Keltham's senses are no longer returning data to him, but he's still conscious.

He can barely feel the weight of his body, followed by some vague pressure(?) on his left hand, and then…

A voice speaking directly in his head, bypassing the ears. "Greetings to you. Aiquzall had a godwar. It's now sealed, and the less damaged pieces form the 'world' of 'Suaal'. The gods no longer live in the same places mortals generally live. You're in the Upper Planes, where the Celestials – you may have heard of them, they're a faction that includes Dai-Kitsu and Torag – live these days."

He doesn't respond.

The voice is still talking.

"You are on a channel of the spell Message with myself, Griffith of Erlonn. I'm relaying for my adventuring party the Resolute Reclaimers, for some reason we were advised to not have them speak to you in their words. You are receiving these communications telepathically because your senses haven't returned yet, and you should be able to reply by intentionally sending thoughts towards the message sender."

"We do not know who you are. Causing you to be here was relayed to us by a trusted entity as a long-shot chance we could take, but the overwhelming majority of that entity's communications to us were destroyed."

"We understand that you are likely extremely disoriented. Our situation is urgent on the order of months or years, not hours or minutes. Feel free to take your time to awaken."

His senses slowly return.

There's a soft surface below him, which feels vaguely unreal, and comfortably warm atmosphere around him, which feels unreal, and some cloth draped over his body, which feels unreal, and the fake-sounding noises of people standing and pacing around in a room, and some fake light shining in through his eyelids which also feel–

WHY ARE THERE CONNOTATIONS BEING FORCIBLY SHOVED INTO HIS HEAD, THAT IS NOT HOW THINGS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK

"I know it's a lot to take in. Your loved ones are almost certainly–"

His eyes open.

There is what in fact looks like a Golarion-ish high-level adventuring party. A human-looking man with multi-lens goggles and the kind of comfortable and practical lightweight clothing, lacking closures, that doesn't really match Keltham's model of Golarion's manufacturing capacity, but also looks less 'manufactured' than 'magically synthesized'. A woman with metallic-looking wings and hair and nails, wearing a formal– an illusion of a formal dress over some very shiny metal armor. A somewhat human-shaped plant wearing armor of many small pieces of leather cut and embossed to look like leaves and sewn together. They're all wearing headbands.

The pervasive feeling of unrealness is still present.

When Keltham asked the simulators to be set up to not think the stakes were larger than they really were, intrusively shoving a feeling of unreality into his head was not what he wanted. Maybe he should be more specific next time, if there is a next time. It does seem like his current simulator is attempting cooperation with him somewhat, so he'll go with the premise for the moment.

Whoever's speaking to him is probably one of the people in the room, but it's annoyingly unclear which one. The vocal qualities maybe match the plant-person, it sounds like a voice coming from a pretty small mouth, but he hasn't actually systematically studied how telepathic voices and spoken voices correspond.

His body has a cloth over it but isn't clothed. He doesn't have any spells prepared. His connection to Abadar is gone. The small scar on his knee that he'd never paid attention to while in Golarion is also gone, his body hair has a different pattern than it did last time he looked at it, and his nails are a neat uniform length and cut differently than his recent attendant tended to cut them. It's like the simulators put together a new body for him, referencing his previous story, which was clearly not in a medium where anyone looked at his body very much. His body also feels unreal. He wonders if an externally imposed connotation of unrealness is something the brain learns to ignore over time.

He has a ring on his finger he didn't put there, which given that this story seems Golarion-ish is probably a bad sign.

Right. This story seems Golarion-ish, except also not. The names Aiquzall and Suaal are utterly unfamiliar. He's expected to be used to gods living in the same places as mortals, apparently? The Upper Planes are supposed to be unfamiliar, even though he has heard of them. He in fact recognizes the term 'Celestial' and the names 'Torag' and 'Dai-Kitsu', though he doesn't remember the latter being Celestial-aligned? Lives in Nirvana but is 'Neutral', not 'Good'.

And 'some entity we can't talk to told us to bring you here but we don't have most of their message' is a really, really cheap excuse for an isekai plot. Possibly less cheap than 'you just appeared out of thin air and we have no idea why either', to be fair. Would have been neat to be the version of him that woke up to a nice message like 'we have infinite compute and decided to rescue sim everyone', instead of in a world with problems he's apparently a long shot for helping solve. "My party isn't supposed to speak directly to you, for reasons with no justification in the intact parts of this document" also looks like an excuse for not computing too many people.

