...to find himself in a bar. It looks like a regular tavern that you might find near the port of Ostenso, except cleaner. And without any other people in it.

This is very much not his room! He casts Detect Magic. 

There is no magic in the room, save for the bar counter, which radiates a moderate aura of conjuration.

A napkin appears on the bar counter from nowhere.

:Welcome. The bar isn't very lively right now, I know. Would you like something to eat?:

As he's deciding what to do, the door opens again, and a woman comes in.  She's wearing a homespun dress looking much better than a Chelish peasant, maybe something like people might wear on city streets.  If he's very observant, he'll notice a ring on her finger with a blue gemstone.

She suddenly looks excited at seeing the bar, and quickly runs in.  "Hello!" she says.

"Hello," he says back. He doesn't seem to notice that he's speaking a different language, and that the properties of the place are translating his intent for him. 

That is a rather nice dress. Is she a noble? Probably is, with that ring. Looks expensive. He is now about to ask a question that is going to make him look stupid.

"Do you happen to know where we are?" He takes a seat at the counter, carefully shifting his loose robes to avoid catching.

The bar replies by means of napkin again.

:You are at the Milliways, the bar at the end of the universe. I'm Bar. I can make any food and drink you want, should you want it. The nature of this place causes certain doors to open into this place, rather than the one they would normally lead to.:

"I was in Kirbrightshire, but now I'm thinking I'm not anymore."

She happily steps up to the counter, and looks at the napkin in surprise.  "Oh!  Have you see any unicorns around here?  And where're you from?"

"...Huh.  This is not the bar I was looking for."  This is the introduction Conrad, Bar, and Lila get to a multiversal traveler who's already pinching the bridge of her nose in something akin to frustration as she slips into Milliways, door closing in a smooth motion behind her.  "Then again, it had gotten kind of dead over there, so I suppose a change of scenery's in order."  (And speaking of scenery, the brief glimpse of the world behind this woman's door has so much glass and steel as to look like an absolute extravagance, to say nothing of how brightly-lit the place is in all sorts of neon colors.)

She hums for a moment, and pulls out a chair at one of the tables scattered around.  "...By the way, do let me know if I'm being rude; a lady shouldn't ogle her host without their consent to some degree, but..."  Her hands gesticulate wildly, almost of their own volition.  "Well, with the sheer elegance of this work, even if I can hardly make heads or tails of the overall design of your magic, I really want to look at it."

She's clearly directing her comments at the bar.

"And I'm guessing the rules are much the same as the other place - no wanton violence on threat of ejection or worse, for example - but do you have a sign or a shpiel or something?"

Her fingers drum on the tabletop as she lounges somewhat askew, and takes in her fellow patrons.  "...If I'd known I was going to run into the high fantasy crowd, I'd've looked the part, but noooo, I get picked up in full post-cyberpunk finery.  ...Eh, I'm the odd one out most of the time anyway, and it's not like I can't change later if I need to..."  Though it's not like she's really gone full cyberpunk in her aesthetic du jour; it's an eclectic mashup of "functional", such as the heavy-duty boots, "sentimental", which is mostly evident in the profusion of accessories that were clearly gifted to her or at the very least chosen for symbolism rather than coherent aesthetic style, and what's probably "societal", such as the glaringly geometric and shiny abomination of a shirt - it's not even got a recognizable pattern, it's just lines and shapes all over with no rhyme or reason - that she's wearing beneath a much more sober (albeit nonetheless bright red) probably-leather jacket.  If Conrad's still Detecting Magic, this woman has so many auras.  Some seem to be off and to the left, like a Banished creature or item is.  Some seem to be parts of other objects, like the two sharp points of evocation aura emanating from the bracer, which probably isn't a proper bracer given the way it's constructed (there's buttons and levers and panels!) but is definitely something of use, on her left arm.  Some are even recognizable; there's what's very probably a Decanter of Endless Water, done in metal, clipped to the belt loops of a pair of black denim jeans.

"Hi!  Who're you lot?"

Lila's hand instinctively goes to her ring when the newcomer arrives, but a moment later she tries to make it look like she's naturally folding her hands.

But she keeps staring at the newcomer, trying to make sense of her clothes and also her behavior.  "You're talking to the bar?  And - you've seen places like this before?  I'm Lila; this's my first time out of my world, but I've talked with people who've been there, and they haven't mentioned anything like... well, like this or like what you look like you're from?"

She pauses a moment, obviously looking at the newcomer's pants.  "Excuse me, but... were you trying to disguise yourself as a man or something?"

"Well of course I'm talking to the bar; the bar can talk back, it's only polite to acknowledge - excuse me, do you have preferred pronouns?  And a name, goodness, I do apologize."  Another question for the bar, it seems.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Lila; you may call me Jane.  And in answer to your questions, no I am not trying to disguise myself as a man, but I picked up an unfortunate pants habit in more modern times than you're from; haven't gone back since because clothes from my home time have absolutely murdered the concept of womens' clothing that has useful pockets - they cut the openings, sew tiny pockets in, and then sometimes stitch the pockets shut again. I really don't understand the point of it all, but then it's not like any corporation that manufactures womens' clothing for mass consumption on my home planet was operating in a way that actually gave half a damn about utility to the consumer.  They just wanted to sell as many things as they could, as fast as they could.  Which is just absolutely empty-skulled of them if they thought more than a couple months ahead, but noooo, apparently they're legally obligated to be shortsighted inconsiderate dunderheads because something something shareholders.  Ugh.  I'm rather glad I'm not there, anymore, honestly; at least adventuring like I do tends to put me in front of problems I can solve.  Instead of dealing with politics.  I am not good at politics.  Apparently, 'care about general wellbeing, since regardless of whether you take instrumental pleasure in the act itself, your life will be better for the doing, because happy people beget happy people' and 'do no harm to those who offer you no harm' are controversial positions, whereas such statements are the cornerstone of my personal beliefs.

"Leaving aside any potential argument over implementation details.

"So, yes, I've been through far more multiverse-spanning adventures than I'd like, and thus this is not my first bar-in-the-places-between-realities.  Depending on how you count, it's not even my second.  As far as my outfit, people where I've most recently hung my hat for more than a single adventure just look like this all the time.  Yes, even the ladies, though you can rest assured that dresses still survive as an article of clothing even into the far-distant cyberpunk future, generally.  One of them is actually responsible for this garish abomination of a t-shirt ending up in my wardrobe.  Honestly, it's a little bit exhausting, visually, but I can hardly blame them for wanting to brighten things up, with the way my particular present home city recently had their ongoing disaster-cum-refugee-crisis rendered...no longer either of those, not to mention the way rebuilding's going more swiftly than even I'd thought it could.  Just have to hope something's not going to fall out of the sky and kill us all, at this point, and then I think all may very well be well.  Which means I'm probably going to start wandering off to more places again, because if I don't have a saving people thing, then I'm doing a really good impression of it with novelty-seeking and chronic overabundance of meddlesome tendencies.  Anyway, enough about me.  What's your story?  And you, other guy?"

Bar manifests a napkin nearest Lila. :No, I haven't seen any unicorns recently. Though I have seen a few, in my time here. I don't remember where I'm from. My earliest memories were already about being here. I can't exactly move, being a bar and all.:

Another napkin towards Jane. :Yes, you guessed correctly. No fighting here. I also discourage trade of physical items here; I would prefer that this remain a bar and not a market. Talking is fine, though. My name is indeed just "Bar". They/them is fine.:

This has been a very unusual day. He won't say "bad", not just yet, but it certainly has been very unusual. He got transported to a ?demiplane? with a sentient construct bar that can conjure food and drink, and then in comes this woman with a thousand different magic items strewn all about her. He can't identify any of them – they're all totally unfamiliar. He should have paid more attention during his wondrous item classes.

He listens to Jane's speech. That is...a lot to take in. She definitely is some kind of outsider from a different plane, except the way she phrases things implies she's from the future? She says she's an adventurer. That probably explains the magic items. What circle would she be? Hm...seventh, at least. Maybe eighth, to have that many magic items.

"This is also my first time out of my world." My story? She probably means his origin. Alright. 

"I am Conrad Ferrer, sixth-year first-circle wizard student at the Ostenso Wizard Academy in Cheliax." He adds hastily, "Uh, in Golarion."

As for Jane's pocket dilemma: "Have you considered a Bag of Holding? Or a Vest of All Tools?" It's likely she would already have them, with how many magic items she has. Though...if what she says is true, then what magic items her world might have might not be the same as what his has.

She reads her napkin.

"Well, then.  Pleasure to meet you, Bar."

"...Ostenso Academy, Cheliax, Golarion, I've heard of a Golarion before..."  She flips the not-a-bracer open, and taps away at some buttons decisively!  There's a soft glow on her face, as well, and notably, no magic in the part of the device producing the glow.

Then she makes a hissing breath between her teeth best described as displeased.

"Well.  That sure...is.  And I do not like that it is, but I'm not running around with epic levels, just a large bag of tricks, and I'm guessing that you've," she looks to Lila, "not anything worth mentioning as far as punching gods goes, not to mention whether you're in any way interested in meddling, so poking my nose in," she directs her attention to Cameron once more, "that door is more likely to get me smote than end up with a world more pleasing to me.  Fuck-er.  ...Have to admit, I'm tempted to see what happens if you feed modrons Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, though.  ...Do you have modrons, or was that a different world...oh, no, you couldn't possibly have modrons.  Regardless.  There is a fundamental irony of logic that means it is possible to prove that some mathematical statements are unprovable, in a way that's distinct from 'it's not true, so it's proven false', and boy oh boy I wonder if they've figured that out where you are and what your Plane of Law's natives think about it.  Not that I'd necessarily be able to follow a word of the discussion; I just know the proof exists."

"As far as the usage of bags of holding...Well, for one, half of my objection ["re:": regarding] pockets is on the principle of the thing, because misogyny is bad.  The rest of my objection to magical solutions to pockets is that a) I don't actually need to fit much into the pockets I have in the first place, and b) it's rather unhelpful to reach into your bag for something in an antimagic zone and find out that the bag's dead, so I try to avoid that happening.  Though there's a few interesting tricks I've picked up how to do that let me..."  She shuts her mouth with a frustrated 'click'.  "I don't necessarily think it's in my best interests to geek out about trickery with magic in your general direction at this time, though, as much as I do so sorely wish to.  I don't think I've yet to encounter a formally trained wizard, either, which is so frustrating when I have to consider that if I talk shop with you, there's an unacceptably high risk that Asmodeus lives up to being the god of tyranny.  Your lot's capable of such bullshit given half a chance, and some of it's even practical, if the rules as written hold...though, now that I think about it, I'm not sure how many of the really interesting builds I've seen involved any wizard levels...probably any ever, I'm very sure there was something with mystic theurge and there was that 'optimize for highest possible spell level' challenge that probably had a wizard in it...Anyway.  I imagine that the both of you have a whole lot of questions, and while I can't commit to answering any of them, necessarily, you may as well ask.  ...And Bar, too, for that matter."

Lila accepts the note from Bar bemusedly.  "Then I suppose the unicorns must come from somewhere else - or maybe they get their far-jumping powers the same way as your doors work?"

Her eyes go wide at Jane's report.  "I wish I could help with the politics, but I couldn't really do anything without knowing more - the stories you've told are so strange to me..."

She falls silent (while Conrad asks his question)

Lila starts at Jane's response.  "You know Conrad's world - and there's a god of tyranny there -

"We had a god of tyranny once, or something like that.  We don't even know how long he ruled; he destroyed all the calendars.  The only thing that finally stopped him was an army of Fay from another world coming, and then flooding half the continent.  Even then, he just ran to another world.  That was almost three thousand years ago."

She turns to Conrad.  "I'm sorry.  Most of the Fay are gone, but I can still ask some of them to help."

"...I'd offer to look up information on your unicorns, Lila, but the irony of this is that they're too commonly placed across a wide swath of worlds for me to even properly narrow it down.  That said, knowing they can, teleport?  That they can teleport, helps, probably, but I don't think the search will cooperate with me as much as I'd like it to just based on that.  Do you know the name of your world, or iconic figures or places within it?  And what have they been up to recently, and are you significantly acting upon any of those figures?  It probably affects the accuracy of my search, because I've never found me on this thing and I doubt I'm going to start now, even though I've been places I recognize, so I'm assuming there's a significant chance I'll find data on worlds that don't contain a you."

And then, she wanders off into the Pathfinder-y weeds, and Lila responds.

"...Unfortunately, Golarion is both better and worse off than that; better off in that the god of tyranny is in fact contested by several other gods, worse off because the forces that give rise to gods of tyranny are part of the cosmology itself; the fundamental nature of things there is to be some parts Good and Evil, some parts Law and Chaos - Asmodeus, that god of tyranny, is Lawful Evil - and I don't think that's readily...mmm.  Alterable.  Though you can, in fact, punch Asmodeus in the face, if you're good enough at punching."

"Of course our unicorns are across a lot of worlds!" she says with a smile.  "They would be.  They don't talk - I'm not sure they're sapient - but they seem like they'd be like that.

"Our world has a lot of different names... I think the Fay call it 'Bydth'?  It's got the Mountain of Assembly, the Lebo-Ganeh Isles, the Realm of Maranon where I'm from...  it used to have the Empire of Pamydal, but that's fallen apart now..."

"You're saying Golarion's nature is that you can't drive out the god of tyranny?  But that's a bad story!  There needs to be a hope, a possibility of fixing things and Good defeating Evil!

"So that has to be a false belief from within the story.  Maybe the answer is that someone from outside that cosmology needs to change things!"

"Unfortunately, Golarion isn't part of a story, it's part of a game.  Within which you tell stories.  And games have rules, which you can ever break and bend...but it requires supreme effort, allowances within the rules themselves, or acts of higher powers than these.  You could absolutely drive out the god of tyranny, with, ironically, enough force!  The thing is, you couldn't drive out the Lawful Evilness.  There might not always be an Asmodeus, but there's probably always going to be devils.  ...Huh, I can't find a Bydth.  Then again, it's not like I found there," she waves a hand at her door, "on a search either."

"Of course every world's got more than one story.  Everyone's got their own story, even if it's a really small and simple one.  And the evilness didn't go out of our world when our god of tyranny fled, either..."

She falls silent for a moment, remembering something, and then runs her left hand through her hair.  Whoever's detecting magic will be able to see that her blue gemstone ring is definitely strong magic, and her hair also has some magic residue in it, as if she'd been sprinkling some magical powder in it.

Jane speaks quickly. It takes all his attention to keep up. She gives off Nethys worshipper vibes. Not that he's met one (well, one that worships Nethys as their primary deity, at least), but it definitely fits the stereotype. 

"I don't know what modrons are. By Plane of Law...which plane are you talking about? We have three: Heaven, Axis, and Hell."

He smiles at the next bit. "Yes, I agree that misogyny is bad. Cheliax has universal education for both boys and girls, and that applies to subsidized wizard education too. It's part of what makes Cheliax great and powerful." A swelling of pride in his chest.

He does not smile after that. ¿Of course Asmodeus lives up to being the god of tyranny? It's part of his portfolio. It's strange to Conrad how Jane somehow knows a lot about Golarion despite never having visited. He would love to learn more about otherworldly magic, but it seems that the outsider will not be forthcoming about that.

What's wrong with tyranny? Conrad is put off by Lila's comment, but it doesn't show on his face.

"Yes, Asmodeus is the god of tyranny. Asmodeus has no interest in destroying calendars, though? That sounds more like a Chaotic thing." Should he give a lecture on theology? Probably not. 

