"Probably a good idea." That sounds SO MUCH harder to verify than a drink. ...She asks Cinlirina if he's got any ideas for how to check up on books like that.

Cinlirina doesn't get the chance to answer before Griffie speaks.

"Saira, I think it would be helpful if you thought about what kind of threats you're concerned about. For example, if you're worried that the book will trick you into buying overpriced tools from Bar, that's very different from worrying that the instructions will trick you into exploding yourself."

Because in the former case, you can just not buy the tools, while in the latter case, high-power but simplistic scrying won't save you, Griffie thinks, but doesn't say. Saying the obvious answer before Saira thinks of it herself will probably just make her trust it less.

"More worried it'll trick me into something that replicates command magic or does things to my world that other people want because they have preferences about how other people's worlds should be. But, you know, things could also explode or something. I don't - everything that's happened is outside all of my models, it'd be ridiculous to think the biggest risk is something I'm expecting."

"Alright, that's both a very sensible threat model and a very hard-to-cover one. I have no idea how you plan to solve that with looking at the current or historical physical state of the bar, though."

Griffie sighs. "And also, if I were pulling a scheme like that with capabilities comparable to Bar's demonstrated capabilities, I'd have, say, messed with your experiences of time relative to Cinlirina's and swapped him out for an disguised employee while you were looking away from him, assuming I couldn't just compel him to speak falsely."

"...Actually, why can Milliways freeze my world to begin with, parts of it have anti-defense wards up that should prevent anyone doing anything like that to them."

"It would be marginally more accurate to say that you are, relative to them, 'outside time' and thus experiencing time that is simply not available to them, than to say that they are 'frozen', though both of these are wildly inaccurate summaries, with the truth being impossible to explain in a way you would understand."

"...Okay. Can any of you, in fact, do magic to me."

"Cheapest test for me would be if you gave yourself a really, really shallow cut for me to try to heal, if you're up for that. Like, 'mildly annoying scratch' level of shallow here, just at the point where you can tell the difference between unbroken skin and that."

...Yeah, that's probably not that much more vulnerability than... all of the rest of this. She can arguably slightly injure herself.

Griffie mutters something untranslatable and makes some gestures. Nothing happens.

"Well, the good news is, that's what was supposed to happen."

So at this point all the worlds where Griffie is honest are ones where they can't do magic to Saira. Even if they might still be lying. ...She needs to take notes on the huge pile of shocking claims and much smaller pile of implications and evidence she's run into. Well, she's got supplies to start doing that now.

"The bad news from your perspective is, I guess, if you could have done arbitrary things to me it would probably not have been worth the effort for me to keep trying to verify anything."

"What we've actually demonstrated is my cheap stuff doesn't work on you. To get into jargon: The spell I just cast on you is harmless, and allows two opportunities for resistance: If you have 'spell resistance', then it might fail to get past it, and if it gets past that, you still have the opportunity to throw it off via mental strength."

"We could, I expect, cheaply demonstrate my ability to target you indirectly, via dumping water on … not your head, I don't want a risk of you actually inhaling a substance your body really can't process even if it'll evaporate the moment you step through your door again, maybe your arm or something. This would probably also not convince you of much."

"The model where I and Bar represent the same faction and we're only playing disconnected people to better manipulate you is … a model that's fair for you to be concerned about, given the circumstances. Unfortunately, if I'm telling the truth, I'm not Bar, and I'm not a chronomancer at all, and my spell selection really isn't great for demonstrations because I in fact usually would respond to inconvenient spell resistance by working with an ally to break it, various indirect effects, or, y'know, turning into a smilodon and clawing you to magically-induced unconsciousness. And the means of using claws to cause unconsciousness instead of death don't work on people with souls like yours, if I had the nonlethal effect up I'd just bounce off of you like I tried to scratch some particularly durable stone and if I didn't I'd, uh, actually be injuring you, which is not exactly subtle."

"This is a tangent. Anyway. Cinlirina mentioned there being elemental Air around me that's not bothering you at all, and Bar can do a huge range of chemicals including mind-affecting chemicals, does this constitute proof that Bar could have just drugged you? She won't offer you serious poison for a demo but she'll totally offer you a nonlethal dosage of … I think it's called 'ethanol', it's a traditional human intoxicant for your kind of humans, it's kind of poisonous but not the really serious kind."

