling there?" Operating in the capital sounds like a fine idea.

All of the bank's outbound documents are in the same place, but they're not sorted between ones he can take on his own recognizance (letters of advice and recommendation, interoffice balance sheet reconciliations) and ones that he can't (specie remittances, bills of exchange). To Tanya it looks like him stopping at a random desk on the way out and sifting through the paperwork for the pages he can shove in his own pockets.

"There are devices for storing and casting spells, but operating one without being a member of the magical tradition it was created within is a separate skill," he explains. "In the immediate future you need to buy magic as a service. One use of Share Language will give you the ability to speak one language known to the caster for a full day – only that language, unlike this spell, but it's cheaper and lasts longer. It can also supplement immersion learning, to the point that rich travelers can reach conversational fluency in most languages in less than three months of practice." Buying a Share Language every day adds up fast, but Tanya is both rich and short on alternatives, so he may as well point her at the most practical approach.

"Sothis is a few hundred kilometers from here. We'll be going by Teleport, along with some of my officers, directly to a spot set aside for this use." Tanya's culture has the concept of teleportation if not the spell for it, which explains why she's not unspeakably shocked by suddenly appearing somewhere else. Hopefully she's not equally suspicious of such flagrant use of a fifth-circle spell for personal convenience.

Presumably he is authorized to handle this bank's papers? Nazir and his men have been using the building freely in the clerks' absence; Tanya isn't going to be shocked or question him about it, even though he did not make it sound like he works for the bank at all.

They have a spell that grants knowledge? Ongoingly, not permanently, so it's not really different in kind from the wordless telepathy. Just in, you know, all the implications. Tanya has no idea at this point what their mental-affecting magic is or isn't capable of! She's allowed to boggle a little.

(Maybe they specialize in language magic? Granting people arbitrary knowledge would make professional specialization, relative advantage and maybe even personhood obsolete! Also, aren't three months of intensive full-immmersion study already enough to become halfway fluent?)

But she doesn't have time to consider this, because -

Tanya has experience with isekai (*). Specifically, irreversible one-way isekai. She also has experience with not being shocked speechless in combat, no matter what happens. And she had several hours to (very superficially) come to terms with her once-again death and relocation before mentally shifting to diplomatic mode to talk to Nazir.

Outside of combat, Tanya can in fact be shocked speechless.

(*) lit. 'cursed divine forkless plane shift', three syllables in Tanya's native language.

They can teleport. With baggage and passengers. To a distance of several hundred kilometers.

No wonder she hadn't seen railroads (or any serious roads, really, or traffic) while flying. Only the very poor and the very eccentric cross the desert on camelback.

...there were the ships and barges, though. So the teleport hasn't scaled to cheap bulk transport yet.

(Of course it's easy and cheap enough for individual mages to use! Transportation is a fundamental constraint on all economic activity! The best transportation technologies always end up super-optimized! Mages don't even need jet fuel!)

But still, for individuals and low-volume, high-value goods: checkpoints? Customs? Immigration control? Borders? Obsolete!

Say, can you teleport some heavy artillery?  Logistics, what's that? Why bother surrounding and bypassing, we'll attack the enemy HQ in their capital! If it goes wrong we'll retreat the way we came in!

Oh, but the enemy HQ is not in their capital, its location is a secret! There are no army groups for them to coordinate. Why group an army? Just have everyone coordinate their teleport time!

Alright, but we still can't teleport the really heavy artillery. Why do we need it, though? To attack fortified positions? Why fortify anything the enemy can bypass at will?

Not enough mages to teleport all the infantry? You're marching them the long way, on sailships and camels? By the time they get to the front there won't be a front left! They're needed to hold the enemy industrial centers? That industry will never pay back the costs of mobilizing. Just bomb it to shreds! The enemy will do it themselves if you capture it!

Tanya is maybe going in circles a little bit here. She's clearly not cut out to be a soldier in this brave new world. The civilian world beckons! Teleport to work in the capital! Teleport a cup of coffee into your hand, hot and steaming from the jungles of distant Brazil! Hurray for capitalism! Banzai!

Tanya makes a series of facial expressions which someone versed in Tanya's culture might interpret as: Surprise! Shock! Throwing-hands-up gesture (but with her face)! Mania! Resignation? 

Ah, that is not the face of a woman who is surprised by flagrant personal use of Teleport. It is the face of a woman who has noticed it can be appropriated for personal use, and has inferred it must therefore be common enough to be The Most Valuable Spell In Creation. This is not a wholly unreasonable state of belief. Cultural Adaptation informs him that the idea of Earthling people teleporting is absurd, even though Tanya is obviously familiar with it, which means she must know of it through exposure to some other creature. Lots of outsiders can Greater Teleport at will! It's probably something like that.

"Teleport-capable mages are rare," he explains. "It was historically considered the threshold at which mages ascended above worldly affairs, both because of the magical complexity and because mages could earn fortunes by selling the service to monarchs and warlords alike. Plane Shift has always been more common but the targeting accuracy is abysmal; it's useless for rapid deployment. A lot of things have changed, too many list without a full history lesson, but the most important milestone was the invention of a cheap magic item that enables non-mages to cast Teleport— relatively cheap, I should say, creating Boots of Teleportation costs half again what you earned today in scarce materials and employs some of the most expensive labor in the world. They're valuable enough that convoys are sometimes targeted by thieves specifically hunting for the Boots, never mind the cargo, so trading companies are in the same arms race as militaries to block rogue teleporters while enabling their own men to operate freely. Having said that, Boots proliferation has produced an enormous amount of surplus. It's theoretically possible to reach anywhere on the planet with fourteen Teleports or fewer, though in practice the spell only works reliably if you're trying to go somewhere you've been before or can currently observe. They haven't displaced the fleets yet, but it's only a matter of time."

Nazir leads Tanya back to the dragon's corpse. How's the dismemberment going?

They're not fully dismembering it, that would be a good way to incite a ghost dragon to violence, but Ymohrglas has been prepared for an otherwise-respectful burial without his wings, claws, eyes, horns, and some of the glands in his throat. They've also taken a full inventory of his scrolls, wands, potions, and captured allies, all of which have been laid out and cataloged neatly. Civilians are still nowhere to be seen.

A Message hits Nazir as soon as he rounds the corner into view: "No alignment aura, no illusory disguise, same magical aura. No one has any better idea what she is than we did before. All good there?"

"Hurayra! Iomedae! We're heading for Sothis!"

After them the next in command is Faris. He'll leave the Wand of Sending with him, in case an emergency comes up the instant they leave.

And they are joined by two others, a woman of the same ethnicity as Nazir carrying an overlarge velvet sack over one shoulder and someone that looks like a freakish cross between a human and a lion. Both of them wear heavy white robes and an ornamented circlet similar in style to the one on Nazir's crown, and they each have a few active magical effects, though evidently not the one that lets them understand Tanya when she speaks in Germanian.

A magic item that can be used by non-mages?! That's a step beyond even mana fixation! An incredible advance of technology! (A dilution of Tanya's unique talents!) Can they do it for other spells? How quickly is the price coming down, even with theft the magic items accumulate, they don't die of old age. And they can be reallocated for the most efficient use. This means even Tanya can use spells in the local tradition!! She wants one of everything!!!

(This is not how to get Tanya to stop boggling.)

They're taking trophies from the dragon's corpse? Like putting a pair of antlers on a mantelpiece, except it's a human person's head. Ugh. Tanya needs to compose herself better and not visibly judge other cultures, what is she even doing, but there's a moment where it's clear on her face that this is... uncivilized.

A cat... person? Assuming that's not an illusion l, but she already made that mistake with the dragon. Sure, why not, there might as well be catpeople on this world.

(Tanya doesn't really believe this is another planet in the same universe as Earth. She can't get a pair of boots before going back home, give them to Schugel, and win the war. That would be - too convenient.)

How does this teleport spell work?

They're going to hold hands and form a circle, with the large velvet sack tossed into the middle. It sits shapelessly on the ground, giving the impression that it contains something with volume and mass but not a particular volume or mass. The woman and Nazir wordlessly extend their hands to Tanya, waiting for her to join in.

It requires multiple mages to cast? "What do I need to do?" she asks Nazir as she takes their hands.

"Do nothing. Allow the spell to carry you without struggle."

Nazir begins chanting. His telepathic translation magic refuses to explain the meaning of these words, though Tanya will recognize 'Abadar' and 'Sothis' among them if she pays close attention to the sounds. As he speaks, a torrent of magic unfolds from both hands in a fast spiral that envelops the four of them, winding around all of their arms and binding them into a tight sphere that trembles with potential energy. The other two are grinning like idiots and nodding along with the chant.

Last chance if Tanya wants to back out!

The chanting would be concerning if this was Earth! It doesn't really rate for weirdness next to a catperson and a dismembered dragon.

Tanya doesn't back out.

The sphere closes, the spell dissipates, and they are whisked away in the blink of an eye. It's almost anticlimactic.

Everyone's boots land on a completely different stone floor, along with the sack and a fine layer of grit carried along for the ride. A gust of hot desert air puffs out into the temperature differential, ruffling clothes and scattering sand as it goes. They're indoors, in a room that has been built expressly for this purpose. The walls are covered in unintelligible signage, though the fact that it's a short message repeated in multiple languages and accompanied by arrows all pointing in the same direction will probably get the meaning across.

"Welcome to the Triangle Gate Bank of Sothis. This is the inbound teleport berth," Nazir says. "Follow me, I'll find you a teller… Hurayra, I need a scale."

The catperson passes Nazir a blue reptile scale, then shoulders the velvet sack and leaves through a different door.

This must be the equivalent of air traffic control. Tanya assumes Nazir radioed messaged ahead to get a berth assigned. 

(What happens if you try to teleport to an occupied location? Possibly nothing good, same as landing an airplane on an occupied runway! Transportation does not have to be inherently fail-safe; society builds safety-ensuring railings around it.)

Tanya follows Nazir. (Why are they using a scale as proof? Couldn't the dragon have an accomplice turn in one of his own scales to claim the bounty? Does the government also collect gruesome trophies - not her business.)

Nazir leads them through the back offices and the counting rooms to the front of the bank in silence. The architecture is similar to the bank they just left, albeit much larger – huge sandstone blocks sealed in place via friction and gravity, rectangular windows glazed with something translucent enough to admit sunlight, and the occasional succulent or cactus planted in an alcove. The sounds of pens scratching on parchment echo through the noisier areas.

The front office has more activity. Here there are rows of desks occupied by somber young men with precise haircuts, all of them with much darker skin and hair than Nazir and Iomedae. Their desks are lit by sourceless white pinpricks of light, sitting on the tips of feather quills and the rims of water glasses like impossible candlesticks. Some of them look up and offer some gesture of respect as the group passes, but most are absorbed by interactions with customers, who stem from a long line that snakes from an orderly queue near the front to a door that goes out to some area lit by sunlight. Nazir acknowledges them but hones in on one in particular, a man whose current customer is just getting up to leave.

Nazir's speech is still comprehensible to all listeners but the other man's is not, leading to an experience rather like overhearing someone speaking on a cell phone.

Eventually he turns to Tanya.

"Share Language will cost you twenty gold scarabs for the day. The bank will offer you a bridge loan to cover the expense – no charge if your account is funded in the next six hours, but if you decided to use a different institution the soft rate applies. I will go and settle the bounty now. Take care."

The young man behind the desk extends a hand in Tanya's direction.

All the tellers are mages? That can't be accidental. Maybe their registers or safes need magic to open. ...oh, this is the line for buying spells. There are probably other, non-mage tellers elsewhere in the building.

(This is very unlikely to be a scam to put her twenty scarabs in debt to the bank. There's no real reason for anyone to do that, and it's a very small fraction of the sum she was promised. Anyway, she's not signing anything.)

(But she probably will be shortly. Opening a bank account as a foreigner must require some documentation, even if she starts out with a large deposit and they have magic to verify her identity.)

(She is finding excuses to avoid thinking about it and she is aware of this and is going to stop right now.)

This spell is going to implant knowledge into her brain. Tanya can't really imagine what that will feel like. And it's reasonable to be terrified of magic directly influencing your mind.

The army is very good at training people to quickly and calmly following instructions and executing on previously decided plans regardless of how they feel about it in the moment. War dulls rational feelings of fear, and weeds out those who hesitate to march forward for even a moment.

Tanya accepts the offered hand with a firm clasp.

The man places his other hand into his pocket and recites something in a similar cadence to the one Nazir used earlier. Magic comes rushing out of his hand and into Tanya's, threads of invisible light soaking into her flesh and bone before disappearing deeper inside her.

Unlike some of the earlier spells that Tanya has seen or interacted with, she can feel this one advancing as it goes. There are tendrils of foreign knowledge intruding into her mind, trying to provide her with information of unknown providence. If she chooses to STRUGGLE AGAINST IT WITH ALL HER MIGHT, she may be able to resist it! If she does nothing, she is going to learn a new language in the next six seconds.

Tanya STRUGGLES WITH ALL HER MIGHT against her natural inclination to resist the spell and yank her hand back and shoot the teller.

Spontaneously learning a new language is a far more disorienting experience than teleportation! Unlike the universal translation effect, this is someone's particular vocabulary rather than the full lexicon, and not all of Tanya's native concepts have an injective correspondence. She must make the conscious decision to speak in Osiriani, if she wishes to be understood at all, but her grasp of Osiriani is strong – she may get the impression that her source for the language was highly literate. It's a little dizzying.

Nazir may be leaving, but Iomedae has a more intimate impression of how Osirians feel about unaccompanied young women. She will remain standing behind Tanya and continue to glare daggers at the teller, in case it's unclear to him whether he has discretion in this matter.

The teller is a professional! He will not break with protocol just because a sixth circle cleric of Abadar and his adventuring partner have intimated that this was not optional! He will, however, incorporate that into his decision-making process.

"You are interested in opening an account?" he asks, in the exact dialect that Tanya now speaks. "We will need some information from you first…"

As a preliminary matter, the bank wants to know Tanya's full name, age, occupation, nationality, home address, whether she is the head of her household, her degree of proficiency with magic, and what she plans to use her bank account for.