"Asmodeus is concerned about every individual having a place in society," he says instead.

He turns to Jane. "You should not punch Asmodeus in the face. Not that you even can. Gods don't have bodies. And yes, you can't alter it – that's how Pharasma made the world."

Back to Lila. Abyss damn it. He's stuck in a demiplane with a Good noble that has a magic ring and magic hair, and a high-circle adventurer with absurdly many magic items. Okay. Focus. Give up, lose hope, endure. That's what he was taught. It's probably pointless to try and show them why Lawful Evil is the best and why Asmodeus will end up conquering all the planes and all the worlds.

¿Golarion is part of a game...story? No, focus. Communing with Nethys leads to madness. Ignore that part. What's important? The bracer-that's-not-a-bracer. Which is apparently not magic. But seems to be giving Jane information. 

He turns to her. "What's that thing you have on your arm? The bracer with the...glowing rectangle."

The comment about not being able to punch Asmodeus in the face prompts a raised eyebrow, a burst of rapid takkita takkita tak click click, and an expression of some surprise.  "Huh.  I stand corrected; on Golarion and the class of worlds-that-run-on-its-design-principles, you cannot, in fact, punch gods directly.  Not that I'm going to let that stop me from trying, given half a chance.  There's a lot of similar worlds and systems in which the gods are very punchable, however.  Still remember the tale in which a friend of mine kicked Demogorgon's - hm, no, let's not offend the lady's sensibilities with how I'd normally finish that sentence.  But let's just say that I'm very convinced the fellow was not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead.  And as far as planes - Axis is very likely the one I mean, by process of elimination and also because it's a math word.

"This?  A portable computer, or in other words a rock that some very clever tinkerers have tricked into thinking.  Except it's not actually intelligent, just doing a lot of math."

It seems that however this woman wizards, she can see that there's magic in Lila's ring and hair, and she keeps trying to politely figure out what the heck they do without being invasive about it.  "Of course there's more than one story you can tell about a world, but there's a difference between the stories you tell with bulleted-list outlines and the stories you tell by rolling dice."

"I don't recommend punching Asmodeus, even if you can." It's probably not worth it to give any more advice. If she gets smote, she gets smote. He gave her due warning.

He turns to the computer. "Fascinating! So it's like a golem, then? A golem that can do math? Golems and constructs do not show up as magical. How is it able to procure information for you?"

Clearly, there's no chance that he's going to be able to do his homework anymore, and he's hungry over having skipped dinner. He turns to Bar and requests a bowl of beef stew and several slices of bread.

"Do I have to pay?" He has about 4gp in his wallet right now.

:You do not have to pay!: Bar replies in a napkin beside the stew. It's the best looking stew Conrad has ever seen. And it tastes just as wonderful. He ignores the conversation for a minute just to eat. 

:I should tell you all that time passes differently in the Milliways. So long as you are here, time will not pass in your homeworld. It's very convenient, no?:

"I don't have any plans to do so at present, I know my limits, but at the same time, if an entity existed that could do so without fucking up the whole plane in the process, I'd recommend they do it.  Because I know of exactly one hypothetically extant probably-beneficial-to-have-around-on-net tyrant qua tyrant, notwithstanding the Roman originators of the term, and Asmodeus is not Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.  And I doubt he'd be himself in that particular way if he were in almost any other situation, but Ankh-Morpork is an absolute cesspit.  The local Thieves' Guild gives you receipts."

"It procures information by being connected to a bunch of other similar devices that people have entered information into.  Or possibly Bar, in this case.  Probably Bar, even, if we are disjoint from our worlds' times while the doors are shut.  ...Speaking of, I'll take whatever you'd recommend, I suppose."

"I'm not sure I'm the person to drive out Asmodeus either.  I have my own story in my own world that isn't finished yet.  And..."  She rumples her hair for a moment with a finger, and winces, remembering.  "I know that fighting a witch before you're ready doesn't go well, and I'm sure that it goes even worse with a god.

"What's this god of tyranny doing to you, Conrad?"

She turns to the Bar.  "Can you give me - stuffed mutton, like they were serving in the castle when I was a little girl?" 

To Jane, Bar produces a pizza sized for a single person, with pineapple tidbits.

To Lila, she gets stuffed mutton. It is frighteningly similar to the way the castle cooks would have made it.

Lila breaks out smiling at the first bite.  Then she blinks back tears, remembering.  And then, after several more bites, she's happy again.

"I see. It's like a library, then, except much more convenient. I would kill to get one of those." This statement is not as figurative as one might like, given that it's coming from an Asmodean. He covers his mouth to hide his smile.

"Asmodeus is definitely-beneficial-to-have-on-net. He's the reason why my country, Cheliax, can afford to give me magic education. Hm. Maybe it's a translation error. I have noticed that you two are not speaking the same language as me. Asmodeus is the god of civic order, education and training, promise keeping, and having a place in society that's yours. Cheliax has many more wizards per capita than any other nation on Golarion, and it is a point of great national pride. Especially since low-level wizard spells, like Prestidigitation and Mending, have immense economic value."

Demonstrating is probably better than explaining, he thinks. He takes the hem of his long robe and makes a half a meter long tear in it. 

"I'll show you one of the spells we learn early on. It's called Mending." 

He moves his hands along the tear and chants, and the tear stitches itself back together seamlessly, as if it wasn't damaged at all.

Lila stares in surprise at his description.  "Our god of tyranny didn't do anything like that..."

She's even more shocked at the Mending.  "I wish I could do that - Can it fix magic devices too?"

He smiles genuinely. "Yes, with caveats. If the magic item is damaged, but not broken, I can repair it normally using Mending. However, it depends on the 'power' of the item. A wizard must have power – we call it 'caster level' – equal to or greater than the object in order to repair it. Otherwise, it won't work. The usual rule is that if the wizard couldn't have made the object themselves, then they can't repair it. I'm still a wizard student, so there's barely anything that I can repair. If it's fully broken, then Mending can repair the item, but it loses its magical abilities. There's a higher-circle spell called Make Whole that works the same way, but can repair fully broken magical items and restore their abilities, but that's a second circle spell. I, sadly, am still first-circle."

After a moment, he adds, "I should clarify that spells on my world are sorted according to their complexity and casting difficulty: from first-circle to ninth-circle. There is a special category of zeroth-circle spells, which are called cantrips. I can cast cantrips and first-circle spells. You're not considered a real wizard unless you can cast at least one first-circle spell."

There is a possible angle here, he feels. "Is it that your enchanted ring is damaged? I noticed it with Detect Magic – this is a cantrip that reveals magical items and gives a hint to their function. I couldn't identify it, though."

"Asmodeus in a vacuum is horrible; I do not know enough about Golarion's overall situation to be able to do comparative theology off the top of my head.  ...And if Asmodeus is the only exemplar of those virtues I will eat my nonexistent hat.  There's an entire Lawful spectrum, let alone the literal Lawful plane.  If they don't practice evidence-based application of human resources, then they're not behaving in accordance with some pretty fundamental imperatives of life and intelligence, and I don't think that's a very Lawful thing, do you?  Not to mention that Asmodeus believes that your position in society is 'ground beneath someone's boot', if you have not proven worthy of being an instrument of his grinding others beneath you.  And that's not in line with promoting sapient flourishing, which I believe to be the most utilitative use of time for most sapients."

To Lila, she follows up on the offer of Mending: "...If your ring's magic is broken, I can very likely fix it, given time.  I'm good at making magic sit up and do tricks."

"No.  it's another thing - a magic crown.  It's back in my world, not all that far from the door really.  I don't know everything it can do - Fraddir was the one who really knew magic; he made it - but it could do a lot.  I tried to use it to fight the witch... but he damaged it.  A lot.  And me too.

"The ring's all I've got left, and it... well, it can make me invisible."

She purses her lips at Jane's speech.  "Er, well, I can imagine all sorts of Law that can work within themselves if you want them to and you don't care about being Good."

"...I am also very good at unraveling others' magic on the fly.  If this witch is still a problem...well, you have my sword.  ...Metaphorical sword, not an actual sword, but you have it."

"Sure, you can construct a whole bunch of systems of law to lead to whatever goal you desire.  Asmodeus's goal is a boot stamping upon a human face for eternity, and laws promulgated thereby, and the enforcement of said laws, are in service to that end.  Anything benefical that comes out of it, such as increased numbers of wizards...I highly doubt that such benefits outweigh the cost of the boot, which in this case includes rather a lot of torture."

"I don't know what you mean about evidence-based application of human resources, but that seems to me like what Asmodeus does in Hell. In Hell, which is the afterlife that Chelish people aspire to, we are-" tortured "trained to be the best versions of ourselves. Which is great. They don't do that in Axis."

Conrad has a non-heretical respect for Abadar, though he still thinks that Asmodeus is better, of course.

"Abadar also promotes civic order. He's Lawful Neutral. Very concerned about cities and wealth and trade. Although I am not so fond of his country. It's very sexist. Non-spellcaster women cannot hold property, and have a curfew. If they want to walk around during curfew hours, they have to have a male chaperone. Cheliax does not have that. And it educates both boys and girls equally. That's what Asmodeus being the god of-" slavery "education and training is all about."

To Lila: "I see. If you want, I could talk to my teachers to see if one would be willing to repair the crown. What properties did the crown have before it was damaged? And as for your ring...we have those in my world. Rings of Invisibility. Very useful indeed."

Oh my Abyss. They're going to be Good people with an aversion to torture, aren't they? Sigh.

"I don't really get the boot metaphor. Asmodeus does not have boot-stomping in his portfolio. Yes, we do do punishment. That's how you keep people in line and motivate them. Is that so bad?" Punishment is unpleasant, yes, but how are you going to get students to study harder otherwise? 

She jumps up, beaming, at Jane's offer.  "Thank you!  Barvid definitely is still there on his usurped throne - please come help -  I kept hoping someone would come save us, but I never imagined it'd be like this!"

"...Asmodeus is straight-up not a knowledge deity.  You cannot make the claim of Asmodeus being a deity of education and training with any seriousness.  However you are acting in the grand tradition of Asmodean trickery, so, good for you, I guess!  ...Abadar, you are not acting in line with your incentives.  Women being part of the economy means that there is more trade.  What the actual fuck."  She allows herself a facepalm, in between snarfing down pizza slices and sipping at her drink.

"Punishment is not per se an ineffective stimulus, but on an evidentiary basis, humans and humaniform personalities respond better to rewards, rather than punishment; positive rather than negative stimulus.  Punishment can especially have some severe failure modes of vicious cycles where you are punished for failing and recovering from punishment means that you cannot invest effort to succeed that would work if you were but able to do so.  And tyranny is in fact mostly boot-stomping."

...And this is clearly her Serious Business Face, as she sits up straight, attention turned to Lila.  "...Alright.  Tell me everything you know about Barvid, and I might need to fetch some specialist equipment but assuming that there's no sneaky immortality thing that needs hunting down...?"

What Conrad is saying sounds good, but it's like he's coming at it from a weird angle.  It's like you're teaching someone to read by talking about the artistic symbolism of the letters:  it might work, and the symbolism is there (just ask Reverend Pedmas), but that's not the important point.

"That sort of training's good.  Our stories should make us the best versions of ourselves - I mean, not just us, but everyone.  But there're better and worse ways to go about it... and if you resist, you're going to have bad things happen - well, if your story doesn't divert to a different sort of story entirely; I'm not sure how that works - but that doesn't mean the antagonists who make the bad things happen are Good."

"Barvid was a general in the kingdom of Liray before he vanished and - he must've gotten into witchcraft.  Now he's saying he's merged with the spirit of the ancient witch Nimrod; Fraddir says he couldn't really do that - dead spirits don't stay around, at least for us humans - but he's not sure.

"But he somehow got Liray's armies to follow him, and he conquered Maranon and killed King --"

Lila chokes on the next words.  She wipes some tears from her eyes, and then continues in a whisper.

"I'm the Princess of Maranon.  The Queen now, really - they did crown me; I took the Oath.  Barvid didn't know I was alive; nobody knew Fraddir and Selma had taken me in the chaos.  He'd put a spell over the whole country, to make it harder to fight him - but we could do it anyway, especially if he didn't know about us.  But now he knows, and he knows who I am, now that we tried to fight him.  With the magic crown Fraddir made.  That Barvid's broken."

Her voice drops even more.  "He killed Fraddir.  And he almost killed me."

"But I can, though. Knowledge is not one of the domains Asmodeus grants, but he cares a lot about training. I feel that your information-bracer is giving you bad information. You said that anyone can write to the library, no? It's probably a bunch of biased Good people writing the descriptions. You really ought better than to trust whatever comes out of the mouths of Iomedae's paladins," he says to Jane. It's taking a surprising amount of willpower to respond to them and not just eat the stew. It is so good, and he is so hungry.

He was about to retort by saying that Asmodeus gives out rewards for good performance too, although the reward for top performance in Ostenso was the privilege of getting to whip the lowest performing student. Which...was fun, but Good people have different tastes for what's fun and not-fun, most likely.

As for Lila, "Good doesn't mean doing good. Lots of Good people and gods have done terrible, terrible things. Sarenrae, a Neutral Good god, once smote a settlement of one of her followers. Asmodeus has never done anything like that. I wouldn't say that the Evil gods promote human flourishing better, but Asmodeus certainly does. Evil has to do with acting in your self-interest. Other people would say that's bad, but Good people have a nasty habit of assuming they know better about what would be good for you. The difference is that Lawful people are able to cooperate – they can bind themselves to promises and not act on something they previously agreed not to do, even if it might be in their best interest in that moment. Indeed, that's part of Asmodeus's portfolio. That's why He is able to coexist with the Good gods, which is something that no other Evil church has been able to do."

Oh. Oh. That explains the fancy dress and magic ring and magic hair. He's been talking to a Princess...er, Queen. Shit. 

He hastily gets out of his chair and kneels, with his head bowed.

"My sincere apologies, Your Majesty. I did not know that I was talking to a royal. Please forgive me."

The business about Asmodeus god of tyranny is now sounding like the bad part of politics.  She wishes she knew who to believe and what they aren't saying - she'll have to be able to figure that out, once she's back on her throne.

"That isn't quite what I've heard about Evil," she says cautiously.  "I've heard Evil tends to like to hurt people even when it isn't really in your self-interest.  Or is that another thing that's different with Asmodeus?"

"- And please, stand up, nobody's been bowing to me for years."  Except at her coronation, but that was for the ceremony.

"...If you would like a hug, Lila, I think I would like to give you a hug.  I give good hugs.  Supernally good hugs, even.  ...And I hate that I have to, pry, into this painful thing that's happened...but if you know anything about how that magic works, can tell me what defenses Barvid has, what tactics worked and what tactics failed...I need to know that, to plan a successful strike against him.  ...How did he even get the army behind him, did he bribe the generals, was it mind control, were they really pissed off at the King for some reason...?"  She seems rather uninclined to stand on particular ceremony, at least; she was a little bit surprised, but not very.

And to Conrad: "I said no such thing, and the particular source I am consulting is primary, the words of those who created the world of Golarion.  And don't fucking get me started about whether capital Good and capital Evil are lowercase good or evil, let alone the history of such, but Asmodeus cannot actually claim to be overall good for anyone but Asmodeus by any standard of the word.  Just lawful.  And laws, as we are all aware, are not actually morals.

"And yes, let's talk about self-interest and doing things to people 'for their own good', you sanctimonious propagandist, because you sure are having a wonderful little double standard where Asmodeus and his clerics making you fit his preferred shape is totally not the same thing as capital Good people deciding that they don't like torture and slavery!"

