"Most things in my world are made of atoms of the Elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Living things have Positive Energy spirits, some particularly death-linked things have some Negative Energy, and some things are made of quintessence, which comes in flavors based on concepts and ideals. I have a sample of Water which has a high concentration of goodness quintessence, it's irreplaceable since Bar won't sell magic and I don't have the right magic to make more, but I'd let you do definitely-nondestructive inspections of it if you'd like."

"I can't get much out of it, unless I get someone from my world to help - I don't have the right kind of magic for that - maybe I will once I've taken more advantage of Milliways. Your world is... weird. And cool. But mostly weird and I feel like I could use some kind of slightly more systematic introduction than saying random things and answering the first question I can think to articulate."

And if nobody makes her pay for that it will be the most free information she's ever gotten from anyone who wasn't part of her family.

Griffie is not an experienced storyteller and this is the most eager listening ey's gotten anytime recently! Why would ey charge for what Saira could probably get from a book for free anyway?

"Before the beginning of stable history, the gods fought an all-out war, the War of Aiquzall. Gods are very powerful people made of quintessence, and the Celestial gods have a lot of Goodness quintessence in. But gods can do things that create more quintessence, and back when they lived in the Material section of the world, this could get them at-least-seemingly unbounded power. So you get cases like, say, Asmodeus attempting to impose Absolute Tyranny on the world while at the same time, Kalia-etcetera, er, Kaliamirungaiopag attempts to impose Absolute Freedom and Kindness. Extremely rapid usage of utterly absurd amounts of power. Chunks broke off the continent of Aiquzall and went flying, and then the fight got mysteriously … stopped. Gods looked at the tattered remains of the continent they were in and the absurdly powerful weapons they no longer fully understood, and despite their massive values differences, agreed to seal away their weapons, rebuild the world, and move further away from the Material such that they could not quite as have the power to do such a thing again."

Griffie displays a map. The continent constituting 75% of all land is labeled 'Aiquzall', and the remaining continents look plausibly like they could have been chunks off of it, if oddly distorted.

"And then, uh, thirty thousand years of history happened. Well, sort of, there's exactly a bit under thirty thousand years available and everyone always agrees that Aiquzall was that long ago, even if they're old records from an empire millenia older than you."

"Go ahead and ask me more questions if you like, but if not I'm going to talk about the portions of my world I know the most about, because they're related to me."

"...So the... time thing... is, uh... you can't pastwatch, can you."

"It's possible to scry on the past, but the difficulty increases with temporal distance, you can't scry tens of thousands of years back."

"Well, that sucks. And you don't think the old records were rounding, or that yours are wrong, or theirs are wrong, in some, uh, normal way that could just happen if you couldn't pastwatch?"

"No. For one thing, Axis, the Plane of Law, which tries to keep among other things Space and Time stably functional, was around almost that long and their records match with the temporal compression existing."

" - So, time phenomena happen in your world, which is, I assume, where you confirmed that time was paused. I'm going to go check on that for mine."

"You know, the bar says Milliways does that for everyone but that's actually a reasonable thing to check, given your informational state!"

She checks.

Time is paused in Har. Or someone is going out of their way to make it look like that.

"Looks paused, yeah. Anyway, you were telling me about your history?"

"I was actually going to skip past most of history to get to the parts related to me and then include background as it came up, because I'd enjoy that more and there doesn't seem to be a strong reason against? If you want general history of Suaal you can ask Bar for a reading list."

"Sure. Makes as much sense as anything."

Right. Don't get caught up in how this person's hobby is doing people favors, it's still Griffie's hobby for making Griffie happy. It's still a favor and still useful even if it's not really about her.

Griffie notices Saira's disappointment. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to disregard your preferences here. I like listening to myself talk, but if you're not having fun and-or I'm being rude you should feel free to say so?"

"What - that's not even - " This is completely outside the range of inputs Saira has ever experienced.

Right, well, now is not the time to prove them right about her not being able to carry on a polite conversation.

