"This person was at odds with, so far as I can tell, every faction she encountered, including the omnicidal faction and mine."

"Are there those in Suaal who avoid the notice of all factions and live entirely alone?"

"I would approximately expect so? Some people retreat into extremely warded 'demiplanes', spaces that you can't enter or leave just by moving a long distance through normal means, and presumably some of those people do so by themselves and some of them work on personal projects that no faction would want to go to extreme lengths to monitor or halt. The person we fought was expansionist, though."

"I see. Was the information you received about the future useful to you?"

"In this case, the information about binding the person with her own shadows was also conveyed by another non-future-ish source after we got the future-information-now-thingy and we didn't really benefit much from advance notice, and the information didn't make it adequately clear how not-dying the person was. In general, though, it's been useful to us on multiple occasions."

"In what ways is it typically useful?"

"Facilitating advance preparations. Sometimes this is very direct – 'Worry more about earthquakes' is a valid thingy.
Noticing when a topic is causally linked with a broader phenomenon.
Confirming that a topic is not causally linked with a broader phenomenon.
Noticing when someone else is using a future-information-now-thingy. I'll go into more detail on that. When someone asks the god-like flow to give them a future-information-now-thingy about a topic, and the god-like flow gives them one, that makes it easier for other people to get prophecies about the same topic, unless the first asker pays a very high and unpredictable-before-paying cost. If you ask for a future-information-now-thingy and you get a very long and detailed one, that's evidence that lots of people have been engaging with the god-like flow on the topic.
A sudden insight that becomes usable only in the moment. 'You must not agree to the first contract the red one offers you' doesn't suggest much you can do to prepare, but if you end up discussing a contract with someone you could call 'the red one', then it will be relevant.
I don't know if this is all the typical uses."

"I see. How do your tactics typically take into account the possibility that your adversaries might receive information in this way?"

"Well, it's expensive and rare, so a lot of tactics don't, except to the extent of advising not to fight someone far stronger than yourself. I can give you some commentary I've gotten. It's advisable to not immediately give up even if it looks like you're doomed by the thingy, because that way a thingy could doom you just by existing and then it'd be potentially easy for someone to make you give up. If your enemies have a thingy and you get to observe it, you should look for alternate interpretations favorable to you and push towards those. Inferring from this, thingies are a target of interest for surveillance. It's possible to interfere with the god-like flow, but it's very costly and in some cases can directly create personal safety risk from the flow itself."

"I see. Are there ways to make it easier or harder for others to receive information about you from the future?"

"So, the non-actionable answer is 'be an Aboleth' – their qualities and actions are in some way opaque to the god-like flow. I mention this because it is genuinely plausible to me that this trait also applies to all of Har – there's a substance my actions radiate that makes them detectable by various cheap and well-studied forms of magic, which should include Hari knowledge magic, though this hasn't been tested yet. Tangent, I've never heard of anyone being injured by it in the quantities I emit and I haven't observed that happening to any local life near me either. Your actions almost certainly don't give this off, and it should really be testable by a local knowledge mage. Optimistically, this means you're fine and things will only be detectable with the thingy if I'm involved with them or a plant, animal, or volunteer I successfully test things on is involved with them, and even then, the things will only be detectable with the thingy to the extent that they affect myself or a possible successful test subject."

"Pessimistically … I really don't know. You might think that having your actions be randomly determined by a good generation source would help, but it doesn't really. If there were easy things that helped I think either someone would tell me or it would be illegal for anyone to tell me and the things would be more restricted, so that rules out a lot of obvious possibilities."

"We can check whether your substance is detectable by knowledge mages. Even if your speculation is correct, it sounds as though all tests involving your magic will involve you - do you know what might count as affecting you?"

"Hmm. If it kills me or dramatically changes my behavior, it affects me. I don't know if this is exhaustive. This would in the scenario still lead to indirect detection – say, if you decided to bludgeon me to death, I know you won't but let's suppose you do, the thing that would be detectable would be me getting killed. It would look sort of like me being killed by a natural disaster, except on closer examination there would be no nature or disaster involved."

"It might be that some tests can be done without affecting you, and perhaps that would be for the best. Are there ways of deliberately using the accessibility of future information to contact and communicate with specific people?"

"Maybe there's a way to use crystallization properties of the god-like flow, but I couldn't help you with that. There is plausibly some set of actions that is useful here but I don't know what it is."

"I see. Going back to your concerns earlier, it does seem that having you observe and record and be the one to report on all the test results would not necessarily be a wise idea, and so you are right that your compensation should be structured differently than my initial plan, and if restructuring it more sensibly yields an obviously dramatically lower total then you will instead be paid based on an estimate of how much it would have cost to get you a house and whatever tools you might find useful plus the price of another interview."

"That sounds better for everyone, thank you."

"We will likely have an alternative proposal for you within a day after the end of this meeting, as well as arranging assistants for you. Are there other things as important and potentially surprising to us as receiving information from the future?"

"I'm going to list some things which may not be as surprising or important as the future information, because I have a poor model of you and my capacity to sort information here is not as good as I prefer. There are things it would be dangerous for you to scry on my homeworld even if your scry would go undetected, including at least one entire language, it's bad for people who know it. There's a cheaper system for getting more limited kinds of information from the nearer future – probably hours – that I would bet against you replicating but seems somewhat more plausible than the god-like flow thingy. If you try to manipulate time in a space with sharp internal corners, you might get some hostile people – tentacled quadrupeds with long snouts and sharp teeth – who specifically have a preference for eating sapients showing up. If you replace the sharp corners with smooth curves before doing time manipulation research, you might get some other people – small blobby quadrupeds with no teeth and bright colors and lots of eyes – showing up. They'll panic and try to poison you but it's possible in principle to build safe enclosures which they'll enthusiastically cooperate with living in, and they can be safely used to produce useful materials, a process they will also cooperate with. They eat plants, but by slowing down their growth, not directly. …looking for them may be a good place to start scrying, they don't do anti-scrying wards that I know of and not a lot of people pay attention to them. There is a not-really-a-faction that appears to approximately be opposed in principle to order and law to the point of not wanting to predictably do things that appear to be in their interests, I don't strongly expect us to run into that but it is a way people from my world can be. There is a species whose central members enjoy destruction for its own sake and also appear to actively disvalue trade and negotiation attempts, which I also don't expect to encounter."

"Uh. The information it might be dangerous to receive problem is significant, there's creatures that try to erase themselves from the memories of direct observers, and documents in fundamental incoherent informational states that it can be dangerous to use automated procedures on, and things like that, including some I can't talk about. Historically there were allegedly alternate truth values that weren't true or false or intermediate as well as concept-destroying weapons, I don't know much about that but it sure was surprising to me when I was told about it."

"I am trying to do a good job answering your question but strongly suspect I am missing things due to my memories being poorly sorted for this task."

"Tell me more about time manipulation."

"It’s possible to give oneself extra time to act, enabling one to take more actions per external second than one’s opponent can. It’s possible to take time away from one’s opponent, making them slower to act. At higher power, time travel is possible, though it's very illegal and I don't know the details. So is, say, splitting time over a decision you made and then picking which part you like better, et cetera. Again, illegal."

"How does that last thing differ from receiving information from the future?"

"There's some not-meaningless sense in which the events happen, I think?"

"Hmm. And what jurisdiction exactly is it illegal in?"

"That of the Axis-Heaven-Hell coalition, I think? Likely not here."