It spins on the breeze and calls to mind what might be called planar coordinates, though in truth they're a little more like memories of a place that never was. 

Needless to say, graduate students do not get powerful magic done for them very often, especially not when it touches on things that can pose some... if not danger, then at least concern, even to it. 

But it is an interesting new idea, and there are so few of those, this long after it first started having ideas, and this long after it got good at it. 

Gate.

And on the other side --

She has, regrettably, discovered a taste for adventure, for discovery, for breaching the unknown.

To attempt to breach the multiverse, even if it is shaped through Void and not through delving the Twisting Nether, is perhaps too much of the latter to be considered remotely sane.

But she can.  And so she does.

Memories of a place that never was, you say?  Her world fits that quite nicely, what with its having been made last Tuesday*.  And her magic fits just as neatly; the Void shows you what you are expecting to see.

*  (...Okay, that metaphorical Tuesday was many years ago at this point, but still!)

There's a reason that Spell was supposed to be a secret. 

Instead of a stable portal, the Gate forms as a momentary breach where reality is thin, and something is sucked through before it closes with a crash that cuts off any possibility of concern. 

Hope it isn't some kind of eldritch abomination, but it would serve you right. 

It's not particularly possible to make out in the darkened ritual chamber, but it's immediately surrounded with a faint distortion in the air. It gives the thousands of coloured lights that reflect from its endless facets an eerie dreamlike look, as if it didn't look strange enough already. 

Well.  Shitfuck damn, she does not say out loud.

She lands on her feet, whirling around, the crystal at the tip of her staff - she came prepared for this sort of thing and that means battle-magic and environmental spells and stranger things besides - flaring a brilliant purple as magic roils defensively around her.

The newcomer looks mostly like a human - dark hair that could be described as silver in the right light, clothes that look like someone was trying to fit all three of 'wizard', 'noble', and 'protective equipment' into the same specification and mostly succeeded, a pointedly unostentatious silver circlet upon her head set with gems like the ones in her staff - but there is a purple-greenish flare behind her eyes as she snaps a proper magelight into existence.  Metaphorically snaps.  She doesn't literally snap.  She never has figured out how that actually works.  (The light is still purple, it's just round and much more self-sustaining than flaring her staff like she's about to hit someone with it.)

The magelight illuminates a stone ritual chamber with an extremely secure door and arcane sigils engraved in the stonework. 

And makes it glow with a violet-and-blue glare that's uncomfortable to look at, casting brilliant spots of light dancing about the room. 

What kind of wizard wears armour? 

Well, maybe ones from other planes! Her insane project actually worked! Sort of! This was only supposed to see if a connection was possible, not bring anything through, but this works too! 

"Hello! Do you understand me properly? Do you know where you are? Did you mean to come here?"

Oh, no, this isn't armor, her armor's in her other bag of holding*.  This is 'Don't get blown up or poisoned' sorts of gear.

...Which probably doubles as light armor, but still!

"Hello, yes, no, and maybe, in that order."  Translation seems to be working out fine...

(From Naevys' perspective, there's a strange doubling of the sound of the newcomer's voice - she can hear what seem to be syllables of a language that is not whatever she was just speaking, but also a meaning behind them that renders itself into the language she's most comfortable with.)

"So where, pray tell, am I?  And who are you two?  And can you understand me?"

...There's just no way that floaty-rotatey-glowy-crystals is just a random terrain feature.  Jury's out on possible sapience just yet but she thinks she felt her translation earring ping.

* (Which she also brought.)

Her translation Spell (she cast it, just in case somehow she'd get to talk to something from another plane!) makes both parties hear things as if they had said them themselves. She thinks. There are some confusing cases. 

She's getting a strange kind of feedback from the doubling. 

This is so frustrating but she should let the Professor talk first-

It inserts images directly into her mind. It feels disconcertingly like she's imagining what it would say. 

A great tower among the rubble - the last surviving school of magic.

The wheel of all possible worlds - the Conjuration Professor. 

A stream of sounds and images and something analogous but unrecognisable - yes.

"Hello! It's so good to meet you! I'm Naevys, this is an experimental- a novel method for interpreting planar boundaries I designed, I'm so glad it worked! Where are you from? You look kind of human, are you?" She's almost vibrating with excitement, she did it, this is new magic it has got to be worth a real Faculty position, and they have a visitor from another plane!

"...of course it's the blasted last remaining school of magic, did the rest all get destroyed in some sort of cataclysmic event an unknowable amount of time ago, then?  Because I'm getting a real 'the Ancients forgot more about magic than we know', sort of vibe, there..."

The second image prompts a thought so loud it almost echoes like a reply, through the strange layer of Something that the attempt to directly insert information into her mind was deflected into. '...But 'all possible worlds' is a phase space of innumerable unit vectors, not a wheel, is that the local multiverse --?'

And then she realizes Naevys said something as well.  "Oh, excuse me.  Well, define 'human'.  But, yes, close enough, considering.  I could be considered any number of things, from 'sapient self-perpetuating magical manifestation' to 'not exactly not a creator deity if you squint really hard', but I think of myself as human.  ...Ah.  And.  Yes.  Introductions.  Right.  One does need to do those.

"Alicia Thorn, lately of the Royal Academy of the Kingdom of Villarosa, amongst other things.  Pleasure to meet you, Naevys.  I think you bumped into an experiment of mine, going the other way, which is at least weak evidence that yours works!"

"No, mostly they just burn down a lot! Well, all right, yes, I suppose most of them fell with the Old Kingdom but that's what happens to new ones, I think. It was only about five hundred years ago! I'm not a historian, I don't know what magic was like back then but it's a good guess! How did you know? Also much more importantly to what extent are you a creator deity? Because I think I have questions!"

It rotates. It ponders whether to try to punch through and put ideas directly into her brain where they belong. It decides otherwise. It will have to employ language. Something in its liquid-crystal structure shifts.

[There's no need to shout. 'Wheel' is a highly simplified metaphor, or comforting lie, for the nature of reality.]

<Oh, was I thinking that loudly?  Goodness.  My apologies.>  Ah, yes, lies-to-children, is carried beneath her words.  She is not quite such a child, though she imagines that the Conjuration Professor has quite a better view than she.

"The Conjuration Professor took a particular slant on their metaphor, as they informed me of where I had found myself, that struck to my sensibilities of the narratives of these things.  It was a guess, just one that was reasonably well-informed about the way most people tell stories.

"As to the extent of my plausible creator-deity-ness, well.  I only had a particular hand in the magic, and not all the fiddly little details of it.  But I did have a hand in the magic of my present homeworld, when it was being made, and considering that I haven't seemed to vanish in a puff of logic despite your clearly being made of different base materials than I, I still have it here.  Which could be interesting.  ...Incidentally, what's yours like?"

It is even older than most people think. It knows enough that it experiences something analogous to fear. 

It does not reply, but rotates silently on the spot, and reaches out to touch a distant mind. 

"You had a hand in the magic? Do you - do you mean, you helped codify how people learn magic, or-" She might be being rude to a god and is probably being rude to an archmage, here. Or alternatively this is all a very elaborate joke but in that case she's not going to ruin it!

"Sorry, let me start again, we might have a translation issue here! 'Magic' isn't a specific thing, it's a broad general term people use for all sorts of things, normally things they don't understand. 'Wizardry' - is that a different word for you? - is what we call it any time mortals use skills that let them affect the world in ways they normally couldn't! Canonical Wizardry is the subset of wizardry that survived from the days of the ancient archmages, so it's reasonably safe." In truth, she's pretty sure it's not a natural category and the schools of wizardry were one of those political decisions, but that's one of those things you take care about saying out loud.

She takes a deep breath.

"Wizardry arises from your soul, from being alive and aware and conscious. In some languages 'song' and 'Spell'' are the same word, and there's a lot of wisdom in that. Spells are like spirits, or pieces of awareness, or incredibly complex patterns of thought, there are lots of metaphors. You have to shape your soul into a vessel that can hold them, with study and practice and learning to think the right kinds of thoughts in the right way. Then you can hold Spells inside you and use them. Then you are sort of shaped like a Spell, and you can do your own magic. There actually isn't as much of a difference between set Spells and freeform magic as we tell apprentices, it gets complicated, but essentially you use Spells to do the most complicated things. Spellcasting puts a lot of strain on your mind, you have to know your limits. There are also Rituals, those are," completely different and if anybody has a clue how they work they kept very quiet about it any time Naevys was around but she can't say that, "easily misunderstood, and even more dangerous. Is that what you meant, that you helped invent something like Canonical Wizardry? That's really impressive and we are going to have so many questions! If not and you actually are a god then I'm sorry!" It Is Written that the Five Gods will protect you if you offend a heathen Power in good faith but then a lot of things Are Written.

"I think we are having a bit of a translation issue, and before I continue please allow me to clarify that I very much am not actually a deific force - I did not actually effect - or would it be af-fect, I can never quite keep those two straight - I did not personally implement any of this, I am yet still as mortal as anyone else in this room.  Probably.  I'm not willing to test that, at least.  And I'm not offended in the least by you treating me like, well, a regular person.  Honestly it's rather refreshing to at least have that be the fundamental social tension I'm experiencing, rather than...  Well, nevermind all that.  But, ah, no.  I was involved in the design of the whole metaphysical framework that makes something like your concept of wizardry work, after forces very much beyond my control dragged me into the whole process - except that, well.  I was thorough enough about it that the fundament of local physics over there is derived from the magic directly.  ...It's interesting, how similar and yet different the things you're speaking of, seem to be, compared to the system I'm used to working with.  I'm almost tempted to speculate.  It sounds like something I read, once."

"Honestly if anything I'm probably the worst possible person available to ask about Villarosa's equivalent to your Canonical Wizardry, I have a much different perspective so it mostly doesn't work when I try to do it that way.  Well, no, where I need it to it will, I've adapted, but I did have to do that.  ...Regardless.  If you want someone to explain Arcane magic as the Academy teaches it, I'm not the person you want to ask, for all that I do consider myself to have a reasonable competence in the field, generally.  Which is.  I'm sure that the people who know me well would describe that as understatement, as much as I wish they'd stop.  I'm not exactly - well, I guess I did the once, even if that was mostly guile - oh, gods, I need to stop just saying things, I keep accidentally cornering myself into effectively humblebragging out of desire for correctness...  Anyway.  If you describe spells thusly, then...  It would not be inaccurate to say that my world entire is something like spells, or is built atop the interaction between three separate axes of...  Spell-like concepts, shaped like...  Hmm."  She waves a hand, and there is a 3D set of basis vectors that she speaks the names of, as she puts symbols to.

Well.  Speaking is perhaps less the right word than λ-speaking (pron. 'Not-speaking'), because she has several things at once to say about them and she is willing to deal with the way her throat always feels like it has a frog in it after she λ-says things that are λ-words for this one.

"[Order:Chaos::Rules:Change], [Life:Death::Evolution(cycles, growth, adaptation):Stillness(gravity, inevitability, low-available-energy)], and...  Hmm... [Light:Void :: Is:Not :: Hyperstimulus:Irreality :: Unity:Diversity :: Infinity:Infinitesmals], though I'm not quite sure I can encapsulate that last as neatly as I'd like, both of those last two get rather paradoxical.  They're the ones that framed - well.  Creation, in its entirety."

It relaxes - it can't actually relax, it doesn't have very good analogues of muscles and so on, but it shifts its threat-modelling - fractionally, but only fractionally. 

[You had still better do something about this,] it tells the Archbishop. 

(Her dodgy translation Spell searches the Elvish language, which happily is richly stocked with paronyms for the purposes of poetry and gatekeeping, comes up with an approximately analogous noun-verb combination, and does a reasonable translation, not one actual Elvish linguists would like but at least one they'd laugh at instead of smile gently at, and renders it with only a slight delay. You don't get that out of most Spells, let me tell you, and don't come again.)

"Oh that's such a relief! Sorry, summoning and offending gods does sometimes happen around here! I'm not actually sure how often it depends on exactly whom you believe about what but probably at least one story in ten is true! You can talk about social problems if you want to it would actually be fascinating to compare them and maybe we can help! If you have any extraplanar insight into the nature of magic itself then please do speculate!"

All right, it's completely expected to try to get secrets out of other wizards, that's the whole point, but doing it to an extraplanar visitor who didn't sign up for it, on that scale, feels mean on both counts. She'll mentally owe her a favour. 

(She doesn't have any problem ordering, memorising and responding to points at this length, she survived her apprenticeship.)

"You should start just saying things and being correct and not worrying so much about it! Humans talk a lot about the virtue of humility but I don't really get it and anyway this is Silvermoon, even the humans do things like talk about the time the Goddess of Love Herself sat in their lap and offered constructive criticism, and that might not even have all been a lie. 

She has ever heard someone speak a Power Word, and when she was little she listened to Bards, she can handle a little λ-speech even if it does give her a bit of a headache. 

"That's fascinating. There's a certain Canonical Ritual that can lead to a little pocket plane based on - I think a less formal version of that - this is probably wrong but as an [almost certainly wrong first guess]* your world is, kind of like what I'd expect if a god did that!"

*A one-syllable-one-elemental-rumble word in Old High Draconic, long since borrowed by wizards.

...The name 'Silvermoon' draws a surprised sporfle from her.  "Sorry, sorry, weird coincidence, don't mind me."

"...I will add that while, yes, well, humility is a thing that I was thinking of, it's also self-defense against becoming the most interesting thing in the room.  ...Which I'm going to be anyway, aren't I.  Dangit."

Then, the ritual...  And it's tickling her suspicions just a bit!  "...Would this ritual's name, to a first approximation, be Create Demiplane?  And would it be, oh...  What was it...  ...Would, assuming that there is such a thing as a 'spell slot', and that 'spell slots' have varying levels of power, would you say that that ritual requires the expenditure of a spell slot that is, say, greater than or equal to ...seven?  Seven, levels of power out of a total of nine?  And possibly diamond dust or actual diamonds?  Because there's quite possibly weird multiverse things afoot.  It doesn't mean I'll know anything more about the hows of anything you're doing, my magic does not work remotely like the magic I think you might have, it's more like an amount of overall flux you're 'allowed'-qua-able to exert at once than a prepare-in-advance sort of thing unless you're, like, teleporting an entire army somewhere - but I might be able to find a few whats that ought to stick."

