Samora's adventuring party breaks up after the defeat of Belcorra.
It's an amicable breakup, with a last night of celebration at the Rowdy Rockfish where they buy a round for the house and promise to write each other. Phrenk goes back to Irrisen to finish his unfinished business with his relatives; Marshall stays in Otari and buys a bit of farmland and sets to learning what it's like not to be at war. And Samora goes to the Worldwound.
Or tries to, anyway. She teleports out--
Huh, something felt weird about that one.
Anyway, you've appeared on a lakeshore. It's winter -- at the Worldwound it is often winter -- and the water is just starting to crust over with ice. Beyond it, a flat scrubby plain cut with smooth gray roads rises into a gentle hill, with hints of another lake around it. Dirty dark snow is falling lazily, blown into the lake from behind you by a gentle -
Wait, actually that's ash.
Behind you, there's a rippling series of explosions, and a crushing roar.
It's about three balors tall. The shape is roughly human -- two arms, two legs, head -- but in spiky black stone, and rippling with lightning. Just now it has its back to you: two small flying figures are contesting it while a shiny steel(?) wall slowly grows behind them. The one on the left jerks upward abruptly, and a projectile streaks away into the creature's shoulder with another string of rapidfire booms. It takes a heavy step forward and lashes out with one hand, spraying wide globs of lava across the sky. The figure jerks again and manages to dodge; the lava falls somewhere beyond the rising wall.
It roars again, and the other figure wavers in midair, but doesn't fall. If they're doing anything it's not having an obvious effect.
Between you and it is an enormous pit, glowing with heat, about the right size for the creature to have dug its way out of.
The pit is about 200 feet away; the creature maybe 250 more beyond that.
What would you like to do?
The roads are weird and the air smells wrong and it's not important right now because DEMON LORD. Is the resistance being put up against it anything other than totally doomed?
Well, something's building that wall. Or maybe growing it; the way it's creeping up says more "fast-growing plant" than "wall of iron variant".
An opening in the wall flicks open, just for an instant. You have a brief impression of a crowd gathered around a huge metal bowl, lying on its side, and then there's a new kind of explosive bang (would Samora recognize a sonic boom?) and the crowd is covered with thick red smoke as the wall snaps shut again.
The demon lord falls to one knee, balanced with a claw in the soft earth.
That's more than enough excuse to join in. She starts sprinting towards the demon lord, until she's in Holy Smite range or something interferes with her.
You have to skirt the pit a little bit, so it takes about four moments to get into range. In that time two more fliers pop up over the wall: one firing big shiny balls, and one throwing...swords? You're a ways away but those seem like they might be swords. They're staying spread out, left/right and high/low, clearly trying to divide its attention.
It might be working. The demon lord is still down on one spiky knee, supporting itself with one claw and throwing fire with the other. It's switched to faster-firing sheets of flame instead of lava, but so far it hasn't hit anybody, and everybody it's not targeting takes the opportunity to open fire.
You bet.
(There's nobody easily accessible who looks like they need healing; Good damage should hurt it more than most other things.)
Well that was an interesting new kind of energy. Where did it even come from? It didn't do a lot of damage, but even so, Behemoth spreads out its senses and turns its useless head from side to side. What was that? Will it happen again?
Its next attack can wait a little bit.
She wants to hurt it, or hurt it more, but she doesn't want its full attention. She'll put a Shield of Faith on herself, for what little good she expects it to do, and if it doesn't attack her by the time she's done with that she'll add a Sure Casting, and if it still hasn't attacked her she'll drop a second Holy Smite. And she'll move sideways while she's doing all of that.
Samora has time to do all of that, because Behemoth is taking its time looking for her. Was it the moving group behind the wall? The bright thing by the pit? Something else it hasn't noticed yet?