He stands up. Doesn't sit back down though. Him not showing respect earlier was excusable, given that Lila didn't arrive with fanfare. But it would be extremely rude to sit down again.

"That is one thing that's different with Asmodeus, Your Majesty. The non-Lawful Evil gods simply want to destroy or ruin. Urgathoa is the goddess of disease and gluttony, and Her cultists spread plagues in cities. Rovagug is the Chaotic Evil god of...well, ending the world. It took the combined forces of many gods, including Asmodeus, to imprison Him. Actually, nevermind. The other major Lawful Evil god, Zon-Kuthon, is also terrible. He's the god of envy and pain. They're just very into pain, for some reason. His followers castigate themselves and do other things to their bodies as obediences to Him. Asmodeus is only interested in pain insofar as it helps correct people, as punishment. Not for its own sake."

Hm. How to approach this topic in the optimal manner. "Yes, hurting people is Evil, as Evil means acting in your self-interest. But Lawfulness represents the spirit of cooperation and binding promises. The reason Asmodean churches are able to coexist with Good churches is because His followers obey the rule of law. If we say we won't do something, we mean it. I feel safe walking around Ostenso at night because Cheliax is Lawful." He feels like he's back at theology class again.

"Eh, as long as Zon-Kuthon's people don't hurt others who aren't Zon-Kuthon-ites, I don't care what consenting people do to themselves.  It's hardly my place to impose.  But nor is it yours."  She drops into an archaic register as she delivers what seems to be a quote, "Do what thou wilt, an it harm none.  And don't think that your dodge of 'how is Asmodeus deciding what's best for me different than someone else doing so' wasn't noticed, Conrad."

"I'll answer your question later, Lila. I think attending to Her Majesty's problem, which is affecting her whole kingdom, is more important. And I also noticed how you said that you were looking at the notes of the 'people who created Golarion'. Which, unless you're communing with Pharasma this instant, is impossible."

He bows slightly. "Please excuse us, Your Majesty. I would be honored to aid you in any way I could in your battle against Barvid. Is he a lich? I could also send a message to my superiors, if you think that you could make use of Cheliax's mage corps." 

"It depends on your interpretation of multiverse theory, Conrad, but I'm confident enough that my sources are about as primary as they've ever been, because they've given me no reason to doubt their accuracy yet, and they've pulled some spectacular shit off, over the years.  Regardless, yes, let's drop this, interesting debate, and focus on the thing that needs more immediate stopping.  Though I don't recommend recruiting Cheliax unless you fancy becoming a tributary."

"Yes, a hug."

She melts into Jane's hug.  It's a minute or so before she continues.

"He's got mind-control, on a small scale, in person.  I don't think - Fraddir didn't think - he could use it on a whole army.  It's got to be they were listening to their old king, or they were fine with conquering Maranon when they had a leader - that's what they said when they answered anything - or something.  They've become more cruel - not quite like those Zon-Kuthon-ites? - but that's what usually happens when you're dealing with witch-patron spirits.

"And... there were people who tried to assassinate Barvid.  But he has mind control.  Fraddir thought that was most of what he had save normal-powered witch magic - it would explain the low-powered spell on the country, and the chaos at the first battle, and pretty much everything.  So Fraddir built this magic Crown.  But it turns out that wasn't enough."

'Jane' gives very good hugs.  Lila is welcomed into her embrace, and soothed, just a little.  The worry isn't gone, but another will helps bear the burden of it.

"...Does he have to know where the person he's mind-controlling is?  Does he have any form of prescience?  Does he regularly make an appearance somewhere predictable?"

"I don't know.  My invisibility ring does also keep me silent, but... even if I get in, I can't, er, do it quickly enough."

"...do what quickly enough?"

"What's wrong with being a Chelish tributary? Isger gets protection from Cheliax, gets social services from the Church, and gets Hell-made manufactured items. Regardless, I'm sure an alternative arrangement could be made. Cheliax and your kingdom could benefit greatly from an exchange of magical technologies, Your Majesty." He smiles. It's a very practiced smile. 

"Ah! Mind-control. We have many ways to get around that. For one thing, wizards receive lots of training in concentration and clearing their minds. It's a necessary component for spell preparation and casting. It helps resist mind-affecting spells. There are also spells to prevent, or at least greatly reduce the chances of, mind-control. Enchantment Foil is a fourth-circle spell. My teachers can cast it for you – it lasts several hours, up to more than half a day. Mind Blank is an even stronger spell that lasts a whole day, but is eighth-circle. Few can cast such high-level spells. As for removing existing mind-control, there's Dispel Magic (which can also dispel other forms of magic, as the name suggests), or the more specialized Break Enchantment."

He thinks about the broken crown. "The crown's effects seem similar to a magic item we have on our world: the Cap of the Free Thinker. It improves the wearer's ability to shake off mind-affecting spells, which include mind-control. It's quite expensive though, at 12,000 gold pieces at market price."

"Er... kill him.  Or send him to some other world like our god of tyranny.  Just get him gone."

"The crown did more than resist mind control - but that would be helpful - if we can learn what else Barvid does have.  Each magical item tends to follow some theme..."

"We could just kill him from beyond the range at which he'd have any hope of even seeing someone to control them, and I know I can make a magic-piercing projectile.  Or, given half a chance, push the crown right off his head; it's a trick I've made quite a lot of use of, since I picked it up.  ...Themed magic items, okay.  Can he use more than one?"

"Yes he can; I still had my ring" (she holds up her finger) "when I had my crown.

"And if he wouldn't know you're there, and if you can pierce his magic shields - pretty much every witch has those - I think that'd work!"

"...I'm very good at counterspells and wardbreaking.  Though I do think that it would be best to have a bit more of a plan than 'sneak in and hope I'm good enough to get through his wards' before we go at it.  Thankfully, we have as much time as we care to take, on that front.  And more supplies would probably be a good idea, for that matter.  And, hmm...I wonder if I could kill him with lasers?  There aren't very many people who think to protect against an overabundance of what lets them see...  ...ugh, and now I'm considering the Heartbreaker problem.  We have to consider his victims, in addition to killing him dramatically enough that he doesn't get a narrative of vanishing to come back again later.  And if he has contingency orders to do horrible shit in the event of his death...We'd need to make sure everyone he's whammied is in the same place, for supervision and hopefully defusal.  And how do we do that on a budget?  It's possible that we can rule that out, if we know enough about the method or the man, but I'm not sure we do or can, with just what I know we know.  Do you have other allies, Lila?"

"I know I've got some - a small underground - I'm afraid it's a bit smaller now.  And I expect most of the people will welcome me when it's safe, and when they know I'm still alive.  I tried asking people sometimes when I was in disguise, and... well, I can't think of anyone who was clearly sincere in saying 'no.'  And then I know some of the Fay, too, though they might not want to interfere in human politics.

"... Yes, we need a good plan... What's the Heartbreaker problem?"

"Heartbreaker is a specific villain who was reputed to have left people his power had whammied into absolute loyalty behind as sleeper agents, thus presenting a threat of mutually assured destruction against any seeking to take him out.  He didn't have any agents like that, but his minions were quite a lot to deal with all on their own."

"My world has similar magic – it's called Geas. If it's anything like that, it should show up to Enchantment Sight. Sadly, I can't cast it either. That's a second-circle spell. I could get scrolls of it though, relatively cheaply. It's not a popular spell."

"I don't want to be casting that on my own people!

"But - hmm, could we cast Geas on his patron spirits?"

"I don't think that a Heartbreaker scenario's likely; megalomaniacs tend to believe their own hype and he's even more secure in his power than he was before.  I'm just trying to find worst-case scenarios, because it is in finding them that we can prepare to avert them.  Anyway, what I'd want for that is a good Remove Curse or three, and then I should hopefully be able to engineer it from its components.  ...He has patron spirits.  Hm.  What, if anything, do you know about their goals, their methods, and their natures?"

"Yes, it works on any creature. Ugh, I am much too weak to be casting any of the good spells, though. There are two forms of it. Lesser Geas is temporary, and won't work on any creature very strong, but it's only fourth-circle. Standard Geas works on anyone and is permanent, but is sixth-circle."

He eats more stew before continuing.

"In my world, there is a limit to how powerful a wizard can get just by study. You can get very good at spellcraft just by study, but you wouldn't actually be better at casting or advance to higher-circles. It has to do with channeling capacity – wizards must imbue their spells with their own energy, and stronger wizards are able to channel more energy each day. The only way to develop channeling capacity is to be in a situation with high stress. Usually, that means a situation where you are fearing for your life: battles are the most common scenario. I can feel that I'm very close to advancing to second-circle, now. With your leave, Your Majesty, I would be honored to join you in defeating him and sharing my world's magic with you. Although I'll have to trouble you to explain to my superiors what happened afterwards."

"They like people hurting each other and swaggering around.  Or at least that's the sort of person they give power to... or once someone's been a witch for a while, they end up that way.  And, well, nobody knows much more about them.  They've been in the world since our old god of tyranny, at least.  They were probably working for him, but nobody knows for sure.

"You can't see them.  They can see you, but they can't tell you apart from other people unless a witch helps them.

"If we can Geas them - well, if we can Geas them to answer questions, I have a lot of things to ask them... but how strong is too strong?"

"I see. They sound similar to entities who live on the Ethereal Plane, on my world. We would need to be able to see them in order to cast Geas. And yes, Geas can be used to ask questions of someone. Hm, how to explain...Lesser Geas will not work on anyone who's more than fourth-circle, on my world. I'm not sure how that translates to your spirits. We can try, though. With regards to detecting them, See Invisibility will work fine. It can detect ethereal creatures, or creatures that are mundanely invisible. It's a popular second-circle spell; I should have no trouble procuring a scroll."

"Oh boy, asshole spirits.  I'm not sure we're going to have much luck with them, but everything's worth trying if it can lead to better outcomes.  As far as 'how strong is too strong', well.  I could show you the math, but I'm not sure it'd help any...say, speaking of, how reified are the numbers I'd see if I was playing this out, on your end, Conrad?  You've been talking about spell levels already, and I'm guessing that a lot of the fiddliest bits cache out into the actual battlefield circumstances, but if I asked you what your Intelligence was, would you know?  More pertinently, I have access to a significant amount of resources that I wouldn't feel very bad about leaving in even Cheliax-loyal hands...what is the demonym for people from Cheliax?  Regardless, I'm thinking that we should hit up the magic item market, and get the good shit.  Maybe even custom gear, but I doubt that our luck will be that favorable, and waiting the umpty days necessary would be rather a strain, even if it has no practical import."

Lila is rather glad that he isn't asking her to promise to explain anything to the country that's somehow sponsored by a god of tyranny.  She really wouldn't want to get involved with their rulers.

She nods to Jane.  "That's how they are.  Or at least I think so."

"Great.  Let's get those Geas scrolls in case they'll work, but let's be prepared if they won't.  And let's definitely get a way to see invisible things; that'll be useful either way... and test it with my ring."

She suddenly feels really vulnerable at the thought of someone being able to see through her invisibility... but she tries to hide it.

"I could also cast Interrogation and Zone of Truth on them. Interrogation is a first-circle spell, and I know how to cast it too. Zone of Truth is, sadly, second-circle, but again, scrolls for it are easy to find because it's popular. Zone of Truth prevents creatures who enter the emanation area from speaking things they know to be untrue. It's not infallible, though. It's possible to shake off the effects of either spell." 

To Jane: "Er, quite reified, I'd say. Cheliax invests a lot of money into magical research. Where other countries or wizard academies would rate wizards simply on the most powerful spell they could cast, we are able to measure things more granularly. Yes, I know my Intelligence score, it's 16. We can measure it using magic." He's going to elide the fact that it reads your thoughts, too. "Everyone gets universal education in Cheliax, but only those with an Intelligence score of 14 or higher are eligible for wizard education subsidies. The demonym is either Chelish or Chelaxian. I prefer the former. Magic items? I can show you around Ostenso and tell you where the good shops are. It depends on what your budget is."

"My budget is 'diamonds are actually rather easy to make, chemically speaking'."

"I suppose the shops want cash up front?" Lila asks before Jane mentions the diamonds.

"Then we shouldn't really trust Zone of Truth, if they can shake it off.

"And if we're talking about magic, then we should definitely at least try to mend my crown.  It was supposed to be able to do all sorts of moving-at-a-distance and force spells - though of course I didn't really have a chance to fully test it."

"...moving at a distance and force spells?  Well, that'll be easy to fix.  Do you have it on hand?"

"No; I left it in the woods by a badger holt - not that far away; I remember where."

She turns to the Bar.  "Sir Bar, if I leave for my world, will I be able to get back here again?"

Diamonds through alchemy. Wow. He has to learn that.

"Well then! They'd prefer gold pieces, but any self-respecting magic shop will take payment in diamonds. We can buy a bunch of scrolls of See Invisibility, perhaps True Sight, Lesser Geas, Geas, maybe Enchantment Foil, ooh, or Mind Blank." He doesn't look forward to the process of having to read the scrolls, but he should not be thinking of that right now.

:Yes, provided someone is holding the door while you're out. You can come back in by coming through the same door. But if the door closes...I'm not sure. I'm not the one who manages the doors.:

"All right... I can find it and get back in a day, with my invisibility ring... if Barvid doesn't notice it when I've picked it up.  I don't think he will, but I'm not totally sure.  Can you hold the door for that long, or do you have any speed spells or" (she looks at Jane) "non-spells?"

"I can't cast Haste, which is third-circle, but I can cast Expeditious Retreat for you, Your Majesty. It's first-circle transmutation, which is my specialty. It increases your running pace by five feet per second."

"...Bar, any problems with my leaving a 'this way to Milliways' marker here?  And Conrad, those are good ideas, mostly, Geas excluded and I am very much a fan of Mind Blank, but I was in fact serious about getting magic items.  Not just scrolls.  We should look through the list, and maybe see if anyone's been playing with the custom crafting rules in the bigger markets -- actually, I bet we could gather...no, that's just more people to have to shield, most likely.  ...As far as transport, yeah, I have plenty of that, if you don't mind holding my door first."

Lila is still working out the numbers (she's not used to this sort of math) when Jane answers.  "Great; of course I'll hold your door!"

:I'm not sure what you mean by a "marker". Putting up a sign about this place would not upset me, but I don't control the doors. Once you close it, it's probably not going to lead back to here.:

"I have my own methods of travel, Mx. Bar; I would not like to wander in should I be unwelcome, or set a beacon that would attract unwanted attention."

:You are always welcome here. The...beacon would not be any problem, since the Milliways usually won't open doors for anyone it thinks would cause harm to me, itself, or the other patrons.:

"Then I'll do this," and she pulls out a rune-carved sphere, then twists it in half, placing one side atop Bar and returning the other to wherever she was originally keeping it, "and trust you to keep it somewhere safe."  She detaches two (of six) of the screen panels from her bracer, sets them up to show a particular wiki, and passes them to Lila and Conrad.  "This is the System Reference Document for Pathfinder, and you're looking at the page for magic items right now - put your finger on the screen and drag to move the page, pinch to zoom if the text is too small, tap the blue underlined text to go to that part of the document, the glowy button on the side takes you back one step; you two should take a look at it and see if there's anything useful.  Er, if the translation effect covers it, at least.  If not...Bar, is there anything you can do on that front?  Either way, I'll go rustle up a ride for Lila, a whole bunch of diamonds, and probably whatever magic item occurs to me in the next hour or so."  She starts to head out, then catches something, turning in her steps towards the door.  "Hey Conrad!"  She produces a small diamond, cut in a medieval-appropriate fashion, from wherever she keeps her gemstones, tossing it at Conrad - though from the subtle flickers of magic around it, if he can still see them, she's not just throwing it and hoping for the best - it's being guided into his catching hand, assuming he bothers trying.  "Are you able to tell if that's good enough for magical work?  Wouldn't want to be unknowingly committing fraud, and I don't know how equivalent my diamonds are to your diamonds.  Or, for that matter, if there's any metaphysical translation layers of this place's function as a nexus that would go along with its translation of languages."