It's very reasonable not to let (apparent) children open bank accounts without a lot of due diligence and paperwork! Tanya is glad it's possible at all! Obviously she's legally emancipated, as of the moment she became an officer, but they're not going to recognize her uniform or military ID. Which also means she needs to make the uniform proud and try to let it carry its weight for a bit.

Name: Tanya von Degurechaff. (Not translated to indicate nobility; she has other things on her mind.)

Age: ... ... fourteen.

Nationality: Germanian. (Tone: if they haven't heard of it, that rather speaks of them, doesn't it?)

Occupation: Lt. Col. aerial mage of the Germanian Imperial Army.

Home address: ... this postal code will get mail to her, once they get it into the Germanian system.

Head of her household: yes.

Degree of proficiency with magic: A-class.

She plans to use her bank account to, uh, keep money in and occasionally withdraw it, and has not made any further plans yet but may make them later. If she doesn't need it for anything else in the next few weeks, she will presumably invest it.

Fourteen-year-old girls are not ordinarily at liberty to open their own—

The glare intensifies.

— with such stellar character references, he is disinclined to doubt her assertion of emancipation.

"I do not think we can send mail to this address," he says, sounding apologetic. "I don't recall Germania from any of our postal destination lists… if you are a mage, we may be able to reach an alternative arrangement. Your classification is unfamiliar to me – what is the most powerful magical feat you are capable of? What is the least powerful magical feat you have not yet been able to accomplish?"

"I expect to rent local accomodations and I can update you when I do." Tanya doesn't want them actually teleporting a letter into the Germanian post (at least not without consulting her first!) "But I don't know how long it will take me to pick a more permanent local address. I can buy a postal office box, if that's a service the local post offers."

"My exact magical abilities and accomplishments are classified. Is everyone in Osirion required to report their exact abilities?" What a colossal intrusion of privacy if so, and more importantly, what a terrible set of perverse incentives! "Class A indicates I am capable of casting multiple complex spells simultaneously, and is the basic requirement to qualify for aerial combat. If it helps, the proximate reason I am opening this account is that I happened to kill a dragon this morning and there was a bounty on his head. ...in self defense."

"This is true and accurate," Iomedae confirms of the last sentence. "Hej Nazir will arrange for the payout into this account."

It is immediately obvious once she starts talking that both Iomedae and Nazir have strong accents. Tanya's internal grasp of the language classifies them both as hailing from far distant corners of the country, or more likely a different country altogether.

What the fuck it would be unreasonable to demand verification when Nazir is presumably already explaining this to his boss as they speak.

"You are not legally required to report your exact abilities to the government," he says slowly. "As your bank, we require this information to… better suit your needs. Your strength as a mage is predictive of your income, future growth, career path, professional activities, and need for specialized banking services." He would press the question again, but casting multiple complex spells simultaneously calls for Quickened spells, already near the high end of the absolute risk assessment for new clients. He adds 'fifth circle or higher' to the box on the form.

"The rest of this, if you please," he says, and passes Tanya another sheaf of paperwork. It's covered in literal hieroglyphs, a mixture of alphabetic symbols and logograms functionally reminiscent of kanji and kana, but it's perfectly readable. It wants her to indicate how to spell her name (there is no obvious way do this in Osirian hieroglyphs), to acquiesce to a set of legal stipulations for dispute resolution (noteworthy excerpts: Tanya will agree to submit to truth magic provided by the bank during arbitration, unless she wants to pay for someone else to do it; Tanya will not be able to transfer funds to any country at war with Osirion, unless she waives several different consumer protection rights; the bank reserves the power to check Tanya for hostile enchantments under certain circumstances which are only vaguely enumerated), and to confirm in writing that she will not share access to her bank account with anyone who is not a part of her household.

Tanya knows, intellectually, that this is a routine process and the bank has a clear business interest in this information, especially for a customer with no prior history. She's just out of the habit of dealing with civilian business bureaucracy. She shouldn't have pushed back so strongly, the poor clerk is only following a flowchart and she was probably a bit rude.

Spelling her name in a non-phonetic system is a Choice, and not one to be made lightly; it will affect how everyone perceives her in the future. "Since I don't actually know this language yet, is it alright for me to spell my name phonetically, or will it become a legal name that I have to use outside this institution and is hard to change?"

Is this for arbitration between her and the bank, or arbitration services the bank may provide between her and future third parties? Is she giving up any legal rights she would otherwise have (e.g. to file suit in ordinary court) by agreeing to this arbitration instead? Is Osirion presently at war with any countries?

A purely phonetic spelling is highly recommended. In fact, Tanya should not attempt a transcreation of her own name without guidance from a native speaker or ten, to avoid accidentally choosing a spelling with unfortunate implications. She is unlikely to run into problems changing this later, unless she experiments with enough different spellings that confusion becomes inevitable.

The bank's forced arbitration clause for retail accounts requires that anyone disputing charges or transactions from the schedule indicated on the contract seek resolution via an arbitrator. This is partially for reasons that Tanya is already familiar with and partially because some arbitrators specialize in niche subfields of dispute resolution, such as cases where a transaction is alleged to have been authorized by someone magically disguised as the account holder. If Tanya is instead accusing the bank of criminal conduct, that goes through the justice system. They do also provide neutral arbitration services between their clients and third parties, but this is a completely different department and they can tailor the arrangement as desired.

Osirion is not presently at war with any countries! If this changes it will become public knowledge within hours at most, and at no point will any of the bank's clients be allowed to unintentionally complete such a transfer.

Ah, it's for disputing transactions? Then it's fine (or at least, the best she's going to get). She does need to know how she can authenticate herself to them in the future, especially at other branches.

Tanya signs on the dotted lines. They won't pronounce her name quite correctly, but given that it's a heavily mangled Russy name to begin with, she doesn't really care.

Then Tanya will be issued a small leather-bound booklet with the bank's name and coat of arms on the cover (a pair of crossed arcs inside a triangle), which she needs to sign a few more times at various points on the first few pages. The rest of the passbook is a blank ledger which will be used to replicate every transaction with this account. The passbook is a necessary but not sufficient proof of identity, and if anyone shows up at the bank claiming to be Tanya von Degurechaff in need of a replacement passbook because the current one is lost, that person is not going to get one without undergoing invasive questioning. If Tanya has any magic that might be helpful here – a way to indelibly mark something as her own property, or a way to make small objects unlosable, perhaps – the bank will happily accommodate her.

She can't mark any objects but she can demonstrate her flight magic which shouldn't exactly match anything around here, do they think they can identify that magical signature? Tabya is assuming they don't have a way to copy and spread around her personal mana signature, or they'd have said.

The bank teller casts a spell to observe Tanya while flying. After watching her for about thirty seconds his expression slides from detached to disturbed.

"It is very unique, no? I have never seen its like in all my life. Any learned Abadaran will recognize this spell, once they know the trick of it."

… yes, if Tanya is prepared to demonstrate this spell every time she comes into the branch, this exact spell and no other, the Triangle Gate Bank of Sothis is prepared to accept it as authentication. He will make a note of the relevant details.

And that's it! Does Tanya have any other questions for him before he goes to finalize the records?

Identifiying spells, and sharing updates so others will know to recognize them, is a core requirement for military mages. In a world where non-military spells are routinely cast directly on people, that must apply to everyone.

Yes, she can demonstrate it every time. (...unless something happens to her orb and she needs access to her bank account to, uh, continue living. But she can prepare for that when she knows more and has some actual plans.)

...she can demonstrate it every time, but might want in the medium or long term to replace this form of identification once she is more acclimatized. She understands that will involve detailed checks and maybe a fee or something.

Tabya has no further questions related to opening the account! She will have unrelated questions later that should probably be directed to someone else.

"Nazir and Hurayra are busy," Iomedae says abruptly. "We should find you lodgings in the city, unless you have magic for it, and someone to sell you Share Language each day until you no longer need it. Twenty scarabs is highway robbery."

That's the price you pay if you want to buy spellcasting on demand. The teller doesn't say this; basic economic truths rarely soothe angry customers. He gathers Tanya's paperwork, extinguishes the light on the desk with a wave of his hand, and bids them a polite farewell.

"Iomedae, right? Thank you for your presence back there." Tanya hadn't missed the glares, and now the intent is clear too: Iomedae thinks they're overcharging her. (A very bad thing to learn about one's bank where one has just deposited a large amount of money! She hasn't seen any schedule of fees, she assumed the fact the deposit didn't earn an interest would cover that, but maybe she should have asked?) 

"Did the Share Language not have a listed price? I couldn't follow Nazir's conversation before it was cast, obviously."

Should she trust Iomedae though? Well, she's here by Nazir's recommendation and Iomedae works with or for Nazir, so Tanya might as well go all in; if they had any nefarious designs they could have executed them already. She'll spend her time for the foreseeable future learning about this new world and country (and eventually other countries too) and it shouldn't matter much which hotel she happens to pick for the first few days.

"I don't have magic that replaces lodgings." (How would that even work while she's asleep?) "My immediate concern about picking lodgings is security. I don't know if that's at all appropriate here, or what the threat profile might be, and the appropriate defenses. As a soldier, I'm used to operating in groups and sleeping under guard when necessary."

"My pleasure," she says warmly. "Abadar's men are, hmm, meticulous and fair, but not always scrupulous. He said it would cost twenty scarabs, and Nazir agreed on your behalf… we can find better prices elsewhere though. When I learned Osiriani I paid fifteen scarabs a day to a man from Oldstone, and I know I could've bargained it down to twelve."

And they can head out! Triangle Gate is another city district made of sandstone and sand, with even more aggressive use of water features and street trees. The heat is sweltering, but nobody outside in the afternoon is foolish enough to loosen their robes.

"This is not my favorite city, but it is not famous for public unrest," she continues. "If you fear strong enemies you would be safe in the pharaoh's palace, or perhaps the Pathfinder lodge, but the price is high. Mages often sleep inside an extradimensional space – permanent ones are feats of legendary spellwork, but temporary ones are not – and rely on their own wit during the day. I take it you have no spells like that? You can buy them, they are not much more expensive than Share Language. That will protect you from the man on the street who thinks you an easy target."

Tanya has no spells that would directly cool her down. She can make mirrors to reflect the sunlight and most of the heat radiated by the stones, but she'll still be breathing hot air and unable to radiate her own body heat effectively. The desert campaign had them flying at cooler altitudes, but they still had to carry a lot of water, and took dips in the ocean whenever they could get away with it.

...'Abadar's men'? Isn't Nazir one of those?

"I'm not familiar with extradimensional spaces, how do they affect security? Do you need a special spell to enter one, some kind of key? I don't know that I should fear anyone; I have no enemies here unless some of the dragon's friends want vengeance. I certainly hope this place is peaceful and law-abiding enough that I should have nothing to fear!" 

On Earth, if Tanya had somehow ended up in another country and at the locals' mercy, they would certainly have wanted to confiscate her orbs for reverse engineering. Laws don't stop a government acting in its national security interests, and Osirion doesn't need to worry about its diplomatic standing with Germania... Unless Nazir is right and Tanya is going to be abruptly sent back to Earth, in which case Osirion should be interested in possible trade (or else confiscate her orbs before that happens).

Obviously she's not going to point out that they might want to rob her, and it's very much to their credit if they don't (but she hasn't spoken to the relevant parts of the Osiriani government yet). And any security a private person could buy wouldn't help against the government. Tanya can probably go to a regular hotel, it's just that she's mentally out of practice going to sleep without considering her security situation.

And it looks like she lucked into a windfall that would let her live comfortably for a long time as a humble private citizen. Which is great! She doesn't plan to sit around unproductively, but it will take her a long time to learn enough to commit to any specific plan, and now she doesn't have to hurry.

"What's your relationship with Nazir? Do you work for or with him?"

She does look like she's overheating. Iomedae will stop at the next temple that isn't run by cheapskates and get some water.

"The spell is called Rope Trick, and it is a much simplified version of a far more powerful spell. It can be accessed physically through a hole torn in the air, but only eight creatures can be inside of it at once. If you enter with seven mice in your pocket, no one can follow you. It is a place not of this world, and some spells cannot reach it even if the hole is very near. Rope Trick is a rudimentary defense against an enemy mage Scrying your location in secret and teleporting on top of you as you sleep, when you are least able to defend yourself."

Tanya thinks to fear Ymohrglas even when he is dead. Wise of her. They did not capture all of his allies in the aftermath of the battle, and surely his friends and family will hear of his demise.

"Blue dragons are usually lawful. You are more likely to hear from lawyers than assassins. I would be on guard for enemy divinations, if they think to look for you, but this is only common sense. Osirion as a whole is very lawful, though whether the law is kind to you is another matter. I am not sure what would be most surprising to you, but as an example: slavery is permitted here. The pharaoh disapproves of slavery, of course, and the welfare of slaves is taken seriously in Osirion, so I will even believe him when he says this. But in Osirion, a law to be rid of slavery is a law that deprives slaveowners of their property, and so they must be compensated. For reasons I do not fully understand, the government either cannot or will not do this. So men are still enslaved for their crimes, and when foreign slaves flee their masters, it is the law that returns them. I do not know if this is surprising to you, but there may be some similar surprise elsewhere you ought to watch out for." Iomedae would have lead with 'Osirian women generally do not have bank accounts', but female adventurers are used to being insulated from the treatment often due their gender.

"Nazir and I are partners, along with a few others. We have been working together for nearly our whole adventuring careers. When we incorporated we decided that equal shares were the only way to avoid sour argument, but if anyone is in charge, it is Nazir." She sounds fond of him. "We assigned ourselves more traditional combat roles, back then, but today I wouldn't say he or I have one particular position on the team."

Tanya will remove her flight jacket, drink as much as she can and soak her shirt if they'll let her, but while she's at no risk of sunburn she is steadily overheating. Even if she were dressed for this weather, it feels unsurvivable for long if she has to move at a walking pace.