[Most interesting? Bold of you.]

(It has a very complex set of heuristics about when standing out is dangerous and when, counterintuitively, among multiple agents, it preserves your image and makes danger less likely in anticipation. It doesn't trust them very much, so it's shifting in defensive adaptations anyway. It looks like the contents of every jewellery shop in the world having a violent orgy.)

"...All right something might be going on here! The term is 'demiplane' yes! "Spell Slot" is a technical term in some theoretical models of magic! It's like - how many, and how powerful, Spells you can contain at once. They're literal gaps in your soul, it's said." She didn't actually specialise in Theoretical Thaumaturgy, it makes her head hurt too much for too little power. "The more powerful ones put more strain on you. There are nine known Circles but it's theorised there used to be more. Actual jewels, yes, or precious things, it's a really advanced and dangerous Ritual I've never done it. There is a story that the archmages of the Old Kingdom could teleport whole armies but I do have to stress we don't even know what it was actually called any more! It could be wrong! There's no such thing as a limit on allowable - do you mean something like, total change? Magic just happens, it doesn't have any kind of source or limit like fuel for a fire."

"...Okay, most rooms, you definitely win if the people in there aren't used to you.  Or aren't earth elementals, though even then you're doing something they don't."

"...Yes, exactly, which is why my magic is not your magic.  My magic is more like winning an argument with the universe with your soul than anything.  ...Vancian spellcasting.  Not even once.  Though I have to congratulate whoever did it here on making it actually somewhat make sense for spells to be fire-and-forget.  ...And considering that Wish is a ninth-circle spell, even if it's presumptively limited in reliable effect similarly to the things I've heard of...  I do not want to know what an actual tenth-circle spell would look like.  Probably some fucking bullshit.  Then again, 'summon, like, four giant flaming rocks' is also ninth circle if this is the spell list I'm thinking of, and that...  Isn't really all that much, comparatively.  So who knows.  ...Wouldn't be surprised if you could hack your way into having a spell slot that size with the right crosstraining and a lot of Fortuitously Not Exploding, though, if such things do exist at all, which, depending on what we're working with - and I don't know that - is most likely not the case.  Wasn't my sort of thing to go looking for those loopholes in the rules very often, anyway, I don't remember anything that was really utter bullshit in enough detail to be able to tell you how and a lot of those hacks depended on rules abstractions of the simulation of their worlds-like-this-one that probably don't necessarily work As Written..."

...She thinks about doing her usual 'I know how to make diamonds' shpiel.

She decides against it.  She doesn't trust them quite that far yet and also she doesn't need that leverage right now.

But she will ask something.  "Does 'carbon' translate neatly, incidentally?  Or - actually, 'sulfur'."

'Charcoal', 'brimstone'. "Yes! Er. So! This would normally be insulting to say to another wizard but it sounds like your magic works differently! At least a little differently! The Fortuitously Not Exploding thing doesn't happen very much, you might live through one idea like that but not three. People don't talk about Spells beyond the Ninth Circle very much, but the Old Kingdom must have done something to collapse so hard nobody can remember its name any more or even find the Great City which is weird because it's on maps! And yes Circles don't really tell you about effect, they tell you about cost, how hard a Spell is to contain and channel without, er, hurting yourself. There's a Seventh Circle spell that just dusts things in sugar."

"There's a what.  No, that does make sense, of course in any real system there's going to be some duds...  And of course our magics work differently, we're from entirely different worldsheaves?"

And then.

"...The Old Kingdom got -- Islamic Republic of Eastern Samothrace'd?  Good gods what the hell were they fucking with, the noösphere?!  Their overall ontological inertia?!  ...That original reference was to a niche work of fiction and not quite right besides, it's more of a 'There is no Antimemetics Division' situation... but still!  ...Hmm.  Wonder if I could do anything about that...  Depends on what's broken, probably.  But.  Maybe.  While I'm here I do absolutely want to have a go at that problem."

She shrugs helplessly. "I didn't understand most of that but it would be amazing if you could! Mind Blank doesn't help and the gods can't or won't tell us which is quite scary and apparently it only gets more scary the more you look into it, there's a reason I'm not brave enough for History lectures! So - if you don't mind me asking," this would be an incredibly rude question to ask any wizard, you're not supposed to know, she guesses there are between two and six Ninth-Circles at Silvermoon which is really an incredible range now that she thinks about it, but the visitor comes from somewhere else and you have to take risks sometimes, "what's your magic like? What can you do with it?"

"...right, so, more on the 3125 end of the scale of Antimemetics Scariness, then.  Yikes.  Let's talk about something less viscerally terrifying and pivot back to magic again!  And no, I don't mind giving at least a general overview, though I'm not going to get into specifics unless there's genuine need to know.  I'm not sure how accurate they'd be here anyway, I've got my little reality distortion field bubble keeping me coherent but who knows if my spells will fall apart the moment they exit.  Anyway.  I am primarily a practitioner of Arcane magic - the magic of Order, in that cosmic-forces diagram - with a bit of a specialty in metamagic, that has enabled me to do some interesting things with Void, as well.  In practical terms...  Arcane magic most often acts upon space and force.  You can get it to do anything you can justify in your own internal logic, but it's not really much good for things like healing because imposing Order on flesh is...  It has unhelpful interactions going both ways, and don't even get me started about the folly of trying to heal with Chaos directly, notwithstanding that both Order and Chaos tap the Twisting Nether, the chaotic primordium, for power.  Arcane magic is where you get things like frostbolts and fireballs and teleportation and bags of holding.  Void, or sometimes it's called shadow magic, is...  Very much squidgy conceptual stuff.  Drawing things that are λ into what Is, or sometimes making something that Is be more like something that is λ.  The action of Arcane upon Void is to further constrain the shape of what you'll perceive into being - or λ-being, as the case may be - because it only takes one time of getting distracted by thinking of pink elephants, you know?  Well I hope you don't, actually, but still.

"Oh, and I completely forgot the elements, earlier.  They're - if you conceive of an element as being composed of one set of the three axial pairings, the plus- and minus-one sets make up more...  classical elements, Fire, Earth, Wood, Soul - well, soul's usually not one of those but it fit - all that sort of thing.  Then both the +3 and -3 tuples form a sort of pseudo- fourth axis of magic.  [Spirit:Decay :: Consensus:Command :: Balancing:Imbalancing :: Principle:Ruthlessness], if I had to explain it in a few λ-words.  They're most starkly different in how elementals behave when they're - figures of one or the other.  Fire or Ash, to name an example."

"As for the cosmic - as distinct from elemental - magics I don't have particular skill in...  You wield the Light with firm conviction - but, to paraphrase a 'funny' little saying, the Light cares not from whom the conviction flows.  It's the sort of magic that gives you clerics and paladins, if you know those.  Good for healing, but you risk losing yourself to the infinite Oneness of the Light if you do it too hard.  Life and Death...  I don't know if I can explain either, really, but Life does shapeshifting."

"That sounds fascinating and almost completely different from anything I've ever heard of! Er, commonalities first! It is theoretically possible to use wizardry for healing but that would be Necromancy which is extremely illegal! It's said that if you go deep into the dungeons at midnight and prove yourself worthy you will be taught the theory, and only the theory, and maybe find out what's so bad about it, which is why I've never done it. There are schools of magic, but they're more like..." how can she put this diplomatically? "They're more like different skills than different parts of the world. All those 'Arcane' and 'Void' things would be Wizardry. Bags of holding exist and are mostly ancient survivals but I bet the Professor could make one and, ah, some breakthroughs in how they might have been made on that scale and to that quality may have been made recently," namely by her, but that's, again, politically complicated so she just demonstrates by drawing her spellbook out from a fold in her robes where it shouldn't fit. 

"Also we do have elements but they go Fire, Water, Earth, Air."

"It... seems strange that the Light can be One thing that you can lose yourself in and also not care from whom the conviction flows! This conversation might be one of those that needs a priest to avoid heresy. But yes 'paladin' and 'cleric' translate but they're personally chosen by the gods, in the singular image of God - actually maybe there are similarities - or something like that - ah, are the gods not known where you live?" That's going to be a sensitive subject. "You can't just be a cleric by being really convinced about something, it's... all right, we should find a priest!"

"Much more importantly! If Arcane magic can do anything you can justify do you mind if I Enchant you into believing you can make me a god?"

"It doesn't work like that.  There has to be a logic to it, for it to work as Arcane magic.  Believing really hard is Lightwork, which...  Well, maybe.  But also, no, because of the overall thaumic flux limits, even if we did do it ritual there's still channeling problems.  And, ah.  I'd bet my crown that we do not have the same gods, though I fancy I'll recognize a few of yours for the same reason I knew about Create Demiplane.

"The thing about the Light that makes sense of that seeming quandary you have, I think, is that it does not have a will.  The Oneness is a property of the Light, not something it desires.  But I did warn you that both Light and Void were just a bit paradoxical.  The Light being simultaneously - oneness, realness, but also an utterly empty thing - that's one of those paradoxes it has."

She wilts. "Oh, that's a shame. I mean, I didn't think it would work, but it was worth trying." She does, however, file away for emergencies the possibility of trying to summon a 'Light' user and providing some helpful Enchantments. 

"How do you know about Demiplanes?"

The Light being a hollow thing is a horrifying thought so she's going to try not to have it for her own sake. 

"Read about them in a work of fiction - quite a few, actually - from somewhere else entirely."

"...What made you think they were real here? Also you said something about a crown?"

"...Did I?  Oops."

"What made me think they were likely to be relevant here...

"I can't really point to anything except the general -"

"- okay, I can still think of Azlant so it's probably not the Old Kingdom's name...

"Ah, anyway.  It was...  Narratively familiar, and odds are that I'm in one, somewhere else entirely, you know?"

"Also, Create Demiplane is pretty distinctive, as spells go."

'Azlant' doesn't ring any bells and she can still remember it a moment later. There's more than one lost empire, though. 

Anyway, she's not stupid, and she's read a lot of stories too.

"Are you saying you've read stories that match?"

The metaphysical implications of this conversation continue to inspire substantial risk-minimisation. Or 'terror', if you prefer. 

"Read enough stories and everything has a point of reference.  But this world does match closely to a particular few lines of combat-simulation games.  The casting of particularly worldshaking spells with money instead of, hm, potential, narrows it down further."

"But, well, I don't think this is actually some variant Golarion - the planet that that game preferred to set things on most of the time - right now, so my knowledge of that game is of limited use anyway.  Could be similar to any number of other settings, though."

"Are there more planes like that? Could we find the world from any book or - game? Even if I write one? Or are writers on your plane just Scrying other ones?" 

"Oh I've absolutely no idea!  I presume yes, the general presumption is that the multiverse is infinite and includes everything, but this is the first time I've really gone looking, you know?"

"This is promising for your first time! Worlds like yours were mostly theoretical until now! Or at least, the people who go looking for or talking about them too much seem to mysteriously disappear a lot! We call them the Far Realms, mostly you get horrible eldritch monstrosities if you try to reach them, my project was a method for searching for, er, it's a little complicated, I suppose, spiritually resonant ones. To be clear I didn't expect it to work this well. What do you normally do with magic?"

"Spiritually resonant?  Huh.  Interesting.

"As far as what I normally do with magic...

"Well, I personally am, regrettably, afflicted with a taste for adventure, when I'm out of ideas for interesting things to do with magic.  As for what the Kingdom of Villarosa does with magic...  Nearly everything, really.  Farming, crafts, administration, transport both of bulk goods and of people...  You name it, there's probably an enchanted object or a spell circle that does it, though sometimes the object is gnomish, which, ah...  Institutional predilection to chaos magic constrained by elaborate mechanisms, but when it works it really does."

A sort of electric thrill runs her. 

"We used to have those! Places with magic everywhere, I mean - the Old Kingdom was the last big one around here but it's said there were more. Not any more, though. I mean, maybe a little bit. ...Did you design magic that way?"

"I wouldn't say that I designed the magic with suiting that purpose as an immediate goal - I just, laid out the broad sweep of it, the same explanation I gave you, though with a bit more about the elements thrown in - but I did definitely intend for that sort of thing to be very possible."  She did pick the 'Magic: lots' option, after all.

Oh sure, there's lots of magic, it's just that most of it isn't the kind you can control. 

"That must be so nice! I don't think ours was designed that way if it was designed at all. But it's definitely possible in principle!"

"It definitely has a lot of convenience factor."  She grins.  And then, a thought occurs, drawing her expression more towards the contemplative.  "I wonder, if I left some of mine here, if it could stick."

(Approximately simultaneously, hundreds of miles away in the secure council chamber in the depths of St Tescarion's Basilica, in emergency session)

"We should consider just killing her."

"That would be common murder."

"We sentence her to death for putting the world at risk, then kill her."

"Is that specifically a mortal sin and a capital crime?"

"It should be. There's precedent, if you recall, the Grand High Priestess tried to kill- you know."

It gives no sign, where it still drifts softly in the depths of Silvermoon. 

[It would not stop this. Heed me. I was old when your star was young. The contamination is here in any case. It is a part of the world now.]

"It might at least help if she's not actively going around spreading it. At least we should cyst off the ritual chamber and cast it into the abyss."

"It's one thing to execute her at need. It's another to execute anyone who happens to be standing next to her."

"It may make things worse. We do not know what she might do, if desperate. And what she speaks of could be worth a lot of money. Can we make her an offer?"

[Do that one.] She's heading swiftly away from the Conjuration Department, just in case. [I'll handle it from there.]

"We're all impressed by your work on the archmages but we're not giving you a pet godling."

[But I'd take such good care of it!]

[She indicates she was not directly involved. She could be lying. I do not think she is.]

By this time the candles are lit and sacred smoke fills the air, and she closes her eyes. 

"Should we treat the anomaly at Silvermoon as a god?"

Ń̶̼̫̼͕͚Ǒ̸̡̧̦͕̝̖̪͙̲̎̿̍̽̽̿̂̂̆̃̔.

"Should we kill her?"

Ư̴̩͇̗̐͋̔ͅN̶̳͖͋̈́͘C̶͖͕͝L̵̪͕͍̔̔͜Ȇ̵̝̤̺͔̂̄̌A̵̋͜R̸̩͖̰̼̐̕

"Will her magic work here?"