"Obviously you can do magic to stuff near me, that's - never mind, let me write this stuff down..."

Claims

1. Milliways does a time-bendy thing that doesn't rely on acting directly on people as opposed to ??? (reference frames?) and consequently bypasses wards. Evidence: observed object to pause in midair while door was closed, didn't also observe force mage.

2. Milliways exists and causes doors to lead somewhere they don't usually. Evidence: this room is too big to be the one I meant to walk into (I walked around and felt empty space where there shouldn't be), and I still as far as I know am protected from the kind of direct magic it'd take to freeze me and move me.

3. Spell resistance is more complicated than I think it is. Clarify.

4. Using abilities described in 1, Milliways could swap Cinlirina for an actor. Evidence: evidence for 1 and Griffie said so.

5. Griffie's world has different physics.
5a. which involves fundamental particles: atoms of earth, air, fire, water; goodness, evil quintessence; positive and negative energy spirits.
5b. and Griffie has a lot of goodness quintessence, which is associated with a tendency to do people favors, but not a reliable sign thereof. Evidence: Cinlirina(?) claimed to see it.
5c. and Griffie's brain is actually a complex spell with information-processing capabilities that can be affected by other spells in ways that don't seem to resemble the normal (Hari) spell interactions. Evidence: Griffie showed me a picture. Cinlirina(?) claimed to see it.

6. Milliways can (effectively?) make whatever. Evidence: my free drink. Communications from Bar. This paper.

7. My free drink is not poison. Evidence: I feel fine and Cinlirina(?) said so.

8. Milliways can do two-way magic translation. Evidence: I can understand Griffie. Evidence that Griffie's not just speaking Ilan: Griffie seems very alien and something is up here. Ask Cinlirina(?)?

9. Milliways is an alien world with alien magic. Conditional on any of this being a prank, it was done by actual aliens, OR it involved the active cooperation of the people I bought my protections from. Evidence: evidence for 1, 2, and the fact that nothing feels amiss about my stuff, and the fact that I haven't been unconscious outside my apartment since buying my assorted protections.

10. I still have all my stuff. Evidence: Griffie's spell failed. Possibly more complicated than that, clarify.

11. Griffie's spell failed. Evidence: nothing happened.

12. Enchantments exist. These are directly mind-affecting spells that could make me believe weird things. Evidence: Cinlirina(?) claims to have observed Griffie doing something to someone else's ?magical brain? that Griffie claims was benign.

13. Griffie likes doing people favors. Evidence: Griffie keeps telling me things, acted reluctant to hurt someone for money, claims to like doing people favors, claims to work for people who like doing people favors,

14. The Celestials are a faction from Griffie's world that wants to take over and make things nice for people.

15. There are other people from Griffie's world that hate immortality and have made it illegal. Evidence: Bar showed me a book. Find out if Bar forged the book. Find out if a non-forged book written by Axis about this would be likely to be accurate.

16. Griffie works for the Celestials.

17. There's a way to  make complicated information-processing illusion artifacts without magic. I can buy books about it here. Evidence: saw artifacts that might not have been magic and looked different from the usual illusions, can buy books about other things here. Ask Cinlirina(?)?

She leaves a lot of empty space in which to add more when she has more to add. Griffie can take a look at this and at her questions from before if they want to.

Griffie gets out a superball and bounces it a bit while Saira writes. Ey then begins a sketch of Saira, but doesn't get time to finish it before Saira is done.

Broadly speaking, a horseman is a typically-male person who uses a tame animal (specifically a horse) as a vehicle. In the context of me talking about the Horsemen, they're a group of four gods who ride horses. Other gods don't do that, so it ends up being a distinguishing title for the group.

A goddess is specifically a female god. A God of Something has powers related to the something, and derives power from the something existing and happening. The Goddess of Good Tools is empowered by people making good tools, and can herself make tools be better, for instance. This is a feedback loop, but it's currently convergent. It was divergent in the War of Aiquzall, which is why that's such a mess. Also, re gender, gods aren't actually like animals. Many of them are genderless, and they don't need male-female pairings to produce children, and gods having children who are also gods is very rare. Thus, if a god is female that's more of a conceptual thing.

The Celestial gods are more likely to look appealing to various people's aesthetic sensibilities because they want to look friendly and pleasant, whereas many of the other gods want to look intimidating, or want to look like an embodiment of Law, or such. It would be weird for them to be specifically targeting caralendar.