The 'extradimensional space' raises so many questions. Why build a spell to enforce 'eight creatures' (how do you make a spell count mice and men?!) and not some kind of password or key? If you can make a barrier some spells can't cross, can you surround yourself with it in combat, or make a room safe? Can you use it in reverse as a prison? Why is it called a rope trick?

How do you make extra space to begin with - presumably there's an excellent physics answer that Tanya isn't equipped to understand and wouldn't help her if she did. And they have a way to make the spell last without anyone casting it, and even let non-mages cast it. How does that work if she buys a daily casting, can she take the opening with her? Does it put her in any extra danger if something happens to the casting implement (?) while she's inside? Where is she supposed to get seven mice, do people here carry emergency mice in a pocket? How do the pocket mice handle this heat? Can she get a rope trick with an air conditioner?

'Scrying and teleporting on top of you while you are asleep' is a terrifying proposition! Tanya really wants to have more layers of defense between herself and certain death than the seven mice!!

"I expect it will take me some time to mentally adjust to the new threat profile; 'scrying and teleporting to a sleeping target' sounds like certain death because I'm not used to the idea, but I'm not used to the countermeasures either. Just for comparison, how much do you think the other options you mentioned cost and how much better is their security against assassination attempts?" Do they just have armed guards, or something else? Why is the pharaoh's palace available for rent - ah, he must have several and converted one into a secure hotel for foreign dignitaries. 

"Nazir seemed to think I was in no real danger from a lawsuit. Can unsuccessful lawsuits be a serious harm or cost to the defender in Osirion? Should I retain a lawyer ahead of time just in case, I think that's recommended in some places?"

"As for slavery - I'm used to the idea that it exists... somewhere, mostly in the past... even if I'm not used to living with it." Because it's a terrible idea that both Germania and Japan sensibly avoided! Slavery is something foreign barbarians do!

"Some governments on Earth abolished it, with or without compensating the slaveowners. Obviously it's better to compensate them if at all possible. Some had it done by revolutions or revolts - which is another reason to proactively abolish it. I'm not aware of any good arguments for keeping slavery, especially with private ownership, but I don't know the tradeoffs here." In the best possible case, if it's used only as punishment for a crime - not just to replace a fine in case a person cannot pay, a lien on a percentage of future earnings would be better, but as an actual punishment and deterrent - then it might be defensible? Prison isn't obviously better if slaves have rights, and it's so expensive that the actual alternative might be execution. However, private ownership of penal slaves by the injured party sounds like a terrible idea.

"Even ignoring the direct harms and perverse incentives, though, it's terribly economically inefficient. A slaveowner has a better relative position in a worse-off society. That's the best possible justification for government forcibly buying property at its former market value; if the markets are confident enough to make the necessary loans, it should pay for itself in the long run." 

Tanya doesn't want to sound like she's lecturing Iomedae about it when Iomedae must have spent a lot more time thinking about this than Tanya has, but she assumes Iomedae mentioned slavery to judge Tanya's reaction and so Tanya should make it clear that her opinion is entirely orthodox.

"It is a habit of Abadar's men to name a price for all things, but I have never had cause to ask about the price of a night in the royal palace. It depends on how much the pharaoh likes you, I suppose, and whether he or Osirion stand to gain anything thereby. It is extraordinarily secure. One night in the Pathfinder Lodge costs ten times or more than a stay in a nice inn for merchants, but their guest rooms are warded against Scrying and their walls will redirect inbound teleporters into an oubliette. It would not stop an assassin from entering in other ways, but what you're really paying for is the company of extremely dangerous men who will be annoyed if their sleep is disturbed." She shrugs. "It is always better to outnumber your foe, and to be stronger than them, and to prepare for anything they can bring to bear. Defense in depth."

"I have never been sued, so I cannot say— aha, we should get water. Here, here."

They're passing a building that looks like a small fortress, architecturally out of place. The narrow entrance stands open but the door is a massive stone block that looks like it'd be hard to move even under ideal conditions, and immediately after crossing the threshold the temperature drops by a solid fifteen degrees.

The inside is spacious with low ceilings, and is absolutely packed with children. The oldest of them are Tanya's age, saddled with looking after infants and toddlers while other children play or nap or sit in corners doing nothing in particular. Most of them are clothed; none have magical signatures. Tanya and Iomedae draw curious stares, but they're not the only adults in the building – a man with a full water skin passes them on his way out.

"Slavery is a great evil," Iomedae confirms once they're inside. "The righteous nations forbid it wherever they can, and the wicked embrace it even as it stains their souls. In Osirion there are criminal slaves owned by the state, and private slaves from before the reforms, and slaves of foreigners passing through… Khemet I is widely beloved for this, there was no protest against the reforms, but there is a reason for that. Across the Inner Sea is Andoran, which rebelled against Cheliax during his reign and set all their slaves free and killed hundreds of thousands in the war that followed. He was still arranging a bloodless secession when the Chelish Civil War started. It must have influenced his thinking. Khemet III employs a number of former slaves as advisors on the subject, but perhaps his thinking is influenced too."

It was not a subtle conversational cue, but it's really good that this extraplanar visitor is so staunchly abolitionist! Maybe she's from a far-flung part of Heaven where kingdoms of mortals are a touch more Lawful and Good?

There is a wet basin against one wall which is almost completely empty, apart from a small puddle on the bottom.

"Feh," she says, running a finger against the inside. "Let's find someone to refill it."

If it's the actual palace where the pharaoh lives then it's presumably one of the most secure places in the country! Tanya can't imagine it's actually available for mere money; admitting the wrong person could drastically reduce the security of others, not even by letting in an enemy assassin or spy but just by serving its function of hosting people who have powerful enemies. The Pharaoh's personal security team isn't charged with earning money but even if they were, the cheapest solution might quickly become building a second, equally defended palace.

And the principle of quoting a price for everything may sound admirable at first, but it's a naive oversimplification; even if you're willing to sell finding out the exact price can be a long and expensive process, involving planning, negotiations, tenders and market discovery. The bigger the deal the longer it takes to close, and that's not just because there are more people interested in it and more money to share between them. The idea that everything (legal) has a price is a nice one to aspire to, but asking the pharaoh how much it would cost to stay a night in his personal quarters is taking it too far. (Also possibly lèse-majesté or something?)

The 'Pathfinder Lodge' sounds more reasonable at first. There's safety in numbers, and everyone is quoted the same price (and doesn't know who the other lodgers are), so people can decide whether it's a good deal. Tanya can agree to a pact of mutual defense if disturbed during the night (and if she has a way to tell apart intruders from guests). However, the obvious problem is that would-be assassins can also pay for lodgings, and some of the frequent guests are probably spies for intelligence operations selling inside information. Whether the bargain is worth it depends on the place's past record. Anyway, Tanya shouldn't put herself in a situation where she might have to fight on behalf of others while she has such an utter lack of understanding of what magical offense and defenses are even possible here.

(Teleports! Scrying! Telepathy! Mind-to-mind knowledge transfer! Rope tricks with mice! Tanya doesn't know how this world works yet, not even a little bit.)

Air conditioning!! And - aha, there's a spherical magical effect that's doing something to the people inside it (including Tanya, now). Now she knows what to ask for in her hotel room slash extradimensional space.

It's a day care center (or orphanage). But why aren't the older children in school (which could conveniently be held in this building)? You have to invest in the long-term earning potential of the next generation! ...unless these are after-school hours? Tanya isn't sure what the local time of day is, after the teleport, except that it involves too much sun.

The building seems to be an old repurposed fortress or bunker, which means it's an obsolete design (why put a fortress in the middle of a city, anyway?); such a heavy stone building might be too expensive to demolish to build something more efficient. Or perhaps the air-conditioning spell would be expensive to recast - no, the building would be allocated to a more productive use if most places couldn't afford magical cooling. Although there are so many children here that their parents probably can outbid people looking for office space. Or maybe it's government-subsidized; it would certainly do these children no favors to overheat at home while their parents are at work, and they definitely can't play outside.

(Heavy stone isn't entirely obsolete on Earth; add a point in the 'Tanya does not understand the local military balance' column. This is entirely unsurprising; people on Earth even half a century ago did not anticipate modern technology, and doctrine evolved rapidly in just a few years of war.)

Some children being naked is... probably culturally unmarked? Surely no parents are so poor that they cannot afford any clothes at all for their children. ...unless they are the children of slaves. Ugh.

"It sounds like Osirion is headed in the right direction, at least. If the private slaves are, uh, legacy ones from before the reforms, perhaps he's just waiting for them to all die and resolve the issue that way? Or are the children of slaves also enslaved? What proportion of the population is enslaved, anyway?" That is also a proxy for what proportion of the population are lawbreakers.

How will whoever refill it? Tanya can't see any plumbing, and carrying water is hard; why not use it where it is? This question will presumably answer itself shortly.

"He could be waiting. It would be an injustice, but a finite injustice; children are born free." She is distracted, looking around. "I don't know how many slaves there are, most of them live on farms, the census… you there! Yes, you! Where is your shepherd?"

That doesn't get a useful answer, only excited jabbering from a cluster of bored children that even a native speaker would have difficulty understanding. Most of them have some basic respect for personal space, but it's the ones that don't who want to play with Tanya specifically. Does she have any toys with her? Games? Books?

One of the older ones across the room rolls his eyes and whistles loudly.

Tanya has a spherical barrier, which means it extends out over two feet, and now it's impermeable to children and other non-gaseous material and consequently very faintly glowing blue. (She doesn't really know how to interact with children. It was bad enough in the orphanage despite the nuns telling the other kids to leave her alone!)

Slavery isn't an injustice if it breaks no laws. Perhaps Iomedae believes in natural inalienable rights? That might be as good a foundation as any, but the nations on Earth that claim to subscribe to them didn't actually enshrine them into law as absolute principles, so Tanya doesn't know how it works out in practice. However, there are plenty of other reasons to dislike slavery; even the rich slave-owner must live in fear of rebellion or simple murder.

"Free children born to slaves probably don't have very good lives," she observes. "How long ago was the reform, if there are still legacy slaves around?"

Iomedae casts another spell, and soon there are four ethereal lights whipping through the air at knee height for children to chase after. If she's bothered by the one still trying to hug her, she doesn't show it.

"It was a hundred… ninety… eighty years ago? All the human slaves from before are dead, but the census takers keep track of children… no, I remember there being a tally for children of slaves, but not for children of criminal slaves or legacy slaves, and they could be very different now. And better off, I hope? Even nations that are more reluctant to follow Andoran's example agree that children ought to be born free." Oh no, is this one of those complicated moral questions where you're supposed to do something counterintuitive because the alternative is worse? Why are there so many of those?!

"...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.)

A blob of magic seeps out of the ring into the air around Tanya's hand, already contoured into a complicated shape that resembles the pattern in the wires. She has an innate sense of its position and movement, but being able to see magic definitely helps. There's a knot sitting in her palm, which looks like it could be untied easily with both hands or with more difficulty using only the one wearing the ring.

And the motion Iomedae demonstrated was for untying the knot? Since when do you operate magic with your hands - wait, this is the version designed for non-mages to use, obviously they need to be able to do something like that.

Tanya tries 'untying' the knot directly. Can she affect it at all? Earth mages can't affect magic generated by other mages in their presence, so it's an unintuitive mental motion, but it's worth checking.

Trying to move the magic directly feels— maybe not completely impossible? It responds to Tanya's attention by shifting very slightly, but that's all. The parts of the blob in contact with her skin stick to her a little tighter, and the shear forces inside the fluid produce interesting patterns on the surface, but that's all. Trying to get it to do exactly what she wants is like trying to form a sculpture out of wet sand while wearing oven mitts.

At least some things are still impossible in this new world.

Tanya pokes at it with her finger. Can she simply move it around by pushing on it? With her hands? 

She can! It doesn't feel like it has any inertia or mass, so it's rather like trying to interact with an idealized substance. It moves effortlessly when she presses against it. It's not possible to tear or pierce the blob, but it's otherwise dead simple to manipulate.

...can she move it with a stick? Did they figure out how to make magic tangible - ok, no, they made something tangible and then made the magic follow it. This was implied by magic items usable by non-mages, but it's still pretty incredible to see.

Foreign bodies pass directly through it without interacting. As far as the blob is concerned, the only other tangible objects in the universe are Tanya's hands.

Not even the rest of her body! It's carefully built to do exactly one thing and has impressive failsafes.

Alright, she'll try 'untying' the knot in the magic. (Not using the exact hand-movement Iomedae demonstrated; she can see what she's doing, after all.)

Doing this releases multiple tension points hidden in the blob, causing it to swell dramatically as its outlying components cycle into a new position. Then the blob of magic disappears, and Tanya has a spell active! It crops up in her mind, and if she doesn't try to mentally hold on to it and direct it, it'll slip away again in no time. For the next minute and thirty seconds, Tanya can:

1. Pick up unattended objects and move them around, up to a maximum weight of maybe a hundred kilograms.
2. Try to manhandle other people, although that doesn't seem like it's going to be nearly as easy.
3. Spend the rest of the spell's energy in a single glorious burst and send nine (9) nearby objects flying around at high speed.

She tries out the first function. Carefully, on a small pebble. One does not recklessly play with novel spells that can fling hundred-kilograms paving stones around.

...even with a small mass, it's restricted to a very slow speed and a short range. More safeties; if you want to replace an actual cannon (railgun?) you need use the third variant. (Tanya approves! More spell designers should think about including safeties, especially in mass-market items people might use without rigorous training! This ring could be used by civilians!)

The really unfamiliar part is how it, once again, implants knowledge in her mind. She knows they have spells to do that and she still can't grasp the full implications.

"Very interesting," she says, returning the ring to Iomedae. "I could control the spell while it was ongoing just as if I had cast it, without feeding it mana. Hooking it up to my mind must be the actually complicated part of this particular spell; applying force to an object is simple and the amount of force is hardcoded, keyed to the object's inertia." She can see why the the local 'wizards' would need to do that complex work up front, to make spells available later and usable at a moment's notice. The ring must be performing any required calculations, although this particular spell wouldn't need much of that anyway; she's still not clear on how wizards do that part. Or - if they can bind magic to tangible forms, perhaps can they perform computations using the magic itself, and the magical structure that does it is what takes so long to set up? In that case, they actually have a very elegant solution that doesn't rely on external computation devices at all!