Y̸͉͚̗̬̊́̈́Ę̴͉̎̏͐͊S̶̯̉̐ͅ

"Is it safe to talk to her?"

Y̸͉͚̗̬̊́̈́Ę̴͉̎̏͐͊S̶̯̉̐ͅ

(Meanwhile)

"It definitely seems to work here! Which makes sense, extradimensional powers usually do! I wonder if Spells would work in your universe? Is there a way to test if it's just around you that they work, or something?"

"I mean, if they can affect me, Spells would probably work back where I'm from.  So I think we can say they probably would, because, well, your magic already successfully interacted with mine."

"...Probably the easiest way to test that is to hit me with a Banish after I put a return anchor down and see whether I can come back but I'm not eager to test it like that.  Maybe if I plonked an independently functional magelight down somewhere and either it or I went somewhere very far away."

"I can try to Polymorph you into something?"

"...I would prefer not that.  Especially because I have no idea how I scan to that sort of thing so it might have two reasons to not work.  Or I guess you could see if any given Detect spell pings."

"...Actually now I'm curious what the heck I'd read like to the one that detects schools of magic on enchanted objects."

"...There... isn't one of those, that I know of. The Dweomercraft Faculty probably has something. It's possible to use Divination kind of that way, see Spells and sometimes other signs of magical power - the school would be a matter of guesswork, making magic items often involves more than one - this might be to do with the thing where magic isn't as neat a concept here-"

Skill issue. Analyse Dweomer. What are the magical properties of the visitor?

Well.  Aside from the fact that she has a piece of infinity (or rather, the Twisting Nether) entwined in her soul...

Okay, honestly, probably that stands out enough to saturate the other checks, because she's not entirely sure how to describe the complex interplay between spirit, soul, and flesh that is her physical (and... ethereal or astral, she's forgotten which was which off the top of her head...) form.

Her possessions are much more legible in some ways.  In other ways, some of them are slippery as fuck to pin down long enough for the spell to get a good look.  A set of lockpicks, for example.

The gem in her staff, notably, is set with effectively half-spells.  The gems in the crown are simple defensive wards, taken to the highest possible level of thoroughness and power their creators could cram in.

She also has pockets of holding everywhere on her outfit, somehow linked together.

That is slightly good news. It does have options. It shares this information with Naevys. It would rather not talk if it must not. 

"All right! To at least a casual glance from a powerful wizard you look like you're made out of magic put into a human shape! I think most Spells that affect people would affect you normally." She's curious about the crown but she didn't want to talk about it and you think twice before you press a wizard on something like that. "The pockets look familiar! I have something like those! Not sure what your staff is doing, though. A lot of it looks not completely unlike Abjuration, if I'm getting the relayed images properly. Oh - apparently there's a Black Magic Spell, Astral Projection, that does something kind of like this? It doesn't look the same, though!"

"'Not completely unlike' Abjuration is certainly a way to describe Arcane wards, yeah; that works.  The staff's basically - a reservoir of pre-established calculations that I'd normally need to feed to my spellwork directly at runtime, for when I'm casting highly complex spells like 'teleport a hundred people to somewhere not on the established portal network and make sure they don't materialize inside something', so, I'm confused, Astral Projection doesn't really go there, that would be Spirit magic...  I suppose the farseeing spell that I stuck in there because I had a bit of spare space would look a bit like that."

"But what's this about Black Magic?  I don't think I'd like to get on the wrong side of whatever that is."

That's Epic Teleport.

"A hundred" and not "thousands", however, and she does not do it all at once. That may indicate some comforting upper bound or it may not. 

"You wouldn't! Technically it's anything that isn't Canonical Wizardry, and therefore forbidden. We have an exemption for some of it - technically my translation Spell isn't Canonical but that's all right. But a lot of it is - things like Necromancy, and lots of types of summoning and golemancy and so on, and other things you shouldn't really talk about too much."

Well she hasn't ever had to teleport thousands of people before, a hundred seasoned adventurers solves a lot of force-projection problems.  That's two and a half 40-man raid groups!

Not that she knows that that's being thought, or would say this if she did.

"...Mm.  Elaborate on the injunction against constructs?"

She looks quite distressed. "I don't know the details. Not all magical constructs are a problem. I don't know exactly what would be forbidden, I've never checked, but, things like trying to... create something in the likeness of a soul, or," she shudders a little, "I don't like to think about it, horrible things like that."

"Ah.  Yes, no, we don't like that sort of thing where I'm from, either."

Notwithstanding a bunch of things that sort of skirt the edges of that but they're hardly relevant here - she can't do them, she's an arcane spellcaster, not a gnomish engineer or a dwarven master fleshcrafter!  Or a necromancer.  She knows exactly One Death spell and it's Death Grip, and necromancy qua zombies is Decay, anyway.

"That's a huge relief. I... hesitate to ask this but why is it possible, if you helped write the rules? ...Er, we might be imagining different things, magic can be really horrible here."

"Because - it was a guiding principle, in the development of my magic, that there is no Inherently Evil Magic.  That the evil of a magic is in how it is used.  The Necrarchy a couple countries over is if anything the force most committed to tracking down the stereotypical 'rip-a-soul-from-the-afterlife-and-stuff-it-in-a-random-corpse' necromancer precisely because they know you can do better than that.  But if there's no inherently Evil magic, there's no inherently Good magic, either.

"But mostly, I just wasn't involved in spell lists whatsoever and I don't even know if half the things you're thinking of are possible within my metaphysics.  Just that nobody with sense would like anyone who tried."

She looks kind of green, as if she's about to be sick. "That - example you just gave - sounds pretty inherently Evil to me. There's. There's definitely inherently Evil wizardry here, if I really tried I could probably think of lots of examples but I'd... rather not. And channelling the powers of the gods is good by its nature."

"...The action of ripping a soul from the afterlife without their consent because you couldn't be bothered to animate a construct normally is pretty inherently Evil, yes, that's why the Necrarchy - and everyone else - hates it.  If I see someone doing that I will make them fucking stop that, lethally if necessary.  It usually is.  Someone binding themself to the family reliquary of honored ancestors so that future inheritors can consult their wisdom?  Not, by my reckoning, actually Evil.  Evil is in the act.  Not the magic itself.

"...When you say, 'the gods'...  Which...  Ones?  Because the cosmology I'm thinking is like yours definitely has gods that ping Evil to a Detect but also, like.  It has a lot of gods and it needed to fill out boxes for gameplay reasons."

That's totally still inherently Evil. 

All right all of a sudden even though she's talking to an extraplanar entity this conversation is not fun any more, and it shows on her face. It's going to be embarrassing if she faints in front of the visitor but this is not a nice topic. "I... think that sounds wrong. That kind of magic is evil by nature, it's not just all the... things you'd have to do to make it work. And I mean the gods, the Five Gods of the Church, Who give clerics their power - it's actually more complicated than that I think - anyway They're not Evil." 

It must act. To Alicia:

[Tread carefully.]

And to someone else:

[Cut short your preparations and lend aid immediately.]

"...I don't know what the conditions are like here, I don't know what your necromancy is like, and anyway I don't even know how to do any of that, I just know that some people do some things like the latter option and it doesn't, like, irrevocably mar their souls, because I didn't put ontological Good and Evil in the cosmology in the first place, but...  Let's drop the subject, it's not helping anybody and it's clearly distressing you and honestly it's just fucking rude of me if I keep going in the face of that.  ...So.  There's...  A grand total of...  Five?  Gods?  That...  Seems like a catastrophically small number of gods compared to what I was expecting!  Did they.  Die?  In the cataclysm?"

"Some of Them. Depending on exactly which cataclysm you mean. Hi, by the way! I'm the most powerful cleric around here. And acting head of the Inquisition, in that I'm telling them what to do."

(She manages to make those words sound outright seductive.)

"The Inquisition would like to have a friendly chat with Naevys, and although they arguably have no authority over you, please come too, miss terrifying alien archmage. This place is insecure because it's a summoning chamber, and if you'd like to ask all about our eldritch and hideous secrets we would prefer that you do it in private."

Gleep.

"I have a friend who is of a terrifyingly kindred spirit to you, ma'am.  So I'll just not get on your bad side, because I'm quite sure you'd figure out a way to make me regret it.

"...Ah, shit, divination.  That's not nearly as much of a threat surface back home.  Probably shouldn't have as much a hold on me as it would like due to Reasons but yes, let's just...  Well.  I was waiting on someone to invite me inside the grounds properly before I went anywhere, honestly, it's only polite.  ...Not that I operate on faerie rules, I just didn't want to presume.  Anyway, shall we?"

She walks out of the circle.

No, you misunderstand her, hypothetical wards that might exist and might think to keep her inside containment.  She is going there, and you are not invited to try and stop her.  She was, after all, invited.

It was only supposed to be a test! It shouldn't have been possible for anything else to come through!

She can leave, making a thin silver circle on the ground flare cherry-red and melt as she does.

"Sensible! I don't know how the Academy would have reacted to you, or who would win, but the last Outer Horror that tried had some trouble. But you're welcome now. Professor?"

Gate. Hopefully less terrifying Gate this time. 

It's an Inquisitorial Chamber, so it's brightly-lit. There are couches. Have a seat!

This has gone from her favourite day to her least favourite day so, so quickly. 

Before they leave, she turns around, hmms for a moment, and fixes the circle.  Now that she's made her point to the Inquisitor, there's no need to be a poor guest, and leaving a hole in their defenses against Void-horror-type bullshit would make her quite a poor guest indeed.

She would offer Naevys a reassuring pat if she thought it would at all be welcome, but she doesn't think so, so she won't do that.

(This room actually isn't technically inside the Academy. Have you seen the kind of thing people summon in here? The door is just a portal. That's why it's possible to do things like Scry or conjure monsters in here.

...But point taken.)

It would help, actually, but she has no way of communicating that.

"There probably isn't Anyone who can hear us in here, and if there is we've probably already lost. You already know far too much. Yes, there are other gods. Not all the heathen 'gods' are creative demons or noble fairies or ancient saints we conveniently forgot about until syncretism time - well, only technically. Yes, there are Evil things as powerful as gods. Yes, we burned all the books about Them. Yes, some magic is Evil. Further questions?"

"...Do the names 'Pharasma' or 'Ao' ring any bells?"

"...All right, that's a bit eldritch even by this conversation's standards. No, they don't. Unless  you're me or one of maybe a dozen other people who've entered the Archives and read about the Far Realms. They aren't just far away like you were, They occupy - entirely different quiddities, interaction is probably impossible - there's nobody left alive who could explain properly. The ancient Church wanted to slay or convert Them. To be clear, they were very far away from succeeding."

"...Considering the sorts of things I know both of them did to their local cosmologies, I certainly don't like them either, but it's worth noting that theirs are the cosmologies I've heard about that most closely reflect the things I think stand out about this one.  Assuming that this isn't an illusion-of-transparency thing and we're not talking about entirely different high-handed deities that are nominally In Charge on some level.  Speaking of deities, though, ah, which ones are officially recognized?"

"...Oh, and: Is there Law/Chaos as a recognizable metaphysical axis, as well as Good/Evil?"

Exciting! It was thought that realities that distant and different would be unknowably alien. She will file this knowledge away for when she wants to see how loud the other dozen people can scream. 

"What things did stand out to you?"

The alien personally disapproves of Greater Horrors from Beyond the Veil. Galora likes her already.

"Questions about Law and Chaos are strictly forbidden even in the very halls of the Holy Citadel itself. Not anywhere else, it's just that once people start arguing about them they don't stop. They're a part of some influential schools of hermeneutics, but the exact meaning isn't clear, any more at least. The Five Gods we recognise are Pelor, god of the sun, justice, and authority; Aphrodite, goddess of love, sex, beauty and lightning; Moradin, god of trade, order, and the forge; Mystra, goddess of the moon, knowledge, and compassion; and Sirenna, goddess of battle, hunting and liberty. Under most theories, Lawful, Chaotic, Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic. Familiar at all?"

"Yes, and strangely so because it's a bit of a pick-and-mix of different pantheons I already know of!  I think.  Actually, now that I'm thinking about it more maybe it's mostly one with a bit of another; I don't precisely recall which deities were which but I'm at least 70% confident that everyone but Aphrodite is 3.5...  Although I've never heard of Aphrodite having lightning in her domains before.  I vaguely expect she picked it up during the Cataclysm, because she's the only one of the pantheon-I-recognize-her-from, here, and previously lightning was held by the chief god of that particular group.  As for what stands out...  Axiomatic Good/Evil, similarly probably-axiomatic Law/Chaos, spell circles, use of specific valuable material components in casting, many spell names and their associated details, most of the gods you've named other than Aphrodite who, I mean, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if she's present in some of the other cosmologies, that pantheon was - popular, let's say, for all that that world didn't evidentiarily have miracles - but I don't associate her with them."

"I suspect I'll recognize a large amount of the Names To Run Away From Really Fast, too, but, ah, I probably shouldn't just start listing them."

"...Oh, and it's so damn obvious to me that I nearly forgot, but the whole 'there was an ancient empire and then it blew up' thing.  That's a commonality, to some degree."

Goddess have You been up to something again. 

"There are, possibly, some passages of ancient works that might make sense in that light. And yes, do not do that. Try not to think about Them too much either. Running wouldn't especially help."

All right, it's very early to say anything either way yet, but this is encouraging so far. The only frustrating thing is that the alien doesn't make sense to her yet, the pressures that shape people in her world aren't quite the same. Using magic to learn about her might upset her, and more importantly is cheating. The not-fun kind.

"Ancient empires do have a habit of doing that. That's actually our whole problem. Exactly how long did your world have widespread powerful magic for?"

"Ooh, that one gets complicated!  Either 'pretty much Yes, though "powerful" might not be quite the right word compared to "strategically useful"' and I don't know if you mean 'in the hands of people', or 'approximately a decade', depending on whether you're counting the outside or inside view and whether you believe Last Tuesdayism to be relevant.  There is a known starting point for the world that is much later than the start of history, if you take the outside view."

All right, she's picking something up. Wizards are the same everywhere.

"Last Tuesdayism* is very relevant. A false history could take arbitrary shapes and therefore tell us nothing about the true future."

