"I'm not going to starve in one day, you know. But yeah, come on, let's get this done."

And, shortly, someone who at least looks like an unremarkable human, not that that will fool a knowledge mage, offers the nearest knowledge mage a note inviting him to come do some basic knowledge magic work urgently.

Sure, Cinlirina doesn't have anything better to do right now and the pay is acceptable. The entity is mysterious, but he's confident that Imperial law will protect him, so it's not a big deal, and the entity is probably just a creative and paranoid illusionist anyway.

And as quickly as Cinlirina can be enticed to move, they get to a door in the apartment which ought to lead to the lobby and instead leads elsewhere. Saira is waiting for them, bouncing antsily, and as soon as she sees them she says, "Come in and shut the door."

He thinks this is weird, but really doesn't come off as an opportunistic crime, and Saira doesn't have any reason to want to hurt him specifically either. The employment note is scryable, so he doesn't bother declaring his intentions before following the entity into the space and closing the door.

When the door closes, all the imperial rings on Saira's necklace lose their access to the master rings they're imitations of and appear as plain steel.

Saira relaxes slightly. "There's a lot here that I am hoping will not get fucked with. If you're for some reason inclined to fuck with things, don't, I'll stop paying you among other things. Go ahead and check that this place really is bigger than the lobby, go ahead and check your rings. The claim that's been made to me is that this is another universe, that this person came from yet a third universe, and that a plant person came here from a fourth universe. The jobs I have for you mostly center around checking various claims related to things like the plant person's water with, uh, ontologically basic tendency to do people favors or something. Yes, really."

What.

Sorry, what.

Cinlirina does some scrying. This space is, in fact, bigger than the lobby, and it is also old enough that by the time he thinks he's about done looking increasingly far back he still hasn't found anything besides this space, either empty or hosting weird guests.

He is not inclined to fuck with things. He is mostly inclined to spend a long moment standing around and gawking before telling Saira "alright, I can get to work now".

Saira giggles. "Griffie's the plant in the infirmary - is the infirmary hidden? It's over that way."

"It's not hidden right now. I'll go … ask Griffie about the … water with an ontologically basic tendency to do people favors?"

Cinlirina gets permission from Griffie to examine the inert item which allegedly has an ontologically basic tendency to do people favors.

The item superficially appears to be water in a sealed glass vessel. It sure isn't water, though, no hydrogen or oxygen to be found. Even the atmosphere around Griffie is full of two slightly different types of some kind of exotic matter, though it seems to be being kept out of his lungs somehow.

The water-like substance in fact does appear to have a lot of a particular configuration of some fifth type of exotic matter that Griffie is also radiating to a much lesser degree. Nothing about it particularly seems doing-people-favors-ish, any more than people's brainstates ever have an obvious "and this person is thinking about pecans" appearance.

He reports this to Saira, and suggests that since Griffie isn't warded, examining their past radiation for comparison might be helpful.

"Yeah, that does sound useful."

Cinlirina skims through Griffie's history at the bar. The fifth-exotic-matter-type present in the "water" (really, a rather misleading name) most matches Griffie's radiation patterns in eir recent history when Griffie is working infirmary shifts (though sometimes the working area of the infirmary is warded), buying meals for malnourished-looking people (which apparently happens not that rarely?), and taking the form of a silvery smilodon to snuggle someone, and at the start of the snuggling, quintessence radiation spikes dramatically and has some unclear mild effect on the recipient's (not-organized-like-Griffie's) soul (what).

He summarizes this to Saira, finishing with "and would it count as fucking with things if I asked Griffie how turning into a smilodon worked".

"I don't think it would! I also want to know this but we don't really have to worry about bargaining for it together, I suspect Griffie'll tell us both for free. Still more efficient to ask together, though."

"Right. Tendency to do people favors, you did mention. Let's go ask?"

"Yeah, let's."

Jim closes the yet-another-book he's picked up during their conversation and gets up to follow them. Or head in their same general direction, at any rate.

Cinlirina turns to Griffie. Apparently he can just ask questions for free. "So, I was doing the analysis Saira hired me to do, and apparently you can turn into a silvery smilodon which can snuggle people in a way which radiates 'quintessence' the way your liquid sample does. How does that work?"

"Oh! That's Celestial Wild Shape. Er, you want an explanation, not jargon. So, I cast spells due to my bond with a facet of nature, which leaves me with a shard of that facet that I draw from. This also lets me do some non-spell things … is this even a helpful distinction, they're still magic and you don't, actually, care whether this capacity is interchangeable with my other magical capabilities or whether this is one of the ones that's hard to use when someone gets in my face with a sword or not."

"Anyway. One of the things that my shard of a facet of nature lets me do is turn into animals, or elementals, which are embodiments of the four basic types of matter. Er. The four basic types of matter where I'm from, Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, I can't exactly turn into an embodiment of protons or whatnot. And I work with Celestials a lot, and Celestials sometimes have animals around that are celestial-ish, and I got advice on how to do that when I turn into an animal! And one of the things that comes with the form is a capability that … it gets called 'smite evil', but it has harmless uses? It's really more of an 'assert good values very loudly' thing, and you can use it if you're fighting daemons or whatnot, but if you don't have to fight anyone, you can use it on, uh, people with souls, er, compatible-with-my-magic souls, to help them understand you better, and if they share the values it can feel nice. So that would probably be the holy-water-like quintessence spike you saw."

This did not explain the smilodon, really, but you get what you pay for.

"It's mind-affecting?"

"It's information-communicating? Loud communicating, but you wouldn't mistake it for one of your own thoughts, it's not an enchantment effect."

"I'm probably not vulnerable to it anyway. Although maybe we should check that kind of thing... Can you hurt someone for science so we can see what that does to your goodness quintessence or is that, in itself, inherently still doing people a favor?"

"Doing science is different from doing favors. It can be both but this probably wouldn't be very favor-ish. But it sounds like you might want to see evil quintessence specifically, and there are pretty few ways to produce that that aren't things I don't want to do! I could try to figure out how to derive Protection from Good from my current understanding of Protection from Evil, that'd produce evil or at least anti-good quintessence without being immoral, but that'd take a while. However, if you just want me to slightly hurt someone, I'll hurt a volunteer, though we ought to leave the main bar area for that."

"Could I pay you to produce evil quintessence a faster way?"

"Maybe you could ask if Jim if he thinks he has some residue and if he's willing to be scried, he's talked about evil hobbies and he has the kind of soul I can at least sort of perceive? The idea of actually harming someone does not appeal to me."

"Hm. Cinlirina? You get anything off him earlier?"