That doesn't sound right, but Iomedae doesn't know enough about spellcraft to dispute it. Unless Tanya is adjusting for the spell circle? Telekinesis is like a fifth-circle Mage Hand; it could be that the control aspect is the complicated part after you scaled it up by five circles.

"Now you know," she says, putting the ring back on. "The item does the hard part. Now, if you are good at using magic devices, you can bend the constraints—" which she demonstrates by wiggling her hand a bit, causing Telekinesis to all but cast itself without her saying her name or doing the unknotting, "— but those are just artifacts of magic item design. The hard part is getting the spellform into that initial state. Spells from Pharasma do not behave like that, the caster still needs to assemble them from a more base state."

"Is it simply granting them knowledge of how to cast the spell? You have knowledge-transfer spells, like Share Language; we don't know how to do something like that. And another component for letting them use magic at all." That is, a mana reservoir, and she knows they can do that because they do it with magic items; this hangs together neatly.

"They grant the capacity and… something like knowledge? There is no training necessary, but it is still possible to cast a spell in a better or worse fashion."

"The recipients probably would benefit from some training." Even if you can make the magic do what you want you need to make the right choices, notice the right things and react quickly. At least that means knowledge- and spell-granting doesn't entirely replace experience. What they can grant seems more like instincts than conscious verbal reasoning, and instincts are vital in a fight but you can't rely on them alone.

"Training helps, but it depends on which branch of magic you want to specialize in, and that depends on which role you want to fill. The shepherd we just spoke to will likely never see combat, so her training focuses on spells and skills useful for childcare and healing."

"Of course. And Pharasma is giving her spells suited to childcare, in order to promote it or because she was already working on it, so it would be irrational for her to change careers now."

Tanya feels like she should be in more of a hurry. Rushing to purchase valuable knowledge before she's sent back, or - 

"Could it be possible after all to find out if I'll spontaneously return home and when? Nazir couldn't tell, but perhaps someone else could. If I knew for sure, that would either justify or make unnecessary some possibly expensive preparations. Buying magic items and books to carry back, and maybe other things I haven't thought of yet." There ought to be more to do when preparing for possible inter-world contact! "Informing the right people ahead of time, maybe? Making sure I'm not harmed by the passage, if that's a concern." Taking someone with her, if possible, but she really can't predict how that would go and it might be wiser to keep these people out of Earth for now. Unless this is their only chance to get a wizard? They'd need someone to volunteer for potential exile...

Nazir's theory is that Tanya will go home once she is paid the amount specified by the Planar Ally caster. Sixteen thousand scarabs should cover any task that can be done in a single day by anyone less than a demigod, and Nazir has doubtless arranged for the cash to be transferred to her account by now, so if that money suffices to send her home it must be that she'll only leave once the payment is in her hands… that doesn't sound right either, called outsiders don't need to personally pick up a stack of gold that weighs more than they do before they leave, even when they've been paid with such a stack of gold. Maybe they need to talk to a wizard after all?

"I assure you that you will be safe if the spell ends— unless it removed you from danger, since it will send you back to wherever you came from. It has been long enough that a calling of fixed duration is improbable, so there must be some other mechanism keeping you here. If this is of the highest urgency, we should go back for Nazir and ask him to find conjurors who will offer you a consultation. If even this is too slow, I will take you shopping for magic items and sundries instead." If Tanya hasn't incidentally finished whatever she came to do by now, she probably won't do it by accident any time soon, but the decision isn't up to Iomedae.

"Nazir seemed to think the 'calling' could expire several days from now, without additional conditions. If there's a condition that we can deliberately trigger - or avoid - it seems even more important to learn about it, so I can be prepared when I do it." Tanya doesn't want to go back to fighting a doomed war, but learning what might cause her to do so is just common sense. "Can't we ask the wizard whose tower it was?" This is all his fault, really. "Failing that, it seems prudent to at least ask Nazir how quickly a consultation could be arranged and how much it might cost." Why is Nazir the best person to ask which experts to consult? He was there to observe the spell, so they'll want him as a witness, but that's not the same thing at all. Iomedae is probaly just used to deferring to him on certain subjects.

Or maybe he happens to be well-connected? Tanya knows some magic researchers from her weapons testing days, so it's not implausible... Hah, she never thought of herself as well-connected on account of probably being able to wrangle a meeting with Dr Schugel of all people. If she does go home she hopes her case isn't referred to him! Tanya probably wouldn't survive Dr Schugel trying to open an interdimensional portal! 

Calling someone like Tanya for days would cost a king's ransom. Why would Nazir mention that as a possibility to her? Even rogue wizards aren't that profligate! Unless… did Tanya tell him something while they were in the Mage's Private Sanctum that changed his mind? Well, if he did, he might have a good reason for not telling anyone else.

"Mahveen of Shiman-Sekh has been missing since 1912. The insurance adjusters will need to speak with her about the damage to her tower, which means they will track down someone familiar with her and initiate contact with a Sending. If she refuses to participate – or is dead – we will have limited formal recourse. We could arrange for a private investigation, but respectable wizards will want an appointment unless we can get it as a favor." They could theoretically walk into the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye and ask to see Nefreti Clepati about a fascinating magical anomaly, but Iomedae considers that seriously ill-advised at the best of times. "I think there is little harm in waiting, unless there is some task you imagine a wizard would go to great lengths to call you specifically to accomplish, which you might unwittingly finish as you go about your business. Nothing comes to my mind, other than the dragon."

Nazir didn't specifically say it could last several days, but he implied it could still run out after Tanya has had time to shop around for better beneficiaries to her will than Nazir, and maybe do something to enable communications after she's sent back, and that will presumably take longer than a few hours.

"I can't think of any such task because I barely know anything about this world. More importantly, it would have to be a task I would be more likely to accomplish by accident than if she had asked me to do it. Which means if I do learn what it is, I will be inclined not to carry it out; this is practically kidnapping and blackmail! Besides, why tie it to an unpredictable attack on her tower, one which I could have easily ended up not stopping if the dragon had not attacked me? The entire chain of events makes no sense. If there's no time pressure because the spell won't send me back on its own I can wait to get an appointment for an analysis, but I'd really like to make sure that's true. If getting an analysis quickly isn't possible, I should probably assume the worst and spend some time and money preparing to be sent back, and undo the preparations once enough time passes."

If she's returning to Earth and can't come back here she'd like to leave her money to fund a lawsuit against Mahveen's estate. ...this is petty, it's much better to leave it to a project trying to establish communications, but she's really quite upset with this unknown person who suddenly messed up her life! Even if she possibly took Tanya out of fighting a losing war and into comfortable retirement, you should ask people before you do that! She didn't know what Tanya wanted!

It sounds like the arcanists of Germania are more sensible than Golarionite wizards. Iomedae is not even remotely surprised that a necromancer in one of the few countries where that discipline is legal set up a chain reaction that seems to have failed spectacularly and at great cost. Ruined pyramids sometimes have a dozen of those on every floor.

And from how Tanya describes the urgency of it, it may be worth going to extremes. She glances at the sun to get a sense of the time. "We can contact you if you are sent home suddenly, but if you think that insufficient we could act quickly to prepare you right this instant. I can Teleport you to a market and loan you money against your windfall to cover supplies, if time is of the essence, but this is a bad use of our resources in every other respect. It is not clear to me whether you should wait or act now, but it occurs to me that we can pay to expedite a certain type of inquiry. Are you prepared to spend two hundred scarabs to know with absolute certainty in the next twenty minutes?" she asks ominously.

"...wait, you can already contact me if I'm sent home? Is that certain to work? Do I still need to buy books or can you just dictate them to me - no, that would take too long, but it means missing any one book is less bad and I should focus on getting an example magic item, which can be the one to read the books."

Two hundred scarabs are around one and a quarter percent of her wealth. She low-key assumed it might cost that much just to get an expedited appointment with an expert! If it saves her from buying expensive items and reselling them after a week, then at a 5% return rate not doing this will save her... sixty-something scarabs?

"Yes, that's a good idea if there are no downsides. How is it done?"

The downside is that Iomedae will take this as a cue to start sprinting back towards the bank without explaining herself! If Tanya wants to keep up she'll have to fly.

Tanya is already flying! Now she gets to fly higher and faster, which means she heats up less!

There must be something about to happen in twenty minutes that they need to be on time for?

The same quarter mile back up the road at full tilt while dodging pedestrians who are going the wrong way and won't get out of hers so they're going to get brushed past uncomfortably close "Sorry!" until they get to the bank where way too many people are standing in the entrance presumably because it's nice and shady how considerate but one of them's a halfling which means she can diving roll over his head with a full eighteen inches of clearance into the doorway and come up standing in the lobby that is pretty full despite it being close to the end of business hours so the sprint to the nearest counting room is a little less frantic whereupon nobody has the answer to "Has anyone seen Cicerone Nazir?!" because why would they be paying attention to that instead of their work or to Tanya who is the youngest flying wizard any of them have ever seen so they will simply have to go upstairs and start firing Messages into people's offices until they find— there he is!

"We should use one of the Commune questions for this evening," she says, not especially breathlessly.

That's one way to get a cleric's attention fast. "Is it an emergency? If I request a Commune tomorrow we won't need to outbid anyone for their slot."

"Not if we use the reserved one," Iomedae says smugly.

"No."

The church holds on to one of the extra questions on any Commune cast by someone strong enough to get more than nine answers. They go for the list price but bidding for priority is denominated in favors; if he takes it he'll be doing the Communes himself tomorrow, which is a waste of his time. But at least she brought Tanya back with her? That was fast. Time to see if this Planar Ally derivative cares about settlement procedure.

"The money is yours," he tells her. "May I have your passbook?"

Iomedae's athletics are quite impressive! If perhaps not entirely safe or legal the way she uses them around other people?

"We were talking about a way to definitely find out the condition for the spell to return me home, if it has one. What's a commune(*)?" She produces her passbook. Is he supposed to write the transaction in it? Tanya is still not quite clear on what Nazir's relationship with the bank is.

(*) Fortunately, Osiriani does not have the linguistic confusion that might make Tanya associate the spell Commune with Communism and its collective farms.

"Commune is a spell that will allow Abadar to answer a binary question for us— one binary question, it's too late to be buying extras off anyone else in line without paying through the nose for it." All Abadarans have a sixth sense for when to raise their spot prices. "If you need one right now it will cost you two hundred gold and most of my working hours tomorrow, so it had better be important." Most of Nazir's buffs have worn off, and the lack of splendor might be coloring his choice of words.

He hands the passbook back to Tanya with the number 16,380 written in the first ledger line, along with his signature. Does this terminate the calling?

It does not! The only difference is that Tanya is now almost as wealthy as an adventurer of her station ought to be.

"We don't know when Tayna will leave," unless Nazir does know and hasn't mentioned but he can figure that part out, "and she is willing to pay for a Commune to learn if the timeline is short. It would have to be the reserved Commune question, but you can get that for her, right?"

They're paying for Abadar to answer a question? The kingmaker/businessman/magnate? Presumably this means paying for his organization to refer the question to the correct specialist in their employ, and having the organization vouch for the answer being correct.

"How are we supposed to get anywhere with only yes/no questions? I want to know how soon the spell will end, not just whether it will. And what other conditions might end it. Why is there this arbitrary limitation? Isn't it buying an analysis of the spell anyway?"

"It's not an arbitrary—"

"It is one hundred percent arbitrary, you liar, but that is irrelevant because all we need to do is ask 'does Tanya need to go shopping soon if she wants to bring all those books and magic items back to Germania before the calling ends?' and Abadar will give us whichever answer causes us to do the right thing. He could even give us a longer answer if for some reason a yes or a no is inapplicable. If yes, we leave now. If no, you can wait to hire a consultant for a second opinion, or pay for more questions later when there are fewer questions already booked. We still have time, right?"

For most gods it would be best to ask about timelines involving the consultant while resolving to hire one that the god has good visibility on, but Abadar is the lord of markets. They'll get a better answer if they can make transactions the pivotal element of the question.

"How is Abadar or whoever actually does the work supposed to operationalize 'soon'? If you mean, should we leave now yes or no, how is he to guess what 'the right thing' for us is? I suppose I can - try to figure out how to best ask something in code - I really don't understand why we can't ask a plain question and get a plain answer. 'Will the spell send me home in the next week', or some smaller number of days, is at least a clear question if we can't ask about other conditions. ...how long do we have to decide on a question for today? Iomedae ran here, is it a matter of minutes?" Tanya is getting the impression Iomedae might be the kind of person who runs like that just because she can. (Admittedly, it reduced the time they spent in the sun, but then WHY NOT RUN BEFORE THAT. If they go out again Tanya will ask Iomedae to keep running.)

"'Will the spell send me home in the next week' is less clear; our answer is reliable if there is a fixed duration but unreliable if there is a condition you might fulfill in the next week and Abadar has to guess whether you'll trigger it. If we ask instead 'should Tanya go shopping soon' we only have to worry about conditions that obtain in the process of shopping, which are easier for Abadar to search, he can make assumptions about which shops we will visit and when… we should also say the alternative plan, hiring a wizard for a consultation and staying the night in Sothis somewhere, detailed counterfactuals could be important. There are ways to ask in code but not for a single question, and we only have one unless you want to convince one of the other sharks in the line to sell you theirs."

"It starts in fifteen minutes, but I should announce that I want the question sooner than that." He does not want the question. "Commune is a spell designed for recipients to circumvent legal and technical communication barriers. Scrying or Sending targets in Aktun doesn't work most of the time, and when it does they might be obligated to selectively ignore your questions depending on whatever laws and treaties apply to the situation." Does Tanya's culture have an advanced understanding of Abadaran theology? It does! "Casting a Commune is inherently expensive but the value is irrelevant to him beyond the price signal directing his attention. There is some opportunity cost involved in answering, so the decision of which questions to ask is delegated to the caster, which is why they can charge for it. The questions have to be binary but the answers are sometimes more nuanced if 'yes' or 'no' would be misleading; the reason has to do with the total amount of information conveyed. As societies become wealthier and develop more efficient ways of asking questions, it becomes more worthwhile for Abadar to answer those questions."