Are they going to have to solve the implicit problem that defeated every other civilisation in history more like this year or this millennium, is what she wants to know. 

"I mean, how long have most things in your world relied on magical power instead of labour, inside actual chronological time?"

She has to hand it to the Goddess, She was absolutely right when She said Galora's life would be more interesting this way.

* She's familiar with the idea. Cartesian doubt is more important when demons really can control your sensory inputs sometimes. And she gets the good translation magic.

"Oh, goodness... Well, it depends on your definition, but I'd say that that's definitely true of Villarosa for all of 'live' history, and I'd hazard that over half of the distinct cultures of the planet have definitely reached that point even when using particularly stringent definitions, and - well, active magic is a fact of life pretty much everywhere on the planet.  As contrasted with, I presume you know, the whole 'everything's technically magic' thing.  ...Is there a particular reason you're asking?"

"Oh, I'm trying to keep the world from ending. I keep all my things there, you see." 

If the spread of magic on that scale happened in this woman's lifetime, and it's only been ten years... On balance, she should check first.

"The problem seems to be specifically mortals using magic. The world has no shortage of wonders, believe me." Her gaze grows slightly distant for a moment. "The Old Kingdom lasted centuries at its peak, but it took a long time to develop. And it still ended. Most magical empires don't last that long. My worry is that maybe in five years' time someone in your world has a clever idea and everyone dies. And if your magic spreads that fast here, well... even the gods couldn't stop the last cataclysm. Maybe They do stop most of them."

"...Hmm.  The funny thing is, is that - it's actually pretty dang hard to concentrate enough power to even look like you might cause an actual apocalypse instead of merely causing some damage in, oh, a square mile or so under the absolute worst possible conditions - and people will see that coming, too, and that generally means 'time for adventurers to come in and wreck your shit' if you're being both stupid and evil.  ...Hell, the gnomes don't have that problem and they're practically throwing raw chaos at everything, I'd compare their risk of exploding due to Experimental Stupid to the average wizard's and those explosions have never blown up a mountain or anything.  Even the ones that're trying to.  Mortal magic operates on a mortal scale, and if you're norming to me, well, I'm an outlier - twice over, actually - and should not be counted."

"There's also a fairly basic and effective 'things exploding' suppressant."

"...If anything, I'd say that probably the larger overall threat surface would be Void-derived cognitohazards, except that I panicked over that once already and worked out that they're self-containing.  You can't make a thing that explodes someone's mind through Void magic without first exploding yourself with it and then the spell's gone so they won't explode even though you did, sort of thing."

"Someone with subtlety and patience could be a problem with Void-based fuckery, but they're not going to destroy the world or turn random people into gibbering cultists of Outer Gods.  I think you're already equipped to handle that threat profile."

That is in fact a completely terrifying set of answers. But she's never really seen the point of being terrified, it's not like it helps. 

She still doesn't know enough to steer this conversation the right way, but who else would do a better job? She can imagine what the Council would say, and then the world would end.

Her turn!

"Power? It doesn't take a lot of power. You only have to make one little joke to a king the wrong way, and you lose your head, or start a whole war. Outside our lands, anyway. Magic works the same way. Did you know, there's a First-Circle Spell that can probably kill most of a country under exactly the right conditions? I might tell you about it if the two of us get along well enough."

She turns and kicks her feet up on the couch. 

"Anyway, we burnt every copy that we know of in holy fire. Your world is only ten years old. Someone could discover that Spell tomorrow. Unless you're sure you designed your magic so well a thousand people cleverer than you could never find a flaw? We're already trying to reach your plane and warn them, of course, but we might well be too late by the time we do."

How is she reacting to all this, exactly?

"Heroes putting down Dark Lords works most of the time. What happens when once every few hundred years you get someone like Acererak or Lum or gods help you the Nameless Queen, and the world's heroes die in agony before they ever get to meet in a tavern?"

(The translation Spell is having to reach pretty far to do something with this reference to the Tragedy of Baron Lum, a play reconstructed, in the time of the Old Kingdom, from papyrus fragments found under a sheet of glass in the Kharidian Desert several dozen miles wide, and recently rediscovered.)

"That's not even the whole problem. Evil doesn't always start from Evil. We obviously don't know exactly how ancient kingdoms fell, but - the Doom of Adaveiga, the old books say, started as some kind of national defence programme. They got the magic slightly wrong, we think, and I'd invite you to write that on ten million tombstones if there were anything left to bury. There's really not much left even in the darkest dungeons, which is saying something."

Old High Draconic does have a word for "cognitohazard", which is concerning once you think about it. Dragons aren't very perturbable creatures. 

"And unfortunately here there are some things more resistant to - cognitohazards - than, for example, most peasants. Even normal Spells would drive most people mad to comprehend. And wizards are allowed to use those!" 

(She winks at Naevys, who is sitting very still and trying not to breathe and hoping everyone's forgotten she's there.)

"So maybe your magic is safe where ours isn't. Maybe it's even safe in combination with ours. Maybe both worlds will be just fine. Or maybe you're as clever as you look and you're worried too."

"...I agree with you that you have reason to be concerned.  And - were I in your position, I would most definitely share it.

"However.

"It is my magic.  It will not be used to cause an apocalypse because I won't fucking let it."  And it is in this moment that it becomes clear why she did describe herself as 'maybe a creator god, if you squint really hard' - because the world around her ripples with the weight of her words, as the Twisting Nether itself flares behind her eyes.

"But that would not reassure me, in your shoes.  So let me argue, instead, that the priorities of the force that actually created the world in question, are...

"...It would not be a happily ever after, at the end, if three years later, the world ended in a ball of nuclear fire.  I did not ask for a world with apocalypse behind every blind corner.  I have enough trust in the people involved to believe that I didn't get one."

"...If I am understanding you correctly, the problem with Spells is that they are essentially a self-perpetuating understanding of something alien, like - making an ant understand a" circuit board "ritual circle."

"We don't have that sort of thing, outside of the primordial forces themselves.  Even my translator can only work with what the recipients can understand."

"...I am concerned about the potential impact of releasing Spells upon my own ontology, but I think, to know whether they need to be quarantined, I would need to actually examine one."

Yeah, that must be very frightening if an elder god has never sat in your lap to give you performance reviews.

"Hey, that's slightly reassuring, thank you. I'm not going to immediately pull people off desperately trying to warn your plane, just in case those Forces made some kind of mistake, but still. For our own sake - the worry then is what happens when your magic meets ours. I am not actually a wizard but yours is quite a clever metaphor. The analogy I would use is... sometimes people see a sunrise, or read a poem, or meet a woman, or hear a sermon, and it shapes their whole life. That's why wizardry breaks people, really, that's what Spells are. And you have only ever seen a very nice and friendly version of wizardry. Naevys? Care to demonstrate some of the horrific highly illegal Black Magic you're hoping I don't know about?"

Is this how the Inquisition kills people? Do they literally frighten them to death? So there's no blood on their hands?

(No, they use swords. Sometimes fire. Even an elf won't die of this, and she has healing. It is hilarious, though.) 

"Er. I- I don't know how your magic works - Spells exist inside me, and across the planes, and - a Spell's effect isn't the same as its essence, mostly, though - ah - I only know of one alleged case of a wizard trying to examine a Spell inside someone - "

"I was there, his head exploded. Cast it."

...Evard's Black Tentacles.

She reaches out, shooting Galora a bit of an annoyed glance because there was no reason to rush, and grasps.

She is no true savant of Death as a school.  But if you need something to stay.  Still.  For long enough to examine it...  She knows that well.

...huh.

(The deep unpurple-black of the grasping Death magic slamming into the Spell - and not Naevys - is being slowly circumscribed with Arcane violet where it's been dragged closer to Alicia's field of influence.)

"...You have good taste in nominally forbidden spellwork, if this is what I think it looks like.  Evard's Black Tentacles?"

(The Spell lashes violently against the way it's pinned like a butterfly to a board, but it can't break out. It can't move or be instantiated. Astral winds blow silvery around it as it tries to take root in the world. In the air are occasional flickers of something dark and writhing. But it's only a Fourth Circle Spell, and it can't quite break out.)

...The Professor of Abjuration can do that, but not many others. That's scary. 

She swallows, hard.

"...Yes," she says in a small voice. "It's - old Conjuration magic - it has, um, uses..."

"I'm sure it does."  There's an undertone of, approximately, fond amusement to the words.  "You don't need to explain them, unless you actually want to."

"As far as how your magic and my magic interact, based off of this limited instance...

"...Hmm.  No, I'd best not say that, I have no desire to overpromise and underdeliver, but I do wonder how well that interaction would scale...  Death Grip is honestly a relatively simple spell.  If it could be laid into an installation to expand the range, powered sufficiently, and cued to snare the Spells You Don't Want Anybody Casting Anywhere Ever...  I suspect that might well help.  I have no desire to just sit there and let more potential apocalypses happen.  But...  Hmm.  I haven't run into the cognitohazard part of Spells in this examination, or if I have, I haven't noticed, which is interesting.  Is that - to be expected?"

"She's more than welcome to. I'd like there to be something in this conversation I could officially approve of."

No actually she's going to try to melt into her chair, is there a Spell for that?

"Anyway, that's exactly the kind of brilliant idea that could save us all! Or end the world next week, possibly. Magic normally gets stronger, and stranger, with time. One of the many, many important reasons her professors tell people like Naevys that it's harder to design Spells than it really technically is is that making them end cleanly is difficult. I wouldn't want to leave a Spell hanging around like that. But something like that is an extremely valuable idea, thank you. 

The Spell isn't cognitohazardous to you partly because you haven't examined its structure closely enough, partly because you don't understand wizardry well enough, partly because it's trapped, and mostly because this is the Last Bastion itself and there is a frankly ridiculous amount of protective magic and outright divine intervention here. I wouldn't have sprung this on you otherwise, that wouldn't even be funny."

(She does, at this point, know how to talk to wizards.)

...Yeah, she's been there.  She gives Naevys a supportive Spirit nudge before she actually manages to think about whether that's a good idea.

"I figure you'd probably just - keep someone or something else around to actually counterspell or dispel the Bad Shit once it got yoinked.  Could probably throw Anti-Magic Shell at that problem and make it self-reinforcing...  The neat thing about Death mana is that its degenerate state is just...  Nothing.  Stillness."

As for the bit about 'why hasn't the Spell tried to jump into my brain yet'...

"Ah.  Yes, that would do it.  ...Hmm."

She'll just pin that off just long enough to do - Shadow Clone - yes, it's the same name, and approximately the same function, but it's different in etiology so there - and pick the spell up again for more direct study in one of the possibilities, but not the other.

"Time to do something kind of risky, for !!Science!!!" // "And hopefully, it can only try to infect the version of me that decided to look."

She jumps in her seat. Anti-What Shell? That... shouldn't even be possible, that's like anti-mathematics or - she shouldn't say anything or someone's going to show up with an anti-mathematics field just to spite her. 

DATE: [N/A - PROJECT TIMESPAN EXCEEDED]

STATUS: CRITICAL

ONTOLOGY: ACRIMONIOUS

HIEROPHANTIC MYSTERY LEVEL: DIAMOND

LOCATION: THE COSMOS, THE FIELDS WE KNOW, ARWIS, THE FARTHEN WOODS, THE LAST BASTION, INQUISITORIAL CHAMBER, SECOND COUCH FROM THE RIGHT

TIME SINCE LAST LOCAL ERROR REPORT: 1357 YEARS 

MORTAL # [UNKNOWN - REFER TO PROJECT OVERSEER]:

MORTAL PERMISSIONS: [N/A, PROJECT ABANDONED]

GREETINGS. 

YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED A LIMITATION IN THE CURRENT PROJECT ARCHITECTURE. THE NATURAL LAWS YOU WISH TO MANIPULATE ARE CURRENTLY UNSUPPORTED. TO CONTINUE, PLEASE REQUEST PROJECT HIATUS. WARNING: PROJECT HIATUS MAY INCREASE RISK OF EXTREME LOCAL DESTRUCTION. FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONSULT OFFICIAL ARCHIVES. 

HAVE A NICE DAY. 

-- or not.

Fucking.  Ow.

"...Are we all aware that physics is in active development or is that new information?  Because I just got an error report saying that the operation I wanted to perform was unsupported because it wasn't implemented yet jammed into my brain.  Also, yeah, no, it's a kind of misleading name, Naevys; what it actually does is - reprocess any mana that attempts to cross its bounds."

"Or I mean I'm assuming that that's why, but it didn't actually say."

"...If this is the flirtatious kind of trying to scare me, I'm flattered but married."

"...I didn't understand a lot of those words but I think that's a bad sign. What were you... Trying to do?"

"Alas, no, I was not flirting, though you are terribly attractive."

"So.  I'd whip up an actual physical demonstration of this but I don't know if it would work either - but, let us take it as read that the thing I'm about to try and explain is how a lot of universes work, including all the ones I've yet visited."  Sure, that's n=2, but she's fairly confident this will continue to hold.

"Light.  The mundane sort."  She snaps one into existence.  "Light is a very interesting thing.  Because it can behave both like - grains of dust, bouncing around in water, and also like a ripple on the surface of that water - being probabilistically more likely to be somewhere where there is a peak, less likely where there is a trough - and this depends upon whether you're trying to pin it down or not.

"This is proveable by something called the double-slit experiment."

She sets up the image of one.

"The double-slit experiment is relatively simple.

"On one side of a set of, you guessed it, two vertical slits, you have a source of - singular quanta of light, photons.  On the other, you have a detection medium.

"You release one photon.

"The detection medium," and here she actually does animate the process somewhat, "measures two impacts.  The singular photon passed through both slits."

"They spread out into a recognizeable pattern if you do a lot of that, but I'm not that invested in particle physics.

"Now.  You put detectors in the slits, as well as on the other side.  And that changes what happens.

"The photon will only pass through one of the slits if they're set up that way."

She demonstrates, again.

"On a human scale, this is pretty much entirely negligible.  But it's the same shape of thing as I was trying to do, sort of.

"I was attempting to establish... the possibility of me-investigating-the-spell and me-not-investigating-the-spell as two separate probabilities of existence - such that I could later collapse them back to one truer reality in my favor.  There's a bunch more in there I've elided, like how there is a fundamental uncertainty in measurement of particles and that also involves wavefunctions, and how, well, technically the thing I'm doing - or trying to do, at least - is based on a misunderstanding of all the underlying physics, but that's the gist of it.