"That's completely ridiculous for reasons I'll explain if you want me to but I'm having a great time."

Saira seems to be doing social smoothing over stress, but not the kind that should be interrupted. "You can explain your reasons if you want but if you're having fun as-is I was in fact about to launch into Amateur Storytelling Time!"

"That sounds great."

Is this the right amount and type of cheerfulness to communicate to Griffie? Who knows. It's what she's got.

The intent to communicate cheerfulness seems to work for Griffie!

"So, a few centuries ago my mother, Erloria, was alive and really good at the same kind of magic I do. And she noticed that people kept dying, and didn't like it, and she did immortality research. She learned a lot about souls, er, specifically positive-energy-souls, and while she couldn't figure out a direct way to make herself not die, she put bits of her soul along with other nature spirits in plant bodies, that's me and my living family, and taught us all how to resurrect each other and make each other new bodies. At some point after that, Charon, the god of Death, kidnapped her, because he kidnaps everyone with useful immortality methods that don't run on Negative Energy. Uh, context, the Negative Energy methods of immortality all have weird vulnerabilities that he presumably knows how to exploit, and also using them tends to require murdering people and make you the kind of person who will murder more people."

"Okay, I don't think I can realistically make headway on murdering Charon and conquering your universe for you but I think this is the part where your social scripts call for me to say I wish I could? I don't know if you can live somewhere without, uh, nature spirits and goodness quintessence, but kidnapping people is illegal in Har."

"Immortality is illegal in Suaal! The, uh, balance of power that interplanar treaties try to reflect the preferences of is one with a really powerful death god. And yeah, my social scripts would call for you to say that, if I weren't already working on it myself from a pretty good position to do so, so instead my social scripts call for you to wish me luck, but you don't have to. And most governments-of-countries-of-mortals tend to ban kidnapping people in Suaal, for some varying definitions that may include things like 'but doing slave-taking raids on our neighbors is of course not illegal by our law', but the law formed by treaties between gods and other major powers doesn't ban gods kidnapping mortals."

"I obviously think given the possibility of future contact I would prefer your world be ruled by people whose hobby is doing favors for other people instead of people who hate immortality and kidnap people. Does that constitute wishing you luck?"

"Yes. Yes it does count." And this is the natural advantage of the Upper Planes, Griffie thinks but doesn't say.

"Anyway, my family and I had this nice hidden village that was a demiplane off the Material in the direction of the First World, which meant it was a bit more positive-energy-ish than the Material and the sunlight was more colorful etcetera, and we all resurrected each other and studied our magic and such, and then one day I fell through a rift, couldn't find my way back to the village, and met up with the people who would become my adventuring friends. Well, actually, some people from a carnival mistook me for an unintelligent plant creature and kind of kidnapped me to use as a carnival exhibit, but they let me go when they realized I was a person, and I met my friends in the process of that. And then it turned out people were framing the carnival for murders in an attempt to create enough chaos to take over the government of this town for their crime ring, and the carnival hired us to investigate on their behalf, and we were ultimately able to demonstrate their innocence. This is the least weird and exciting of all my adventuring stories, honestly, I can get into the more exciting ones or tell this one in more detail or answer some other questions."

"I don't think I'm even following how the different things that happened follow from each other - maybe they let you go because they also like doing favors for people? And then I don't see how framing them for murder would put specific people into power in a town, or why they hired someone who wasn't from their world to investigate."

"Well, kidnapping people is illegal in a lot of places including the one they were in, so when they realized they'd done it by accident they went to undo it? And also they were in fact the type to like cheaply helping people, but also if you're not prepared to hold onto captives it's probably not actually profitable to do so? And framing the carnival for murder … the idea was that it would create a lot of outrage and conflict, such that local law enforcement would be overwhelmed trying to deal with all of it, and also it'd look really bad for local law enforcement that they couldn't stop the murders? And the carnival hired me and my friends because we'd demonstrated our skills to them, one of their animals had gotten loose earlier and we handled it. Plus we were more welcome in the town than they were but we weren't already the type to dislike them."