...Farris was not briefed that this in particular was high likelihood but she was, in fact, prepped for the possibility of finding out that she had to cover all of the key communication points in 15-20 minutes. She has a List. 

They are not going to press her on it! Civilization thinks it is pretty understandable for someone who landed in the middle of a TERRIFYING EMERGENCY in another world that they know nothing about to, once the most critical part is over, want some space to orient and decide what they actually want to do about this longer term, and what information they need to verify in order to make that decision - and that, in the meantime, they might want to reserve as much option value as possible, for example by not taking the risk that the place they landed in is not actually trying to cooperatively carry out fair trades, and might instead try to figure out their magic via observation without paying for it. 

It's okay. There are things that Maartje really shouldn't do, but "deciding to take a few weeks or months to learn the language the hard way and verify some facts about dath ilan" is...fine? 

"Understood," Farris says, nodding, not appearing at all upset and only maybe slightly flustered. "We - in that case there are things I need to cover now, and once I do that, possibly we should top-priority getting you on a comms link to someone from Exception Handling who can learn some of your native language in a few minutes, or whether repeating sentences in Baseline back in your own language is a reasonable use of your comprehension conceptual-magic. Priority request to communicate: for you to stay in Governance-approved areas, because if you are biologically human and from another world, you could have foreign diseases that we have no immunity to and could go through our entire population if quarantine is broken. I'm going to be with you in quarantine, as will all of the staff here and almost certainly all of the casualties until Exception Handling figures something else out. We will have supplies and shelter out here and it should be pretty comfortable once things are actually set up. Do you see any issue with that based on context we're lacking, and/or do you have any core needs other than food, water, bathing, sleep, light while not sleeping, something to do while you're awake and the option for social interaction - that's the basics of what humans here need -" 

Baseline is again doing its clipped-fast-communication thing. 

Well, that's - more Lawful Neutral than she was expecting/fearing.

Gods fucking devour it, she's going to have to learn a language the hard way. That's the most wildly upsetting possible state of affairs, somehow. She feels herself wanting to go back on the not using magic purely because she'll have to learn a language. A normal person in her position would be fine, here. "...that is reasonable. I'll need clothes if it gets much colder than this, and a blanket if it gets colder than the freezing point of water. Ideally, if I don't have magic, I would have two sets of clothes so I can be clothed while doing laundry."

Blink blink. Huh. 

"- That's fine. One moment." Subvocalizing to the admin tech back at the medicopter, [can you please get this poor alien woman a robe to wear]. "We can have temporary clothes for you, and the fabricator to adjust some of the prefabbed ones to fit you will be here on one of the later Exception Handling cargo drops. We'll have a bathing facility sooner than that, and laundry facilities although I am not sure if it's worth trying to salvage your - the rest of your current clothing."

It's in fact not especially cold (and definitely won't drop below 0 C), but Maartje is shirtless and covered in drying blood and seems completely unbothered by this. It's sort of impressive. 

"Probability estimate on whether you can eat the same food as we can?" she says. "You look human, there's only one species on dath ilan that looks like us and we know what we can eat, do you have reason to believe you're significantly different - if your world does have multiple humanoid species with different diets that would be a reason. We'll prioritize bringing a wider range of food supplies to try if you think there's above a 25% chance that you have different dietary needs." 

"We have many humanoid species with different diets but humans won't starve on most of them. ...we will starve if we eat nothing but rabbit, and we'll catch scurvy if we haven't any lemons."

That...is a significant update on the material wealth of her society! Less the mention of laundry - maybe it just is fastest and easiest for magic users to look after their own clothes and it wouldn't occur to her that non-magic-users have technology to do it - but two sets of clothing? Phrased as though this is some sort of special request? 

- someone should be on looking at the societal-models and how material wealth and resources probably affects things like overall Coordination and Governance structure and rate of interpersonal physical violence? This is not Khemeth's specialty. 

What the nuclear garbage is that five-syllable Baseline compound word that sounds like a medical term for a particular micronutrient deficiency but that Khemeth has never heard of? ("Severe chronic symptomatic vitamin C deficiency" is mostly not a thing in dath ilan post-history-screen.) He needs to go look that up. 