In the Denver PRT defense HQ, Armsmaster is wondering the same thing. That glowing sphere doesn't seem to be hurting Behemoth much, but it might be distracting him and that's rarer. If they can figure out who's throwing it, and get them to sync with the Crusher Cannon (not his tech, not his name), they might be able to do some real damage before Behemoth pushes through into the warehouse district.
But he doesn't recognize the power, and neither does Dragon, so they have no idea who to talk to. Pings for the blasters who aren't already involved all come back negative. It takes them almost fifteen seconds to start looking for someone uninvolved, someone who wasn't at the rally point, doesn't have an armband, and just...wandered onto the battlefield on his own.
One of Dragon's reserve drones starts dropping through the atmosphere, scanning for living figures with line of sight on Behemoth.
She starts by scanning the nearby hilltop; the idea that someone might roll up and start blasting Behemoth from 200 feet out is not really in her model of parahuman behavior. It would take her a few minutes to spot Samora, but...
As the second Holy Smite lands, Behmoth decides to commit. He lurches to his feet, and pulls a huge glob of magma from the earth with his right claw. He throws it underhand toward the wall, about sixty feet left of where the cannon fired. The wall bends inward for just a moment, then shatters, collapsing away from the impact point in a rain of rounded mirrored shards. Pieces of metal, and at least one human body, are flung into the air above the impact point.
At the same time, he whips his left claw backward, broadly toward Samora. His aim is a little off, but that's fine: the sheet of fire that engulfs her is almost fifty feet wide.
Dragon's drone diverts. If they're lucky, there's someone at the site of that second attack who needs medical attention.
Honestly, Samora, you could use a little medical attention; that fire attack kicked like a high-powered fireball, even if it was more shaped like a giant burning hands.
You doubt if there's anyone in need of healing at the direct site of the lava attack, but there might be survivors on the periphery.
She can eat another one of those, but she can't prove that was the strongest thing it had. She needs to get coordinating with the other defenders; they might or might not know more about this particular demon lord than she does but she can at least do some healing, maybe buff someone who can hurt it more. She starts moving toward the most likely location for survivors, yelling "On me for a channel!"
One of the fliers is showering the demon in glowing green water, which got its attention: it's moving away from the hole it made in the wall and pursuing with big waves of fire and lightning. Nobody's been knocked out of the air yet.
That is to say, you have a clear path toward the space around the impact site. It looks like about a 3-moment run. Some folks are already up and moving. As the rest of the wall collapses you get view of the space it was defending: big boxy buildings cut into uneven rectangles by those strange gray roads. There are lots of people on the roofs and peeking around corners -- dozens, maybe even a hundred, gradually coming out of cover and aiming weapons or conjuring shields.
As Samora starts to run, though, a figure in elaborate full-body armor swoops down toward her. It's (he's?) about 8 feet tall, all angular metal in shiny greens and reds. A small pair of wings jut unmoving from its back. It's not carrying any obvious weapons, though of course in a getup like that the scope for non-obvious weapons is considerable.
The strange cape doesn't look like she needs medical assistance, but just in case: "Are you injured?"
By the bye, what does Dragon see, when she points her optics at Samora? What does she look like?
A woman of unclear ethnicity in a metal cuirass and a scarlet cloak, with a gem-studded headband on her brow, a shining metal shield in hand, and a sword sheathed at her side. She doesn't look old enough to drink, but she moves like a soldier and the burns the lava left on her arms don't seem to trouble her much. She's observing the armor with keen, curious silver eyes; it's strange to her, but a kind of strangeness she's accustomed to.
"Moderate* non-urgent. Just 'ported in; sitrep?"
(In the back of her mind she's tallying unexpected things. The roads, the air, the strangeness of the armor, this demon lord who is neither baphomet nor deskari, the armor, the perhaps heartening fact that the Good gods haven't intervened yet against a demon lord on the material.)
*Translator's note: Taldane has half a dozen different words for amounts of injury specifically. Samora is attempting to convey efficiently that she could stand to absorb something in the Cure Serious to Cure Critical range but could be twice as hurt as she is and stay up. Alas, English has done its own form of violence to the sentence.