Conrad is very impressed by the illusion-information-light bracer. 

"I can't read it. Likely this place can only translate spoken language, then. If I end up sleeping here, I can prepare Comprehend Languages tomorrow." Fortunately, he is a very good student who paid attention in wondrous items class. He can just describe the items (which he can recognize by the pictures) as they come up to Lila. 

"If we're going to be fighting a caster, then I recommend Mantles of Spell Resistance and Cloaks of Resistance. Rings of Protection are also good to have, since they provide deflection. It protects against touch attacks by casters. Oh, and Headbands of Vast Intelligence. Very useful for wizards." Okay, the last one isn't actually very necessary but he might as well get it out there. Who doesn't want to be smarter?

He receives the diamond with cupped hands, like the treasure it obviously is. The diamond is clear and seemingly free of inclusions. "It's Raise Dead grade. I would say it is good enough for magical work." It's worth five thousand gold pieces. He can...buy a headband with that money. And still have a thousand left over to buy spells with. 

:Yes, the Milliways can only handle spoken words, sadly. You can sleep here, but not here here. There are rooms upstairs you can rent for the night.:

Lila stops dead-still next to the door.  "You can raise the dead!?"

Interesting. He wonders whether Bar would accept Chelish currency. It's backed by gold, but also by damned souls. That might cause issues.

"Is it possible to pay via services? If you have laundry, cleaning, or dishwashing that needs doing, I can do it. Prestidigitation can get rid of dirt in seconds." He spills a little of the beef stew gravy on the countertop and casts Prestidigitation on it. It vanishes, and the bar counter is left pristine.

:That's amazing! Yes, of course. With that level of efficiency, two hours of work will be sufficient to rent a basic room for one night.:

"Er, yes. It's a fifth-circle cleric spell. I can't cast it. Not just because I'm too weak, but also because that's a divine spell, and wizards cast arcane spells. Do you not have divine magic where you're from? Raise Dead is the weakest of the resurrection magics. It requires that the body be fully intact. It will heal lethal wounds, but it will not regenerate lost or severed body parts. Only important people get raised, though, because you need diamonds for it. Raise Dead grade diamonds are usually worth around five thousand gold pieces. There are other resurrection spells: Resurrection can work with just a tiny fragment of the body, and True Resurrection doesn't need a body at all. Sadly, those ones need bigger and therefore more expensive diamonds, and also are a higher circle of spell."

If the Church of Asmodeus were to be first to offer resurrection magic to Lila's world...

"Jane - you said you can make diamonds easy -"

Her surprise is giving way to a different sort of shock.  This will change all sorts of things and reopen all sorts of stories that were ended.  The whole idea of ending stories will need to be changed.

"Can you raise people who died of anything?"

"Sadly not, Your Majesty. Revival spells cannot revive anyone who has died of old age. It...has to do with how souls are retrieved from Pharasma – the goddess of the dead. Further, Raise Dead cannot revive anyone who died because of a death spell. By that, I mean that certain necromancy spells are able to prevent the raising of those they kill. However, Resurrection and True Resurrection are able to get around this. As an aside, coming back from the dead is taxing on the body and soul. People who are raised usually come back weaker, but this can be healed via Restoration. That's also a divine spell I can't cast."

Now's probably the best time. "As a Lawful faith, the Church of Asmodeus offers revival services for the price of the required diamond and the cleric's time and spell slot. The fees are comparable in price to Abadar's church, although Asmodean churches do not offer resurrection insurance. Er, resurrection insurance is something very rich people or adventurers take out to ensure they are revived if they die or get killed."

Oh.  So some stories will stay the same, at least, because people will still be dead of old age in the end.

That will still be sad in a way, but they will have lived a good life.

And Barvid probably doesn't know that sort of necromancy.

"I think we should all get that insurance.  We can't rely on anyone being able to bring the diamond afterwards."  Also, she'd rather not put herself in the hands of the god of tyranny's church.

"I agree, Your Majesty." Him? A first-circle caster, getting resurrection insurance? It's...absurd. Not going to argue that, though. Honestly, it's disappointing that Asmodeus's church doesn't have resurrection insurance and Abadar's does. That's probably heresy and he is not going to think that. Asmodeus is Asmodeus and Abadar is Abadar.

"We can visit a temple to Abadar in Ostenso for that. Cheliax permits other Lawful gods to set up places of worship. It will be much more expensive if you do not provide a diamond. To clarify, you can give them a Resurrection-grade diamond then and there, and they'll use it for you if you die. That's an option you can take when signing up for insurance. It's cheaper if you do it that way, because then they don't have to go through the trouble of sourcing the diamond themselves."

"...The question is, does Adabar even cover our putative service area?  I wouldn't want it to turn up too far away...Maybe I should learn the spellwork, set it up on a contingency basis; I probably 'count' as far as 'has divine spellcasting class levels' goes, given some of my...youthful indiscretions, and it's yet to be too far away like that.  Certainly works here, at least.

"Also, I'm going to want to watch you cast Comprehend Languages, because while I have my own tricks, that one is one I'm only making do for rather than actually making work; the last place was more of a Babel Fish about translating, and only sort of covered written language, so if I'm not still covered by that, a reliable way to do such for arbitrary languages would be grand.  I've got plenty of tricks for the spoken word, but not any for writing, yet." 

She's rather glad she does have such tricks.  They're probably going to be -- "Speaking of which, I would like to teach and learn your languages by way of my own spell.  Well, I say 'my own spell', but really it's someone else's spell I...hm, reverse-engineered isn't quite the right word for that, but it's not exactly plagiarizing either...  I've got the spellwork, regardless, and it's mostly a black box that I've figured out how to plug things into, rather than something I necessarily fully understand, even if I do know exactly where it came from.  Still, teaching and learning your languages in turn is well within its remit."

"I'm not sure. I do know that there are planes which the gods of Golarion can't reach. Though Abadar is an ancient god, not like Iomedae or Norgorber. He has a wider range, I would think. Sadly, I can't cast Comprehend Languages. I already used up my two standard spell slots for school, and my specialist school is transmutation. Comprehend Languages is divination. I can cast it tomorrow, though. And that spell you're talking about sounds fascinating. It sounds similar to Voluminous Vocabulary. Not a common spell, but diplomats and envoys use it."

He currently has Expeditious Retreat prepared in his specialist school slot, although that fact is not evident. He offered to cast it on Lila earlier, but he'll just keep it in his back pocket for now. It is a wonderfully useful spell. The name is misleading, too, since you can use it just as well for attacking. He is not the sort of person to run away.

"I'm going to operate under the assumption that we will need to test whether a cleric on Golarion can resurrect someone on Lila's world somehow.  Do...you know where your brother's body is, Lila?  I can get arbitrary diamonds; we can make Resurrection happen, it's just going to need something of him for the spell to focus on, something that was him when he died.  And then we'd want Restoration, to shake off the negative level.  Or we could do Reincarnation, that's an option too, I guess, which is...certainly an option, but not one I'd really prefer, too random.  Maybe even True [Rez: Resurrection-but-it's-one-syllable], which would mean not needing to visit his grave, but there the limiting assumption is 'is there a cleric or other divine caster capable of casting a 9th level - circle, I mean - spell'; you don't get those every day any more than you get wizards who can cast something as absolutely bullshit as Wish.  It's highly unlikely that Abadar has one stationed in Ostenso; I'd expect such to primarily be in his faith's place of greatest prominence, not out in the middle of Asmodeus Land.  High-level adventurers are power projection in and of themselves; it's rude to swing them about without permission."

"As far as the spell I'm talking about...Well, it's called Communication Through Essence, and while I've done a bit of tinkering with the spellform's targeting, it's still mostly in the state I plagiarized it from, but to my understanding, it works by a different method than Comprehend Languages or Voluminous Vocabulary.  It's spiritual communication, rather than extra knowledge inserted into your head.  Which is why it only works on living beings; most objects can't talk back.  ...I should see if it works on computers sometime, I know it works on plants and I know materials do have a Presence characteristic in that cosmology, which is what the spell's limits are tied to natively even if I reworked that bit to be less of a pain, so we can determine that soul is an emergent behavior, and if I'm carrying that metaphysics around with me...Anyway. 

"It'd basically be me 'saying' 'the concept of English as I currently understand it' at you, and you hearing and understanding that, and some instructions for the...mental motion I needed to figure out how to encapsulate broad concepts like that in the first place, so that hopefully you can do it in turn.  Biggest ask I've made of this, really; I've used it to 'say' images before, and transmit abstract concepts, but not an entire language yet.  ...and I can't really think of a way to make Milliways' translation effect useful for machine translation that wouldn't be an absolute pain, so Comprehend Languages is probably what I want to get; then I can pair it with some sort of language-learning algorithm and any actual study of linguistics and anthropology.  ...I have to admit, speaking of Milliways' translation effect, that I'm very curious what I'm going to hear on the recording of all this later.  ...And whether it varies depending on whether I'm in Milliways or not, because if it works on recordings...And if it works on sign language!"  She tests this hypothesis with the pidgin sign she's picked up from working around military types; saying something that's approximately 'I will advance to the objective, calling air support; you two hold position.'

"...And, say, could you Prestidigitate some more, when I get back?  If I'm not going to run you out of spell slots.  I don't think that's a thing for even prepared casters' cantrips in any of the third [ed:edition, as a one-syllable word] alikes, and I know 5e doesn't have spell slots for them, but I don't have as much practical experience...  Anyway.  I've got my own solutions for a lot of what it does, but how the fuck can it handle flavoring things?  It has to be operating on a mechanical level, because it's not mind-affecting, but you hardly have to tell it the chemical structure, and it can mask scents as well as make them..."

Her door opens to a bustling street, and she makes sure it stays open with a shim of force anchored to an actual shim as she sticks a sign on the door, pulling it from what's probably a bag of holding; some sort of hazard symbol, perhaps, from the bright coloration?  A line, inside a circle, inside a triangle, black on shining yellow, and, after a moment's thought, a cordon of caution tape from a reel that seems to just be yellow before it goes through a device attached to one end.  "Warning: Magical Bullshit Behind This Cordon, Enter At Your Own Risk."  Then she sticks another warning sign, a red octagon with a stick figure having been punted into what's probably a portal, beneath the first.  Having reclaimed her screens, she does something with them for a minute or so, and makes a satisfied nod as she steps back inside, letting the door swing almost-shut, as the bustle of the city continues. 

"Alright, my bike's gonna be here soon enough, and I've placed an order at the fab for riding gear and comms for the both of you, which you're going to wear for this, gender roles be damned; I don't care if you wear something else over it right now but I don't want either of you getting mugged to death and this is the best way I have of preventing that that doesn't take more time than I have patience.  ...I'd better suit up properly, for that matter."

"Fraddir's not my brother; I hope his body's found and buried by now, but I didn't stay around to see...

"We're all going?  Shouldn't one of us stay behind to make sure the door doesn't close?"

"Ah, my apologies.  Don't know how I gathered that impression.  Still, having someone who actually knows what they're doing with your world's magic around can only help when it comes to repairing the thing and making new things, if we can but find him.  And I can make very sure the doors don't close, short of a high-level caster deciding that this specific door being a smidge open has offended them specifically and deciding to do violence about it.  I'll add an order for a couple of security droids, plonk them in here, set their shields up against the door..."  Tap tap tap tappita tap, go her fingers once again. 

"...Bar, if I'm on the other side of a different door and my door closes, am I on my own for getting back there, or is the, connection, held open by people passing through it?  If you know.  ...Same for if a door closes while someone from another world is on the other side, for that matter.  But regardless...the one world I would have a pain making my own way to a specific instance of the hard way, really, is Golarion.  There's too many of them to have much reliability finding a specific one that I've only seen and casually interacted with just from knowing the general story, if I don't have a unique native or narrative to point at.  Though at this point I think I could probably specify both of your worlds well enough that I'd be able to land in their space first try, with only a little winnowing; interacting with Milliways is quite distinctive, if nothing else."

He barely understands half the words Jane is speaking, but it seems to him that he's about to get a bunch of otherworldly ?magic? items from her homeworld, so he doesn't complain or interrupt. Apparently she can make infinite diamonds? He...is going to refuse to consider the implications of that for him. Not thinking about things is a vital Chelish life skill. He's not as good at it at Lucia, but he's passable.

"Yes, I can cast Prestidigitation as much as I want. Cantrips can be recovered after casting them. It's one of the first things you learn in wizard school."

:I don't advise that. If your door closes, I cannot help you get back, save for the Milliways itself leading you back to here.:

"I can always go home when the adventure's done, Bar.  's the rules.  's the story.  And I know how to get back to my beacons.  The question is more, 'if Conrad leaves through Lila's door and Lila closes it, does the door still work because Conrad's on the other side of it, the same way I can open and close my door all I like while I'm in here'.  And Conrad, if you wouldn't mind going wild with Prestidigitation, just hitting every possible use if you can, and telling me what you're doing and how you're doing it as best you can, I'd really appreciate it."  She's staring intently at the wizard.

:It won't work anymore unless the Milliways sends him back here. Which may or may not occur. My apologies.:

"Well that's...problematic. We could buy a few scrolls of Plane Shift and Teleport for that. And a tuning fork for the Prime Material. Those are expensive, but I've been led to believe that money is not an issue, yes?"

"Sure, I can do that," Conrad says. He can lift small objects with it, though using Mage Hand is better. It can make things clean. It can make things dirty. It can make things change color temporarily. It can heat up or cool down various things, not just food. It can change the flavor of food. It can create tiny, ugly, and fragile sculptures.

"It's really quite a versatile spell, I agree, though the main use of it is cleaning. We're taught how to clean our clothes and ourselves using it. It's important once you're at the Worldwound or deployed on a mission. Although it doesn't make you feel clean."

"Hm.  Thank you, Conrad, I still have no idea how Prestidigitation does that, but I've got a good idea of what it's doing.  And no, money's not an issue.  If you know the specs I can make it myself.  The plan's going to have to be modified, probably; we send only the people who aren't from the world we're going to on missions there, and the person whose world it is operates via telepresence.  It's a bit more than I'd like to deploy, and probably going to cause a riot if the crashed spaceship and its tiny god gets wind of it on the Golarion side, and speaking of which what year is it on your world, but in the interests of not stranding anyone, I think it's worth it."  She starts pulling out a series of things much like, but clearly different from, whatever device is on her bracer and was previously handed out to Conrad and Lila, and begins assembling them together with some sort of telekinesis while she spools out some sort of wire from the device in her bracer and connects it to what's probably a work surface.  There's a bing! noise, and she hums.  "Don't mess with this, it's basically a ritual working and you will not be happy with what happens if you mess with it."