A druid is a person who shares values with some facet of nature and is able to understand that shard of nature well and can thus channel the divine power of that facet of nature into spellcasting. The facet I work with is hard to describe but is focused a lot on the desires of living things to flourish and the mutually beneficial relations they can enter into.

Aiyuna, Immonhiel, Torag, and Magrim have all done a lot of stuff. Aiyuna was almost killed by Lamashtu and played dead for aeons and is just now coming back,so she hasn't done the most stuff recently. The big-deal thing Immonhiel recently did was taking a lead role in a project to cure a mosquito-borne plague that was an evil god's personal project and killing the god while a bunch of mortals used her aid to cure the plague. Torag is known for doing stuff related to forging metal, which I haven't paid the most attention to. I really don't know much about Magrim other than that Torag recommended him for the specific task at hand.

Summoning can't be demonstrated here, it's too far away from anywhere I know how to summon from, and all of those places are paused relative to us. For a standard example: Aveloz is a snake in a different world from me but still in my worldsheaf. When I cast a summoning spell, Aveloz can project herself into wherever I am to help me, but no matter what happens to the projection, she's actually safe at home. If she dies, the only thing that happens is I have to wait a bit before summoning her again. It's a way to get temporary expendable allies to fight on your behalf, basically.

Planes are separate chunks of reality. You can't really go in between planes by walking no matter how far you walk, though technically you could go through the Astral, which all the planes are in, they're just really far apart. Honestly there's a lot of stuff to say about planes so you'd need to be more specific in your queries.

A prophecy is definitely-true information about the future, but they're often really cryptic and uninformative and can be misleading. Sometimes they spontaneously generate when some event in the future is dramatic enough, and there are unreliable ways to try to get some on purpose.

An Obcisidaemon is a really powerful servant of Szuriel. I'm not sure what else there is that's important or relevant to say.

Polymorphing is shapeshifting. Rhoswen turned some people into birds for a very long time. It's possible to shapeshift into animals and keep your normal cognition, but it's also possible to force people to shapeshift into unintelligent animals, and apparently if you do that for millennia it's bad for people's minds even when they return to their original form.

Aiquzall was the original name for the world, which at the time was flat and all one continent. Then there was a war, pieces went flying, and when the war got sealed and the mess got cleaned up the planet was a sphere and the original continent was totally uninhabitable.

Rhoswen was a very powerful spellcaster from Old Aiquzall. She made a lot of enemies, who tried and failed to kill her, but did eventually manage to imprison her. She did a lot of shadow magic. She's actually still alive, just imprisoned again, but hopefully more securely this time.

The Jubjub Bird's supernatural loudness refers to its really, really weird screech. It's loud enough to stun people in a 60-foot radius, but they don't suffer any hearing loss. Magical senses pick up the screech even if they're not hearing-like senses. Being deaf or being in a form that doesn't even have hearing at all won't prevent you from hearing it. Also, some of the entities it stuns disappear for a few seconds, during which the Jubjub has the option to attack them if it wants to.

3. Spell resistance is in fact fairly complicated, but I usually just ask my coworkers about it. There may be Milliways books.

4. Time passes at different rates in different areas of Milliways. Bar says she doesn't control this effect and it doesn't work on people in the same room, but it is a thing unless a bunch of people are telling seemingly-unprofitable lies.

5c. My brain is made of atoms of earth and air and fire and water. My soul is made of positive energy. This is not a spell by my world's terminology, you can't just use Dispel Magic on it and it wouldn't even go inactive in an antimagic field.

6. Milliways has some limitations. She can't do complex life, she can't do magic items, etc. There are also things she refuses to do.

8. If you've memorized any texts in a language you don't fully understand, you could try saying or writing them.

10. I in fact am not a cutpurse but I feel like your wards not being broken aren't actually evidence that nobody stole anything from you? Maybe you don't have that much stuff on you though, or you have an anti-theft ward.

11. I know I brought up Cinlirina being replaced as a possibility, so I see why you don't want to check with him, but if you get to the point of trusting Bar but not me, you could have him scry what happened here.

12. It was communicative not enchantment-y. I don't think any of the directly mind-affecting spells I've ever heard of could work on you, you don't have the right kind of mind for them.