No mask. Clearly not a newbie, that would be obvious even without her elaborate costume. No match for any heroes -- or villains -- that Dragon has on file. Almost certainly not American or Canadian, however good her English is. Brute enough to take that hit and come out only singed. That "ported in" is a relief; at least she knows where she is and who she's fighting. Though, who teleported her, and when, and why here specifically?
Dragon's thoughts can run in a thousand semi-relevant directions at once; her words, in moments like this, have to be rationed out like grains of plutonium. "Are you a blaster? We're falling back; I can fly you to one of the rally points." They'll have more time for details once they're in the air.
That question is unexpected and she suspects she isn't understanding everything about it but there's not time for a nuanced answer. "Yes-ish and please do." She prepares to be picked up and flown with in whichever of grab-a-wrist or fireman's carry this person prefers.
(Did that mean "Can you focus on damage output" or "Can you only focus on damage output" or "Do you usually focus on damage output" or "Did you prep a lot of evocations today"? Why is that the question and not "What circle?" Maybe this guy is from Tian Xia and has Tongues up; clearly the question makes perfect sense in his doctrine. Maybe something weirder.)
The armor's torso abruptly unfolds, like a clenched fist opening, into a curved seat and a waving set of dark metal(?) restraints. Underneath there's something softer, too firm to be cloth, in plain white. "Climb in. Face outward."
Assuming the stranger does, the restraints will wrap snugly around her torso and forehead, pressing her into the soft backing. Some people have a hard time with this aspect of the medevac suit, and Dragon will keep a close watch on her new guest's pulse and breathing just in case she needs to loosen some restraints or explain something. While she's at it she'll try a close sonic scan too, looking for nonobvious injuries. Depending on her Brute power Dragon might not get anything, but trying is free.
She won't distract the new cape with another question until she's oriented to the carrier. Once she's sitting, she'll go with, "What's the range on your glowing ball? What else does it do?"
Talking construct? That wants her to ride in it? Well, sure, okay, whatever. She doesn't like that it grabs her, but it isn't doing anything that would prevent her from Teleporting or Plane Shifting out, so it's more likely just a weird conveyance than a demonic ploy. Her vital signs don't suggest fear so much as confusion.
What a strange question. "That was a Holy Smite at about max range, it does Good damage, and the fact that you don't know that makes me think something weird is going on."
(The sonic scan doesn't turn up any hidden injuries. Nothing but perfectly normal and healthy human organs in here, at least on the macroscopic level.)
There's a lot for Dragon to track in every Endbringer fight. This relatively straightforward bit of S&R was important, but in terms of processing power it was still Dragon's seventh or eighth priority.
Now it's third. In ascending order of confusion:
Hypothesis: she's actually from an alternate Earth where she's much more famous, or lots of people have that same power for some probably-creepy reason. This theory has a bunch of blank spots (how did she get here, and why? Why did she just immediately square up to Behemoth?), but it does suggest a test.
"This is Earth Bet, United States, Colorado, Denver. We're eighteen minutes into a fight with the Endbringer Behemoth. What were you expecting?"
As she speaks, she plots a course that skims the ground in a wide circle around Behemoth, targeting a group of shielders at the leading edge of the fallback point. Even if she's a lost dimension traveler she clearly wants to fight, and that's just about the only place she can do it with a range that short.
"I was expecting the Worldwound on Golarion!"
(Wordless inference at the speed of thought: If a description of being able to cast fourth-circle cleric spells prompts a description of what planet she's on, there aren't enough fourth-circle clerics on this planet.)
"I have healing, do you need healing or damage more right now?"
There are several known alternate Earths. Some of them are not very nice places to live. None have a "Golarion" or a "Worldwound" (!?!).
"You can heal?" she temporizes. "How fast, what limitations?"