"Of course, it's Void magic, so if I can imagine it anyway, it works.  Void is such bullshit when you have a multiverse to steal the good ideas from.  But I digress."

Something comes back around, the error message still sitting there, sharp in a way that memories aren't, with all the finality of a tombstone.

"...Wait a minute, why did that say PROJECT ABANDONED?  Did.  Did someone leave the universe.  Unattended.  Are we out of the long-term support window for the great cosmic machinery.  I don't.  I can't.  Excuse me just a moment."  She's lost her grip on the tentacles by this point, her thoughts just reeling from the implications.

She puts up a mild-to-moderately obfuscatory barrier (violet, semi-translucent, sound-dampening), for politeness' sake, picks up the nearest compatible soft object, buries her face in it, and goes "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!"

"...Right.  With that panic attack out of the way.  I'd like to see if I can put my cosmic-machinery people in touch with your cosmic-machinery people so that maybe someone can actually administrate the blasted cosmic machine.  Which is a thing I have no idea if I can actually do but dammit somebody ought to be driving this thing!  I shouldn't have received that error message!  ...They might work for a random-omnipotent-being who's kind of weirdly into, effectively, romance novels - that gets kind of complicated in further detail, but it's close enough for now - but they did do a good job on the last project.  ...Sweet mother of fuck this is.  I do not think I have sufficient words, and I like to think I have a good supply of those!  Some sort of - fractally apocalyptic disaster area?  How do you have - where did the local administrator fucking go?!  Was there some kind of War In Heaven and they got blown the fuck up?  Who leaves - fucking, Mechanus - unattended!  I'm just!  Going to go scream into a pillow again!"  Because, fucking, AAAAAAAHHH!!!!!!!!!!

This shit is so fucked up!

Right.  Calm.  Game face on.  Be strong for Naevys' sake, if nothing else.

"Did something happen 1357 years ago, incidentally?"

See, this is why nobody likes wizards. 

She's starting to get it!

"That doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard of! But I don't know if that's not how our world works or if it was just never discovered. Or censored. Your magic is so... forgiving of the thing where you meddle with incomprehensible forces you can't even begin to properly understand!"

All right, panicking wizard is something she knows how to deal with. This is starting to be fun!

Goddess, I really think You should pay more attention here.

"Oh, there was a war among the gods," She says cheerfully. "We call it the Theomachy. Nobody knows exactly what happened, everyone including the gods was too busy dying to make records. The Prophet put a stop to it but it's not clear exactly how, he didn't write it down. That's where the Church comes from, incidentally, from the last time Things Went Wrong. Significantly more than 1357 years ago, though. If other gods could come and help I imagine They would have by now."

The visitor isn't malicious but she does have the classic archmage complex, that much is clear. 

"But why not call Them? If you don't mind something bad happening to Them, of course. Like presumably Whoever used to be in charge. Have you really never got anyone killed by meddling in the arcane?" She says all this perfectly casually. 

"Oh I'm certain that somebody understands it in great detail, it's just not me."

"As for the question of 'Why don't I call them' - I've never done it before, and also it's your universe, you get veto rights.  As to whether nobody dies from meddling with the Arcane - obviously it is magic and you can still fuck it up, losing control of a spell can go badly, but generally unless you're standing as a ritual fulcrum, which requires much more formalism than the vast majority of people with more megalomania than sense possess, no, the backlash won't kill you even if you don't successfully ground it out somehow.  I, personally, have not gotten anybody killed like that that I was not actively trying to kill at the time."

Alicia is a difficult person to understand. 

The world that shaped her is clearly very different. And she has some of the typical wizard traits, but she doesn't have the same scars on her soul as a powerful wizard should... Maybe she's not just highly skilled and lucky, maybe her magic really is safe. What a pleasant world that must be. 

Would this have been what the ancient archmages were like? So supremely confident that their mature sensible civilisation, with all its wise sages and great wyrms and ancient elves, could handle even the deadliest powers? No, this is worse, at least they had records of darker times. 

Making people rightfully afraid isn't something that comes up often and it might be unwise to try it on an archmage. Normally by that point you've been burnt enough times that you have at least some sense of fear. 

"Glad to hear it. Let's just say I'd be more worried for the health of your gods than our world."

Let's try...

"Can you perhaps tell me exactly what you designed your magic to do? And why?"

"...That's the wrong question."  It slips out of her, quiet for all its import, before she can think about whether it was a good idea to say.

"You're - I'm not entirely sure, really, but - if I had to reach for the words right now, you're treating the magic as something that came after.  It didn't.  It came first.  I didn't - it wasn't designed to do.  It was designed to be.  I wasn't setting out to make a magic system that got bolted on to carbon-based lifeforms yet again, I was setting out to make a physics.

"And because it is a physics that is fundamentally realized in the tension of its fundamental forces meeting on equal ground, you can't shake the world until an apocalypse blows up.  You'll be pulled back down in the trying, or simply align yourself so hard you fade out."

That's better. She smirks softly and pops a grape into her mouth (don't bother wondering where it came from, she's an Archbishop and this is the Last Bastion). "I really like how bold you are, you know. What's the right question, then?"

...Asdgfjkld.  She is, regardless of her efforts to ensure that this won't backlash upon her people, still weak to Compliments From Pretty Lady.  It just doesn't show as much on her face, nowadays.

Okay, now we actually answer the question.  "You have the answer to it already: What did I design my magic to be?"

Yeah, she knows. She smiles gently, and it's one of the good ones this time, the kind of smile that suggests that you're doing just fine, darling, and if you keep trying you might just get a treat. 

"Actually, the important part of my question was why."

"...To be honest, a large part of the reason I did things this way, instead of any other possible system - like yours, for example - was because I'd seen it half-assed once, and wanted to see if I could do it better.  Which is perhaps a bit petty, for a decision that shapes the lives of a potentially infinite number of people, but...

"I wasn't given a choice in that I would be responsible for the shape of a world.  My only choice was how I'd be responsible for it.  And I'm just...  Awful at applied sociology, so...  Better I focus on the hard," as-in-scifi, "bits instead of the soft," as-in-skills, "ones."

"Ha. You designed new natural laws because you like numbers and thought you could do a better job? The 'half-assed' version must have been awful."

She does the so-so handwiggle.  "It was moreso that they hadn't bothered to do it, than that the bits they did do were bad.  The potential was all there, they just weren't doing anything with it.

"And then they made like a hundred horrible writing decisions at once, too."  Looking at you, the entire existence of dracthyr or whatever the fuck they're called; you had a perfectly good excuse with how Cataclysm ended, and then you blamed them on Neltharion?  He wouldn't have the slightest fucking clue how to do any of that!  Whereas Deathwing would have probably known how, but like hell would he have wanted to!

"I was going to ask who 'they' might be, but it sounds like you live in a story."

She's very aware that her only reason to think this isn't an obvious, if atypical, case of an archmage going insane again is the word of the Conjuration Professor. Which could have all sorts of schemes she wouldn't expect, since she's mostly specialised in mortals, or just be wrong. 

(If Alicia is in fact just a heathen archmage who finally snapped under the titanic spiritual strain, she's going to have a lot of fun with her.)

She rolls languorously onto her side and props her head up on her fist. "So are you going to tell me what the authors of reality are like, or do I have to guess?"

If the Inquisition are going to kill her over this at all, they already have more than enough cause, and they aren't allowed to kill her any slower than burning. Which they'll do anyway, she's a wizard. From that point of view, she might as well speak her mind! 

"I have some feedback for them too!"

"I was for a bit, see also random omnipotent being kind of obsessed with romance novels but that's over and done with, thank goodness, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I am yet still part of a story somewhere else, this sort of thing is a whole damn genre, but no, the thing that offended me was a work of fiction diegetically - for all the irony of saying it like that.

"As far as I know, those authors weren't remotely your authors, though your sort of world definitely exists in dialogue with the sort of worldbuilding bones that make up Azerosa...

"But I think I can make some predictions about the sort of people who would write you, if you'd like to have them."

The x-risk concern is very telling, for one.  And she's sure that someone who'd work...

Hey wait a minute.

"I think I have identified the name of the first-circle spell that kills an entire county or possibly country under the wrong circumstances, which suggests which sourcebooks I should be dredging out of the Void if you want me to give you a copy."  ...Wait, shit.  "Not of the spell just of the rules around it.  To be clear!  Unfortunately it's the one I'm much less personally familiar with.  And it's the one with...  Much more utter fucking bullshit that you can pull off by combining obscure conditionals, even leaving aside the things that rely on such obviously bizarre contentions like 'the rules of the game you're playing don't say you can't take actions when you're dead'.  Though the costly material component for high-powered spells like Wish suggests something like a fusion, because the 3.5e version cost - approximately, potential - to cast...  I don't recall if it cost money too but I don't think so."

Realistically, human beings don't think as fast or as hard as she does now. It's difficult to actually swap contexts, break the pattern of what one has been saying, orient-calculate-execute, in reality most of that happens on a sort of semi-conscious level people assign flattering labels to afterwards. 

But as far as she can tell she was Chosen as part of some kind of plan - or at least, for some specific reason (she has obviously looked into the question of whether and how much the gods can perceive the future in case she can learn to do it herself and came out with confusing answers) - and considering how much she's got out of it, the least she can do is return the favour and make the Goddess really, really happy. 

Simplifying, so that she can complete this thought in between giving Alicia a warm, happy, bone-melting smile - and sipping suddenly-present wine, and offering it to Alicia and Naevys, and seeming to pause indulgently to think for just a moment - either she's insane/lying, or this is to some extent real. Any amount of truth in this is important, and it's not terrible even in the former case.

Also, in almost any interpretation, there's a neglected and important aspect of this. 

"If you're really offering me the secrets behind the conception of the world, then you do know how to impress a girl. I think I can think of some things I could offer to the kind of person who would write me, that they might want. But first you have to tell me about what it's like to live in a romance novel. We subsidise those. I've always thought I could do better. What did you do?"

Asgjhkkdf!?

(She waves off the wine on pure reflex; she's never liked the idea of drunkenness and it goes even worse with phenomenal cosmic power.)

"To be honest my main goal was to survive being in a romance novel without getting entangled in anything messy like a torturously convoluted boarding-school love polygon or the obligatory third-act big nasty thing that needs killing because this is an adventurer sort of novel.

"Thankfully I was in a good position to derail all that before it could even start, because, well, the hypothetical plot-that-would-have-been in the counterfactual universe where the Princess wasn't always having been Last-Tuesday'd me, was one where she was one of the rivals who managed to get in way over her head with cult bullshit because her parents were...  Decent people, perhaps, but they didn't really know what they were doing with her - and, well, not giving the cult the artifact that nobody but them knew they needed to summon the demon lord is pretty easy to do.  And I managed to end-run some of those guys' rules - well, I had insider help, but still - and get someone to be the heroine of the original plot who also shared my metaknowledge, so it was rather amicable all around.  The betrothal that would've been at stake in the original plot went to one of my siblings, in the end; he was nice and all but we didn't really click as anything more than research buddies.  They're very happy with eachother.

"Somehow I then ended up with the crown on my head for a few years until I managed to convince my sister to hold down the home front and throw me at new and interesting problems she needed solved, instead, so that I could - well, do things like this without leaving my people in the lurch."

Oh, interesting. 

"Really? If you know you're in a romance novel, why not get... messy? You know it has to end well, after all. You might as well have fun with it. Congratulations on somehow mysteriously ending up with the crown, though."

Archmage, god, queen, sure, fine, she can cope with this, she's not dead yet for some reason! 

"So you lived in a romance novel but you never got to have the romance?" There's something uncommonly sad about that thought. 

(Queen-emeritus, technically, but dear gods people still seem to like thinking of her like the queen regnant for some reason and her sister, for whatever reason, won't stop them.  That's not how this is supposed to work!)

...Well, aside from having broken fate because fuck that...  "It wasn't actually guaranteed that the happily ever after at the end of the book would be mine, if I played my cards wrong.  And, it, hm.  I just really wasn't feeling the premise at all.  The setup I got was for, like, a childhood-sweethearts thing, which was...

"That sort of thing only works if you're relevantly a child.  I had too much weighing on me to permit myself that to begin with.  And I never was much of a romance novel person before this, especially because a lot of the stuff I was aware of kind of sucked.  Which isn't to say I'm not interested in anything like that at all, just that it wasn't my preferred sort of scene to play in, especially also given that while it's not as if I've never appreciated a guy's body, and he was definitely within that strike zone, I still do round off to obligate lesbian.  ...Also, honestly, I don't rightly know if the prince would know what a kink was if you hit him over the head with it, and I know myself well enough to know that those didn't come out in the wash."

Does she even need to say that honestly her taste in women runs pretty much exactly like.  Ah shit did she actually introduce herself by name?  She doesn't think so...

...Well.  Anyway.  The Inquisitor's hot, gods help her.

...Maybe she shouldn't think that bit too loud, because They actually might.

"...It has just occurred to me that I don't believe we've been introduced by name?  Which, well, I imagine there might be reasons for that but if it was just that neither of us thought of it then, well, I just did."

Oh, she was the rival, that makes sense. ...Marginally less likely to be arcane madness, almost all the wizard insanities involve delusions of grandeur in some way. 

"Oh, I did think of it, it just always amuses me to see people try to work out if they're allowed to ask. They are, by the way. I am Galora, Archbishop of Silvermoon. If Naevys didn't tell her pet summons her name then that was very rude of her."

It might be something interesting in the wine or it might be the numinous Presence in this room, obvious to her wizard's senses, or it might just be the sheer excitement of all today's events, but the world right now seems very... colourful and promising, and seeing as she's already doomed if the Inquisition will it and not if they don't, she's suddenly determined to at least have fun with it. 

"I did. And did you ever ask the prince what he liked? Humans are sometimes very shy about that kind of thing. I would know."

The 'her pet summons' comment, while left unaddressed, did nonetheless spark a faint blush.  Incidentally.

"I did, or at least I brought up that some people have kinks while we were still betrothed and he did not go on a journey of self-discovery about it.  But - like I said, he wasn't really ever for me.  I didn't want him as more than perhaps a friend to begin with.  He suits Lila much more than me."