She's actually popped the entire screen-and-board combination out of her bracer, now, and sets to work doing some sort of arcane but non-magical test sequence, and then what's clearly a magical test sequence, because it involves floating lights, much akin to the Dancing Lights cantrip but operated entirely by artifice.  "Alright, we've got acceptable thaumic flux...now pass the precompilation through the optimizer, set this and this and that..."  A bar on the screen fills up.  "And here, we, go."  Tak, goes her hand on the biggest button, and with a flash of a runic diagram of a form only almost completely alien in shape and nature to Conrad, the low-resolution circle of white-and-black on the floor expands into a solid black cylinder, about the height of a human, consuming light that touches it, as magic is put to work.  "Gotta keep the build environment clean, so I can't drop the shield all the way or for the entire process, but I could probably detune the light absorption 'round the visual spectrum and let you watch; nothing in this stage is photosensitive during assembly and if you're smart enough to figure out how I'm doing this just from watching the compiled work, you deserve to be able to do it yourself."

And with that comment, she pulls open the metaphorical curtain, revealing an intricate diagram in the center, plus a boundary circle of some sort.  It appears that nothing's happening...until, suddenly, something is; parts of some mechanism simply start appearing in-place.  Occasionally, the inner diagram flashes white-on-black for a second, then more parts start appearing.  It seems to be some sort of six-legged...something, about the size of a large dog, made primarily of silvery metals.  "The wonders of technology, hm?"

"Yes, by all means, let's resurrect Fraddir!  He'd love to be back here and help us finish this story!"

(She's a lot easier about that then resurrecting anyone from her actual family, for some reason... maybe it's just that they weren't a part of this story?  But she's not going to think about that just yet." 

"Yes, let's get the Tuning Forks, if you're both going into my world.  There is still a portal out of there that I could probably reopen... but that's the one they shoved our own god of tyranny through, so goodness knows what's on the other side these days --"

Lila cuts off and stares in awe at Jane's mechanism.  "What... does it... do?"

"Security!  In this case...hold on, I'll set it up and show you, now that I need to get her moving anyway.  ...No, there's not an actual mind or gender in this.  It's a she in the same way as boats or natural disasters or temperamental furnaces or what have you, are."

She plugs her cable into the now-finished droid.  "Normally, I'd do this wireless, but I'm being more paranoid than usual because, there's a crashed spaceship that would just love to get its hands on minions like these."

"In this case, I'm loading Minion One here up with the best in 'hold this position' I can make.  Which is, if I dare say so myself, pretty good.  She minds the person whose door she is assigned to keep open, in this case I'm figuring it should probably be yours on account of needing to gather a couple things from your world...and if I'm building a telepresence 'bot, or just having you ride along with VR gear while I travel, we probably don't need to worry so dearly about keeping the door open.  Not that I'm going to not stick her in the doorway regardless, but it's not urgent.  Anyway, she minds the door, and keeps it held open by the simple expedient of having 'shields: yes' in the way of attempts to close it."  The shields, it seems, are by default softly glowing silver-white hexagonal panels about a meter across, based on the idle muttering she does as she tunes the (several redundant) emitters to be best suited to bar Lila's specific door, then Conrad's, then hers.

"Right, that's one set...Well, set...but what I've additionally done is anchored a ward inside the chassis that I can target at specific objects, to reflect force, which I'll apply to the doors.  And that's enforced by the equivalent of...well, I don't think you know what a Faraday cage is, so that it's the Faraday cage to an antimagic field's EMP doesn't help any in explaining.  Anyway.  The project started when some people who hated magic started throwing antimagic nets at my friends; I stole some samples, and basically turned the effect inside out, such that instead of dampening magic, instead of prying apart a void in the Weave, if you're Conrad - wait, do you have Mystra, or - no, no you do not, nevermind then, that's a different world's thing.  Or if you do have a Weave it's someone else's.  But since we're talking about the Weave, let's use a fabric metaphor!  Imagine a blanket of some sort, woven with yarn thick enough that you can see individual threads.  Instead of prying the threads of fabric apart, like an antimagic field does, this grabs hold of the threads that're already running through that area and sort of pins them in place, but that explanation is really, really simplified.  Magic's a lot more...wibbly than that, in my experience.  Still, it keeps antimagic fields from crossing the barrier."

"And then of course it can physically jam itself in the doorway if needed."

There're so many new things here that Lila isn't sure where to start asking questions.

"Do you have another one of these to fly us to the forest?"

"I wouldn't use this design to fly with, unless it was the only tool I had, but yes, I do have transportation fit for at least two, that I can actually fit through the doors."  She eyes something on her screen, and starts another print cycle.  "I think the bike's going to be here in..."

And then her bracer goes bing, and she pulls what someone from a modern world would peg as a sci-fi motorcycle through her door.  It has Tron lines, for all that she immediately starts testing the active camo, because she is an absolute nerd whenever she can get away with it.  "Now, apparently.  This, is kind of like a mechanical horse, but many, many times faster, and yes, it can fly."  It's already hovering, but somehow she conveys the impression that that's not at all what she means by flying.  "Speaking of which, flying is dangerous, so I'm going to give whoever comes with me safety equipment, and it will be used."

This mechanical horse looks great!

Lila holds one hand up to the motorcycle's headlight and strokes its handlebars with her other hand, just like she would a horse.  "I used to watch the birds and wonder what it'd be like to go flying with them.  That was all I could do for a year or so, while Fraddir and I were hiding in the woods and he was studying magic...  Birds and foxes and rabbits and such; my ring of undetectability was such a great friend."

Oh wow. The...headless horse machine does not appear to be magic. And is levitating of its own strength.

"Yes, I would indeed like to have safety equipment. Well, assuming I get to use it. How do you use this thing?"

"...Yeah..."  She seems to be lost in contemplation for a moment.  "Being in hiding for a year, with whatever problem had forced me to it beyond my capabilities to even reasonably affect, would have driven me spare.  I...have to admire your resilience and resolve.

"But speaking of your ring of undetectability, I'm quite curious how it works; do you know?  Is it an illusion, a somebody-else's-problem field, some sort of 'phase off and to the left of reality' thing?  And I'm quite curious if my gear has any way of piercing it.  I'd like to experiment, if you wouldn't mind?"

And assuming that no-one vehemently objects, the party gets to see what this lady's adventuring gear looks like!  It's...something very much not unlike scalemail, perhaps; there's certainly rune-etched steely metal scales in a shape that reminds one of gemstones, woven into a black undersuit.  Her boots have some sort of springy not-a-heel stretching from mid-calf to the ground, for a reason as-yet unknown.  Across her hips sit what's clearly some sort of weapons belt; Conrad can definitely recognize "wands, but weird" (and, oddly, tied to the belt via some sort of integral mechanism, unlike most of the magical items Conrad knows), both can recognize a seemingly bladeless weapon hilt, and there are some other things clipped to her belt that might be recognizable as holstered guns, albeit that one of them has a tank of some sort attached to the frame, as well as a pressure meter, and both scan as having magic involved in their operation, if Conrad has another Detect Magic in him (or Lila has magic-sensing capabilities).  There's also several color-coded magazines of ammunition tucked away, and, oddly enough, a cape that rapidly adjusts shades from a rich purple to a soft blue as it unknots and drapes itself over the back of a chair.

Also she has a tail now, armored in much the same way for all but the slightly bulbous tip (that looks to be some sort of nozzle and three-pronged manipulator), idly weaving back and forth in a way that makes it quite clear that it's somehow under her direct control.  "Fun fact: Any human that came into existence via natural selection instead of divine intervention has the mental hardware necessary to easily adapt to having a tail.  Equally fun fact: that world out there can make artificial limbs to spec and interface them with your flesh, and includes a lot of tail-having people.  So I made myself a tail, though the one I use in daily life is a lot more easily tucked away when I don't need it.  It's pretty useful!"

"As far as the safety equipment I'm going to give you...It's going to be a stripped-down version of, well, this.  Mostly just the undersuit; you don't have to worry about hypersonic bullets crashing the party which is what the scales are for."

"And, you don't use this unless I'm out of the action entirely, but you accelerate with the right-hand trigger, brake - slow down - with the left, and steer by turning the yoke left or right; it helps to lean into the turn if you're going fast enough but isn't precisely necessary, unlike how it would be with a motorcycle that rolls on its wheels.  If it comes to flying...we'll get to that when we get to that.  There's an autopilot, anyway."  She busies herself with putting words into action and setting up the field fabricator to make those basic suits for the two, with slight alterations to the design because they will need to get in and out of them the hard way.

You know, it would probably have been a better idea to give the clearly very high level wizard adventurer more respect from the beginning. It's not a good idea to be rude to high level adventurers. Especially high level adventurers with magic (and non-magic but still magic) items up the wazoo.

Scalemail. That will interfere with his spellcasting. Not a good idea. Though he still wants it. 

"I should tell you that wearing armor as a wizard causes issues with casting spells with somatic components. I haven't been trained in spellcasting in armor."

Tail? Why would you want to make a tail? Tail means tiefling, and tiefling means second-class citizen. Although it's likely that her world doesn't have tieflings. Or discriminates against them, so it's moot. 

Lila tries to dampen her sudden fear at Jane's testing the ring.  "If you want to test it, sure?  It doesn't affect people's minds; it... yes, you could say it phases me out from the world sort of?  It was... really helpful.  Fraddir made it."

"And that's great armor!  I've never heard of any magic that works differently with armor - what counts as armor like that?"

(She's much more comfortable with the thought of armor.)

"Hey, Lila, it's okay. We're on the same side.  I'm not even going to take the ring myself; I just want to see it in action, and then maybe enhance it.  How's walking through walls sound?  And Conrad, as for whether I'm giving you something with arcane spell failure chance...Well, the undersuit absolutely doesn't have anything that'll trip you up; you could wear it under your robes if you wanted, and it's proof against bow, crossbow, melee weapon, and most gunpowder firearms save for stuff like cannons to the head, and that mostly because of the dynamics of forces, which I mitigate with magic - firearms will definitely still smart a bit, but really even cannons are safe to stand in front of if you're not in an antimagic field, they'll just toss you around somewhat - but let me look something up." 

The screen on her device changes without a single touch, and...oh boy, her tail's jolted straight out like a scared cat all of a sudden.  "...How far is Cheliax from Numeria, Conrad?  Because if we're near enough to that polity that there's anything like a trade route or adventurers showing up routinely, I think I might insist on adding at least some armor, though I'll keep range of motion and lightness in mind.  I don't want someone thinking you've gone and stolen something from the Silver Pinnacle or wherever the Techno Union have set up and shooting you with 3d10 bludgeoning about it, or worse something esoteric; pretty sure the undersuit alone is not rated for that, though it'll still do its damnedest."

...Several more pages flash onto the screen in rapid succession, as she continues to investigate things, and the magitechnologist actually swears.  "And of course disrupt technology exists, why was I thinking it wouldn't?  And there's nanites made of bullshittium, on the other end of the scale, what joy.  I am going to have so much fun going over my theoretical defenses before I dare set foot on Golarion.  Not.  Plus whatever the fuck noqual is is probably a ready-made pain in my ass, and I don't know what wins in a fight between adamantine and diamonds...  And did you know the Technic Union made a magic automaton out of the explicitly antimagical material?  I wonder if it's like the way steel stops being magnetic when heated to a certain temperature, then magnets stick again when it's cooled down, except, obviously, backwards.  Seems like the sort of thing that might work, at least, and there's an example of it doing so.  That or they electroplated a regular automaton with it.  Except that I bet if I went looking, I would not find that the book says that; I bet it's made out of pure noqual.  Anyway.  How likely are we to encounter Numerian bullshit while going magic item shopping in Ostenso?  And what year is it?"

Lila breathes more easily when Jane mentions enhancing the ring.  That's a good reason to give it over for a moment; that sounds more like a good turn in the plot.  She can't leave that by the wayside.

"Yes, sure," she says, holding out her finger with the ring on it.  "Now?"

She twists the small gem on the ring, and disappears.  If Conrad is Detecting Magic, there's a burst of magic, but then nothing, even as she remains invisible.

A few moments later, with another burst of magic, she reappears a few steps away.

"...Interesting.  It's like you're taking a half-step, leaning ana-wards, doing something so that things reflect off of you at a fourth ninety-degree angle, compared to the spell I know that simply lets me walk that way, or the material that somewhat erratically moves along that fourth axis when you handle it in specific ways in the first three.  It allows me to project other things like spells, for that matter; I can pick up on the light you're reflecting when I push a sensor in that direction.  But you're still physically present here.  I think I want to get this spell copied for myself, and maybe show it to a friend to work out the intricacies of it; she's the one who taught me the trick I use for 4D work and I bet she'd love to see someone doing something like this, because I don't know if she knows how and it's her thing.

"Anyway, it's going to be pretty simple for me to make that spell work for you; give me a few minutes to tinker, I just need to put the parts together really quick.  That said, keep the ring you already have, too; being able to exert force while invisible is quite useful."

It's a simple enough process for her to repeat the enchantment she's built into every suit like hers; modifying it slightly so that it has a more forceful telefrag avoidance protocol, then checking it twice, takes up the majority of the time allotted to actually working the spell.  The rest is predicated on assembling a ring much like her other band, and keying that into the switch that powers the spell.  "Be warned, I've done what I can to avoid trouble like falling through a floor that's not there or shifting back into an object that is, but if you're on a second floor or in a building carved from a mountain, there's a strong tendency for near-ana and near-kata to not have the work of human hands mirrored across it.  I did work in a basic force panel, but you're going to want proper boots if you intend to go up and down stairs that way.  And maybe a periscope."

Lila takes her ring back with relief.

She takes the new ring too, and runs her hand over it with wonder.  It feels hot like it's from the forge, but also smoother and lighter than her ring.

"Can I try it out now?  What happens if I use both rings at once?"

"Numeria is far away from Cheliax. Egorian is a thousand miles away from Starfall: those are the respective capitals. Adventurers are everywhere, but Numerian adventurers are unlikely to be in Ostenso. The year is 4700 Absalom Reckoning. It's the Age of Lost Omens. Also, thank you very much for the undersuit. I'll try casting Prestidigitation with it to see if it interferes with my casting." 

"There's Protection from Technology, by the way. We might be able to get scrolls of that in Ostenso. I can neither cast it, nor have it in my spellbook. I only have Protection from Chaos in my spellbook as part of Worldwound training. Why are you so worried about Numeria in particular? Other technology abjuration spells are Rebuke Technology, Magic Circle against Technology, and Antitech Field. It will be years before I can cast those myself, though."

"Oh, would Rebuke Technology break this new ring and these suits?  I don't see any reason for Barvid to have it, but I'm realizing I don't know where his patron spirits have been... some scholars say they came from some other world at first."

"No, it merely suppresses them. Technological items are temporarily disabled, and technological creatures are rendered unconscious for the spell's duration. It lasts less than a minute, though the duration scales with the power of the caster. Many spells are like that."

He thinks on this for a moment. "We would call Barvid a witch then, Your Majesty. Witches in my world have dealings with otherworldly patrons that grant them powers."

"We call him a witch too..."  She thinks a bit.  "I don't know where that word comes from.  I think it's a coincidence.  But maybe I shouldn't be using this new ring to walk through things around him."

"As far as I'm aware, this is an entirely different method of travel compared to plane shifts, which is what I'd expect anything that would lead you into being somewhere his spirits can reach out and touch you would be based on - this isn't stepping into the Astral, it's just another direction, like up, down, left, right, forward, back...As for using both of these rings at once, they should go together fine; just keep in mind that if you've stepped kata - if you turn the ring counterclockwise - and lean ana, like your ring does, that you're going to reflect your presence across the zero point, this reality.  And the ring's just magic and subject to antimagic and dispels, not technological.  As for whether disrupt technology et al. will mess with my stuff...There's some features that might get fucked with, but I'm a firm believer in redundant engineering, and what I'm giving you two has...exactly one thing that's got the processors anti-tech has to be targeting, anyway.  The rest of the suit's just mechanical.  If anti-tech spells can cause shear-thickening fluids to not thicken when hit, or carbon fiber to stop having tensile strength, then we're already screwed, but I don't think that it works that way.  And there's a magic-based redundant implementation of the software, anyway, so it'll just fail over unless someone's decided that you in particular need to be dispelled.  Still working on adding proper psychic coverage, but you have psychics as a flavor of magic anyway, not a whole 'nother system, even if they substitute verbal and somatic components out for thought and emotion.