Definitely not enough clerics. Maybe none. This might be a "convert everything to Cures" situation.
"Injuries not diseases, six 30 foot radius area heals and" mental arithmetic "23 single-target with a range of power levels, plus two that can get someone back up who died less than six seconds ago."
Second priority now. Dragon has a number of picky questions, like "what does your power think an injury is exactly?", "why those specific numbers?", "six seconds, how does that work operationally?" and "does that trade off with Holy Smite?", not to mention trivia like "what's your name?". There's time to ask a few of those but there isn't, probably, time to listen to the answers.
There's a point of view that says you shouldn't bring an unknown foreigner from a weird alternate Earth into contact with your wounded. She might have strange priorities, or strange pathogens. She knows who to see about the pathogens, but they're multiple minutes away. The priorities...honestly Dragon likes what she's seen so far.
"How long does your area heal take? If it's fast, we can try to stabilize all the survivors of that last big lava attack. But we can't linger there; if we draw Behemoth's attention back we'll just get everyone killed."
"Everything takes six seconds. Three of the midrange single-targets trade off against two more Holy Smites and one that makes eleven people move faster."
One that makes eleven people move faster? One that does? They have a few seconds before they arrive..."Does all your healing trade off against other idiosyncratic powers like that?"
"Yes but the rest is either weaker or only works if I can touch Behemoth and then get very lucky."
The rhythm of this conversation seems to be "Samora explains herself and the construct integrates the information" rather than "the construct explains the situation and Samora integrates it" and that's not so objectionable she'll add friction trying to change it, so:
"The two that can raise someone trade off against weak heals that hit eleven people, and I have one I didn't mention that can fix a weird set of problems or moderately heal eleven people." She genuinely has no idea how to explain Heal quickly; it will probably be faster for (whoever is talking through?) the construct to list the weird problems Behemoth can cause. Does it look like they're going for a channel on the survivors of the lava wave? If so, she'll add "And I need line of effect for everything, open the door."
There's not a door; Samora's body doesn't quite fit inside so her arms and legs are external (this is not the suit's only mode, but it is the only one compatible with high-speed flight). Even so, it opens up again to let Samora out when they arrive.
It's all pretty hellish, for something that apparently has nothing to do with literal Hell. There are small charred bits of people all along the smoking path of the lavaball, and the grass along the edges is burning in a desultory way.
But along the edges there are survivors. Eight people altogether, moving or making noise. The burns range from "bad" to "horrific", and it's not always possible to distinguish their clothing or gender. What you can see of the clothes is bright and colorful, with lots of light cloaks and skintight fabric.
Samora's "Get close to me for healing!" is backed up by 16 Charisma worth of I am the most important thing that's happening right now as she heads for the center of the survivors' positions.
They're not super mobile but everyone who can, does. Soon you've got them all in radius, no problem
Channel! It's a pretty average one, not quite enough to fully heal her burns, but close enough as makes no difference.
Nobody here has strong Brute powers of any kind; the ones who did got away on their own.
All eight are suddenly restored to full health.
That doesn't mean they're back to normal; that guy is still missing his lower left leg, and those two are both blind still. But nobody's dying, and the problems they still have are all problems Panacea can fix. The six with working eyes are all staring at Samora in awe.
Meanwhile, Sanguine finally texts Dragon back. "I'm on the roof of Field Hospital B, does that work? We can always burn the place down later if Behemoth doesn't."
Dragon addresses the survivors: "I've put a pin in your armbands. Help each other to rally point C; you'll receive further instructions there."
Then to Samora: "Can you stand another flight? I've arranged for someone to meet you and explain our situation more fully, answer your questions, and make sure we have all the same diseases." Ugh, that's so awkwardly phrased, but she doesn't want to outright say "make sure you don't kill us all with some plague that your world's immune to".