"Oh, it's really sad that humans are stuck in that way! I hadn't thought of that before! You poor thing." She didn't actually know it was normal for humans to have such specific preferences, assuming the translation Spell is working, that makes it even worse! 

This is fine. This is fine, she's over it. And honestly the visitor is... not really very scary, kind of the opposite.

"Was there anyone you did want? Or did the romance novel just... ignore you after that?"

"I mean, I wouldn't describe it as stuck, but yes, some people just aren't interested."

Also: asgbdfl?  She wasn't expecting to receive a reaction like that one?

"I haven't really been looking, honestly, it's...  Well, I'm effectively a head of state, no matter who's actually sitting the throne; I can't exactly go mingle.  And those times I do sneak out, I can hardly...  It would be bad to seek a relationship on such false pretenses."

"I mean stuck the way you're born! I hadn't really thought about it before."

Does the Visitor seem sad? She thinks the Visitor seems sad. 

"Why can't you mingle if you're the head of state? You could just pass a law that says you can. I would."

"Ooohhh.  Not as stuck as you'd think, I think, though still probably less than you seem to be used to.  Is that, like, a thing elves are known for, here?"

"...And, well, I could go out there, it just wouldn't accomplish anything because it would be unbearably awkward."

She might be a little bit sad.  It's a kind of resigned sort of sad, she's used to it, and she has other things that bring her joy, but it would be nice.

"...I don't know exactly what humans know us for but it's something we can do! We were made in a different divine image, it varies a little but - we don't have fixed sexes like humans, no, I can see how inconvenient that would be!"

She shrugs lightly. "I think it's actually easy to bear awkwardness. Nothing bad actually happens. And in a way you're mingling now and you're doing really well!" 

"Oh believe you me, I made sure that being stuck like that - someone being stuck in the wrong shape physically - was not going to be a problem."  That one sounded personal.

(She didn't actually necessarily develop it beforehand, but boy would she have been pissed off if magic transition didn't exist.  She'd have invented it herself if she had to.)

"And, yes, I am having a pleasant social interaction here, which is nice, but it's working because I'm not in Villarosa, where the crown is particularly immanent upon anyone I'm talking to."

All right, she's just going to admit it to herself, the alien archmage-queen with non-zero claims on godhood is kind of really adorable. 

"That was really nice of you!"

"Morphological freedom, in all its many...  forms, oh I did not intend to make that pun but I do wholeheartedly approve of it, is a cause near and dear to my heart - no matter that I'm almost painfully vanilla about it, compared to some of the people I've known.  I actually like having opposable thumbs."

"Thumbs are nice, but so are wings. So how much could you design things like that into magic? I wonder how much fun you really had with it."

"They are, I will admit."

...Wow, that was a really weird way of saying that last bit?  Probably just weird word choice and not, she doesn't kniw, passive-aggressiveness.

"It was definitely neat to think about, though I'll admit that mostly I didn't get into the level of detail of picking out individual spells to have, really."

"What I mean is, you said you designed magic as - a system of consistent natural laws? But then you also said you made sure 'morphological freedom' was possible. I was wondering if you built anything else into the laws of reality just for fun. I would have!"

"Oh!  Oh, yes, definitely.  Bags of holding qua things that are bigger on the inside were a specific inclusion, because, well, I just think they're neat.  And the trains, can't forget about those!  ...Oh it has been ages since I've thought about electric motors properly but someone remind me to explain them; I'm fairly sure magnetism is working like it should, regardless of some of my more esoteric knowledge of, hm, carbon-based will do as an adjective, physics being apparently unimplemented."

Elvish doesn't exactly have the word 'nerd' but she's thinking it very hard. Maybe all archmages are like this once you get to know them. She kind of likes it.

"They are neat! They're one of the things we don't really know how to make properly any more but I'm working on it, I have a prototype. What do you mean by 'train'?"

"A large vehicle consisting of a series of - well, train cars - on a fixed track that carries passengers or cargo at faster speeds and-or with much more pulling force than you could get from a horse."

"Electric motors...  Well.  Do you know the thing about moving a magnet through a coil of wire making electricity start moving, and the thing about running electricity through a coil of wire establishing a magnetic field?  Well, I don't recall all the details of how you make the ones that are actually worth using, because I know they're not actually shaped like the easiest practical example, but I forget how they actually work - is it that they move the coil of wire inside the magnet?  I have no idea - anyway!  ...Oh, also, you can get a standing source of electricity out of copper and zinc - stacked together in thin layers, I believe - and some kind of acid.  ...Been a long while since I read about any of that, so maybe ask me for an encyclopedia article instead of just taking my word for it.  Except the magnets-and-coils-of-wire thing.  I'm sure of that and specifically that."

"...Wish I knew how to turn bauxite into aluminum.  I know you can and there's electricity involved somehow, but, well.  Honestly the most specific physical process of production I recall is diamonds."

This is such a strange system of magic. She's still not sure she understands, it feels a lot like she's racing ahead along a line of assumptions, but one minute the Visitor is saying she helped design magic (!) to be... some kind of single coherent system? Because she was annoyed it had been done badly before? In some kind of story? And the next minute there are all these special designs for bags of holding and apparently now 'motors' built in.

If, as she said, she wasn't thinking about all the good she could have done, just to make magic her way, it still feels like she could have had so much more more fun with it! If Naevys were designing the laws of magic - if magic had laws instead of suggestions - the world would be a really interesting place at least. Well, no, that's way too harsh, Alicia does have all those wonders in her world and she implied that was deliberate. 

"I don't know about any of those things! Diamonds are very useful in wizardry, I wouldn't have thought they could be produced easily."

All of this is at the same time impressive, endearing and deeply, deeply annoying. She does not understand and Alicia keeps making portentous allusions and normally that's archmage talk for "you don't want to know if you like your brain between your ears where it belongs" but that apparently isn't true here and so it's just making her want to acquire answers. 

"Diamonds," she says with the tone of someone delivering a well-worn aphorism, "are just fancy carbon."

"It's not exactly easy to make geological-scale heat and pressure, but what it definitely is is simple, especially since carbon is, to a first approximation, charcoal.  Or actual coal."

"...Azerosa doesn't actually operate on the same physics as you do, so honestly I'm glad I remember even that much."

"So... You originally came from a different world that worked more like ours, then went to Villarosa and designed their physics?"

"That is indeed the case, yes.  Except that one didn't have - well, anything that's verifiably magic."

"How did you get to the other one without magic?"

"Random omnipotent being did it, no further details available about how or even, really, what.  I don't remember getting hit by a bus or anything."

"...The romance novels one? Omnipotent sounds really interesting as well I should have realised."

"Yes, the romance novels one.

"Really it's more - random arbitrarily potent being and/or force, but that isn't as snappy.  Somebody who's, like...  At least one level of powerscaling above the gods you have here, at which point I can hardly know anything further about the scale they operate on - but, like.  They could pull a plausibly infinite multiverse out of nowhere for their whim of giving me a planet to fuck around with school drama on."

Oh lovely, another Outer Horror that probably needs killing. They were running low on those, really. 

... She hopes all the people in those created planes are all right but she really doubts it somehow. 

Well, she can probably think of something It wants, if that ever becomes relevant. 

"You know, I'm starting to wonder if you're being a tease on purpose."

...

What about what she just said was --

-- oh.  Right.  Yeah, they would be terrifying, if you didn't consider them a landscape feature.

"On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is 'oh gods oh fuck kill it burn it with fire immediately this cannot be allowed to continue', I really have to emphasize that the entity I interacted with was, like, at most a two.  Possibly a three because who knows what its actual selection criteria are and people can be inventively cruel little shits sometimes, but considering some of the actual were-once-human people it works with I don't think it'd be that bad."

"Also, I'm not trying to.  Whether I'm accidentally succeeding anyway, well, you tell me, I don't kink on existential terror.  ...gods dammit now I have to go find a big evil thing and burn it down because in an infinite multiverse it's bound to exist somewhere and it already disgusted me enough when it was fictional."

Oh, don't worry, they'll do something about landscape features too when they can. You shouldn't think You can get away with something just because stopping You is physically or theoretically impossible. 

"...If... the multiverse is infinite, how can that make a difference? It must also exist somewhere else."

"It matters for the starfish.

"...Old parable.  It matters for the people who are dealing with it, wherever I find the problem, even if I alone can't make a dent given the scale of the issue."

"That's unfortunate, it sounds like it would be a convenient one for you to have. I am not so low in our Lady's esteem that I can't kind of see it."

She works with wizards, it's not even in the top ten weirdest. 

"I was referring to how you keep dodging telling the whole story, especially your guesses about my world." She smiles a smile that's only very slightly predatory by her standards, to take any sting out of the words. "One almost wonders if you're disappointed I'm being so polite about it."

...Huh?  Oh.  Oh!  She sporfles.  "Nah, it'd probably make me do something stupid.  I like my eldritch entities benevolent, thank you very much."  ...She wonders if she'll run into a Sable.

"And, no, sorry, I just have a horrible habit of running off on a tangent and forgetting what the original thing I was talking about was in the first place.  Right.  So.  If you want me to start guessing things about your author...

"They are likely to share your concern about hostile deitylike entities of some flavor, because nobody comes up with something like this setup who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about preventing the end of the world.  Judging by the fact that you've heard of both of their - keystone cosmic figures -, and that I can only think of the one instance of a first-circle spell being hacked into a county-killer, I'm fairly sure that they know both of the rulesets of those two cosmologies, and kind of squidged them together a bit but sort of in a way that favored 3.5e more because the - ahem, not saying it - wouldn't work in Pathfinder, I don't think it has that, though it did originally claim forwards-compatibility so what do I know.  The costly material components thing is definitely straight from Pathfinder, though.

"Also I'm fairly sure that most of your pantheon - Aphrodite being the odd one out, she's from a specific popular historical mythology that for all I know could have been statted out in either system for whatever reason, but I don't really know either way, just that she's not default-setting Pathfinder - is from 3.5, at least by name though not necessarily by portfolio.  I'm certain of at the least Mystra.  Though the 3.5e Mystra was more involved in the setting's setup, she made a Thing that made it possible for people to cast spells, and then took tenth-level spells off the menu later when people started fucking things up with them, which is evidently not what's happening here.  If the Weave existed she could just ban - excuse me, still not saying it.  Or prevent the relevant hacky metamagic stack from, well, stacking.  Or fix the element of the spell that makes it possible to do that with it in the first place.  Why on earth they made it a burst...

"Like, that's the whole reason that that bullshit even works, that and the open question of 'what counts as a "target" when the spell doesn't naïvely seem to have one'.

"I'm honestly glad there isn't a Weave here, though, because I do not want to have all of you having to deal with the fucking Spellplague.  Or any other consequences of a more 3.5e-compliant Mystra falling into a template attractor and getting murdered by, I think whatshisface evil god of murder.  I specifically remember there being a lot of plot about that happening, though mostly none of the details."

(Elsewhere, privately among the Five Gods on high, but also from a certain point of view everywhere):

(Aphrodite is 1e. Also, the Weave is midichlorians-tier bullshit and We're all better off without it, trust Me. I'd say everything went wrong with Thieves but the femdom spider elves came later and they're pretty cool.)

(They're really not if You look, or think about it for five seconds. Can You seriously not do any better than gibberish from the Far Realms even when We might possibly be under attack by the Romance Novels God.)

(Look, it could be worse, they could have mushroom-flavoured breast milk.)

"Well, I'm glad the Creator and I have that in common!"

Maybe she is just insane. This would be her first properly broken archmage, but she has contingency plans for that, it doesn't go badly but she's going to need to clear her schedule.

"Mystra doesn't have that kind of power over magic here, or if She does She's never mentioned it. Wizardry isn't of the gods, if it were my job would be much easier. In many ways it's the opposite, but I shouldn't say any more until Naevys finishes pulling herself together. How did you find out about all this? If you can negotiate with Outer Horrors and you tell me how then I might just make sure you're happy you did."

She does not know this conversation is happening!  But if she did she would be laugh-crying at the reminder of Ed fucking Greenwood and his horny-on-main.  She's so sorry you had to deal with that actually happening.

Also she would be feeling extremely vindicated about her confidence that Aphrodite was not 3.5e material.

Anyway!

"...I thought we were all well aware of the world-of-fiction bits of multiverse theory?  I could have sworn...

"Well, no matter.

"I didn't get any of this information from Outer Horrors, I got most of the setting knowledge from literally just a game people played, just a literal book - okay, many, many books, 3.5e has.  So much random shit."  ...Wasn't...  She's fairly sure the fucking Truenamer was 3.5e at its worst, even.  It was definitely in an edition that started with 3.  "But still - a literal book of rules and a default world to use them with, and most of my guesses about the ultimate creator or creators of this setting are because I know that sort of person pretty well.  It's a fairly - dense - that's not really the right word, but like...  I'd expect at least seven out of ten of them, when given a design brief that includes both 'involves this rulebook' and 'must be postapocalyptic', would end up with something like this place.  I probably would have, too."

How intensely fascinating. 

"We are not all well aware of it, no. We do begin to touch on the kind of truths that reliably drive mortals insane, especially the ones who believe they're far too wise and worldly for that."

She can guess more than this - what this sort of knowledge has to do with Alicia and her romance plot, for example - but the question is how she can use it. 

"Ha.  I am not wise at all, just reasonably well-inoculated.  If I was wise I wouldn't have been running my half of that world-breaching experiment."

"You know, you're quite self-aware for a wizard."

She seems baffledly flustered by the compliment.  "I suppose?"

"Oh, you definitely are. Most wizards think they're just the only really competent people who've ever tried the ritual that drove their last three predecessors mad. Or they think the work is just so important they must take the risk. You'd think they'd learn, but they don't."

She has some guesses as to why.

"You seem to actually know what you're doing. It's nice to have company in that for a change. Do you have a plan yet for making the Creators do what we want here like in your romance novel? Or shall I start?"

"Ah.  Hubris.  You'd think that that would have been selected against if they all do something batshit and blow up before they reproduce, but I guess psychology is hard to really shape that way.  Insofar as the process of natural selection can be personified, which is 'not very'.