"Why I'm worried about Numeria in particular is that its presence in the world involves and invokes particular threats that I normally don't run across at the same time as I do any wizards of the sort that can cast wish, and they've got some very particular flavors of bullshit that I don't, yet.  Notably, anything involving nanites.  Not that I don't have plenty of ideas, but I've yet to find the seed tech.  So I might actually want to make a stopover and get samples, if I can be sure I'm not going to be shot for trying.

"As for what Barvid is...if anything, if I were comparing him to classes, I'd probably reach for 'binder', knowing what little I know of how he does what he does; I'm not sure if you have them, Conrad, but I think the way they gain power by mantling vestiges with certain traits is much more like the image I've built of how Barvid does what he does than a witch or warlock making pacts for their spells-known; if Barvid was separated from his spirits he'd have significant problems, whereas witches can just find different ones to bargain with.  I think, at least; it certainly sounds like that's the story."

"Interesting. I don't think I've seen anything like that before, although I'm not exactly well traveled. I've only been to Laekastel, my hometown, and Ostenso, where I go to school. A year from now, I'll be at a Worldwound garrison. As an aside, when are we going to sleep? It will be my bedtime in a few hours, and sleep is very important for wizards. We can't prepare spells without sleep. What sort of spells do you think will be most useful? I can prepare them tomorrow. I'm a Transmutation specialist, and my opposed schools are Enchantment and Evocation, so don't ask me to prepare spells from those schools, not that I know many."

"Yeah, eight hours' rest, which I've always thought was bloody stupid because the only reason sleep exists is because evolution can't manage a rolling live update, so giving it mystical significance is just absurd...Lemme check, but at least one Comprehend Languages, if you would.  I'm going to need to take a close look at that if I'm to get anything useful out of your spellbook, by the way, unless I've got enough data on how the actual fuck your lot's casting works and the right metaphysics to prepare spells from your spellbook, which...Honestly, in terms you'd understand, I'm much more a sorcerer than a wizard.  So I'd love to find out if I can actually read your spellbook, but I'm sort of doubting that I have any particular inherent capacity, at present.  Maybe I'd count as whatever that sorc-wiz hybrid is - Arcanist? - but somehow I doubt it.  Anyway, how many spell slots?  And if this place doesn't let you rent rooms, I suppose I could put you up somewhere on my end, so long as you don't get all...proselytize-y about it.  It's a nice place, and if I have to spend the next three months scouring out demon cults doing nonconsensual blood sacrifices or something, I will be very annoyed.  I could probably stand to take a night and let things percolate, too; see if I've got anything better-suited, ask the masses for spell designs that'll deal with whatever the fuck sort of absolute bullshit a molecular annihilation pulse targeted specifically at sapient life is.  Maybe see if the decision theorists have something useful for avoiding getting retconned by an angry god, or if someone's come up with a foolproof scheme to either starve or glut Rovagug to death.  And take shameless advantage of having semi-reliable foreknowledge to poke some shit that needs poking."

"I - it is not our kind's way, as wizards, to just...show people our spellbooks. To a wizard, a spellbook is almost an extension of our bodies. Half my net worth is contained in mine, and I bet that most other wizards are the same. Also, most wizards charge a fee for another person to copy spells out of their spellbooks. However, I understand that you are already giving me armor and equipment. In the spirit of cooperation, therefore, I'll let you observe me prepare my spells, and I'll let you look at my spellbook portion for Comprehend Languages while I do so. And I'll show you me casting it. None of my spells are particularly rare or valuable, and the highest circle of spell I have in it is second-circle. I suppose Masterwork Transformation is a rare spell.

I can cast three first-circle spells per day, not including my specialist school slot. I can prepare Comprehend Languages in one of them. Is that all? Hm. I wonder whether Rings of Sustenance would interest you. It cuts down your need for sleep and for food." 

She's a sorcerer? A different sort of sorcerer, then, it must be. She doesn't seem particularly Splendid, honestly.

He is genuinely offended at the demon-worshipping comment. "We do not worship demons! Demon cults are banned in Cheliax. Demons are Chaotic and we want nothing to do with them. That's why Cheliax sends so many people to the Worldwound – to fight demons. The reason I go to school is to fight demons.

Also, I doubt anyone in the whole of Golarion has thought of such a scheme. It took the combined efforts of many, many gods to imprison Rovagug, not just kill him. If one of them knew of a way to eliminate him, they'd have done so already."

"Yes, excuse me, I'm not used to making a fine distinction between demons and devils - I meant the latter, rather than the former, but practically, I have so rarely encountered either in a universe that cared about the distinction that they just both just mean 'Infernal living thing'.  My apologies; I may have vehement opinions about the pointless destructive nature of most evil gods and the value of sapient flourishing in general, but it behooves me to at least mind my terms.  I don't like it when there's devil cults doing nonconsensual blood sacrifices on my home plane either.  And, yes, I am in fact interested in rings of sustenance.  I shall quite probably make an entire list, if I'm going shopping properly.  It will, at least, help me keep track, even if my brain tends to be rather akin to a magpie in a dragon's hoard at the prospect of getting substantial material and materiel from Golarion.  The metallurgy alone...do you happen to know if," she checks something, "siccatite, is still possessed of a fixed temperature even when in environments as devoid of magic as Golarion knows how to make?  Because I have so many ideas for what I could do with that, let alone the replicable process for making metal that's a one-way valve for heat."

She stops doing the mad scientist impression, backs up a couple steps, and takes a few deep breaths.

"If you do not wish to show me your spellbook you are by no means obligated, but I truly do appreciate that you are willing to allow this."

"I see. If it's 'infernal', then it's a devil. For demons, it's 'abyssal'. I'll accompany you in magic shopping to ensure that the shopkeepers aren't gouging you on prices. And so that we can...haggle. Haggling is an important skill as a wizard with a keen interest in magic items. Sadly, I don't know much about siccatite. It's a rare metal that falls out of the sky – I haven't seen any before. It certainly hasn't come up in my studies either. I would permit you to examine my spellbook as much as you like provided that I receive magic items. Are you Lawful?"

He doesn't think she is, but maybe. "If so, I'll happily compact with you with regard to the issue." He smiles.

"I think that the general concept of a two-axis system of morality is at best bullshit spun out of a historical artifact of wargame faction design, but I do consider myself capable of holding to contracts, especially contracts of specific performance, when to do so would not immediately endanger life, and would be willing, in principle, to negotiate a deal with you along those general lines."  ...She's stored her armor back away, produced a pad of paper from somewhere, and is propping it up on - oh, interesting, she wasn't wearing a belt, that pale lavender wrapped through her beltloop is what's coiled up as a stand for the pad.

"I will procure for you, or allow you to keep, if it is an item we find with no other ownership claims upon it, a magical or wondrous item to be determined, subject to veto for cause; its value, as measured by comparison to book value for an arbitrary magic item, shall be equivalent to no more than the present replacement cost of your spellbook, and you will allow me to observe your spellbook for no less time than one Golarion day, in discrete hour-long chunks at my option, subject to your veto; as well as observe, with full sensory panoply, the processes by which you prepare your spells and scribe new spells at least once."

Lila, who's been testing out her old and new undetectability rings, briefly flickers back into visibility to comment, "I've never heard of siccatite before, or anything like it.  And go ahead and negotiate yourselves, but I'm glad you both accept Law, because it's really important to be able to work with others!  Even when you're not a queen."

"I see. That's Lawful enough for me. I assume that the equipment you give to me with regard to helping Her Majesty will have to be returned to you later, then? By replacement cost of my spellbook, I wish to clarify that this is the total of the cost of the empty spellbook, plus magical ink necessary to rewrite all of the spells inside it, plus 50% to the ink fee to represent copying charges. Half the magical ink price is standard fee charged for a non-rare spell for a wizard to let another copy from their spellbook.

I also wish to add that observation of my preparation of new spells must be fully passive and will not interfere with it in any material way.

Further, I wish to have the option of taking multiple items so long as the total cost of the items does not go over the preagreed limit, and the option to offer you my own money, denominated in gold coins, in the case that the total cost of the items exceeds the limit but not by over 10%. Also, I would like the phrase 'magical or wondrous' to be struck – the possibility exists that I might desire a non-magical or non-wondrous item. I'll take a few minutes to calculate the value of my spellbook now."

He could just...lie...about it, but that seems like a bad idea. He'll be fully Abadaran and honest in this case. He gives the calculations.

Blank standard spellbook: 15gp

Zeroth-circle spells: 18 * 5gp = 90gp
First-circle spells: 21 * 10gp = 210gp
Second-circle spells: 23 * 40gp = 920gp
Total: 1220gp
Plus copy fee: 1220gp * 1.5 = 1830gp

Grand total: 1845gp

Lila tries to hide her shock at the cost.  She knows the Royal Treasury handles sums of money much more than that - she's talked with a merchant in the Resistance who'd handled similar amounts himself - but she hasn't seen more than double-digit sums of gold in years... and that went promptly to Fraddir's magic-crafting.

Instead, she goes invisible again, and twists the ring into a new configuration so she's still invisible but still audible.  With an "Excuse me," she grabs the pen out of Conrad's hand once he's finished writing.  It disappears as soon as it leaves his grip.

A few moments later, she reappears and offers him back the pen.

"Ostenso doesn't skimp on their spellbook provisioning, I see.  And we've used the same math; wonderful.

"Yes, the equipment I give to you is on loan.  And yes, observation being passive, save by your agreement otherwise, is something I'm willing to agree to.  Hmm.  There's somewhat of a problem with the idea of you offering me gp for its monetary value, and it's that I mostly only have use for gold insofar as it's something others value and useful in industrial processes.  I wouldn't necessarily say there's anything like a post-scarcity society on the other side of this door, but I would say that gold's value to me is less than it would be to yourself.  I certainly keep some in my emergency traveling supplies, but that's because of preparedness, not out of believing it has intrinsic monetary value.  It doesn't, and Golarion's economy is lies anyway; money just does not work like that, especially money backed by commodities.  So how about we round the replacement cost up to the nearest hundred gp, instead, or - Bar, would you be willing to serve as currency exchange for this purpose?  I believe you'd make a fair neutral arbitrator, at least.  If you have specific items in mind now, Conrad, I'm willing to consider adjusting what I round to.

"As far as striking 'magical or wondrous'...I suppose that's feasible, yes, with the proviso that technological items must be items native to Golarion or items serving only as identical replacements for such.

"I am not going to buy you an arbitrary amount of items; three permanent items, where 'permanent item' is defined to include items that are consumable but have permanent effects, or items that regenerate charge without further investment of resources, totaling no more than whatever cost we agree to, or the option of converting an option of a permanent item into no more than three scrolls, wands, or technological items of similar inherently limited usability, or no more than five alchemical potions or chemical products as would be sold by a Golarion chemist on an individual basis."

"Indeed. Chelish magic students do not want for anything. Well, I do want for many things, but that's just my greed. Compared to other countries' magic academies, we are well-equipped. 

I...see. I'm being trained in wondrous item creation, not ring forging or magic arms and armor smithing. If you would be willing to round up in exchange for naming a specific item, then I would like to keep a ring of protection +1. I realize that the difference is over one hundred gp, though, so I am willing to make up for it by scribing a scroll of Comprehend Languages for you to study and use for free. I'll use my own magical ink for it. I will also let you observe the act of me scribing the scroll, under the same observation conditions previously stated. However, the act of scribing requires that I prepare and use a casting of the spell itself, so I will have to prepare Comprehend Languages twice if you want to see me both scribe and cast it. The specific action is a little different from casting – scribing a scroll is more like putting an enchantment on an item than real casting."

The amount of magical ink he would need to use for that will use up all of his personal reserve, but it's totally worth it if he gets a ring out of it. Also, he's very confident in his ability to...haggle with the shopkeepers to get the price lower than 2000gp, but it's not good to do that too often.

"Oh - you're working on magical item creation?  Then you really should look at Fraddir's notes, or talk with him if we do resurrect him - he was probably the single best person at it in our world!"

"I would be honored to meet with him, Your Majesty. I do hope we are able to resurrect him. There are several different disciplines of magic item creation in our world. Ostenso teaches the common ones: crafting magical arms and armor, crafting wondrous items (which is what I am training in), forging rings, and crafting wands. The academy in Egorian is bigger and teaches more."

"What do your wands and rings do?  Our witches have wands too; I think they act as beacons for the spirits.  And what're wondrous items if all those aren't?"  

"Wands hold charges of a specific spell, which lets a wizard cast a spell many times without having to prepare them. They're expensive, though, and you need to be a strong wizard in order to have the channeling capacity necessary to make them. They are distinct from rods and staves. Rods usually permit a wizard to cast a spell with metamagic – specific boosts to a spell's performance. I'm trained in Extend Spell, which doubles the duration of a spell. Staves are similar to wands, but can be recharged. I don't think that Your Majesty's witch wands are the same as the wands of our world.

'Wondrous item' encompasses a wide variety of items. I would say that basically any magic item that isn't a staff, wand, ring, armor, weapon, potion, or artifact is a wondrous item. They usually offer some boost to the wearer. Cloaks of Resistance help someone avoid the negative effects of spells, headbands make someone more Intelligent or Wise or Splendid, belts make someone Stronger or more Dexterous or Enduring, and so on. Rings are similar, but they hold different spells. Certain spells are simply much much easier to make as a ring rather than a wondrous item, and vice versa. Common rings include rings of protection, which is what I am negotiating for. Those shield you from both magical and mundane attacks. Another popular one among wizards are rings of sustenance, which negate your need for food and water and drastically reduce your need for sleep, without interfering with spell preparation."

"Wizards usually save to buy Headbands of Vast Intelligence, which, as the name suggests, makes you more intelligent. Being intelligent is necessary for being a wizard. I personally am looking to buy a Belt of Giant Strength, however. It makes me very strange among wizards, given that wizards usually have no need for strength and stay in the back line. But I'm planning to work as a frontline buffing caster that aids other fighters with spells, while also being able to fight, and for that, you need to be Strong. I have martial training in the use of greatswords. Er, I should clarify that that is not something taught at Ostenso Wizard Academy – I learned that from my family. They passed down an heirloom greatsword to me."

"I don't think so, unless you're trapping spirits in the wands... or setting up deals with them in advance for them to look out for the beacons...  Hmm, I could almost see someone doing that in my world?  That would actually explain a few instances with secret agents.  But it sounds like your wands are different.

"I don't think rings are different from other magic items in my world, though - Fraddir said the only reason he made this as a ring" (she holds it up) "was to make it easier for me to hold it.

"And yeah, you do need to be strong to fight.  I know the shortsword, but I don't like it."

The woman currently calling herself Jane hmms for a second and nods, in response to Conrad's request, pen scratching across paper as Lila and Conrad talk for a moment. 

"To be clear, Conrad, the deal we're making, is: I shall fund your purchase of a ring of protection +1 for personal use, and in exchange, I will gain the option to intensively but non-invasively study:

Your spellbook, for the duration of one Golarion day, in non-consecutive hours;

Your process of spell preparation, once;

and

The process of your scribing a scroll of Comprehend Languages, once.