...Huh. Is that something you would get in a materially poor civilization? Like, really incredibly materially poor, he's looking at what sort of diet someone needs to have to end up with severe chronic symptomatic vitamin C deficiency and that is a horrifyingly degree of food and implied supply-chain insecurity! 

(He also has to look up the Baseline term that 'rabbit' translates to. He's not really a nature person so much. Kalorm would have recognized it.) 

'Scurvy' translates as a five-syllable Baseline compound word, because "severe chronic symptomatic vitamin C deficiency" is mostly not a thing in dath ilan post-history-screen. Fortunately, Carissa is talking to a medtech, who nods. 

"We can do a reasonable varied diet," she says. (Meal replacement shakes, which is what she expects to mostly subsist on for the next few days, and even literal tube feeds, obviously all contain everything the human body needs! But it seems maybe better to give this poor alien woman, who wasn't sure if they would give her two pairs of clothing without explicit request, an array of less processed foods that might be more recognizable as plant or animal products.) 

"- Anyway, while you being safe and having everything you need here is among our higher priorities, we do also need to ensure that Civilization is safe. I'm aware you may not have verified answers to these questions, but you almost certainly have more context than us, so give a probability estimate and indicate degree of uncertainty*. We need to know if dath ilan is in danger. More specifically, a helpful input to that would be whether you expected this to happen to you, or didn't but had a model of it as something that had happened to other people, or that could in principle happen, versus whether it's an much of an Exception to the known physical laws from your perspective as it was for us. Related to that, probability estimate on whether more people are likely to appear, if so whether they may already have appeared, and more broadly whether further contact with other worlds is imminent and 20% / 50% / 80% spread on the timescale for that." 

Going by her tone, she thinks that these are all perfectly reasonable questions to ask.

(And unless she's a very good actress, it's not even slightly intended as a threatening question, and she's thinking of herself as on-Carissa's-team with the self-evident shared goal of "no bad things happen to Civilization.") 

(Not everyone observing this situation is thinking of it in those terms! There are definitely a number of Very Serious People planning for the contigencies where they don't have shared goals and values with the alien, even to the point of mutually beneficial trade being possible. But the medtech hastily retrained as an alien first contact liaison is not thinking of it in those terms.) 

*This entire clause is three syllables. 

"I was probably removed from my universe with a spell that standardly has that effect, though it usually drops people in an adjacent universe that we're familiar with and have, uh, trade-relations with already."

Shit, it's totally the case Cheliax might scry for her and that the best way for these people to prevent that is to execute her. How to avoid telling them that.... 

"From their perspective it probably looks like I died in a fashion that destroyed my body, which happens often enough I wouldn't expect immediate efforts to find me. If they did have reason to think I hadn't died and was retrievable, or if they wanted confirmation I was dead, they'd scry me, which in my home universe would show them either me or my ontologically-basic-mind in a ontologically-basic-mind-dimension. If they saw me they would probably observe to make sure I was all right and then contact me when I was alone. If they couldn't find me or my ontologically-basic-mind then they'd be more worried and confused, that pretty much never happens, and look harder." That part is probably false but she thinks she's safer if the locals believe it.

"It also seems possible your world is far enough from our normal ones that even the spells that work across worlds wouldn't work to find you or transit here, considering how if you really don't have afterlives then you are probably outside Creation entirely. The other possibility being that you do have afterlives but for some reason no one was allowed to tell you, and if that's true then it's much likelier someone'll try to contact me but also we don't really need to worry about those possibilities since in those everything's just going to be fine in the long run. 

...I don't know how to turn any of this into your numbers," she adds apologetically, because the language keeps wanting her to be more specific when she chooses a hedging word. 

(Tongues is CONFUSED about how to translate 'Creation', because it sort of seems like it should be 'Greater Reality' but the connotations don't line up at all and it's a proper noun in Taldane. Tongues goes for 'most-recent-iteration-of-the-local-multiverse'.) 

The what now. 

- Farris really wants to know about the...most...recent...iteration...of the "local" "multiverse"?? What does that mean???!!! They - have contact between universes in some sort of local universe cluster??? 

