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 with 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 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 nine."

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 can't remember making 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 Hold Monster, which is also what it sounds like. Mine is good, maybe good enough to stop an adult dragon in its tracks for a minute, 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.