In addition, I shall receive the resulting scroll, to do with as I wish.

Bar, please confirm to Conrad that this is the text of the document that I am handing him now.  Conrad, please write a copy of the contract in your preferred language, at which point I would appreciate if Bar could confirm that it has no meaningful discrepancy in terms.  Then we shall sign it, date it in both Golarion and my local time, and if they are willing and able, either Lila or Bar signing as a witness would be appreciated.

As for your questions about Golarion's magic, Lila, wands store a spell which anyone can theoretically use but have limited charges of said spell, rings are one of the things you can make magical equipment out of, no more and no less, and wondrous items are a specific subclass of 'items that are magic' that Conrad has explained better than I.  There's also artifacts, which are magic items with extra ontology behind them, but I doubt we'll see any of those.  They tend to be related to quests, and we're not questing on Golarion.  Just shopping.

Though I might take a detour, since we've a potential infinity of time; I've a scheme percolating to potentially pacify Rovagug and maybe take some competition for the Grand Asshole Prize off the table, and I'm certainly going to see if anyone spots something else that just needs a good kicking to fix that no Golarionite knows needs delivering."

Bar confirms that what Jane said indeed corresponds to the text of the document. Conrad writes down the terms in Taldane from what he hears Jane speak. He puts his version of the compact on the table, and Bar confirms after a few minutes that the two papers are functionally identical. He signs it and dates it in Absalom Reckoning. He notices that the contract terms do not actually say that he needs to prepare another Comprehend Languages to cast on himself, only that he needs to scribe a scroll of it. So he actually has two standard spell slots free.

"I am pleased to compact with you. Where will we be sleeping? Here, or some other place? I will need to sleep to prepare my spells; you can observe me and my preparation in the morning. Hm. I also realize that once we leave this place, we will no longer be able to converse with each other. Comprehend Languages can only let you comprehend, not speak. I also cannot cast it for the two of you, since the spell has a range of 'personal'. I am unable to cast the other language spells like Share Language, Tongues, or Voluminous Vocabulary."

She signs the contract and dates it in a time she checks on her screen.

"I have some potential solutions for language barriers; mechanical translation is not impossible, just very, very hard, and I do have a spell of my own that allows communication in concepts, rather than languages; I'm interested in Tongues because mine doesn't do writing even if it does do plants.  And, note to self, check if it works on computers and [VI: A thing you can make a computer operate that is not intelligent but could pass for intelligent when performing specific tasks] sometime.  I believe we've already been over this, actually?  As for sleeping...I vote we sleep here."

"Before we do, though, I should run some tests for your armor; I'm going to set that to making, overnight.  And Lila, do you have preferences as to what I should prioritize for you, equipment-wise?"

Conrad is very pleased with this development. Well, he won't be able to keep the armor, sadly, but it will still be a great experience. He Detects Magic while Jane does the tests. 

That is certainly some magic he sees, a tangled mess of disciplines showing as a thread - a physical thread, for all that it's somehow transparent - unspools and wraps around him in an outline, before filling in with the slightly glowing ghost of some sort of cloth, what's probably armor panels of an entirely different form than those seen on the one example of this armor that they so far have, and...huh, there's a thin layer of water in there too, for some reason, thicker around the vitals, thinner around his hands.  The bits that are clearly force constructs seem to be reacting like actual cloth and whatever-the-panels-are-made-of would, rather than mage armor, even.  "We're going to test this for range and ease of motion, and you're going to tell me when it stops giving you arcane spell failure chance.  Go ahead and do...Whatever it is you need to, I suppose?"

That is just...wow. He has never seen anything like it. It feels strange, what with how it fits the body exactly. He tries casting Prestidigitation a few dozen times, and finds that the first iteration already doesn't cause it to fail.

"It's perfect. It's wonderful. It's great. No arcane failure." He's in love with this armor. His voice is full of awe, well, by Chelish standards. He tries slamming his fist into his other forearm to test the armor, and the armor hardens in the split second that he makes contact and spreads out the force. No pain or discomfort, even though the force he used would be normally enough to bruise.

Lila countersigns the contract as witness.

"We were planning to have my Crown fixed, but I'll want another weapon as well... Do you have a magic sword that's designed for people who aren't so strong?  Or - even better - a wand with some fighting spell, if we can get one that isn't so limited?

"And then something that will disguise me.  I can be invisible now, but - sometimes I might want to be visible but not recognizable.

"I'd ask for a shield too, but I think the Crown would shield me about as well as any of yours... even though that wasn't so well."

Lila watches Conrad testing his armor, smiling with relief.

But then she frowns a bit.

"That's great, except... Can I get something that's even less obvious that it's there, or else something that, er, has skirts?  Er, I could wear skirts over it, but that isn't really done - I mean, it'd look unusual if people saw it."

"Good, very good.  I'll just get that going, Conrad; you can go get some rest."  The ghost-of-armor is pulled back, the platform of making things spins up again, and she turns to Lila.  "Yes, I do think we can get you some wands that aren't drek, and a sword that's good by my standards, and I can absolutely work in some skirts; this, as it is, is really not anywhere near as stand-out to anyone who doesn't very personally know what you look like without it as you'd think, when you're wearing it like you're supposed to, speaking from experience and also having talked to quite a few professionals, but far be it from me to turn down an excuse to add more protection to someone's outfit.  And I can make it different colors, if that would help.  I'm - how did you control the Crown?  I know the rings turn to activate...  I'm going to need to do a bit of fiddly adjusting so as to make the magic items work well with the suit, now that I think about it, but I can certainly do that.  Would probably help if you stuck around a bit longer, though, for testing."

Conrad cannot, in fact, get some rest right away though, because he has Laundry Dishwashing Prestidigitation Wizard Duties to do. Hooray. Bar gives him a list of places and things to clean, and he goes and does that for two hours while Lila and Jane figure out magic items together. After that, he gets a key from Bar to his room.

He goes in to see a room with a bed, desk and chair, and a lockbox. The key opens the lockbox as well. Before he goes back to sleep, he sneaks into his room in Ostenso to recover his explorer's outfit and his greatsword in its leather sheath, and puts them all in the lockbox along with his spellbook. 

Really? This was supposed to be a regular room? You mean that this room, with its piped water and flushing toilet is regular? Amazing. Two hours of Prestidigitation work for this? Then again, the bar is magic, so what did he expect? He thoroughly enjoys the cold water shower. Before sleeping, he Prestidigitates his Ostenso academy uniform robes clean.

Sometime during the same two hours, a credstick is swiped to pay for two rooms, much to the patron's abject bemusement and insistence that "really I hardly think you should take this, but if you're sure," but she waits until Conrad is definitely gone for the night to reveal that she owns a violin that, well-played, can refresh the body and mind, as well as the soul, in much less than eight hours.  She isn't going to bring it with her on the adventure; it's of sentimental value as much as it occasionally comes in handy, but Bar's safe as houses, so she can do a soft solo piece for a two-person audience, mournful but determined to march onwards and make things better.

Assuming Lila wants to listen, that is.

She's definitely going to play, though; she needs to be awake to work on designs like this.

Conrad wakes up in the morning and puts his robes back on. He doesn't know where Jane is sleeping, so he asks Bar. Bar says that they don't give out that kind of information. Conrad reminds them of his agreement with her. Still, Bar is reluctant, but does convey a message to Jane by instantiating a napkin on the desk in Jane's room.

About to prepare spells. Meet at room 3.

He returns to his room and puts the spellbook on his table, opening it to the page for Comprehend Languages. Hm. He doesn't actually know which spells to prepare, since they haven't discussed whether they're going to Lila's world straight away or going shopping over at Ostenso first. Or doing some other thing. He knows that adventuring wizards usually discuss the night before with their team which spells to prepare so that they can formulate tactics. Not that he's going to be doing the heavy lifting in this party, but he might as well be as useful as possible. He taps his foot while waiting for Jane to arrive.

He has three first-circle spell slots, and a bonus one for a Transmutation spell. 

(Lila explains that she controls the Crown by thinking.  It was designed to work well with human minds, specifically - that wasn't Fraddir's doing; it came from another pre-made artifact he modified for it.)

Lila is very happy to hear the violin and enjoy the running water.  Some remaining tension seems to melt out of her.

She spends several hours getting Lila equipped and acquainted with her new outfit; as requested, and as involved in the design as she was, it does have skirts.  It has many things, in fact, in addition to the aforementioned skirts, not least of which is "a transformation sequence, because if you really insist on having long skirts like this I'm going to make sure that no-one trips you up on them, and the best way to do that is magic fabric," as well as "this sword is also a wand through which you can shoot lasers; so are the boot daggers and the ones hidden up your sleeves."  Additional features include "and this is how you activate the energy-absorptive properties; I've worked in the same sort of warding I use for my own equipment, so I don't think that there's ever going to be incoming fire that it'll miss, but there's certainly no guarantee I'm perfect...oh damn I need to consider the case of 'overheals sometimes can make you explode', dammit Positive Energy Plane, but at least I can probably store that for later...let me just rough out a..." (the next half-hour is spent deep in the weeds of that problem for both Lila and herself, and ends up with yet more runework embroidered in her dress, deep blue embroidery on smooth black fabric as contrasted with the odd threads of white woven through the underlayer and fringing the small bit of gold setting the gem that holds her outfit, "which I can't really do so much of for Conrad; it's hard to muster care for someone that would cheerfully have bullied you in school and is actively promoting torture and slavery, even though I do prefer that everyone gets a chance to live their best life, and the spell that goes into this thread in particular has an emotional component for me," unless Lila has specific colors in mind.)

It seems that she has decided that the best weapon for Lila is, in addition to a general tune-up of her shortsword to the mage-technologist's standards of appropriate sharpness and maintenance requirements, extra-strength sword beams; simple collimated light projected at any angle from the tip at a mentally designated target ("can you think at this crystal like you'd think at the crown for a bit?  Thanks."), powered by her absorption of ambient energy, when it's not a dart gun that shoots "pretty much the best tranquilizer I've yet seen; if it can't get through the armor flick this switch and it'll shoot a pellet that bursts into naptime mist instead, and if that's not effective, taser darts should work on most of the rest; be careful with them, though, too much shock can kill," or something that she describes as containment foam "grenades", which are hardly grenades as much as an air-reactive chemical that goes foomph, stored within a thin-walled, rune-etched (for aim enhancement), glass sphere, "summoned at need but there's always going to be a few in this belt pouch.  And there's med-spray in the opposite; good for emergency wound care, disinfectant and it promotes clotting.  Right, am I missing anything?  Oh; the veil's meant to proof you extra against things that require eye contact to hurt.  And I think that's all, unless you have a specific request.  I'm gonna go lie down and stare into space for a bit, then see what my call for research on Golarion's turned up."

Later, the napkin flutters through the holographic interface she's been browsing Golarion's timeline on, annotated by an entire Internet's help in sorting through the lore, looking for long-running crisis points (Rovagug, where she herself has added "if Unity is divine because of sims, can Rovagug be satiated?", an alien invasion...) and definitively beneficial interventions (an arcane disinfecting spell for Rahadoum, several different societies' public health texts (she has a spell specifically for scanning books, tablets, etc., and makes liberal use of it on every library she passes through on her travels), instructions on how to culture penicillin, several economic papers on why slavery, misogyny, and more generally discrimination are a net harm to economies that practiced them that she intends to yeet at the church of Abadar - though most of these are marked with the yellow warning dot she's assigned to "requires fluent language"), and she flicks the hologram off as she reads the napkin-message, rolling out of the bed she's been laying on for the past little while in a smooth motion as she pulls her equipment from wherever it goes when it's not on her person.

Her loadout is different today; she's loaded not just for bear, but the entire forest, and the result could best be described as both bedazzled and bristling.  This is the bleeding edge of her never-finished work, not the stolid workhorse of a middlingly armored suit that she wears when the only things she finds a reasonable thing to fear are the remnants of disgruntled corporate assassins, and it shows; whether in the incredibly obvious opal-tipped wizard staff, strapped to her back by a seemingly solid metal band, that looks like she could use it as a warhammer and a rifle, the springloaded diamond-edged sword blades slightly recessed in her arms that crackle and glow ominously as she runs a test sequence, the magicproofed inertaic compensator that will not only lighten her load but also defend against hostile gravity manipulation, the nozzles for dispensing chemical attacks built into the frame, the way that the suit itself runs through a rainbow of colors and then fades into the room as she tests the responsivity of the smart camo...

There's that and more to warn off anyone who'd think about fucking with her, and that's mostly only the technology, not the varied magics she's worked into it, from backup runic control engrams, to field fortification magics, to the way that every bit of cloth she wears on the outside of that armor is under her mental control (such as the cape, once again tied 'round her shoulders, still in a pleasing blue, but also including the invisible strings tying shut and anchoring to her person her various and variously manufactured bags of holding), to a defensive array that not only absorbs but consumes and unleashes the force of blows laid against it.  Not to mention the bevy of drones waiting for the signal to shift anawards and wreak havoc of various degrees.  It's best to bring one's A game, she thinks, when you plan to go meddling with gods and horrors.

Then again, the cautious thing would be to simply not do it at all...but if she doesn't, who will?

Her voice echoes out, slightly staticky due to a subtle distortion applied by the freshly magicproofed speaker system.  "Alright, then.  Time to go shopping...then go meddle," and off to Conrad's room she goes.

Lila loves the blue-woven dress!  She twirls, dancing, and runs her hands up and down it, and gives Jane another hug.  "Thank you!  This's the best dress I've worn since -" (there's a brief flash of remembered pain in her eyes) "- since my adventures started!"

She tries her shortsword on the armor, and is happy to see it doesn't get through.

"Should we all be going to Golarion together?  And - oh, any suggestions about shoes?"

She gets an extra-strength hug, as if not just the woman giving it has enfolded her with care, but some vast entity has looked upon her and experienced compassion.  "Shoes, shoes...did I not?  Um.  Right, I'm going to make you some boots; they make it effectively impossible to land on anything but your feet.  As in, you could jump from the top of a mountain to the bottom of the sea, and be perfectly fine, and I know they worked for a thousand feet or more of mineshaft.  Those are also going to be part of Conrad's gear, so I'd figured I'd save the handout and explanation til then, but yeah.  And then I can give you the gravity skates...And you can get some practice in, for that matter, especially if you start playing with the bouncy panels I can work in.  If you want, at least.  I might just start with gliding."

And Lila soon has a pair of genuine mobility boots, possibly not only with the addition of toewiggle-activated gravitic repulsors that allow her to skate across the floor!  Lila has the option of getting an insets in the sole for "bounce high", "accelerate more in complete defiance of friction", "stick to things", or even all three, altered by a somatic command that she can theoretically trigger independently per boot, if she wants.  (She stole clicking the heels to make shoes do things from The Wizard of Oz.)

Conrad stands when Jane enters out of habit, and then sits back down again.

"Let's get to it. Where are we going today, exactly? Are we going to Lila's world, or to Ostenso? It will determine what sort of spells I ought to prepare. Not that I have communal spells yet. Those are second circle at the least. Most of them are only going to affect me. Still, it's a good idea to practice, especially since I'm going to have to work in a squad at the Worldwound. Unless you have objections, I'll prepare Infernal Healing, Shield, Magic Weapon, and Comprehend Languages, which you asked for. It would help me if you could tell me what sort of spells you can cast or abilities you have, so that we don't needlessly overlap."

His magical ink bottle is sitting to the side along with parchment for scribing the Comprehend Languages scroll.

