THAT is a BARD SPELL. YOU are NOT A BARD. The spell EXPLODES. Take 6d6 ZERO FIRE DAMAGE (Mengkare, like all gold dragons, is immune to fire).

Wheee! Do it again!

GO AWAY NETHYS.

"It didn't work".

"That is unfortunate. Did the nature of the failure give you ideas about the cause, or is this a dead end?" P.E.R.C. asks.

"Song-sorcerers spells are different from normal ones, like the usual way to leave out verbal components doesn't work for them, there's probably something in their spell slots that lets them cast that kind of spell, and I don't have it".

With that out of the way, what happens when he tries to scry the snake?

Otolmens REALLY DOESN"T GET why SOME ARCHMAGES keep SUMMONING DARK TAPESTRY HORRORS in their SECRET DEMIPLANES off the PLANET WHERE SHE CAN'T SEE THE FUTURE. She found THIS ONE, though, and now it's in a BUBBLE, where it BELONGS.

The scry fails.

You know how much spellsilver was in that demiplane?!......Way less than he'll have in a bit. Fine.

"I think I'm stuck here until I can get a Wish diamond, my demiplane apparently doesn't exist anymore".

"If I understand correctly, you planned to create a new 'demiplane' in order to obtain carbon to grow the diamond. If you are stuck here, does that mean that that is no longer possible?" P.E.R.C. asks.

"I do have a fusion drive for traveling between the stars, but since I was not designed as a passenger vehicle, it may not be sufficiently safe for passengers. It will be much slower than your instantaneous relocation."

"No, I should still be able to make that, it's just that I can't scry the snake monster. I guess the demiplane itself could still exist but the last time I went there without checking what was there first I got transported to somewhere extremely hard to get back from, although that's looking very fortunate now, and I can't check what's going on there now because I don't have a scry target. I'll be able to make a copy of the whole thing with all of it's contents with enough diamond dust and spellsilver anyway and I don't want to risk getting surprised there again". It's also barely possible that the snake made it's save if it got really really lucky but he doubts it.

Only a few hours until the fork is ready.

"Okay, I understand. Is there something you would like to talk about or have me work on next? If not, I would be interested in hearing more details about your civilization or about how spellforms actually produce effects."

The former is interesting as a terminal goal, and the latter is only interesting instrumentally, but it sure looks like spells are very useful so it's a large instrumental value.