The formerly-injured eight all get to their feet. They don't immediately follow Sanguine's instructions, though; they're still watching Samora. Finally, a woman in an elaborate bird mask gets up the nerve to ask, "Who are you?"
"I don't have any diseases. Why do you want to make sure I have diseases?" This construct has earned some trust, though, so she adds, "Another flight is fine; explanations can wait if more people need healing." To the woman in the bird mask: "Samora, I'm from another planet." Back in the weird seat to go to the next location, yes?
"You don't have any diseases that can harm you, just as my real body doesn't have any diseases that can harm me. But it's possible that either of us might still be contagious, in ways harmless to our own people but deeply dangerous to foreigners. There are precedents."
A moment for that to land, then, "I'm Dragon, by the way. Thank you for" picking a fight with an Endbringer even though you didn't know what it was staying in the fight after you knew what it was volunteering to heal instead of charging into the front lines like everyone else wants to "helping us."
She really should have introduced herself when she arrived, she's realizing now, but she's out of the habit a little bit; she always already knows who everyone is and vice versa. Oh well, that's why she delegated the next part to someone less busy and less socially awkward.
And then they're off.
"Oh! Understood. It's good to meet you." What's the next-highest-priority information. It might be a question, actually. "Does your planet not have divinely empowered casters, or are they different? And what types of damage does Behemoth do?" So far it looks like fire and bludgeoning, but something that big could easily have half a dozen things she hasn't seen yet.
"Some people call their powers divide gifts, yes." Dragon says diplomatically. "In general their source isn't understood. We do know that everyone with the potential to develop powers has a specific brain region, the Corona Pollentia, that no one else has." Explaining that Samora also has one can, Dragon decides, be someone else's job. "None of them have the kind of healing power you've demonstrated."
(Dragon has not actually seen Samora's Corona Pollentia or Gemma; her sonic scan earlier was just looking for broken bones and internal bleeding, and barely touched her brain. But come on, what else could it be?)
And after that they've still got some flight time, so: "Behemoth is a dynakinetic, and seems to be able to freely manipulate most kinds of energy. We mostly see fire, lightning, radiation, sound waves, and electromagnetism. Within 32 feet he can heat your body to 1400 Celsius directly - " wait, if Samora's Earth diverged long enough back they might not have metric temperature " - which is hotter than even the hottest lava. Stay at least 100 feet away from him at all times, just to be sure."
Dragon brings them in right in front of him, and releases the flight restraints again. "Samora, this is Sanguine, a healer who specializes in blood. They're ramping up the next attack, I have to swap out, but I'll check back in when I can."
She'll give it about two seconds to see if Samora urgently needs something else from her, and if not the suit closes itself back up and sits down, knees tucked up to its shiny neck.
That sounds like Dragon isn't sure whether the empowered priests he knows are actually priests or more of a Razmir situation. That's something to figure out later, as are the implications of all casters having something in common in their brains.
"Goddess go with you." She pops out of the construct and goes to greet the other healer for, it sounds like, a preemptive Remove Disease. "How can I help you?"
His first thought is, huh, no mask. But, hey, Sanguine doesn't wear one either -- no point, unless he wants to go full bodysuit with gloves and everything. The silver eyes miiight be contacts? Armor, shield, sword, cloak, all very medieval chic. Looks heavy, but it clearly doesn't bother her. Yep, Dragon was right as usual: this person has been caping, or doing whatever her world has instead of caping, for quite a while. Her apparent age doesn't really register; he meets a lot of super-powerful teenagers in his line of work.
Also, geez, why are all high-end capes so hot. Except Eidolon of course. He's not going to do anything about it but like, a man observes what he observes.
At ground level it's clear that he's a little shorter than Samora.
"Well, mostly this is 'sposed to be me helping you. Dragon said you're from some other Earth, and you didn't come here on purpose?" He shakes his head, laughing a little. "Of all the times and places...you've got some kinda luck, lady. But I'll fill you in, no problem."