"I don't have - a metatextual plan.  Beyond keeping the camera on us, so that the world keeps moving, I suppose.  I don't have a plan that can manipulate the authors.  Just some thoughts on the object level like pulling in the system reference documents.

"If you have ideas then please do share."

"Maybe enough of them reach Ninth Circle and live hundreds of years and have thousands of children. Maybe there are just too many clever fools in the world to make a dent in. Maybe that does happen and they used to be worse."

(She does know a little about heredity. It's relevant to some long-term plans and there are lots of interesting insights in the extremely forbidden Archives.)

"And oh my dear I have lots of ideas, especially if you know more than you've said about the Creators, which I expect you do, you're a clever girl. But let's see these documents."

Naevys remains confused about how she's still allowed to be here and still breathing and everything but she's not going to let that stop her!

"In Silvermoon most wizards survive! It's not that bad!"

Asgdfbl.

"Right!  One-and-a-half potentially alarming conjurations coming right up, then.  Please don't stab me, it wouldn't help."

Dragging something out of a shadowy void, anchored by a spell circle that is floating in midair as she puts runes to it (the circle at least coming first), is probably alarming!

The System Reference Documents Conjured For Archbishop Galora...

... Contain a complete and searchable copy of the rules of D&D 3e, 3.5e, and 3.75e (Pathfinder First Edition).

... Are safe to permit the existence of.

... Contain all associated lore texts relevant to Archbishop Galora's native worldsheaf as separate, but not separable, addenda.

... Cannot be used for ill consequence.

... Do not expose classified information to those who have no need to know.

... Cannot be destroyed, defaced, or degraded.

This will work.  She is as sure of it as Diana is of the Light.  (And it is the Light that is making these real!)

It's not necessary, except as in creating the right frame of mind is necessary, but she intones -

"True Creation."

Are you sure you want to whitelist this. 

Extremely.

A grimoire! Full of terrible secrets that underlie reality! This day really does have its compensations!

She probably shouldn't call her a good girl just yet, but she does want to. 

She hands the thing that definitely Looks Like An Old And Mysterious Tome over to the Archbishop.  "I'm thinking about whether I've ever seen any - prosocial character optimization hacks like the - spell I am continuing to not name.  I'm sure there's bound to have been something like 'What's the largest Create Water you could do' out there somewhere...

"Probably also you want to take a look through the more obscure Craft Wondrous Item abilities.  I know I've seen a way to get at-will Cure Light Wounds from a clockwork automaton in Pathfinder, and that one's a lot more grounded than 3.5e."

She hadn't expected that to work but she's so glad it did!

For her own part, she's going to flip immediately to the sections on where wizards come from, in case there's a safe way to make more of them.

Say, does anyone have any pressing questions about the nature of reality that even the gods might not know the answers to? 

She's not saying she isn't glad they're looking at a future with two possible loyal archmages and zero Dark Lords, she's just saying putting Galora in the same building as those mad firework-merchants is what's giving her grey hairs. 

"...This isn't how making magic items works at all. Some of these Spells are real but not all of them. Is it possible whoever wrote this was using this universe for inspiration?"

"Considering that the default cosmologies, and thus the details mentioned, come from - over there, with the gods you're trying to kill...  Yeah.  It's not going to be completely accurate.

"I could try for a locale-accurate one if you wanted.  Or, actually, hm...  Well, it wouldn't be necessarily a properly compiled rules text, but I could at least try pulling your creator's worldbuilding notes."

"Also, there's three different sets of rules and lore in there.  At least two out of three are going to be wrong in some particular."

"Insofar as I speculate about the nature of your setting compared to those, though...  I find it vastly more likely, assuming that your creator is from my Earth because I'm here and I could hardly do that on the meta level if they weren't, that the direction the inspiration came from was from them, to you."

"The ground" is a really silly name for a planet.

...It's the obvious name for a planet, if it's a cradle world.  The reason you think otherwise is because everyone doesn't want to get their fictional planets confused with Earth.

Honestly if you want silly planet names, though, try Planetos.  The inherent etymology makes no sense!

What? Like any self-respecting planet this one was named by ancient dragons who could fly high enough to see it. Its name means "globe" in Old High Draconic, how do you even know most of it is ground if you can't see it? It ISN'T mostly ground!

A big bowl of Planet-Os is a great way to start the day!

"What limits are there on that Spell you've used? Can you bring other things from your home world? People?" Gods? 

Not everyone has dragons!  Dragons are an outlier adn should not have been counted!

Also you literally named it 'round ~planet-visualization object', you have no better claim to linguistic superiority!

"The limits...

"Overall thaumic flux, which circumscribes - mass, initial volume, computational complexity.  I only have so big a metaphorical spell slot to cast it with, to translate.  ...The limits of my ability to describe and visualize.  Actually being able to do that in the first place is really fucking hard because the reason it's called True Creation is because it is literally the same interaction that created the universe, uh, in-universe, for my universe.  Usually Light plus Void just equals regular explosion.

"I'm not, actually, bringing anything, I'm making it."

(That's everyone else's problem! Not all globes are planet globes! Round things are globes! The planet IS a round thing but what it's NOT is MOSTLY GROUND.)

Fine, but she can bring in extradimensional books of the natural law that aren't totally wrong.

"Remind me again why you weren't the unquestionable God-Empress of your world?" Does she possibly lack ambition. Would she maybe benefit from someone to do that part for her. 

(The thing that nurtured life was the ground!  Except when it was the ocean!)

"Well first off I do not want to be responsible for the entire planet, I'd absolutely lose it because I would take the responsibility seriously if I had it and I'm better off not having to deal with that and just, like, saving the world anyway - not that there's anything that it needs saving from presently - and second off, while it is an unparallelled expression of magical skill, it's not actually all that powerful even when I'm cheating like hell and/or manifesting convenient impossibilities.  I'm great for logistics in a way much of my cohort aren't, but, while I am in rarefied company in terms of personal power, I don't top the charts."

(It was not the ground that nurtured dragons.)

She smiles and licks her lips a tiny little bit. "What's the most powerful magic you can do, then? If you were trying to be impressive." 

(Yes, yes, dragons can fly, she knows this.  Anyway.)

...Meep?  Meep.  Definitely a 'meep' sort of moment.

"...Spatial shear, and otherwise anything to do with sufficiently applied gravity, at least in terms of 'ability to utterly fuck something up if it hasn't been warded against it'."

"Mm."

The thing is, she has an awful lot of options here, and she's got to choose something to balance many considerations - protecting the world, doing as the Goddess wills, not spooking the Visitor or any Powers that might be inclined to get protective of her, not giving Reality too much of a blinding headache, being polite about using her divine powers, and of course having some fun with it all. 

You might think this would be stressful, but really high-pressure interactions are much more pleasant when you don't even know what social anxiety feels like. And have had hot tips from an ancient greater deity, who is a personal friend. 

"You'll have to show me one day. Are you this nervous just because of all the cosmic import? Or is it the pretty girls staring at you?"

"The matters of cosmic import, while sometimes terrifying as they should be to any rational person, are at least things I know how to do something about.  You're married, you said; why are you flirting at me this hard?  Wouldn't that be something you're -" 'not allowed' is not the right word, she's fairly sure, what would fit - "disincentivized from doing, by your marriage's terms?  Because if it's not, well, damn it all, it's working."  Gods help her.

...Ah, shit, she probably thought that too loud.

Possibly the Inquisition actually tortures people by sheer mortifying embarrassment. But she's here now! It can't get worse unless the Archbishop is reading her mind in which case she's so sorry she's sure it can get so much worse! She might as well enjoy herself! 

"If you don't know how to do anything about this you might be in the best place in the cosmos to learn."

She laughs and doesn't hold back. She hasn't held back in years, since one special day. It's a surprisingly sweet kind of sound. "Darling, if I were going hard you wouldn't still be sitting here. Let me worry about my husband's interests, Goddess knows he doesn't. You're so brave and so clever when it comes to magic and gods and violating the natural order, you can handle this too, can't you?"

aghsbdlnk!!  And the fucking critical hit with 'Darling'!

...but, but, Galora, but, she's not?  Either of those things?  She's cheating?  So hard?  She shouldn't...  Should she really get credit for that?

"It is a truth of many universes indeed that a university is a good place for experimenting," she quips back to Naevys on autopilot, and then she realizes she's said it, which absolutely breaks her Composed Face until she refocuses towards Galora's input.

"...I think I'm less of either of those things than you think I am, Galora, but I can't say you're wrong - that I have never shown courage, nor exercised intelligence - without pretty blatantly lying.  And trying to lie to you?  That would be utterly stupid.  ...Well played.  You actually got me to accept a compliment."  She laughs.  It's a lot more wry.

"As for whether I can actually handle this, well, I haven't died of anime nosebleed syndrome yet, have I.  Aheh.

"...As far as I know that's not a real thing.  By the way."

"You'd be surprised."

"This one is the best place for experimenting. I never did tell you what I would have designed magic to do! ...Also if it's this hard for you to hear nice things about yourself that's intolerably sad and you deserve more of them. You do. Really."

The world may have gone mad, the very nature of things may be in question, but she can still be nice, and she will be, extremely aggressively so.

No, she probably wouldn't.

As for Naevys...

...Step 1: Try not to cry.

Step 2: Fail step 1.

She dabs at her eyes for a moment.

"...It really is, isn't it."

...The hint of a whisper of ink curling about her reassuringly has to be from a desperate corner of her own imagining, she hasn't run into any Sables yet!

She breathes out.

"...What a reminder, of a friend I haven't seen in a long, long time, who would have said perhaps the exact same thing were she in this conversation to be able to do so.  Thank you, Naevys."

Oh!

Really, her fear seems like a small and distant thing now, compared to what's before her eyes. It doesn't really matter after all if someone is an alien archmage-cum-god, or even the Archbishop no that's pushing it, they're still a person.

Hug? She might at this juncture not be remembering you shouldn't be as familiar with humans as with normal people and give her a little squeeze. 

If the social norms say she can't have a hug and also cry right now then the social norms are wrong.

They are wrong! She's absolutely right that's so staggeringly sensible of her! (She is completely sincere about this and also genuinely surprised, in a good way.) She can just be held for as long as she wants to be, this is good! Naevys is going to pet her hair a little bit. 

She settles herself nearby quite naturally, as though she doesn't just have every right to be here and every right to watch but somehow as though she was born to this kind of situation, as unselfconscious as a snake in the grass. 

"That's so good, already," she murmurs, and then "you too, Naevys," to take a little of the sting out of it. 

The Archbishop is terrifying but a person is sad and she's going to hold on. She does deserve to hear nice things, she deserves to be able to, Naevys doesn't know what exactly went wrong there but she will help her practise. 

Hairpets: also good.

...She cries silently, the loudest noise the ragged shuddering of her own breath and possibly the occasional sniffle.

What went wrong?  She wishes she knew.  Clearly, so much, to cause such soul-deep pain as this, and yet - so little she could hope to see, nothing she sharply recalls, no obvious inflection points that lead to this, not from the inside view.

Then again, sometimes absence is just as bad.

Thank you, Naevys.  You're helping.

She relaxes on some deep level, pouring more wine with the twitch of a finger, making the furniture melt into something more soft and appropriate with another. Deep breath. She closes her eyes and makes a prayer that's really wordless, more an impulse of affection and gratitude and relief and a certain wry acknowledgement.

"This is good," she says in a low, warm voice, a voice backed with such sheer force of will it almost echoes. "It might be difficult for you to believe, but you're doing so well."

Can she give someone a nosebleed just by being nice? Today is a wonderful day to find out. 

"You don't need to understand what's wrong to feel it, you know. Or to deserve comfort." She says this quite matter-of-factly, but she punctuates it by taking her hand and running a thumb over the knucklebones in a curiously warm and tingling way.

Humans are normally so much weirder than this around people they've only met recently! And that's a sad thing! Alicia is very good and she'll tell her so and give her a bigger squeeze and tangle her fingers in intricate patterns in her hair. 

She's not sure if she appreciates the Archbishop being here and helping, because this clearly needed to come out, or, impossibly, wants her to go away. 

She settles on making herself as comfortable as possible for Alicia and making it very clear that in this place of all places she can cry as much as she likes, and that Naevys would like to hear her talk about it but will also like just holding her. 

fuck.

Eventually, the gyre of overwhelming emotions spits out an Alicia Thorn, once again.

"...I've known other people who were - like this.  Who couldn't believe something unreservedly positive about themself if - stick whatever sort of being you know is most unable to lie, here - if they were told such a thing, by such a being, in triplicate.

"I also knew enough about their lives to know that - I hadn't experienced the same formative traumas that broke them so.  I had a relatively pleasant childhood.  I hope.  There were a few things I was told where it may not have been all sunshine and roses - and goodness knows that there were some things I was horribly oblivious to having been hurt in missing them until much later - but...  Not like this.  Not this pain."

"...Being like this snuck up on me.  And I still don't know how to stop tearing myself apart, because I'm not convinced I'm even wrong to do so.  I could have made a proper utopia, you know?  And I didn't.  I could have done so many little human* things differently.  A thousand choices I didn't make, that could have helped people, or at least not made things worse - no matter that they weren't world-changing.  I could have.  I should have.  And I didn't.

"I...

"The part of me that remembers all that, this many years on.  It can't believe I deserve even this kind consideration, because in those cases I didn't give it, even when it would have meant more."

(*species-neutral)

"Really? Oh, well then, that makes it obvious."

The cheerful fires and sourceless lights that light this room burn a deeper and rosier colour, the air heavy and warm and humid and incensed like it wasn't a moment ago. The room with its solid yet graceful stone walls seems to swim, to blossom in living hues.

(Probably all the sacred places were like this once. She yearns for those days, which won't bring them back.)

 "Of course you should keep tearing yourself up. Want me to count how many people suffered, and how badly, for what you failed to do? Mystra could probably do you an estimate. You missed a chance to do good, surely no decent person can say that. Naevys should let go of you, you should never feel good about yourself ever again."

"That's so unfair!" She's absolutely not letting go, actually she's holding on tighter and she's uncommonly strong for how she looks . "Nobody's ready for that kind of power! The Prophet himself said that was why you shouldn't pray to idols!" 

Is she accusing the Archbishop of heresy? Maybe. It's not that she isn't terrified, she's just still talking anyway. 