(Which, well, if that's a thing then possibly some of those had a First Contact, at some point...) 

Anyway! The situation sounds really complicated! Farris also isn't sure what to do with it without probabilities! 

"- Whether or not they scry you seems important," she says. "The numbers is - it's just to avoid miscommunicating if we don't have the same underlying sense of how unlikely you're thinking when you say you 'wouldn't expect.' Is it one in three? One in ten? One in fifty?" 

"- well, I don't know. It's not like a spell with a failure chance, or like guessing if you need backup or not, it depends on whether my commanding officer saw what happened and whether anyone has a Scry free at the end of the day. ...which they do on eight days out of ten, I can use numbers for things like that."

??????????????????????

What does she mean it's not– it seems basically analogous to "guessing if you need backup or not", something Merrin has to do all the time in conditions of uncertainty, and the fact that it's more uncertainty just means a wider spread...

...You know what, it doesn't super seem like the time to try to figure out the source of the misunderstanding. Come to think of it, who knows what the mysterious translation conceptualmagic is even conveying to the alien magic user, maybe it's coming out the other side as something totally different. 

"Noted." She listens to her earbud for a moment. "Can you, uh, give us the one-minute description of your...local region of Lesser Reality? The thing you said that translated as 'most-recent-iteration-of-the-local-multiverse' but I'm not, uh, sure that's coherent as a concept and I don't know what you meant to say on your side, since we don't understand how the translation conceptualmagic works." 

"The spatially-continuous-dimension I'm from is called the Material Plane. It has lots of worlds around lots of stars and most of them are inhabited by aliens. With magic we can also access other spatially-continuous-dimensions - the places where ontologically-basic-minds go, the places of ontologically-basic-elements, the First World which was the creators' first attempt at the Material, and a couple of others. All of those are within the local multiverse, which is a - bubble, maintained by Pharasma and the other ancient entities, so things that are big and beyond our comprehension don't eat us all. - the ancient entities are very good at their jobs and we aren't at risk of getting eaten or anything, we're much better off than you guys, everyone's ontologically-basic-minds are safe at least in the ontologically-basic-mind-place that Asmodeus is Chief Executive of. In general you can't scry out of the local multiverse and can't Plane Shift out of it and if you did end up out of it you can't get back in.

The thing I'm trying to figure out is whether you are a little bit of the local multiverse where the entities bargained for none of them to interfere at all -- in which case you probably do have afterlives and I can probably get home -- or whether I got dropped out of the local multiverse somehow.

I don't know enough about other worlds in Creation to guess which. But if Cheliax can find me here or I can get home, then everything's going to be okay and you almost certainly do have ontologically basic minds after all, I'm so sorry that no one told you. So I'm only actually concerned about and being careful for the possibilities that you're outside the local multiverse."

Back on server backend, listening to this conversation:

There's an obvious (albeit incoherent, insensible, ridiculous, and not even slightly predicted on priors) partially-woven-together story you could try to rapidly put together, if you are aware of some things that only 0.1% of the population is cleared to know:

- "Things that are big and beyond our comprehension" sounds like how you might describe 'superintelligence' to somebody who wasn't cleared to know what a superintelligence was.
- An obvious thought is that "Pharasma and the other ancient entities" would have to be superintelligences in order to build a bubble that superintelligences couldn't get inside; however:
- "Maartje" doesn't particularly look like something put together by a superintelligence; she's not a sort of thing that should exist inside a superintelligence optimizing for inscrutable alien things.
- Maartje can also fly and slow down crashing aircraft, and seems to view this as a conceptualmagic primitive of alternativephysics rather than a direct gift or mechanism, and to think she has an ontologically-basic-mind.  This doesn't exactly seem like a strictly biological organism whose biology and physics nobody meddled with?
- Superintelligences can fake weapons looking less optimized than they really are, of course.  But if a superintelligence is fighting dath ilan seriously, Maartje spewed nanomachines all over the atmosphere the moment she arrived.  If dath ilan were targetable by superintelligences in that way, dath ilan would have been eaten earlier and more directly, long before Maartje showed up.
- Superintelligences with a weird choice of utility function for some reason leaving dath ilan undisturbed, plus the alternative "leaving whole galaxies undisturbed, actually" else "ate the galaxies, but replaced all of the Solar System's incoming photons and/or hacked the telescopes to make the now-eaten galaxies look undisturbed", was always one of the possible alternative solutions to the Great Silence besides the standard inference "Civilization is early and will meet aliens in a billion years or so". 