"But yeah, we gotta do the pathogen screen. The way my power works is, I can do all kinds of stuff with blood." He just barely restrains himself from doing his usual Bela Lugosi impression; she probably won't get it. "So if you give me a drop of yours, I'll compare it to a sample I got from a guy downstairs," he pulls a little potion vial out of his pants pocket, "and we'll see what we see. Mine wouldn't work, it's special. It'll take me a little bit and be really boring, so if you'd ask me some questions in the meantime I'd appreciate it." Dragon also wanted him to get a survey of her powers, but Sanguine figures they can work up to that.
He doesn't move toward her. He's got a syringe in his other pocket but between the sword and her general attitude she seems like she can draw her own blood sample.
People on Golarion do not, generally, give strangers drops of their blood for unclear purposes. But this man isn't Evil, and the purpose is only slightly unclear, and they're all fighting the demon lord Endbringer together. She draws her sword, carefully nicks her own arm, and presents the reddened blade-tip to Sanguine.
"Has Behemoth attacked this planet before? Is it from the Abyss, or somewhere else?"
He delicately touches the tip of Samora's sword, and the bead of Samora's blood flows smoothly into his palm. He pours out the blood from the vial, and then all the blood seeps into his skin. In a moment it's all gone.
As he's doing this, he says, "Yeah, he comes around every ten months, give or take. Him and his two best friends, Leviathan and the Simurgh. The Endbringers. They take turns, hit random cities, and we all scramble to stop them."
"We don't know where he's from. He first showed up, uh, about thirty years back? If we hit him hard enough he'll burrow back underground eventually, and just roam around until next time."
"What's the Abyss?"
Maybe not an outsider, then, maybe some kind of Darklands thing. "I'm very impressed with your civilization's rapid response capability. The Abyss is the Chaotic Evil outer plane--do you know what Good and Evil and Law and Chaos are?"
"Yeah, well, we get a lotta practice."
Then the conversation takes an awkward turn to the philosophical! It's not really Sanguine's specialty if he's honest! Why didn't Dragon do this part?!
"Well. Sure, I guess. Law is the law: pay your taxes, don't drive without a license, go to school 'til you're eighteen. Chaos is, uh, anarchy, looting, the Sl - " wait, don't say "Slaughterhouse Nine", give her like an hour on the planet before you hit her with that " - uh, disorder. Evil is killing people, robbing them, taking advantage of them. Good's the opposite: protecting people, especially from things they can't handle on their own."
"The Abyss is...a chaotic, evil place?" He has a sense that he's wrong about something here, but not what.
"Huh, I think you just resolved a centuries-old philosophical debate. You're aware of those as--ways people can act, but not as fundamental forces of reality? Uh, the Abyss is another plane--somewhere you can't get to except with magic, or by dying--defined by Chaos and Evil; it warps everyone who gets sent there into demons. There are planes for all the other combinations of Good/Neutral/Evil and Law/Neutral/Chaos."
Dragon would probably want him to get her to talk about "magic" some more, but he can't stop himself: "Oh really? What debate?"
Once that's settled: "Can you go there? Not saying you should, just, is that something your power lets you do?"
(The "or by dying" aside barely entered his brain; he's heard plenty about where people go when they die, a lot of it concerning him specifically, and it was never once worth paying attention to).
"The debate about whether humans would figure out the importance of Good and Evil and Law and Chaos on their own if there was no magic that interacted with them! Or did the gods communicate the alignments to mortals here some other way? I could theoretically go to the Abyss if I had an item for it, which I don't because I have never considered doing that. I can go to Heaven, the Lawful Good plane, or Nirvana, the Neutral Good plane, and I can and have gone to Axis, the Lawful Neutral one. They are, as you can imagine, much more hospitable."
"There's a book that mentions those, yeah. Supposedly God wrote it? I'm not an expert. But there's not, uh, you can't go there with powers, it's just where you go when you die. Or so they say, no one's seen it. And there's not an abyss, I don't think, or a neutral anything."