"...there are many things I don't understand about this and will ask later."

What are these legal barriers they're circumventing? It's an organized public activity so presumably it's legal here in Osirion; are they helping Abadar break the law somewhere else (in Aktun?) Perhaps Nazir meant not quite circumventing but exploiting known legal loopholes, which is still not great but if everyone's doing it can be harmless to join in on? What kind of legal loophole permits answering only yes or no questions - strike that, legal loopholes can definitely be that silly, they're unintentional after all. 

And how can Abadar answer if the question is so underspecified? Doesn't one of his agents need to come over here and look at Tanya and maybe the tower to come to any determination? Is that agent not legally allowed to tell them anything about it besides yes or no? Wouldn't it be simpler to hire the agent directly, or someone else with the same skillset, and talk to them properly, since that's the actual market need being served? 

"If we need to make a quick decision, and this works as advertised, and there isn't another way of getting the information in a better form - reasonably quickly, reliably, and cheaply - then I think it's worth two hundred scarabs. I need to act as if I might return at any moment until we can rule that out. Quickly spend most or all my money on things to take back with me, carry them around all the time, and not have the money available for anything else or collecting interest."

"Not more quickly, nor as reliably." He sighs – so much for having a day off. "Let's nail down the phrasing of the question. Proceeding under the assumption that Abadar already knows or can trivially discover the workings of the call, can we more precisely separate the future into two scenarios that dominate most possible outcomes? In one future, Tanya does nothing interesting other than buy— what are you buying? And in the other, Tanya rents a room for the night and… pays for a consultation? About?"

"One bag, one helm with Comprehend Languages, whichever magic items and books we come across as may be useful to a Germanian traveler," Iomedae says. "If she stays here we take her to the Pathfinder Lodge, unless we think of something better, and tomorrow we get an opinion from a conjuror, if you can recommend one you like and trust."

"Why the Pathfinder Lodge?"

Tanya can set aside her lack of understanding and answer questions quickly.

"I'm worried someone might attack me in revenge for the dragon while I'm asleep, but that's unrelated. If I expect to go home soon I'll buy magic items, textbooks on magic, science and technology, a general encyclopedia if there's room - I'm not sure what it means that I need to carry it." What if she's sleeping? "The helmet to let me read, other items for research if there's money left. Anything that will enable future communication, Iomedae said you can message me when I'm gone but I don't know how to message you. I might think of more things to do. Like finding someone who'd be interested in contacting Earth and invest in giving me a magic item that would do bidirectional communication. If I expect to go home in a few days but have time left I suppose I'd write down some things about Germania for you, and some potentially useful science or technology if I think of something I can describe quickly and well."

"If I don't think I'm going home - soon or at all - I'll spend the next while learning things without any hurry, and not do anything interesting with the money. If I don't know, and Abadar doesn't know, I'll want to consult someone else who might find out. Especially if there might be a condition that would trigger it, and not a simple yes/no for the next few days."

There is a problem with this plan. "The Helm of Comprehend Languages and Read Magic," and you can almost hear the trademark symbol at the end of that name, "is expensive and in low demand. I have no idea where you could buy one in a market; we'd have to find a private seller in Absalom or Quantium. Give me a moment to think."

Can they rescue this by buying a Wand of Comprehend Languages? Not if Comprehend Languages is unknown on Earth. Imbue with Spell Ability gives her an extra hour and a half at most. Permanency doesn't grant any linguistic abilities for anyone other than the caster. Limited Wish is dubious, and that's if they can even find a caster and a diamond on short notice. Borrow a telepathic familiar from someone…?

The original plan is not going to work. They need to substitute Tanya's time now with her time later— well, when he thinks of it that way the answer is obvious.

"Skip the books, buy only magic items and other things you can't find on Earth but which don't need any particular skill to use. When you go back we can discuss further over Scrying. It's dangerous to let a Scrying through from an unknown sender, but if we coordinate in advance you'll know when it's us targeting you and you can let it happen." Tanya must have enough Will to throw off a crystal ball, even civilians can do that some of the time. "Alternative plan, you stay the night in the Lodge with Iomedae and tomorrow we talk to Setareh or one of Hurayra's elders about the calling. Unless you're willing to buy additional questions tomorrow, since I'll be preparing the Commune anyways and can give you priority if I feel like it."

"Are you certain you'll be able to contact me, and I don't need to guard against the case where you don't? ...can you contact other people on Earth even if I don't go back? Is there anything I could take that would let me contact you or otherwise help with communications?" Can other people on Golarion scry people on Earth and do dangerous things to them? "...if it's likely to work and there's no immediate alternative then lets' go with that."

"If you were on Golarion I would call it an effective certainty. If Scrying doesn't work the helmet is a poor contingency plan; most possible properties of Earth that stymie one will also affect the other. If you don't go back you can pay for a Scrying of your own, but it would have to be you – the spell only works if you know who you're looking for, 'someone on Earth' isn't enough detail for a secondhand description. And yes, relative to the alternatives this is very likely to work."

He thinks through the wording. "'Must Tanya von Degurechaff leave at once to go shopping for magic items that cannot be found on Earth if she wishes to finish before the calling ends… before she is returned to Earth, rather than staying the night at the Pathfinder Lodge in Sothis and seeking more information tomorrow?' Is that satisfactory?"

"Fine and thorough."

"If I must leave to shop not at once but within, say, a day, I should act the same. Unless getting an analysis from someone else tomorrow will be much cheaper, but we're already paying for this question." How can Abadar (the organization, not the person, unless she misunderstood and there is no eponymous person) answer questions about when exactly she should go shopping? Do all the stores have records in a centralized database? Tanya doesn't understand why Iomedae thinks this question is better than one explicitly about the spell, but Nazir seems to agree so she won't question it while they're under a deadline.

They have to resolve this in the next few minutes. An imperfect plan with a few minutes of mental preparation is usually better than a perfect plan invented literally in the last moment. If the next iteration is no worse than this one, Tanya will stop adding suggestions.

Then they will settle on 'Must Tanya von Degurechaff complete her shopping for magic items that cannot be found on Earth if she wishes to finish before she is returned to Earth, rather than staying the night at the Pathfinder Lodge in Sothis and seeking more information tomorrow?'

"Time is short. I will go to ask the question. Iomedae, take Tanya to make a cash order for however much money you think you'll need, and debit her account for the Commune."

And he'll leave.

"This used to be easier," Iomedae comments. "There were spells that could see far into the future and give you practical advice on this sort of thing. They stopped working before I was born; the best you can do now is get a vague sense of whether something that will happen in the next thirty minutes will bring weal or woe."

Alright, now Tanya has time for questions. So many questions.

"Why are the answers binary? How can Abadar tell how long it'll take us to shop if we don't even know what we're buying yet or where? Why is that better than asking if the spell will send me back by tomorrow, when would the answers be different? ...how long will it take to get an answer?" By predicting the future Iomedae presumably means predicting what the spell is going to do. That would be an extremely useful analytical function, but someone inevitably invented spells too complex and/or obfuscated to analyze. Tanya doesn't know what 'weal or woe' means, but - one thing at a time.

"Commune is ten minutes to cast, then however long it takes to go through the rest of the questions. Not very long at all. It is a safe telepathy spell – attempting to read a mind much more complicated than your own can produce serious backlash, anywhere from being momentarily stunned to having a debilitating headache for weeks, but Commune avoids this problem by narrowing the channel. There is also a lawful negotiated aspect to the situation. I am not privy to the details, few are, but the narrow scope is a compromise of some kind. The way it was explained to me was— imagine you asked this question of one as wise and powerful as Abadar but utterly depraved and evil, like Asmodeus. What is to stop him from reaching through the spell back to you, reading your mind in its entirety, and feeding you the most damaging answer possible? Yet Asmodeus deigns to answer Communes, if only those that serve his purposes, and presumably would feel the same way if Abadar were to benevolently give us as much information as he wished. The ultimate shape is a compromise."

Iomedae does know how to efficiently use Communes, and is happy to explain this part. "Because the answer is 'yes' or 'no', every question partitions the world into two possibilities. Had we asked 'will Tanya be sent home tomorrow' there would be many possibilities – for all we know, the spell could end at any time between midnight and midnight. What should Abadar say if the end is in the small hours of the morning? Instead, we ask whether our plan is necessary. I know that Abadar will know the answer, being much smarter than us, and knowing in detail the activities of markets; therefore we give freedom to interpret the question and provide an answer that steers us true."

That is a very very complicated answer! Tanya wishes she could Commune with Iomedae and read her mind to figure it out!

"Commune reads the mind of Abadar to get the answer," she works out. And he has a much more complicated mind than Nazir's. What does 'having a complicated mind' even mean - ...wait, they have many sapient species here! Abadar isn't human (is he a dragon?) and his mind is complicated in some sense that interacts poorly with regular telepathy. "If telepathy with Abadar works poorly, why use it in the first place and not normal language - right, you don't have radio." They can't communicate verbally at a distance. "And the binary answer is a compromise between Abadar and someone else called Asmodeus." Which introducing radio might render irrelevant.

"How does Abadar know what the answer is, if he's so far away you need telepathy to reach him? Doesn't he need to look at the spell or something?" This is presumably related to the reason Abadar is answering questions personally at all. "However he knows about everything on the market, how does he know about the actual thing we're asking about?"

"The compromise concerns everyone who hands out Commune to their followers… probably. I know you can Commune with minor powers, too unimportant to have a say in the bargain. They might just be copying a spell fit for purpose? Wizards have invented a derivative spell that allows any kind of one-word answer but haven't figured out how to make it safe; if I had to hand out one or the other I would pick the safe one. And, while I am confident Abadar knows how you got here, I do not know why. Perhaps he uses exceptionally strong surveillance magic, the way that Discern Location is stronger than Scrying is stronger than Clairvoyance. Perhaps he does not know at present and must pay others to discover it on our behalf. Perhaps he will read Nazir's memories and spot some detail that tells all. It is like trying to guess how someone smarter than you will solve a puzzle."

They're going back downstairs, where there is just enough time left in the day to find someone who can authorize a cash order for thousands of scarabs.

Abadar might be monitoring all use of magic? What kind of surveillance state is this?! And he's superintelligent! Or he might just read the answer out of Nazir's brain - well, that's presumably by permission, Nazir is the one casting a telepathy spell (or just paying for it?) - anyway. This sounds even farther in the direction of Tanya not understanding how anything works here!

Maybe try an analogy? They're paying Dragon Sherlock Holmes to solve a mystery. Dragon Sherlock Holmes doesn't care about the money, he just likes interesting mysteries, but the money serves as a price signal because he has limited time and, uh, the mysteries of rich people tend to be more interesting. He's far away so you can't talk to him, but if you try to telepathy Dragon Sherlock Holmes you get a terrible headache unless he answers in just one word. Luckily, he's so smart that one word is all he needs! Also, he knows about everything that's on sale anywhere because Dragon Sherlock Holmes knows a lot of random trivia (by having worldwide surveillance). Meanwhile, he's gotten so rich off people asking questions that he runs a bank, a security outfit and a small country.

You can also ask questions of Dragon Moriarty. He might read your mind and use it to destroy you, but he's so smart and charismatic that people ask him questions anyway. So he and Dragon Sherlock Holmes agreed to a truce where they both answer only yes or no, to keep their game interesting.

...thank you, Tanya's brain, that did not explain anything at all! Not even in the sense of predicting what happens next! It's as useless as the original Sherlock Holmes stories!!!

...focus. What does happen next - oh, right. "How does the cash order work? If we spend less money, or need to split it between stores - I guess we could get a lot of small ones but it'd be a lot of work for the tellers - what if the answer comes back negative and we need to cancel it?" Can they get some sort of bank guarantee that they're good for the money and then write a regular cheque for the exact amount? "And where are we going to shop, if everything's closing for the day will we miss important stores and how tight a time limit does that give us?" 

"Ah, it is not so difficult. First, we submit the cash order to the teller, and the teller confirms that the bank has enough money to make the order good. Then, we hunt. Of the nine most common types of magic item, we need only wondrous items, so we start with the crafters that specialize in them, who are mostly in the Old City. They are very expensive and sell rarely, so the owners often keep odd hours in the hopes of finding customers. We can even arrange for particular pieces to be brought to us, if you hear of one you like. When you pay most will prefer the gold in their own keeping at once, and for that both parties come back and have someone from the bank notarize privately." Probably Nazir, if he's taken some bank hours to make this happen. "If they accept paper notes, so much the better, but we will not be carrying gold through the city ourselves. With all your money you can buy five or fifteen good quality magic items, few enough to manage it all tonight."

Iomedae wonders which magic items Tanya will want to buy. She know which ones she should buy, if she were equipping herself as an adventurer, but she is still not advising that as a career path, no matter how apt, and Tanya's arcanist researchers might get more data out out of a box of Marvelous Pigments or a Robe of Infinite Twine than a Belt of Incredible Dexterity or a Cloak of Resistance.

Oh, good, at least some things are simple. What next - "I may have very little to go on when choosing what to buy. If nothing is needed to help with communications or transport between the worlds - or can provide a backup, it's good to have a backup - didn't Nazir say I could scry someone on Earth? Is there an item that does it that I could use in the direction? Other than that, there might be something that's useful for more than research even if we can't duplicate it. How many items that can be used by anyone and are likely stocked are there, should I expect to go over ten or a hundred or thousands of descriptions?"

"If nothing is directly useful then I can't actually tell what would be best for research. Probably something simple to understand and build, and separately something that would be very hard to reinvent. ...and I need to understand what items will actually go with me. Anything in a radius? Anything in my backpack? Is there a size or weight limit? What if I'm asleep when it happens?"