This state of confusion does not yet admit of having a single story forced upon it.  It does suggest two priority questions:

- Priority question one:  Does Maartje's materialization here potentially open this place to invasion by the things that are big and beyond comprehension, or negate the hypothetical agreement preventing intereference here?
- Priority question two:  Does Maartje's home multiverse permit spatial FTL, including by going to another plane as an intervening step?  Does it allow time travel?  (This affects which equilibria of Maartje's home multiverse are consistent; changes how much time Civilization has to respond; or in some cases makes expected future interference less probable because if it were possible it would've already happened.)

Oh, and if the Basement hadn't already been instructed to storm ahead full speed on a Limited Creation, it would've been thus instructed now; but they already sent that instruction as soon as they realized they had no longer had any idea how Existence worked or what couldn't happen next.

(Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh?????????????!!!!!!!) 

- one thing that dath ilani medtechs learn – even if they don't work for Exception Handling and have Merrin's level of experience with "bizarre sim scenarios where they have to make judgement calls while missing half the context because the context is infohazard-sealed" – is how to keep all of your internal screaming purely internal, or as close to it as possible. It's okay. This sounds like AS MANY AS SEVERAL INFOHAZARDS but that's fine. She will just - listen and remember the literal content and not try to figure out the implications while she waits for someone to tell her what to say. 

(Farris' expression is - maybe a bit surprised or startled? She does not otherwise look at all alarmed.) 

(This is good! Khemeth has some concerns about how not-Maartje, who is already clearly scared - and for reasons that are at least being narrowed down, if not entirely clear yet - might respond, if she observes that dath ilan is reacting with alarm.) 

Priority questions are relayed to Farris! The delay isn't more than 1.5 seconds after Maartje finishes speaking. 

(Also, the first-rank Keeper who was most recently coordinating casualty care in the makeshift-Complicated Patient Area is nearly finished handing off all of that context, and can take over soon, but Exception Handling can just give Farris a script to answer these next few questions, and one of their considerations here is not making it any more salient than it already is to Maartje that the explanation she just gave has high-stakes implications.) 

...Farris nods. 

"- So the followup question is - does your arrival here change the situation regarding whether and to what extent dath ilan is open to invasion by the– the things that are big and beyond comprehension? Or negate a hypothetical agreement preventing those - things - from interfering here?" 

Carissa is not that easy to bluff and she can notice if someone is startled. What - what process on their end, because it's not this person, this person's just reciting as ordered from her little earpiece like the one they gave Carissa - what did they infer -

"I don't know anything about the things outside Creation," she says. "I'm sorry. I don't - I don't know what the rules are. I didn't break any rules I know about. I don't - I've never heard of a superintelligence-agreement that would stop applying if a random person teleported into the middle of it."

The Baseline word for 'superintelligence' is, somewhat unusually, not a compound word, and its meaning isn't etymologically evident from the phonemes. This is deliberate; it slightly reduces the damage if a conversation is somehow overheard when it shouldn't be. 

Farris has no idea what that word is! (She's pretty sure from the phonemes that it's a Baseline word she just hasn't learned, rather than a word in Maartje's native language that her translation conceptualmagic isn't translating because dath ilan lacks the concept.) 

The obvious deduction is that the concept itself is infohazard-sealed, and her secrecy-oath clearance isn't high enough to know it. The second obvious deduction is that this conversation may be headed for Keeper takeover very soon. She's going to actually wait for that instruction, though, and in the meantime, she's not exactly trying to block out the word or not make any inferences about what sort of ********-agreement generally wouldn't stop applying if a random person teleported into the area affected by it, but she's not prioritizing thinking about it either. She still has other instructions to carry out. 