15. Axis is known in my world for their honesty, if that helps at all, which it probably doesn't.

"Wow, this is a lot. What the fuck. Um. Purely on basis of this being the easiest part to answer, I am currently wearing a very large fraction of all of my wealth. Including the enchanted items that protect me from other people's magic." She tugs her earlobe in a plausibly-deniable gesture toward an illusory earring that is not one of her enchanted piercings.

"Ah. Same here, actually, though I don't have that strength of anti-magic wards in item form."

"...Well, they're not prohibitively expensive and I know some people, and the three options here are you're secretly working for Charon or something and the people I got mine from are fine, you're a nice person and the people I got my wards from are fine, or I can't trust you at all and you're in league with them already and they betrayed me. If we can just rule that first one out..."

"That'd be nice, yes. Unfortunately, all my usual identity verification measures are designed for people who've heard of the Celestials before meeting me."

"Makes sense. What are they?"

"I have a verifiably from them and for me item, which I normally don't show to people and I don't really want to show to you if you don't have the right toolkit to verify it, which I would be shocked if you do have. Typically, I would encourage someone to perform a Planar Inquiry about it, which would consist of magically sending them a letter saying 'I have a person here who claims to be Griffith of Erlonn and be working for you and not evil, please come confirm this' and some money, and then a Celestial would be magically brought over to inspect me. I'd cover the money. That won't work because we're too far away and the time issue. Or if someone couldn't do a Planar Inquiry, I might demonstrate the ability to use Smite Evil, which is pretty rare among Evil people. That won't work because you don't have the right kind of soul, and also it plausibly wouldn't get through your wards."

"Maybe you could smite Jim. But I don't know how I'd verify that that's rare among... people who are generally assholes and working for Charon or something."

"If he'd experience it in an unpleasant way, which seems likely given his activities in his home world, it seems like it wouldn't be permitted in the main bar area and he wouldn't be interested in cooperating with it? Plus if you trust Jim to be accurate about things, that's basically trusting Bar to have presented you with a genuine entity of whatever sort he is, and at that point you might as well trust her documents on me? …I'm not sure that's correct but I dislike 'target an evildoer who currently is hanging around doing non-evil things with Smite Evil' as a plan, it's kind of bad incentives. I guess if you want to pay him to experience the non-injurious version I won't stop you, and maybe he wouldn't dislike it?"

"And, uh, it depends on my beliefs, being able to hold anti-evil beliefs in the right way while also working for an evil god is … not strictly impossible, perhaps, but certainly quite difficult. …I do want social credit, er, for you to acknowledge that this is evidence in favor of me being honest and cooperative, for telling you that there technically exists at least one known case of someone being able to use Smite Evil while also being a bad person who shouldn't have more power."

"Is that evidence? If you're secretly someone I don't want to help, you're - what would I do if I were a real asshole and wanted something from me - I'd just offer money. I wouldn't get into some argument about whether I really do have a weird magical tendency to do people favors. What do you even get out of that, at most if I got really convinced I'd hold my door for free and send Cinlirina to go fetch the people who did my wards, which would not be free because you'd have to convince Cinlirina - maybe you could also convince everyone else and then you'd save, um... depends on how far away they are. I wouldn't have thought to check whether you were secretly working for someone who hates immortality and kidnaps people and might sway a major war that would determine whether we might run into a world ruled by people who like doing other people favors someday or a world ruled by people who hate immortality and don't really enforce the rule of law! That's so specific and I've never been in a circumstance where I would regret engaging in commerce with a total stranger. It's definitely a mistake on Evil Griffie's part. ...Okay, you know what, yeah, I should have thought of it from that angle sooner. This is a really stupid lie to tell and it hasn't gotten you anything. I guess the maximum possible payoff is one inheritance mage's lifetime of work, which is big but so is constructing and maintaining an elaborate deception for my entire life. And, uh - one sec - "

She looks back at her notes. " - and if you're working with Bar and replaced Cinlirina and you're working with Jim then when would you gain anything from not just tricking me into thinking everything was normal, basically only if you want me to work on alien inheritance - okay, not going to do that without more evidence - and if you're not working with Bar then I have independent corroboration of your story. Probably not useful to ask you to point out if there's anything I'm missing here... I guess just 'what if Griffie and Bar terminally value lying to people?' Maybe. Uh. I think I got lost somewhere in all this. You wanted acknowledgment of - yeah, I have no clue if that's evidence of anything."