Well, he's never liked lying, and if he's definitely somewhere fake he's not going to do things he doesn't like. Which means attempting to take the ring off, no unknown-effect magic items for him today please.

Both aloud and attempting to communicate over whatever telepathy spell they were using, he says "I'm Keltham of dath ilan. Do you want to tell me this setting's lore first, or skip straight to asking my help with some kind of horrible problem, or what?"

The ring comes off, no problem.

The reply he gets is in his ears this time, not his head. It has the usual directionless feel of a regular Message spell. "Thank you for introducing yourself, Keltham of dath ilan. I don't know the full history of summoning in Old Aiquzall, but are you at all familiar with the phenomenon where summoned creatures feel unreal?"

Great. So there's supposed to be some in-universe excuse for this. "I've summoned before, it's not like that. Look, I'll participate in this if you're nice about it, you don't need to have this argument with me."

"You know, I have heard arguments that people from other alternatives are fake, but I have not heard them made by someone visiting such an alternative. I will stop discussing this matter for the moment and come back to it later. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the Boatman is intelligent these days and is trying to kill everyone."

Keltham doesn't bother to avoid looking a bit relieved. "Okay! Lower stakes than last time. Thanks. Is the Boatman Charon?"

"You don't have to work with us if you don't want to, but if you do want to, this is serious! And how did you know, or for that matter guess, Boaty's name?"

"How about you explain this place to me assuming I have absolutely no context, and then I'll decide what I want to explain?"

"Yeah, sure." Griffie appears to do nothing, but probably actually has a telepathic conversation with eir party.

After a moment, the goggled man hands Griffie a spheroid. Ey takes it, and an illusory diagram of a bicone shows up, black on one side and white on the other with a thin layer of neither in the middle. "So, this is the bicone model of the multiverse! It's a simplification to make it work in three dimensions. Uh, should I explain dimensions or does that translate alright?"

"Yes, I know what a dimension is. Do continue."

"Great, I don't normally do math lectures but I don't get to outsource them to the usual speaker today. So, the depths of the Positive and Negative Energy Planes compose the overwhelming majority of the multiverse, this model understates it so that there's anything to see."

The illusory bicone splits into two cones which show their bases, 'revealing' a green dot in the middle, surrounded by a circle with a red-hot quarter, a stony grey quarter, a deep blue quarter, and a translucent pale blue quarter that blur into each other, surrounded by another circle of abstract symbols, including some implication of a red pentagram that's not really complete enough to be Asmodeus's symbol. "And then in the tiny subset of the multiverse that won't explode you with healing, we have the Material Plane, the Elemental Ring, and the Outer Planes. The Upper Planes, where we are, are a subset of the Outer Planes."

"It's not known exactly how mortals and gods began, but the consensus model is that it was a cycle between both. Souls come from the Positive Energy Plane and are complex Positive Energy structures. Mortal life is made of the elements with a soul. When it does stuff, it produces quintessence of the stuff it did. For instance, if I study dimensional math, then that produces scholarship-y quintessence. Quintessence clumps up and can get souls as well. A quintessence being of, say, scholarship, will try to make more scholarship happen. So if you consider really simple life forms, they might produce something like 'assembling the correct chemicals to build more of itself' quintessence, and then that might form some extremely weak force of encouraging life forms to do more of that, and then, well…" Griffie waves around to indicate the room and its occupants.

"With me so far?"

So the claim here is not that the gods as they are today created mortalkind, but rather that they evolved. Mysteriously in parallel to dath ilani, which is sure something. But actually, there's another thing.

"Sorry, mortal life is made of the elements? And gods are made of quintessence, which connotes 'fifth element but not like the four'? Elaborate?"

"Alright then! So. Normal matter is composed of particles of four elements. Fire, Earth, Water, and Air. Air is, uh, the stuff you're breathing. You can't see it. You could try exhaling forcefully into your hand and then you'd feel it?"

Keltham does not seem particularly inclined to do this, so Griffie continues on, pulling a metal cup out of eir backpack. "This is metal, specifically ferin. Metal is a form of Earth. As you can see, it's solid, which makes it useful for the next part of this demonstration." Ey makes some gestures and mutters under eir breath, and clear liquid appears in the cup. "This is Water. It's a liquid: it has a constant volume like Earth, but it flows freely like Air. You can drink it, or play around with it and the cup, we can handle cleanup if need be."

Ey holds the cup of water out.

"I've interacted with solids and liquids before. Could I get a particle-level explanation?"