"Second followup question. Do you know if your world allows faster-than-lightspeed travel?" And since the alien from the incredibly materially poor world who apparently lacks training in assigning probabilities to things may not have had a comprehensive science education, "- light has a maximum speed, and if your world's transport magic can teleport someone from one place to a very distant place in the same plane instantaneously, or in less time than light would take to travel the straight-line distance - including by routing through another plane - then that would violate our known physical laws. Related question, do you know of any magic that directly does time travel?" 

"Time Stop yes, time travel no, except in stories that aren't very reliable. If you Teleport across the world and back you'll arrive back a count of ten after you left, a count of two if you used quickened Teleports. But that's because the spell takes time to cast, not because you experience it as taking time in transit - I haven't noticed light having a maximum speed?"

"Light has a maximum speed here, and - at least according to our understanding of how our universe works, it's fundamental to the physical laws that let stars and planets form and life evolve - uh, I've been assuming your material plane has stars and planets but I should actually check that. Lightspeed is very fast. It would take slightly over a second for light to reach our moon, and about three minutes for it to reach the fourth planet, but lightspeed delays on a single planet are measured in fractions of a second. If your star system has multiple planets and a teleport spell between them exists, and takes the same length of time as a same-planet teleport, that would imply faster-than-lightspeed travel." 

"We have stars and planets, humans are very small and weak, the stars are very great and far by comparison to us," she says with the rapid fluency of someone rattling off trained theology. And then, at more the pace of thought, "Stories-claiming-historical-origin-of-unknowable-truth-value-spread-recreationally of great wizards say they could Teleport between worlds but nothing about how long it took them. No one alive today can do that. I do buy that people did it at some point because there are some species not native to Golarion that live there now."

Sorry, their word for 'legends' is what?

Various pieces of that are interesting, mostly in a way where Farris' brain is wildly trying to map them to the closest fictional tropes. The first bit is...weird...both in the content and in the tone. The second half is just confusing.

(Legends of the type that Golarion has are not especially a genre that dath ilan post-history screen has. Speculative fiction exists, of course, including fiction that speculates about the past, where the author is trying to reconstruct as plausible an image as possible, but this is still very much clearly flagged as fiction. The closest sociological phenomenon might be, well, the stories that get spread as a result of pranks or faked Conspiracies, like "Merrin is secretly a Sparashki", but you wouldn't call that the same thing, and you wouldn't call the truth value of it unknowable.) 

If they don't know about lightspeed then they probably also don't have the engineering tech needed for non-magical travel even to their moon, let alone other distant star systems. 

"Are there a lot of, uh, stories spread recreationally about powerful magic users in the distant past doing things that nobody can do now? If so, do you know the reason claimed for why that was lost – is it because the powerful magic users kept it secret and didn't teach their students, or was there a period with no magic users powerful enough to learn it, or some other way the information was lost - or has it gotten harder to do even if the method were known?" 

...Come to think of it, it's odd that any historical knowledge could be permanently lost, if everyone goes to an ontologically-basic-mind-plane when they die? Right? It was at least strongly implied that communication and trade exist between the "Material Plane" and the ontologically-basic-mind-plane(s). And if that's true, wouldn't someone at some point have decided to buy the knowledge from the ontologically-basic-minds of the powerful magic users who could teleport between planets? 

"There often aren't any wizards capable of casting spells of the ninth-standard-degree-of-complexity, and the ones who are that powerful benefit from their capabilities not being fully known, and the person who develops a powerful spell usually does not teach anyone."

That...sounds like some kind of economic failure? Farris of course doesn't know enough about all the other factors of the situation to conclude this very confidently, but - it definitely sounds like something went wrong? 

"This question may be premised-on-assumptions-that-are-false*, but - why are the wizards capable of casting spells of the ninth-standard-degree-of-complexity– I'm going to define a local-to-this-conversation-shorthand**, why are ninth-degree-wizards not more strongly incentivized to teach others any new spells they develop? ...In the types of societal systems I know of, that would be an obvious exploitable-economic-inefficiency." 

*A two-syllable Baseline word.

**A four-syllable Baseline word.

" - well, I don't think ninth circle wizards really want anything money can buy? What with how they're ninth circle wizards."