"There are hundreds of wondrous items— thousands if you include the ones known to be possible but too pointless to bother creating. Most are meant to be worn and thereby enhance the wearer: belts that strengthen the body, headbands that sharpen the mind, gloves that steady your aim, robes that shroud you in darkness. Some are meant to be consumed, but we shall avoid those. Some are akin to commonplace objects, but better. You will want to purchase a Bag of Holding, a sack with an interior larger when measured from the inside than from the outside, regardless of what else you plan to buy. They are the most common way to move objects while Teleporting. A crystal ball for Scrying would be nice, of course, but they are far too expensive. I can name items that are very simple, so simple that even an apprentice can craft one with the light guidance of a master: Deathwatch Eyes, which allow you to see how close a creature is to death; the Bladed Belt, which can transform into a knife on command; the Catching Cape, which contains a single use of a poor quality force field, but is cheap and easy to make; Sleeves of Many Garments, which can make your clothing look like any clothing. I do not know which of these would be hardest to reinvent, but the crafters we speak to will have more insight. Wearing these, or carrying them in a bag, will suffice to bring them with you… maybe sleep with the bag in your fist, just in case."

Is there a free teller? No? Time to stand in line, Iomedae's least favorite activity.

"If the answer comes back 'no' you can take out a bank draft to pay for a night at the Lodge. They accept paper notes."

Magic consumables are presumably (...hopefully?) single use, so it makes sense not to buy any. A bag that's bigger on the inside... is probably the permanent item version of the rope trick, without the seven mice security limit. The other things are the mix of practical utility (illusion clothes), weird party tricks (a belt that transforms into a knife) and revolutionary innovations (medical diagnosis/prognosis spell! improved strength and aim for nonmages!) she has come to expect from Golarion. 

"I might not be able to go over many hundreds of items in time. ...if we had asked when the spell would expire, I'd know how long I would have to make up my mind. The question we actually asked implies I will finish shopping by morning... I think?" Abadar had better be very superintelligent, even Tanya doesn't know what exactly her question means! Hopefully Nazir has an interpretation in mind; he's the one actually submitting the question.

Their queue is fast and orderly. Only busy professionals need to visit the bank right before the close. The teller is not a cleric of Abadar (yet), but this only shows through his lack of a magical light source. He looks between Iomedae and Tanya for a moment before addressing Tanya specifically. What does she need from the bank this afternoon?

"I want to buy a cash order for the sum in my account. Not to pay with it, but to guarantee the bank has that much cash available, hoping to close a deal later today in which case we'll come back here for the actual cash with a more precise amount." She presents her passbook.

The teller accepts her passbook. There is exactly one recorded transaction: a deposit of sixteen thousand three hundred eighty scarabs.

He checks the rest of it, which is not any more enlightening. It was issued today. The account holder is fourteen years old. Her circle is identified using letters rather than numbers. She can authenticate herself by flying using an unidentified Universal spell. Two different clerics of Abadar have approved of this.

…

Tanya will be informed that, while he can place the order immediately, she will need to verify her identity before she can actually withdraw it. This queue is now closed, he needs to go arrange for the gold to be ready.

"We have time to buy food, if you need any," Iomedae suggests, having noticed some time ago that Tanya isn't wearing any rings.

"I ate my flight rations before I talked to Nazir, I'm not hungry, but it's a good idea to get something for later if we have time. Why would this take more than a few minutes though? ...is there a food vendor in the building?"

"Nearby, surely. People sell grilled fish on every other street corner in this city, we will not have to search for long."

They didn't pass one on the way to the Pharasmin temple, so Iomedae will wander out the front door again and head in the opposite direction.

Tanya is relying on Iomedae and has to trust her knowledge of all things local but also there is, like, basic politeness? The clerk didn't say when he'd be back and he most certainly didn't say 'please come back in ten minutes'!

She will stay and wait for him while Iomedae looks for food. It means Tanya will have to eat foreign food she didn't get to choose, while potentially being in a tearing hurry, but that's a reasonable demand to make of a soldier. Risking the clerk coming back while they're gone might be unreasonable. (She also has some chocolate still in her pack.)

Osirion is the kind of civilization where well-meaning bystanders will intervene when parents leave their daughters alone in public. Fortunately, Tanya is clearly an unusually short sorcerer and couldn't possibly be the other woman's daughter, so the well-meaning Osirion bystanders decide to mind their own business this time.

Most of the lighting in this room comes from sunlight and lit candles. In fact, those are the only non-magical light sources Tanya has encountered in the country thus far. The small magical point lights and the perpetual flames that don't seem to produce any heat or need any fuel are common enough, but clearly the illumination situation is a source of privation for the non-mages of the nation – which is most people, going by the number of magical signatures around her. The most common spell continues to be the most common, but there are only a few instances of it in the building and most of them are on the tellers in the room where Tanya got her Share Language spell. She is the only mage in the room she's in, or at least the only one who's used magic recently.

With her flawless grasp of Osiriani, she can overhear people talking about their business, and for almost everyone that business is the same thing: payroll. The unit of a day's wages is the silver penny, which people are tallying up by the hundreds and thousands in leather-bound ledgers that are heavy enough to serve as a murder weapon. Apart from the math being done by hand rather than spreadsheet and the transactions being made in person with clerks rather than over the internet, it's all very familiar to her.

The familiarity is soothing, but why aren't they using higher denominations? (Or paper money?) 

Does she happen to overhear how many silver pennies make a day's wages? There will of course be a large spread, and any one bank branch is going to be a very biased sample, but it's still better than nothing. It would be nice to have some kind of estimate how rich her bounty makes her, on the scale of normal life that doesn't require magical translation and safe lodging.

...she can't tell how many pennies to the scarab, though, if everyone insists on using pennies.

One day's wages are anywhere between one and fifteen pennies, with the modal value being three. It's not clear how many pennies there are to the scarab, but going by the occasional conversion being done within earshot it's at least five. And, while there is a total absence of bills changing hands, there is a noteworthy divide between the half of these people withdrawing actual physical silver to make payroll and the other half directing the tellers to make deposits into other accounts.

If it's just one to five, surely they wouldn't be going around with thousands of pennies, or even hundreds. ...no, wait, these aren't the workers being paid, they must be their employers. In that case it makes sense that the day-laborers want to be paid in individual pennies, since they'll need to spend them at that granularity.

(Tanya is somewhat out of practice with the monetary economy; she of course gets a paycheck to her bank account, but rarely has the opportunity to spend it in person. Military procurement can be a marvel of efficiency for a centrally managed system, but it's not a market. Besides, she has an adjutant who can be trusted with purchases of coffee.)

If, hypothetically, it's ten pennies to the scarab, and a day laborer is paid fifteen pennies a day at the upper range of the scale (and might need to support a family with that money), then she has the equivalent of thirty years' salary. Not bad for an afternoon's work.

The first of the three to get back is Nazir.

"The answer was no. You have time tomorrow to seek a second opinion, which I recommend doing early in the morning before the summoner uses all of— where is Iomedae?"

"She went to get food," Tanya says somewhat disapprovingly. "The clerk is getting the cash order, should I keep it for tomorrow or will it make paying the summoner or someone else difficult and I should cancel it? I don't know if it locks up the gold for my personal use or just affirms that it's here at this point in time."

The iron triangle for adventurers: competent, affordable, and the third one doesn't matter because if you need adventurers you'll hire ones that can do the job no matter their lack of social graces, inconvenient religious beliefs, or antisocial tendencies. Cultural Adaptation has worn off; he knows that tolerating chronic restlessness in your officers is considered imprudent in Tanya's culture but can't remember whether you're supposed to apologize on behalf of your subordinates for that kind of thing. He'll err on the side of saying nothing.

"The first. Cancel it for now and withdraw cash if you need any for the evening. In the immediate future you'll need two hundred scarabs for the Commune question, more at the same rate if you want to buy additional questions tomorrow. If you want to consult an expert, local rates vary wildly. The spell for a summoner to get a professional off-world magical researcher to investigate your case to its conclusion in a single day will cost five hundred, but you might be able to bargain them down if you pick the right one and offer them a look at your equipment and spellcasting in exchange. One night with the Pathfinders is… a few silver, I haven't been there in a long time, but they'll take paper notes. Do you need money for anything else this evening?"

"Iomedae suggested a protective spell for sleeping, a rope trick. I'm not sure if that was an alternative to the Pathfinder lodge or in addition, but it might prudent to use it at least for a night or two until I'm better oriented. Iomedae thought it might cost around twenty scarabs? I don't anticipate needing anything else tonight." Presumably the lodgings come with breakfast and a shower. Also presumably they aren't very secure after all, if they're affordable for the median worker! Anyone who's slightly nervous because they had a fight with their wife will spend the night there, and that will eliminate most of the effect of lodging with mages and soldiers who pledge to protect each other.

"Letting someone analyze my magic might" give away her only proven relative advantage "be worth more if I take the time to consider carefully who to sell it to, or whether to keep it to myself for a period of time. ...I don't actually know how much you can deduce just from looking at it and recording it, since I'm already using it in public - some of my spells, at least - or how much more anyone could learn just by looking at it and maybe asking me to do something particular with it. If a consultant can definitely solve it for five hundred - or at least as well as possible - then I'll pay that, there might still be something about the answer that will he worth learning quickly instead of shopping around."

They can call up specialist consultants from off-world - no, he must mean someone originally from off-world who now lives here. But if all the best consultants are immigrants that still leads to the same conclusion: travel to at least some other planets is cheap enough for the best professionals to get their education there. This is yet another Golarion fact that mostly follows from what she knew already but hasn't had time to really process yet.

"Twenty is a reasonable guess, if you're buying from a Pathfinder who can sell you one. You would use it inside a room with the door barred; outdoors is fine in a pinch, if you need shelter, but even keeping the space full won't stop anyone from shooting through the entrance or canceling the spell." There are better combinations of defensive spells to shelter under, but all of them involve passwords and can't really be rented out to the public.

"I don't know if you have gnolls on Earth, but most are not especially clever or proficient in subtle magic. Some can enhance their ability to track their quarry, but I predict with some confidence that they will not be able to follow your scent here. That is, if they bother to regroup and avenge their master, which I doubt, and if they know enough to come for you rather than me, which I also doubt." Without Ymohrglas to lead and outfit them, gnolls pose very little threat to anyone of Tanya's caliber. That's no reason to be complacent, but neither will Nazir suggest anything more extreme.

"The summoner would have the individual names of outsiders to call up, but there are three types that I think are well-suited to your question: burleevs, who scour Creation for magical lore, and who might be persuaded to part with their knowledge if you can find one interested in your magic; codex archons, who prefer to help those whose cause is righteous, but won't mind as long as it isn't harmful; and synesis aeons, who specialize in teaching dangerous and obscure spells. I would be surprised if you couldn't find one that knows the answer, since Abadar tells us there is an answer, but I will leave negotiating the deal up to you."

"I don't know anything about gnolls; I assumed he" (the dragon who must not be named because Tanya can't pronounce his name) "might have other dragons who'd want to take revenge, family, friends or other associates. If you're talking about a literal scent trail then it seems categorically impossible to follow across a teleport, but - it's probably not a secret we went here, or at least to a nearby major city, and if I stay here they might pick up my scent at some point. If they can tell which of the scents from the site of the fight to follow, but they could follow all of them if they're numerous and organized enough... I'll think it through later when I know more; for now it seems worthwhile to pay for the rope trick." Hopefully the caster also rents out the seven mice?

Does the wording of the commune question imply that if Abadar doesn't know the answer, he would answer 'yes'? Because there's a chance Tanya might need to shop quickly? Ugh, she really dislikes this binary question game. "Then I would appreciate an introduction or referral to the conjurors to try tomorrow morning. ...is five hundred scarabs the payment to the conjuror and then I'll need to negotiate with each offworld consultant for another payment on top of that?" Five hundred scarabs just for recommending and calling a few experts one of whom will do the actual work seems like rather a lot?

"By the way, how much silver to a scarab, and what banknote denominations are available?"

"Five hundred for the expert, usually; the conjuror will charge fifty for brokering the deal if you tell them I sent you." Sixth-circle Abadarans get good rates on everything. "It's ten copper to one silver, fifteen silver to one gold, thirty gold to one platinum. We issue paper banknotes worth five copper grains; one, two, and five pennies; and one and two scarabs. Every Abadaran bank will honor them at face value, but not all businesses accept them, and other banks have their own policies." Abadarans don't run every bank in the world, but every unaffiliated bank has a good reason for it.

"Dragons are not solitary creatures per se, but if Ymohrglas has any family or friends that know of his death, they will assuredly be circumspect in their investigation. There are very few ways to magically identify someone described only as 'the person who killed so-and-so'; it is not an immediate concern. A dragon adversary is one to be feared and respected, but as a dragonslayer they will fear and respect you. The gnolls, on the other hand, probably won't."

So it's five hundred and she might need to offer them some nonmonetary compensation on top, or else more money; a minimum of 550, but she had better withdraw a thousand gold in various denominations.

...it's odd that the highest paper denomination is fifteen times lower than the highest one coined. The platinum coins might be more like rare commemorative medals, but isn't the whole point of paper notes to let you carry around large sums in a lightweight wallet? The proverbial suitcase full of cash might not be necessary if inter-bank and even international cheques work well enough, but why even bother having paper notes for denominations as small as five copper? ...maybe they have a shortage of metal and want to keep its price down? Tanya doesn't actually know that the money is backed by silver and gold; maybe they use that to mint for historical reasons but the value is free-floating, or fixed against another currency. - this is not important and she shouldn't be woolgathering about Osirion's monetary policy of all things.

Was there something else she needed to ask Nazir? She's still not sure why he or Iomedae are helping her; her best guess that it's in his capacity as a bank employee (if he is one) and in her capacity as a friendly, hyperactive, curious person who likes to keep busy.

...well, yes, there are enormously many questions she'd like to ask him (or someone), but she's not entirely sure if it's appropriate to do it here and now. "I would like to better understand why commune works the way it does, but it's not urgent. ...should we inform the bank clerk that we're cancelling the order, is it going to take him a long a time otherwise?"