"Hm.  I think that we should plan on spending, at the least, vastly more of today in Golarion than Lila's world; there's something of a question of dependencies in that if we want to resurrect Fraddir we must both have a high-level - excuse me, high-circle - divine caster, and, uh, Fraddir, unless you happen to know that there's someone who can cast True Resurrection...wait, wait, would that even work if nothing of him is on the same plane as the caster?  On the same set of planes as the caster?"  She attempts to pinch the bridge of her nose, only to instead have her armored hand clonk into her armored face because she's armored up.  "Okay, so first we need a priest willing to travel, or...I don't know, wandering oracle?  Or a bard, possibly.  And then we need to see if they can even get divine intervention once they're through here, or if we're going to need to teach me how to do it.  Or possibly hire a druid for Reincarnate.

"...Regardless, I'd plan for more time spent interacting with Golarion than Lila's world, today, for all that we might fetch a few things from there.  Notwithstanding that I have a few thoughts on resolving some longstanding problems your planet presently has.  Still working on pinning down a solution for the Worldwound, but I do have a thought or two about potentially pacifying Rovagug via technological means, and there's an evil pyramid in Osirion that needs to be de-magicked before it starts an alien invasion and when it comes to cognitohazards I'm probably the best we've got.  Not that that says overmuch.  I might've borrowed copies of an organization's guidebooks for how to deal with the sort of stuff like math that attempts to eat your brain and proof that there's a 'missing number' when the representations of numbers are arbitrary anyway, but I lack the very necessary ingrained training to properly execute half of them.  Still.  Most of today is a Golarion day."

"We can seek an audience with Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn for a True Resurrection. Far be it from me to presume, but I think that she will be happy to perform it for the opportunity to establish churches of Asmodeus in another world. Wandering oracles are hard to track by virtue of them being...wandering."

He kind of ignores Jane's planning, because he doesn't want to spend mental energy on contemplating how you would even do any one of those things.

"I'll prepare the spells I mentioned earlier, then. I'll swap out Mending for Mage Hand. I ask that you remain quiet for the rest of the hour; it makes things easier for me."

The first part of spell preparation is concentration. You must have a clear and free mind in order to hold the manifold in your head. He's done this every day for half a decade now, and it still takes effort. He breathes deeply, and his eyes glaze over. He sits in the chair for over ten minutes before touching his spellbook.

Energy flows from his fingertips to the diagrams on the Comprehend Languages page in his spellbook. The ink on the page reacts, and sprouts hooks and spikes made of energy. It's invisible to the naked eye, but it would show up to magical sensors. Wizards can't Detect Magic to see what they're doing when preparing or casting spells, so they train to develop a sense of the presence and shape of magic independent of all other senses. He channels more energy, and a sheet of magic begins to appear. He carefully twists and turns his hands, sometimes pausing to examine the shape of the manifold using his senses. He moves the manifold back and forth, using the hooks created by the ink to stabilize and pin down certain parts of it while he worked on another. It takes ten minutes before he finishes. The manifold is exhibiting visible strain. He examines the manifold one more time, and then dispels the scaffold created by the magical ink. The manifold suddenly shifts into a different state. More stable, but not fully stable – metastable. He examines the manifold again, then cups the finished spell into his chest, absorbing its energy. He continues to hold the shape of the spell in his mind to prevent it from destabilizing.

He does the same for Infernal Healing, Shield, and Magic Weapon, with the last preparation taking the least time. The process is largely the same, but the particular way the manifold is manipulated and the final shapes of the spells are different. The one commonality is that there is a "hole" running through all three spells in some way.

Finally, he prepares Mage Hand. It takes less than five minutes for that one, and the manifold is noticeably "hole-less". Despite that, it shares certain common motifs with the shape of Magic Weapon. The whole process takes an hour.

He closes his spellbook and sighs. "It's done. I will now scribe Comprehend Languages for you."

He attaches the nib to his dip pen and starts to draw the diagrams on the parchment. It's similar to the diagram on his spellbook, but somehow less compressed. There are particular reductions and refactorings in the spellbook diagram which are absent on the scroll diagram. Conrad has only scribed scrolls a few times before, given how expensive scroll supplies are. Unlike with his spellbook, scrolls have to be written in a mostly-standardized way, to enable other wizards to use them. He often puzzles over some particular aspect of the diagram, pausing for over a minute each time before continuing. It would be disastrous to make a mistake. It would not only waste magical ink, but also have to be painstakingly scraped away (while ensuring none of the neighboring lines are disturbed). Fortunately, he doesn't embarrass himself this time. The ink visibly emits magic, though faintly. Near the end of the process, he moves his hand over the scroll, and the manifold for Comprehend Languages manifests. He guides the spell down to gingerly settle in the middle of the scroll. The manifold is held caged by the lattice the ink has created, and its aura dampens somewhat. He takes a deeper sigh and rolls it up. The scribing takes up half an hour.

"One scroll of Comprehend Languages."

"Mm.  That's Lila's call to make, I think; insofar as it belongs to anyone in this party at present, it's her kingdom, not ours.  Even if it would be my diamonds, I'm certainly not going to compel her to agree to that.  Though I have to admit, it's better to have some options than no options."

She lets out a breath.  "Honestly, the biggest worry I have at the moment is scrying, no matter which world we go to, but you can hardly do anything about that as you are.  Do you happen to know if you can scry into an antimagic field?  I'm reasonably confident the answer is 'no', but I dare not be certain without consulting a second opinion.  And I suppose I could check the sourcebooks, as well, couldn't I...  ...Guess I'll be wearing an extra cloak, then.  ...but then I can't do live translation, or at least I cannot benefit therefrom...and it's hardly proof against gods, anyway; that's called out in the text.  Feh.  May as well go boldly, I guess."

She watches the process, very intently staring directly at the manifold and scaffolding.

"Thank you, that was very interesting to observe.  ...It's odd; I've a primary experience of magic being, geometric like this as well, but at the same time, there's so many differences between the way you and I approach it...I mostly assemble spells as...functions that I invoke, perhaps in the inverse of the way gods bestow magic upon followers, rather than discrete entities that I build and then release.  And...hmm.  Those were all first circle spells, weren't they?  Do you know if second-circle spells have two holes, or is it simply that the hole in them is...Well, actually, how do you target things with these?  I've several competing hypotheses at the moment, and frankly I'm still wondering how spell components come into it at all...especially since there's...oh, but your metamagic isn't a separate reserve; it modifies the underlying generative function!  Although I do wonder how in the absolute fuck you can have component pouches and foci perform the same damn function as far as uncosted material components go.  Hm.  I shall have to ask other cosmologies' wizards about this the next time I meet any, especially the ones with separate metamagic pools if they aren't just winging it.  Because most of them are sorcerers, and you try getting something academic out of a sorcerer.  It'd probably be a very interesting divergence, nonetheless.  And then there's the way sorcerers, who do an almost entirely different thing, get the exact same base spell list, controlling for origins...and however the hell you have some spells that cast as different circles in an entirely profession-dependent way in general, even if they're learned through the same worldly sources of lore!  I suppose it's funky soul shit affecting the way storage-and-release goes, which...is not exactly something I find myself possessed of great knowledge about, but figure is the most likely [Watsonian: pertaining-to-the-perspective-of-fictional-characters] explanation."

She'd also set up several devices, fixed in place by entirely technological means, to record the process from as many angles as she possibly can through several distinct magic-to-photon renders, and she busies herself taking them down and piping that data into her computer as she talks shop.  (Not that it's particularly obvious that those are cameras-for-magic, except from context; they're just, boxy things that she puts up before he begins.)

"...how the fuck am I supposed to use this, anyway?  Amazingly enough, it's never really come up before."  She's looking intently at the scroll; if Conrad is still feeling out magic, he can feel her feeling the scroll in both rolled and unrolled states, a soft pulse of magic almost working like sonar.

Meanwhile, Lila sits in her chair in her beautiful new dress, staring out the window at the stars and fireworks, thinking.

Her story has taken a huge twist.  You could almost say she's in a new story at the moment, or at least the buildup for one.  There's a new torture-god almost as evil as the ancient Milcom, there're all the machines Jane is using... and then Jane herself, who clearly has a lot of secrets she's not talking about.  And then there's this resurrection magic, which blows past so many of the limits of previous stories.

But then there's also the Crown of Maranon, and Barvid - that story is still going on as well.  Or at least the story hook is... maybe she could almost say the old story ended when she stepped into Milliways?

(Lila blinks back a tear at that.)

No, she's still here, and she can get back to Maranon.  Think of it as a series of tales; arcs started in one installment can be finished in the next one.  There's no reason to cry when one concludes, unless you're too childish to wait for the storyteller to tell the next one.  And Jane and even Conrad are happy to fix Maranon, so she should just keep playing her part well, like she has been.

So then, how should she as Queen handle all the new questions this new story is posing?  Lila shakes her head at this thought.  So many of them - like Jane's machines - she doesn't understand well enough.  If someone wants them in Maranon, she doesn't know what to say.  Maybe she should ask Jane.

But... This god of evil and torture, Asmodeus, is going to want to play with Maranon if he can.  And Conrad is going to try to let him.  It'd be ill repayment if she closes the door between Golarion and her own world right afterwards, but... she can't let Asmodeus build temples in Maranon.  She'll try to delay there as long as she can, to see if there's some other option.  Maybe Asmodeus has enemies in Golarion too?

And they're going to Asmodeus's country next.  Jane's given them enough armor that they might be fine, but she wouldn't guarantee any armor against a god.  If Asmodeus takes an interest in them...

Well, she knows what to do if you're about to be captured by Milcom or his follower Nimrod.  She stands up and whispers the Litany of Enos.

The woman calling herself Jane subconsciously mirrors Lila's gesture at the whispered litany, her hand resting against her chest about where Lila might have seen the flash of a silver pendant peek out of her shirt over the course of yesterday's work.  Lila might or might not be able to tell why, but...something comes over her, in that moment, a feeling of deep compassion, of care, of protectiveness against those that would harm what the source of this feeling has embraced.

"Asmodeus' clergy aren't our only option for resurrections, just the closest option.  I do, in fact, somewhat want to talk theology with this Aspexia Rugatonn person, I've had an interesting thought come to me...but I don't think that that should be the only cleric we ask for resurrection assistance.  If nothing else, clergy of Abadar, who I believe are based in Osirion where I need to stop and defuse an apocalypse anyway, because it's not high fantasy kitchen sink without Space Cthulhu I fucking guess," she interjects in a mutter, "are firm believers in exchanging money for goods and services, even if my reading suggests that the local culture there has a misogyny problem.  And that doesn't even mention the Good gods.  It's possible you'll run into one of their worshippers even in Cheliax; I know worship of Iomedae is permitted at the present time."

Lila sighs with a smile as Jane comes in midway through the litany.

"Good.  We do need to talk to other gods - but I'm surprised Asmodeus is even permitting people to worship other gods?  Our tyranny-god didn't.

"And, uh, what's going on in Osirion?"

"Cheliax isn't directly administered by him, or it probably wouldn't be permitted.  I'm certain his actual area of rule in Hell doesn't allow the average soul to - well.  The average soul that has the misfortune of ending up in that particular afterlife is tortured and twisted into building material, as I understand it.  But of those souls that Asmodeus and his underlings graciously permit to retain enough ability to act that what they think matters to any extent to the world around them...They certainly wouldn't be allowed to do anything but worship him.  He has an ego a mile wide.

"So, Osirion.  Some many thousand years ago, there was this guy.  And this guy got hit by an evil space empire's psychic weapon's aftershocks, and instead of immediately succumbing to the...memetic hazard, he retained enough functional lucidity to study the thing while he walled himself off.

"Except that in studying what would later come to be called the Aucturn Enigma, he let his very ability to reason be infected with space mindviruses and tied into the notes he was making of his studies.  Somehow.  So eventually he fell into the same state others exposed to these mindquakes had, feigned full recovery, murdered the religious order that until then he'd been a member of, and proceeded to do shit intended to bring about the invasion of Golarion by the Dominion of the Black, a polity mostly consisting of evil space monsters that Asmodeus would love if they were subservient to him because their philosophy is remarkably similar: grind all else that is to dust beneath your boot, because you are meant to rule and everything else that is exists to serve you.

"The means of this invasion is brought about through a ritual-inscribed pyramid in a demiplane that every so many years aligns to point at the planet Aucturn, and the 111th alignment, when that ritual has accumulated a critical mass of power, enough to make it actually work, is coming up in 4718 AR.  So if someone can drain the capacitor now, and ideally sabotage the working itself...Apocalypse prevented!  Hopefully without being the down-to-the-wire sort of thing that's how it's normally meant to be resolved.  Of course now I've jinxed it, but that's at least the plan."

"Yeah... the story's never as simple as that.  Or if it is, that means there's an even bigger story coming up."

"I'm sure I'm going to have to deal with my worst enemy, politics, at some point in the course of this excursion, and that's not even counting the chance of seeing something worse enough than my expectations are already braced for that I cannot remain myself while avoiding acting to fucking stop it.  Cheliax being a country heavily predisposed to use negative stimulus to the point of self-parody in its practice of behavioral and cultural engineering is already bad enough, not to mention the bit where it's on some level optimizing for production of tortured souls."  She sighs. 

"Frankly, I expect the worse issues to be in Osirion and Numeria, because Osirion is a country you can negotiate with in good faith and thus not one I feel justified in arbitrarily doing shit to without some sort of negotiation breakdown, and Numeria's just...full of fractally nested problems built around a core of bullshittium tech that no-one has a snowball's chance in hell of actually understanding anytime this century without an uplift package, that they're still fucking poking.  I mean, I imagine there's probably a few people capable of picking up gravitic engineering from having the example in front of them, but I really doubt that the way Numeria works isn't basically [cargo-culting: replicating superficial elements of something while lacking fundamental understanding of why they work] it."

"...You're a storyteller, huh?"

"Yes I am!  And I try to observe stories around me, too.  The whole world - all the worlds - are a story if you look at it the right way.

"And I hope I can deal with politics?  I know I'm going to have to if my story ends well."

Conrad walks into the room halfway through the conversation.

"Sadly, my great country of Cheliax still has the Abyss-damned problem of politics." He was about to complain about nobles, except, well, a noble is in front of him right now. Not exactly the best thing to say.

"I'm sure everyone does - I suppose even Barvid has some politics to deal with."

"Yes I am! And I try to observe stories around me, too. The whole world - all the worlds - are a story if you look at it the right way.

"So they are, so they are.  Some even moreso than others, I think.  I've been places from books I've read, even."

Then Conrad comes in, she shakes her head minutely, and there's much discussion of politics.

"Well, if you're volunteering to deal with the politics...want to come with me while I defuse an eldritch magic pyramid?  ...Huh, now that I think about it, this guy might be able to give you some targeted advice; the Ruby Prince deals with a lot of elementals."

"I'd love to, but I cannot advise on politics in the slightest, unless you want me to cast Acid Splash on them. I'll observe you defuse the eldritch magic pyramid using a spyglass. If we're dealing with elementals, we can pick up Dismissal or Banishment scrolls." 

"That was directed specifically at Lila, but I quite agree with that sentiment most of the time.  ...We absolutely should pick up those scrolls, even if I think that they won't see use in Osirion; they might help with the Barvid problem, especially if I can do something interesting with the spellwork.  ...Really want to see if I can build a general interpreter, then recode it for...Anyway."

Hearing about their plans to go shopping in Ostenso, Bar opens the door leading to Conrad's world after checking in with him first.

And, putting Lila on the second seat of her hoverbike, it is time to go shopping.  And maybe defuse an apocalypse or two.