"She didn't even do anything wrong! I didn't think of that either, I was thinking - never mind - she shouldn't suffer for it-"

"Yeah, what she said."

She stretches a little on the shapeless but supportive mass of soft things she's turned the room and its furnishings into.

"You're actually extremely clever, your majesty, and so it's always going to be easy for you to come up with some brilliant cunning twisted reason why actually you don't deserve any kindness, like you just did. They're all going to be just as hollow as this one."

She rolls a little upright, suddenly just slightly further towards Alicia's personal space than she expects. 

"Now that that's behind us, know that people are as they are for all sorts of strange reasons. What was it you were missing?"

"Oh - and Naevys, I'm afraid you know far too much, and you've shown me terrible disrespect just because you thought I, your far superior, was mistaken. I'm afraid you're about to find out what happens to people like that! Welcome to the Inquisition."

...

Well now she feels stupid. And relieved, and- actually she's just going to give Alicia another squeeze and say nothing.

...Oh gods don't laugh she's sure Galora can read the expression on her face but don't it wouldn't be kind to Naevys --

...Yeah.  Hugs.  Good plan, Naevys.  She's stealing it.

Okay.  Her face has stopped screwing itself up in novel ways as she tries to suppress the situationally-inappropriate amusement.

She has a reaction to what Galora's said, and that reaction needs to be delivered.  It is as follows:  "...Fuck."

"...As for what I had missed...  Regrettably I have a horrible habit of Not Directly Telling People Sensitive Personal Things Even When That Would Be The Sensible Choice To Make, even when I actually trust them," which, gods fucking dammit, she seems to be doing, "so apparently I'm just going to say that testosterone is a horrible thing to inflict on a girl and hope you can figure out what the hell I'm talking about."

"Would you like me to force you to tell us? It often helps."

She can have that one for free! Naevys pets her head while she quietly tries to process everything, gives that up for doomed, and decides to just carry on and try to enjoy the ride.

"Yeah. Fuck." 

...Is this what happened in all those stories about Dark Wizards who came back from interrogation forever changed. What do they escalate to if this doesn't work. She has so many questions - oh, right. 

Wait hold on a moment. "...Some... mad alchemist was... force-feeding you Masculine Humours?" It's a dangerous kind of thought but she's been exposed to humans for years at this point, she knows dimly what kind of thing happens to human children sometimes. Maybe they should steal them. Rage.

"I can in fact guess what you're talking about. Well done for giving me an obvious enough hint!" She rolls her head a little. "I imagine you have your own solution, but just in case, can I offer you the chance to be entirely regenerated and reborn from scratch, courtesy of the Church of Aphrodite?"

...She is still utterly baffled by the praise, it seems.

"That's basically what's already been done to get me to this point, I couldn't exactly be put in Villarosa while still carbon-based, but I do appreciate very much that you'd offer."

"...I wasn't being force-fed anything, Naevys, it was just...  What was already in the instructions for that body to do when I hit puberty.  But if you can't make your own estrogen, store-bought is fine, assuming you actually know how to do it."  She huffs out the ghost of a laugh.  "Before they figured out how to produce the genuine article, which is...  So much chemistry I have not the faintest idea of - they could collect a close cousin from the urine of pregnant horses.  Which is also something I know next to nothing about, but knowing it can be done is half the battle, when you're facing an engineering problem.

"Anyway, fun human biology facts aside...

"...Actually I have no idea where to go from here.  Oops?"

The praising will continue until morale improves! 

"That's so brave of you! You had to drink horse urine how awful." She is not nearly that attached to having a feminine shape but she did always think it must disconcerting to have no control at all. Some elves do almost always stay one way. 

"Oh, you were going to tell us all about what was missing from your life and how it left you unable to hear anything nice about yourself without melting into quite an adorable puddle of molten archmage. You can cry some more first, if you like. I don't mind. Quite the opposite, actually."

...Yeah, her eyes watered again at that.

"Well, no, the horse pee was long before my time and they took the urine parts of it out of the stuff first anyway, but.  Yeah.  It sucked.  Especially since I didn't catch it for multiple decades despite the hindsight being so fucking obvious --"  She cuts herself off, the fire behind her eyes slowing back to its usual roil.

"But yeah that did not help.  Nor did the pervasive messaging that the only women who were conventionally desirable were...  You could practically snap them in half with a sharp breeze, and I was very much not remotely in possession of a body that could have done that at the time.  Not that I wanted to be that utterly fucking stupid with my health, but it still...  Seeped in.  The 30 to 50 percent of my homeland there who had fallen in behind the politicians who loved whipping them into a froth about hating that which did not conform to their awful, awful worldview - I'm fairly sure they'd offend each and every god of the Pantheon personally qua individual doctrinal insult - also didn't help, though I don't think that's the same issue.  And as for compliments about the intangibles...  I'd never had to work for my intelligence overmuch.  And then when I had to self-organize in further pursuing it I - not literally - exploded and that rather put paid to any ability to believe in the idea that I was actually remotely as good at this as many of the very intelligent people I knew, you know?  I don't know.  And this go 'round...  Well.  I'm effectively cheating like hell."

"Was it obvious? Did anyone else notice? I'm not sure that would have occurred to me in your place! I don't know a lot about heathen lands but I have heard they're horrible places so this makes sense actually. It's not your fault and you did make a better world than that! I am honestly curious about what it was like and what this worldview was, I've never actually talked to a heathen before."

"I have. This is actually on the better end."

All right! This does sometimes happen, she's heard it discussed - they do do as much as they can to make it possible for people, even peasants, to get healing magic that powerful when they need it, but clerics are rare and elven cities aren't easy to find, it's at bare minimum disruptive, many people can't manage it and many more probably live in denial, at least for a time... The rest of it isn't quite so clear, but it makes some sense. 

So - suffered pointlessly for years at her own hand, because of who she is, shunned and persecuted, probably for the same reason, feeling undesirable, plus a little standard wizard inferiority complex. This is so much more fun than she was expecting! Alien archmages turn out to be fragile in interestingly different ways.

(She imagines telling wizard apprentices that there's an archmage who'll tell you deep cosmic secrets if you're very nice to her and watching them swarm her like dire piranhas, and smiles at the thought.)

"So," she says thoughtfully, "it's not that you can't imagine anyone thinking highly of you, you just can't accept it, after all that. These heathen politicians must have been very convincing for you to still agree with them. I like you already, and you're saying I'm wrong." She taps a cheek with her finger. "There are some who might call that heresy."

"It was, trust me, very fucking obvious.  I was all but literally thinking 'I want girl puberty' once someone told me what it was."

As for what Galora's saying...  Asgkldfsbs.

(...Also!  Hey!  She wouldn't tell just anyone deep cosmic secrets!  She has some notion of opsec!)

"...To say that I have ever agreed with them is, I think, overstating things.  I was raised well enough to call their bullshit when I saw it, even before I knew why I reacted so strongly.  But that doesn't stop you from internalizing their hatred regardless, if it's pervasive enough."

"...As for the doctrine of those awful people, Naevys...

"To be honest, it was a bunch of cult-y stuff, along with some very much straight-up cult cults, stuffed into a big tent of 'elect this guy because he' - and it usually was a he, there was a horrible gender imbalance even amongst the people who tried to be better than that - 'performs hating The Outsider really vehemently'.  Lots of...

"There wasn't axiomatic Good and Evil there, either, nor any sufficiently reliably-attested divine forces in the case of religion - no clerics or paladins, the people claiming faith healing were charlatans - so they got to sling around the sort of shit that would make anyone be capital-Evil, and call themselves good.  Preachers of the gospel of hoarding, in the cloaks of a religion that praised charity.  Preachers of a gospel of hatred, in the cloaks of a religion where one of its most famous parables is that the self-righteous religious authority who does not stop to help a man wounded on the side of the road is less aligned with their God than the heathen who did.

"And they had their token quislings, the people who thought they'd be safe from the Othering if they were one of 'the good ones'...

"I kind of feel bad for them, because appeasement never works on fascists.  There was ample historical evidence of that to be had.  Of course a lot of the fuckwits were indoctrinated into denying that that history had happened the way all the evidence says it did, which...

"Ugh.  I hate wilful ignorance."

"...It wasn't all bad, though.  There were people who wanted to do good.  Childhood mortality was low enough that replacement rate was 'have two kids'.  We eradicated a disease entirely.  The country I'm originally from pulled off a crash total mobilization of - an economy probably on the scale of the Old Kingdom - to kick some fascists in the teeth when they had actually seized a country and started killing people for murder's sake, for all that it took them way too damn long to get there.

"Of course my generation's lot of fascists that needed stopping came from inside the house, because of fucking course they did, but the principle of resisting genocidal fuckwits by all available means was at least there.

"...I'm not entirely sure why this is the thing I'm expounding upon.  Do tell me if you'd rather I not."

"This isn't something I can speak on - oh actually no now maybe it is?"

She shrugs. "You're an Inquisitor now. You're past the point where we can keep you safe like a parent would a child! Do your best, we'll have feedback."

"...I have heard stories about... powerful clerics making limbs grow back, in front of vast crowds, to convert heathens. Sometimes dying for it which is actually confusing if they were that powerful! Did nobody notice they couldn't do that?"

"No. No they didn't. Unusually good wizards sometimes notice that kind of thing. Most people don't."

"... Can't we teach them?"

"Oh, I've never been to our visitor's homeworld, I'm just guessing because I have met people before. Sort of, Naevys, but there's only one of me and we'd need thousands. ...For humans. I'm not sure there are enough elves stupid enough for that to work. 'Fascist' isn't translating well but I can make a guess. Thank you for the extra reasons why we should just try to conquer certain places if we ever can! There are many among us who think as you do. And please do tell us more. What problem did they have with you?"

"I was several times over an easily-Otherable minority.  We have," she starts counting fingers, "being female in the first place, having decided to be such, also being both romantically and sexually interested in women now that I was one...  Not liking their favorite religion to hide behind after I found out that it was not remotely as accepting as the congregation I grew up in, as a matter of doctrine, though I'll give some of the various splinter sects credit for being better and even the big church took some prosocial stances...  Actually, technically you could count having been part of that church instead of a Protestant one, given my country's specific breed of assholes, but I think most of that was well before my time.  ...Believing that actually abuse of power was bad...  Similarly about the untrammeled excess of the noveau riche hoarding money and power for merely having bought up all the useful legal fictions of ownership of important necessities like food, healthcare, and logistics...  Honestly I may be a bit of a hypocrite on the hereditary-wealth front by now but at least Villarosa's an elective monarchy...  ...Practically the only thing they didn't hate me for was my skin color."

"...The only vaguely historical account we have of somebody doing anything remotely like that, Naevys, is, well, probably a complete fabrication on the miracles front, even though I am under the impression that they actually traced some of the myths rolled up in that faith, back to actual events and people, to some degree of confidence.  ...It's also more than two thousand years old.  ...Actually, no, most of that was completely wrong, I just fucking forgot about the existence of a bunch of other major religions, one of which incorporated that guy wholesale and another of which that religion sprung from to begin with, though honestly they were probably the most sensible of the lot - but none of them really have proof of things that don't have an explanation that relies only on physical coincidence.  ...Interestingly we did have an Aphrodite, of a practice in times yet further in the past, and now I'm dreadfully curious if yours recognizes the name 'Sappho'.  She...  Well, she became retroactively important enough a person for her poetry, that the words my native tongue uses for being a woman who is interested in other women came from her name and where she lived, and - well.  I'll just quote a bit that's stuck with me ever so long, that will also explain why I'm asking.

"Sweet mother I cannot weave — / slender Aphrodite has overcome me / with longing for a girl."

"...That bit was very popular to re-quote," she says, surprisingly matter-of-factly for the way she put on a Serious Mien to actually recite it - like it was an act of devotion that she had been given a chance to witness, and share again unto them, despite not being of particular faith in the goddess herself.

Very far below Her, just for a moment, a little rose flame kindles in a foreign soul.

All questions of a deep and timeless familiarity, all riddles of the nature of the Far Realms and the foundations of reality, quite aside

More than the content or intent of a prayer, is the underlying shape it impresses, on a soul

The future is even more uncertain than ever 

But what is not

Is that that was a sincere thought

Of love and of joy

And that soul does not

Have enough of those. 

There is a part of you that was always Mine when there was no Me of Whom to be.

It's not even really a glance, only the faintest sense of a facet of Something vast and dreadful aware of you, like being out under a darkening summer sky, and the tiniest touch of electric warmth. For a moment colours around you deepen and sharpen into rainbow ecstasies, shadows deepen and lights brighten in a way your eyes and your heart will never forget.

"...How are women a minority? Did - most of them change - why? I - you know what I should stop asking you questions and give you another hug."

She looks slightly arrested for a moment, because you have to give people something. 

Sorry, Naevys, she'll get to you in a second, she's busy processing what - what - what -

"...If anyone was wondering," she says faintly, "I was not expecting to succeed quite that hard on that particular Knowledge: Religion check, but apparently I did so anyway.  I, uh.  Wow.  That happened.  I'm.  I was not really.  Expecting.  Anything, of what I just experienced."

...Aphrodite may be a figure of dread power beyond human comprehension, but in that moment of contact, she nonetheless was kind.  Thank you, she thinks, in the hope that her appreciation will be heard.  I wasn't expecting any of this, and I thank you for it.

"I.  Ah.  You asked - no, women weren't less frequent.  They were... Given less access to power, by force and by societal pressure, for many, many years.  But you're right.  More hugs is a much better idea than - more of me talking about things that hurt us all to hear, that are all in a past I've left behind."

She still seems - rather stunned.

She leans over and takes Alicia's hand in both of hers, squeezing gently. She holds on for a moment. 

"I know. You were not expecting it. In case you were wondering, the Goddess Herself does not directly acknowledge very many people. Well, in a certain sense She does every day, every time anyone looks at a sunset or drinks wine or makes love, but not quite so directly. I'm afraid, my dear, that you have just been called a good girl by a primal force of ancient creation Herself. I think you probably ought to be crying by now. Also, no, it's not blasphemous to flirt back."

She wants to say that actually, it's clearly important to Alicia, she can talk about it! And it's not hurting her too much because she has a lot of practice in not thinking too much about awful things that will hurt her! But she's too busy being terrified and overawed and filled with the sublime!