"I can inform him if you don't want to wait; I'll be working here tonight in exchange for the reserved question. I assume you're asking about the purpose of Commune rather than the technical details? It's a telepathy spell that complies with a series of multilateral export control treaties, specifically the part that deals with information. There are a lot of signatories, which is why I asked you if there were any binding on Earth with respect to Golarion. You would know if this were the case; there would be laws about where visitors from other worlds are allowed to travel while on Earth. If someone from Aktun were to send a message to us, it would be incumbent on them to obey whichever laws are applicable, but since we are the ones asking the question, Commune provides a framework for us to get an answer every time. It's also much safer than trying to target Abadar directly with a Sending; the best possible outcome would be him ignoring it. Does that answer your question?"

"It's not that I don't want to wait as much as - we should save him the time if we can, if it's going to take much longer? ...I was curious about what I thought were technical constraints, but if it's a binary answer for legal reasons that answers my question. I don't understand the legal situation here but hopefully I won't need to, or not anytime soon, as long as I don't need to police my behavior to obey these treaties. They are definitely not public knowledge on Earth." If they can ask offworld experts (presumably in normal speech?) but the commune falls under export control treaties, then - no, she has no idea what that implies. The experts are presumably trained in not breaking the treaty, but why wouldn't Abadar('s organization) be? If Tanya is allowed to know about the spell then why does it matter who tells her about it or over what channel?

So, there is nothing stopping either of them from milking this relationship for gold. Nazir can't help but smile.

"If this is news to you then you have nothing to worry about. I'll cancel the money order for you; go withdraw whatever cash you need before you leave. Iomedae will be back… soon." Soon, right? She can't have gotten into trouble just by looking for food.

Probably not, unless she was ambushed by gnolls.

Tanya moves to the rear of another queue. She would like to withdraw a thousand gold scarabs, the last twenty in smaller denominations. She didn't think to ask Nazir whether the conjuror or the off-world experts will take local banknotes, and it seems not everyone accepts them but she can't easily carry thirty kilograms of actual gold - no, wait, they have higher-denomination platinum coins which presumably weigh less. She'd like most of it in platinum, if they have it available. Here is her passbook.

...can she actually withdraw money while there is a pending (active?) cash order in her name, which she doesn't have on her? She will inform the clerk of the situation.

Having cash ordered actually helps, it means there are people actively sourcing money for her in the vaults as they speak. They'll have the original teller confirm once he returns.

Thirty-two platinum coins is only a kilogram of precious metal, easy to fit in a bag if you've got one. Platinum coins are almost but not quite the same color as silver, with a smaller diameter and a color more like stainless steel than a mirror. You would never mistake one for the other, once you've seen them both. The obverse side of the coins is a stamped portrait of a man wearing the same headdress as the giant statues along the coast. The reverse side of the gold coins is a scarab beetle tergiant, while the platinum coin has a female sphinx couchant. Copper and silver, which are both much smaller, have crops instead of animals. They're all dated to the last century and, as far as Tanya can tell, none of them have been clipped or otherwise damaged.

It's… still an awful lot of precious metal. Gold and platinum coins are on the large side.

She'll need to buy a new wallet. A literal moneybag, hah. Later.

(Tanya doesn't check the minting dates. Why would she do that. She also isn't in the habit of checking for clipping, certainly not coins she just got from a bank teller. At home she'd be using banknotes long before she got to such sums, if only to avoid carrying a kilogram of metal in her pocket.)

Is Iomedae back or does Tanya need to go look for her? And Nazir didn't actually recommend a particular conjuror or tell her where to find one...

Iomedae returns triumphantly with a bundle of grilled fish wrapped in lotus leaves and pockets full of dates. Tanya is welcome to both if she's changed her mind.

"Was the answer yes, no, or unclear?" she asks.

"The answer was no, we canceled the cash order. I withdrew a thousand scarabs, expecting to pay five hundred fifty tomorrow to a conjuror and an expert he'll call up to diagnose my case. Nazir, can you recommend a conjuror or is there a directory or something?"

"No directory that I know of," he says ruefully. "We buy our conjuration materiel from a wizard named Setareh and her apprentices. I can't accompany you, but she's met Iomedae several times, and there should be someone she can spare for it. I can recommend her for both fairness and discretion. The next best option is one of Hurayra's elders. I expect fairness and discretion from both, but Setareh is better connected, so start with her."

Why has Iomedae been voluntold for this? Isn't there someone better— probably not, they left most of the company out in the middle of the desert.

"Thank you. That's for tomorrow morning, then. I can't think of anything else I should do today... How much time does arranging lodgings, sleeping and eating and arriving at the conjuror's at their opening time leave me? If there's a spare a hour or more, I suppose I should spend it learning about Golarion and Osirion. Is there a book with a useful introduction, or a pamphlet or something?"

They have contact with other planets! That might mean everyone already knows all about the other planets, or that the books are written for an alien perspective, but it's still better than sitting around doing nothing, unless Iomedae is willing to stick around and personally tutor her. (Tbaya is deeply unclear how much Iomedae plans on helping her and why, and is working her way up to just asking.)

"It depends on how much sleep you need. We must get there before the wizards start preparing their spells for the day – an hour before dawn would be best, which means we should arrange for the room now."

What are they going to do if they can't get a room at the Pathfinder Lodge? Sleep in a random hotel while Iomedae keeps watch? That's a terrible backup plan.

"We should fly there," she adds. "Setareh will surely be able to recommend a bookstore for you when we see her tomorrow."

"I normally sleep for seven to eight hours, but I can sleep less or in shifts if there's something urgent. Missing a few hours once won't impair me too much the next day. Flying sounds wonderful, given the weather." If Iomedae can fly, why weren't they flying on the way to the daycare earlier? Why the mad dash instead? Iomedae is weird from a culture Tanya doesn't understand.

Regularly sleeping for seven hours or less rules out needing a full night's rest like a wizard— but don't arcanists need eight hours of sleep too? Iomedae is happy to cast Fly and follow Tanya into the air at a comparatively pokey 60' per round.

The weather is nice! There are other people flying too, mostly with magic but occasionally by virtue of having wings, and almost always within a hundred meters of the ground.

The dominant feature of Sothis from a bird's eye view is the gargantuan beetle carapace at the center. It is not only the tallest structure in the entire city but a remarkable glossy black, in striking contrast to the sandstone and marble used everywhere else, and the position of the massive elytra and legs matches that of the scarab beetle on the gold coins. Investigating its magical signature is like staring into a mirror, returning the exact magical signature of Tanya's orb in the moment.

There are a few other noteworthy structures of similar size. A few miles away from the beetle shell is a castle much larger than any medieval structure on Earth, built using a riotous collection of different materials in a way that looks structurally unsound, and surrounded by creatures taking advantage of the conditions to practice flight. It is the highest density of magical signatures that Tanya has ever seen. In the west end of Sothis is what looks like a sandstone Gothic cathedral framed by the setting sun. The entire city is divided in two by a wide canal filled with boats, running south to north from some unknown river source towards the sea. There are smaller pyramids here and there, and with their marble outer layers intact they look very much unlike the Egyptian relics Tanya may be familiar with. Even some of the more normal buildings are a little odd, in ways that are hard to place.

Flying at a running pace, above street level, and in a straight line to their destination is tolerable!

A magically reflective surface is yet another impressive technology Earth doesn't have, but nowhere near as shocking as teleports or telepathy. She's more curious if the entire volume inside it is air-conditioned. Maybe the structure just provides very good thermal isolation? A giant beetle-shaped thermos, perhaps? Pity they couldn't cover the whole city with these. ...hopefully this is the local summer and other seasons make you actually happy to see the sun! (They should really make a little canal run along every street, if the river would bear that.) 

Tanya has seen (in passing) majestic old cathedrals and tenement buildings, enormous neoclassical constructions and weird Commie geometrical contortions, metal skyscrapers and villages built from logs and thatch. (Sometimes in the process of setting them on fire.) Slightly odd buildings don't really bear mention, even if nothing else was going on.

Their destination is an artificial island built into the canal. There are two buildings on it that scream 'fortified garrison', one on either end, with some commercial buildings in between. Their destination is the southernmost building: three floors in height, with narrow barred windows and a front door with a portcullis hanging over it. The outside has a large circle chiseled into the ground around the building, with a message written in multiple languages alongside it in huge font. The part that Tanya can read says 'DANGER DO NOT TELEPORT' in Osiriani, right outside the entrance.

Iomedae did mention they have defenses against teleportation. This is very much to Tanya's advantage, since she's the only one here who can't teleport. 

There are many magical signatures in there, too many to investigate and quickly catalogue. Tanya's orb lets her designate spells as known-safe and casters as friendlies, and in possibly-combat conditions if a completely unfamiliar and unexpected spell goes off right next to her she will react as if it were hostile before she consciously notices it. It's fine as long as she knows she's among allies, or civilians, but if someone with active spells startles her in her sleep it might have... unfortunate outcomes. Another reason to pay for the rope trick.

(When sleeping in a known safe location a veteran mage will put their orb as far away as the bedside cabinet, or possibly a weapons locker. Sleeping with an orb in your hand, for a mage who might dream about the Rhine front, is a little like sleeping with a loaded firearm and the safety off. Most mages' startle reaction is shields and flight before other spells, but you should not gamble on this, at least not every night.)

Who do they have manning the door today? Iomedae hopes it's someone she— it's a sand golem. Great.

"We need to rent a room," she tells it.

The faceless statue of a man turns to face Iomedae but doesn't reply. Layers of sand flow over its quartz body like skin while it's in motion, then settle again into perfect stillness in its new position.

Was that not specific enough? "Please, go and get the nearest Pathfinder for us to speak with."

She would identify herself by name, but that rarely helps.

That convinces the statue to go inside. The door is closed and barred behind it.

The sapient races here are bizarre. Really, that follows from 'hundreds of sapient races from multiple planets', but Tanya had not thought ahead to 'not (conventionally) biological'.

Eventually it returns to let them in. The golem's head turns to follow them as they pass, giving the impression that it's watching them distrustfully despite not having eyes or a facial expression.

The Sandswept Hall, unlike most Pathfinder Lodges, does not look like a converted tavern filled with adventurers. It looks like a converted fortress filled with adventurers. Half of the crowd is armed with curved swords, although there's one man cleaning out a disassembled revolver-like firearm in public, and the rest do not look harmless despite not openly carrying weapons. Humans are a narrow majority in this room – other species include 'humans, but shorter', 'humans, but with wings', 'humans, but with unnatural hair color', and 'humans, but 20% more like cats'. There's even a person who could pass as the same ethnicity as Tanya, although he doesn't seem to consider her arrival noteworthy. This room is equipped with enough magical flame to simulate daytime despite having no windows, a very nice air conditioning effect, some indoor plants, and a large map of the northeastern corner of Garund framed on the wall.

There's a cell-like room off to one side that might be a reception area, which the golem will point them towards.

All the different kinds of humans probably have common ancestors? Some of them might just be hair dye (magical makeup?) or more permanent magical modifications or - something. Tanya will refrain from guessing. She doesn't even know why there are humans on different planets, unless this is an Earth and everyone else is from the other planets in contact with this one.

Tanya really isn't an expert on which kinds of swords are best (besides Japanese ones, presumably) but it's weird that people are using swords, at all. They have firearms! A revolver isn't some kind of ancient musket that takes a minute to reload! ...does it have cartridges? 

Is Iomedae taking the lead on talking to the receptionist? Tanya can't recall if Nazir said her presence would serve as a recommendation here or if that was just for the conjuror.

Iomedae will take care of this part! They need one room for the night, ideally one with a Private Sanctum up, and they need someone to cast an Extended Rope Trick. Iomedae can vouch for Tanya, if that's going to be an issue, she's a fifth circle sorcerer and can definitely handle herself in a scrape.

The man behind the desk has heard stories way more far-fetched that wound up being true; he's not going to doubt this one just because it's facially implausible. Tanya is more than welcome to stay here. That'll be one scarab for a room with a Sanctum and twenty for a Rope Trick that lasts for ten hours.

Tanya will pay him.

Being described non metaphorically as a fifth circle sorcerer is, um, not true? She won't call Iomedae on it in public, though.

"What does a private sanctum do?" she asks once they are at least semi-private. "And, uh, what is implied by being a fifth circle sorcerer that I might be called on to do?"

"It blocks divination spells and eavesdroppers waiting outside."

Their room is in the basement, and it has the same black fog shrouding the door as the private room in the bank that Nazir used with Tanya earlier. Iomedae will refrain from saying anything else until they're inside. It's not an especially nice room, but it does have a writing desk and a wash basin.

"Circles are the measure of a spell's… complexity," Iomedae says. "The name comes from a common mathematical property I do not understand very well. Zeroth-circle spells are the easiest, followed by first, second, third, and so on. As a sorcerer you are not expected to do anything in particular – sorcerers rarely have control over which spells they acquire – but at fifth circle it is possible to master the metamagic technique of casting multiple non-cantrip spells at once. There is also an improved Fly spell that stabilizes at fifth circle, though it is not as fast as your own flight. For this reason, fifth circle is a good lower bound for what people should expect of an A-class mage such as yourself. No one will be surprised by a fifth circle sorcerer who can fly, cast Illusions, and kill two men with two different Evocations at the same time. Teleport is a fifth-circle spell; as is Sending when prepared by a wizard, though there is a stable fourth-circle version."

That's a good cover story! Every sorcerer has different spells, which they didn't choose and so make no sense taken together, and people shouldn't expect Tanya to be able to do any specific thing.

It must make for an interesting society. Some people are just born with flight magic, no orb necessary! But they can still learn 'wizard' magic, so it's not a problem, just another random variable like height or hair color. (They can also be born with wings, apparently, even though wings that size shouldn't be able to support a grown human. Was that person bird-boned or something? ...Tanya probably shouldn't try to reason from quadruped logic to wings that come in addition to arms.)