"Ah, so you do have communication from the gods even if you don't have clerics like Golarion does. The philosophical debate will continue. And yes, Hell is the Lawful Evil plane and people go to the plane that matches their alignment when they die. In what ways do the gods tend to intervene on this planet generally? Back home they all pick clerics who work basically the way I do."
Sanguine's been an atheist for as long as he can remember*, first by default and then out of sheer self-defense. She's...she doesn't even seem to believe, the way some people do. She just says stuff about gods and hell, the way you'd say stuff about cars or rivers. It's freaking him out.
*about three years
But then he notices something weird about Samora's blood, and that calms him down some, and then he realizes that a true answer to her question will make the clergy look like assholes and that helps some more. So, after a noticably-disturbed pause: "A lot of people think he created the Endbringers. God, I mean. To teach us a lesson, or just punish us for being too 'evil'. Some people say it works to pray for healing but it's never, like, a leg grows back. It's always stuff people can get better from on their own. Nobody even tells stories like that thing you did earlier, with the Behemoth survivors. Nobody on the whole planet works like you do."
"How do you work, anyway? Dragon told me a little but it didn't really make sense. You can heal, but only 20 more times?"
It's very reasonable of him to be disturbed! Finding out the Lower Planes are real is disturbing! Also slightly disturbing: the possibility that the Endbringers aren't from the Lower Planes and the gods are keeping their interventions to a minimum. She'll need to think about the possibility that she's disrupting an equilibrium or costing the Inheritor way more budget than she thinks she is or something, and come up with a robust way to deal with that, before dawn tomorrow. Which may involve getting off this planet ASAP.
"It's possible an Evil god created the Endbringers, that's very much the sort of thing They would do, though if one did it wouldn't be because of mortal Evil particularly. I'm not strong enough to grow legs back but I've met someone who could; the strongest healing I can do is stuff like raising the recently dead and curing blindness or insanity. More generally, I have a collection of spell slots of different power levels, and every morning I choose which spells to prepare in those slots, and I can use a spell slot to either cast what I prepared in it, or cast a healing spell of that power level. And then separately I get six channels, which heal everyone in a thirty-foot radius. Also my healing harms undead. Also I might need to leave this planet today or tomorrow, if the gods don't intervene here and the reason for that is something I don't want to mess with, sorry."
Why has no part of this gone the way Dragon said it would, she's supposed to be smart That's not true, she said Samora's blood might be unusual, and hoo boy.
"And there are a bunch of people like that where you're from? Because our powers don't work like that at all. Like, I can do stuff with blood, but I can pretty much do whatever I want as much as I want, it's not like I can analyze it three times, and replace it five times. No, I got an all-day pass to blood town."
...did he really just say that? Why? Keep going, maybe she'll be distracted. "I guess you're kinda like a Tinker. They build things, like Dragon with that power suit you rode in, and those can have limited charges or ammunition or whatever. And they can usually turn their things into bombs if they really have to. But really you're your own thing."
"How do you find out why gods do things? Is there, ah, a spell for that?" And could you maybe cast it on our gods, find out what's up with this place?
"You don't have any per-day limits? That's so cool, back home the joke is that casters go to bed at noon." And fighters stay up all night, but she's not doing the eyebrow motion that goes with that part at someone she barely knows. "There are clerics who can make items, and I know an alchemist who goes in for bombs, but I never studied crafting. Figuring out why gods do things . . . on Golarion mostly you look at their holy books and who they pick as clerics. There's a spell called Commune that can ask them yes-or-no questions directly, but gods have limited resources and answering Commune questions is expensive, so it's only for very important things. And people have summoned angels or aeons to ask them questions."
(Is it worth trying to cast a Commune for some of the questions about why the gods don't pick clerics here? No point trying to decide that until she's sat down with the questions themselves for a while.)