"Alright. Where do I get the rope trick? Is there anything else we should discuss tonight and not tomorrow morning? I have a great many questions, of course, but I don't know which if any are urgent and I shouldn't cut into your sleep time."

"I need two hours of uninterrupted sleep. If we are keeping watch in shifts, I would prefer to sleep first." That way if they're interrupted she can deal with it and go back to sleep later. "If the staff wizard does not arrive soon, I will search him out."

Is there anything else that urgently needs to be said? Without knowing what Germania is like, it's hard to— no, Iomedae does know something about Germania that Tanya ought to hear. "I do not know if your magical sight discriminates between spell schools, but it can be done within three rounds of observation using Detect Magic, or immediately using Arcane Sight. Your spells all have the Universal school, which is a small grouping of spells that specialize in duplicating or enhancing other spells. In practice, doing everything using Universal spells is an extraordinary waste of power. Any foe who learns this fact about you will therefore conclude that you are a great wizard of the highest order, and if they then choose to oppose you still they will do so using a plan they believe can kill an archmage. There are many such plans, to be sure, but all of them with any hope of success involve taking the mage by surprise. Be forewarned."

"I don't know what spell schools are. Unless I know them by another name, but even if they're known on Earth I might not have heard of them. My spells don't duplicate or act on other spells, if I understand what you mean. I can't rule out that they're very inefficient by your standards." Mana and the force or light produced can both be measured, and orb technology has improved in efficiency over time. Tanya has absolutely no idea how much energy teleporting takes; maybe it can't be done with Earth-style magic at all!

"Thank you for the warning, although I rather assumed any plan to attack a mage starts with surprise in a world with teleports? Unless it leaves times to react, I haven't seen it on the receiving end." Tanya doesn't know how to operationalize the warning, though. It ought to be net good, but if someone does attack her they won't be conserving resources about it, so should she invest even more in preparing defenses?

She only needs two hours of sleep? ...is she not human, Tanya had assumed she was human but if some of the people in the vestibule weren't human Iomedae might not be either. It would be rude to ask, of course. There's a more important question anyway, which is - "I am of course very grateful, but may I ask why are you helping me so much? I'm sorry if it's an culturally insensitive question; if it's a matter of hospitality or helping strangers then" - saying 'it does you credit' could also easily be read as an insult, since it implies helping others is supererogatory - "it is an excellent custom, and I'm grateful." Not that Tanya doesn't wants to imply that in Germanian culture helping strangers so much would be weird. If she has to put a finger on it, she would say that doing it without explaining or settings any bounds on future help is what's weird.

"It is no matter," says Iomedae. "The Osirian national character is lawful, but they are not always the most gracious of hosts. You are young, and a woman, and do not speak the language. The charity of a mage who might cast their Comprehend Languages for a stranger out of pity is rare in Osirion; they are more like to sell it in the market, and use that money for a cause of their own choosing, if they are moved to charity at all. I will do the good work that is placed before me, when there is no one else to take it up… also, Hej Nazir requested it. To meet a peaceful outsider such as yourself is the chance of many lifetimes, and keeping one's partners alive and happy is just sensible business practice. We can hardly approach your friends and allies in Germania without you."

The fish and several fistfuls of dates are deposited on the desk. "Help yourself, please."

Iomedae does not have a sophisticated explanation of spell schools. She can demonstrate Prestidigitation, using the same spell to reheat the fish to the proper temperature, color one of her metal bracelets bright green, and lift one of the dates into the air like a weaker version of Telekinesis. The spell matrix looks like a massively overengineered pile of magic that was meant to do everything but turned out to not be very good at anything. The effects are versatile but temporary and extremely fragile, which Iomedae demonstrates by creating a hammer-shaped object which instantly disintegrates into thin air when whacked against the table.

"Teleporting directly on top of an adversary while they are unprepared is very effective, but an archmage will never be both unprepared and reachable via Teleport at the same time," she says, on the topic of killing wizards. "Teleporting anyways risks the defending wizard being able to react first while the Teleport is resolving. Better to strike from an impenetrable stealth, lying in wait where you know they will eventually be or infiltrating their demesne, so you preclude any attempt to escape."

...of course Nazir and has team want to be part of possible first contact with Germania! That makes perfect sense, then. (Tanya has already noticed that Iomedae disapproves of Osirian society.)

Fish and figs are probably a complete meal? They're tasty, anyway.

"Why make one spell do so many different things? I would expect that to be harder than making several separate spells... unless you know a way to make it cheaper instead, but then all your spells would be like that. Is it that the combination technique makes the effects weaker, so there's a single spell for all the miscellaneous minor utility effects where you don't mind them being very weak, and every other spell is kept separate? Flavoring things is already a somewhat complex effect, since it has so many options." Not that she can estimate the complexity of making tangible illusions (???).

Tanya can't group the local spells she's seen into any obvious 'schools' but she really didn't expect to be able to. Stealth beating preparations makes sense, if the stealth is in fact impenetrable. (You can also leave a really big impenetrably-stealthy bomb where you know the enemy will be eventually.) She ought to train to react in time against incoming teleports on top of her, if they have a cheap way to simulate the magical signature of other spells or something like that? ...more realistically, she's not going to be able to defend herself against serious efforts to kill her using local magic, not soon and possibly not ever, and she would much much rather be the kind of person nobody has any reason to try to kill.

"I do not know the secrets of Prestidigitation; it was created by a more powerful civilization and left to our keeping after they were destroyed. The combination technique does make the effects weaker, that much is true of other Universal spells – and Shadow spells, which are similar in some ways." Iomedae would not have guessed that illusory flavoring was a particularly complex effect, but what does she know?

A middle-aged Osirian man arrives to create the Rope Trick! He sets a loop of thick rope on the ground, scatters a bit of white dust over it, and waves a loop of parchment over it while chanting in a different language. The rope rises up off the ground until it hangs vertically from some invisible suspension point.

That's it, that's the whole spell. It'll last for ten hours.

He also has a box with seven rats in it, which doesn't smell amazing but will limit the Rope Trick to one occupant as long as the box is inside.

Different flavors don't share a mechanism; they require different chemical agents in the food. A spell that only makes things salty, or only sweet, would presumably be simpler. (Illusory flavoring? No, the spell is clearly acting on the food, not on her mouth or brain.)

Do the rats come with care instructions? How does she get into this newly-created extradimensional space (?!) and what does it look like from the inside? The rope is for people who can't fly, right? (She's surprised they don't provide at least a rope ladder, it's not as if they're camping out so the extra weight hardly matters, but she can fly so it doesn't really make a difference.)

Going up to the top end of the rope and trying to ascend beyond it directly into the ceiling leads into an extradimensional cavity. The interior near the rope is an empty space large enough for eight people, bordered on all sides by glowing silvery mist. The rope at the center hangs down through an invisible horizontal window with one-way visibility back into the room she came from. If she were still in the universe she would be head and shoulders inside solid rock right now.

The rats did not come with care instructions. They have a little ceramic water dish (empty) and a layer of straw to sleep on. The three that are awake give Tanya a soulful look when she opens the box to check on them.

She can give them water, and... a couple of figs? Rodents can eat fruit, right?

"Is it dangerous to touch the edges of the portal, or the walls inside?" The portal is magically visible, so she can't accidentally touch the edges, but of course it's important to be sure. And it's large enough that she won't fall out even if she rolls over in her sleep. Speaking of which, does the room have a bed with a detachable mattress that she can lift up here? 

"You offered to stand watch, should that be inside or outside the rope trick? I don't know what the threat profile is. Is there a way to interfere with the spell itself that would harm anyone inside?"

"Interacting with a Rope Trick is safe, unless you have a spell to walk through the boundary directly into the Astral Plane. Which is itself safe, unless you then have no way to return… do not experiment with this tonight."

The mattress is not fastened to the bed frame, and if rotated diagonally it's possible to heave directly into the Rope Trick. It takes up less than half the floor space.

"You can shoot in either direction across the Rope Trick entrance, so wait wherever you please. I will use the outside. If it is dispelled then the contents of the Rope Trick will drop back into this room, which is one thing an adversary might try, but this is only as inconvenient as falling from the height of the ceiling. Other extradimensional spaces fail by depositing their contents in the Astral Plane, but not this one. If the target is sleeping an assassin might attempt a shot through the entrance, but one person keeping watch will suffice for that."

The awake rats will gratefully eat some of the dates. The sleeping ones begin to be roused by the aroma.

"All right. Wake me for my watch."

Tanya will close the rats' box (it fastens securely, right?) and put it in a far corner of the rope trick. Then she realizes that in order to both sleep and stand watch inside the rope trick they'd have to get rid of one rat and they have nowhere to put it. This also means Iomedae can't come up into the rope trick if she needs to. Well, presumably she accounted for that. 

She will lie down on the mattress, then, with her rifle pressed against her side and her orb (and second, secret orb) on their chains against her breast.

Hej Nazir and Iomedae are very welcoming and helpful, but Tanya feels like she has no real idea of what's going on. So she might as well get on with it, and sleep.

Iomedae will cope with this assignment by reading a cheap Qadiran adventure novel for seven hours punctuated with restless pacing, an activity which does not go very fast. Even though she only needs to sleep for one-twelfth of the day, she doesn't have much more productivity in her than she would if she were sleeping for eight. It's a great convenience for adventurers and soldiers – less so for craftsmen and academics.

She will awaken Tanya by filling the Rope Trick with the sound of birds chirping so they can switch.

Tanya did not know that was the sound of her alarm clock but when she bolts up she can see Iomedae looking calmly in her general direction before she does anything drastic.

"Coming," she says, and takes a few moments to rearrange her clothing and check on the rats before floating down where she can wash her face. "Good morning. All is well?"

The dates in the box have disappeared. All that's left are suspiciously bloated rats.

"Nothing to report." The most interesting thing that happened all night was a plot twist. "Finish the food if you are hungry; we eat breakfast after we talk to the summoner. Do not wake me up unless you are in danger."

Now it is Tanya's turn to do nothing for two hours. Iomedae climbs into the Rope Trick, lies down, and promptly starts snoring.

Tanya has no problem standing watch for two hours in a cool and quiet room. Even with her attention carefully trained on the door and any magic she can sense near the room, this leaves her a lot of free time to think.

She is in another world. Her third, but she didn't reincarnate this time. It could still be Being X setting her up, but probably isn't; if the locals think they have a full explanation, with precedents, then Tanya has no reason not to believe them.

On its face, this is absolutely excellent news. She no longer has to risk her life fighting a doomed war! She is free from Being X placing her in ruinous situations! Even Earth might be free from Being X making mortals irrational, which Tanya half-suspects he was doing to annoy her! She got her retirement handed to her on a golden platter. The dragon's hypothetical family is a real concern, but it can't be as bad as being a soldier, she'll clear it up and then go on to be a productive member of a peaceful society! Even if all her non-combat skills are irrelevant or obsolete on Golarion, thirty years' worth of pay will let her start a new career or three.

Complication: it might be possible to communicate with Earth, or go back to it. She might even be forced to go back to Earth, if not immediately.

As long as going back is possible, Tanya's duty as a Germanian soldier is to do so. She is conflicted about this, obviously, but it was always possible to betray her comrades and the Fatherland and run away, defect or just hide in another country. She never seriously considered doing so. Being on Golarion gives her more options, but she's not going to abandon them the moment she's out of sight. 

If she goes back, she'll bring novel magical technology with her. Revolutionary technology. Technology which, in the hands of Germanian R&D, might yet turn the course of the war at the last possible moment. Or it might just make the war last an extra decade and kill or maim half of another generation's worth of young men. Still, that's not her decision to make. Lt. General Zettour might have the rank and position to make a judgement call like that, but as a mere Lt. Col. Tanya emphatically doesn't.

Ongoing communications between Earth and Golarion would be much more useful still, but they raise the prospect of other people making the trip and that is dangerous. When a technologically superior civilization - worse, several planetsful of different civilizations - make contact with a less developed one, the results are often grim. It would be best if they could keep to sending messages until Earth catches up, with Germania (i.e. Tanya) relaying all such messages. She doesn't know how to prevent Golarion from leveraging communications into interplanetary transportation, but she will avoid suggesting or promoting it.

If she stays on Golarion, can the locals still contact Germania with her help? She isn't sure and will ask Nazir later. If that works it would be the best of all worlds: an excuse for Tanya to stay here as a relay, possibly an invitation to bring more Germanians over to relieve her (she continues not to be an authorized diplomat and must not be construed to usurp that role!!!), and communications that may benefit Germania on the other side of the line. In fact, it would be best to establish a permanent Germanian delegation in Osirion, to make sure their interests are well represented and to help smooth over any cultural misunderstandings. Negotiations are always best conducted in person.

Transport from Earth to Germania has been demonstrated; the other way around has not. Tanya would be very gratified if this state of affairs continued.

After two hours have passed, the rope trick fills with the sound of Tanya chirping(*) 'It's been two hours. Iomedae, please wake up.' 

(*) In the flying young girl sense, not in the bird sense.

Having your entire night compressed into a single sleep cycle will never stop being a weird experience. Iomedae rolls off the mattress and shoves it through the window, then follows it by climbing down the rope with the box of rats in one hand.

"Dawn is in one hour and ten or twelve minutes," she says, like someone for whom 'dawn' has always been the most important time of day to index off. "I am ready. Do you need to prepare your spells or perform a daily ritual before we leave?"

"I don't need to do anything to be able to cast my spells. I do have a daily ritual of breakfast and if convenient a shower." Best to establish expectations early. She can eat the remaining figs, though.

Tanya needs to eat breakfast every day. Easy to remember; they can make sure that happens. She's not sure why she only needs to shower 'if convenient'. Maybe whatever benefits she gains from ablutions are nice-to-haves rather than essentials?

"You can bathe with that," she says, pointing to the wash basin. "Turn the valve and water will come out of the spigot on the side. The Lodge does not charge for this but less expensive inns will, if they have it available." The spigot is located at what would be a convenient height for an adult man, but Tanya can probably work with that. Iomedae will step out into the hallway and resume reading her novel without being prompted.