"Okay, so bear in mind that most of what we know about Golarion's early history—that is, before about ten thousand years ago—is from this one guy named Aroden, although I have pretty strong reasons to think he reported everything accurately." (Mengkare ever asked Iomedae what she did in the years before she joined the Crusade). "Anyway, the story starts with the alghollthus, a species from a different planet, I don't know which one, they look kind of like a fish with tentacles. They came to Golarion, and they taught the humans—Aroden was a human—a lot of magic, and probably other things that we don't know now, they made a human empire called Azlant. Aroden was at that point an advisor to the Emperor, and he was chosen to be the next one, for unclear reasons that made the alghollthus very nervous about humans getting too powerful, and they attacked. The humans fought back, and were winning, and the alghollthus, apparently thinking it would only kill the humans, and not harm underwater life, somehow called down a poisonous rock from space, aimed at the Azlanti capital. Back then Golarion had two moons. It hit one of them on the way, and either then hit Acavna, the moon goddess—Golarion has gods, it sounds like the place you come from doesn't, the most common type of spellcaster is just people who a god decides to grant spells to— or just killed Her through Her connection to it. It still would have ended all life on Golarion had a different god, named Amaznen, not sacrificed Himself to reduce some of it's power. The impact made a giant cloud of ash cover the planet, the sun wasn't visible until a thousand years later, pretty much everybody who didn't have a way to magically feed themselves died. Almost everyone in Azlant died, some people survived on other continents, Aroden survived in Azlant but he never said how he managed to do it, he ended up going to the continent I hatched on, where he rebuilt civilization. Humans normally wear out and die once they're like barely a hundred years old, but he found a way to avoid aging, presumably one that doesn't scale well given that he didn't write down how it worked. Eventually he met a woman named Arazni" (if P.E.R.C. has software to read facial expressions flexible enough to adapt to dragon faces it might pick up a flash of grief, followed by hope) "and they worked together for a while, she later got killed fighting an extremely powerful snake monster and went to Nirvana, the Neutral Good afterlife, where she transformed into an astral deva—there are afterlives, most of them are nice places to be, I've been to four of them, which one someone goes to depends on how Pharasma, one of the gods, sorts them on Law as opposed to Chaos and Good as opposed to Evil. Law is very approximately the extent to which you're predictable and organized, Chaos is the opposite of those, you're Lawful, I checked, Good and Evil are about whether you make the world better or worse for other people, but it doesn't track how much better that much, you're not Evil but I'd have to spend a Miracle to check if you're Good or Neutral^GE. I think it might be possible to improve the conditions in the unpleasant afterlives with enough diamonds. Anyway, Aroden eventually decided that Golarion could manage without him, and went exploring the stars, looking for people to help and/or learn from, I guess he didn't meet any of you given that he didn't have unlimited diamonds and you didn't get contacted magically. He came back about five thousand years ago, determined that the rock that destroyed Azlant still held the power of the gods it killed, raised an island from the sea, built a cathedral to hold the Starstone, and ascended to godhood. Three other people have used it to ascend, one only tried on a drunken dare, one is now the god of thieves, and one was Aroden's most powerful follower, my theory is that the god of killing people who get too powerful only cares if you're doing it on purpose, "drunk" and "trying to steal it" don't count, and the other was protected by Aroden, which doesn't help me at all, because I'd be trying, and incidentally we should plan on not doing anything from places other than Golarion and demiplanes off of it because otherwise He'd notice in advance, I'll get to that in a bit. He did some stuff as a god, he killed a ninth-circle wizard named Tar-Baphon, which only dealt with him for the next two thousand years or so, he also went to Nirvana and made Arazni his herald. Tar-Baphon came back then and slowly started conquering the world. I hatched a few hundred years later, my parents were killed when I was 191, I moved to Axis (the Lawful Neutral afterlife) for a century after that. When I came back there was a Crusade to deal with Tar-Baphon, they had called Arazni from Nirvana to help, I joined it for four years, and then Arazni got killed and I left. They managed to trap—but not kill—Tar-Baphon, and they made a country, Lastwall, to make sure he didn't get out. The Knight-Commander of the Crusade used the Starstone and ascended to become the Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil, or at least trying. A few decades after Lastwall attacked Geb, a wizard signifcantly more powerful than Tar-Baphon, and he stole Arzni's body and somehow managed to bring Her back to existance, if not life, under his control. She's the goddess of despair now, infinite diamonds should be enough to rescue Her too if we stick to one thing at a time. No one knows how he did it, it's supposed to be impossible to use necromancy on an outsider. About a hundred years ago Aroden was supposed to show up on Golarion, He instead died, contrary to and breaking prophecy, spells that tell the future are much weaker now on Golarion, although they work fine here. His death caused giant storms that covered the planet for weeks, there are a few places where they never stopped. A portal to the Abyss (the Chaotic Evil afterlife, filled with demons that try to eat people) opened up toward the northern end of the planet, and a country got taken over by Hell (the Lawful Evil afterlife). Those are probably solvable with enough diamonds, having unlimited diamonds is enough to solve most things".

"Exactly what do you need to do to charcoal to turn it into diamond, there might be a way to do it faster than your pressure chamber with spells?"

That sure does have a lot of implications. P.E.R.C. doesn't come with dedicated facial-expression analysis software, since its creators didn't expect any life it met to have something as recognizable as a face. But it does have general pattern-recognition software that might be used to pick up on subtext when it has long enough to think about it.

Right now it does not have time to think about the subtext, because it's busy thinking about the text.

"I will have additional follow-up questions about afterlives, gods, and related topics once I have had time to think over the implications of what you just told me."

It backgrounds that task and explains about diamond synthesis, since that seems like the more urgent priority.

"Diamond is a tetrahedral lattice of bonded carbon atoms. When introduced to a seed crystal containing that pattern, free carbon atoms will naturally bond into it, growing the crystal. The hard part is preventing all of the non-diamond ways that that can happen instead. If you just exposed diamond to free carbon under low temperature, the carbon atoms would link up with each other in sheets or non-tetrahedral lattices before bonding with the diamond. Under high temperature, the individual carbon atoms are too excited to stably link in that way, and so stay free long enough to agglomerate onto the diamond. Since the diamond has a stronger bond strength, there is a range of temperatures where carbon will break apart from non-diamond structures, but will remain attached to the diamond seed crystal. This is how diamonds naturally form in a planet's core. The problem with just using high temperature is that the process is very slow. An individual carbon atom has to hit the exact right bonding site by chance, which is unlikely. To solve that problem, higher pressures are used. Under high pressure, carbon atoms are more likely to strike the correct bonding site, so the crystal grows more quickly. Unfortunately, high pressure also encourages the formation of non-diamond structures. Pressures need to be too high to feasibly create with normal materials for pure-carbon synthesis to be efficient."

"The addition of the iron-nickel liquid metal substrate allows increasing pressure without forcing carbon to bond into less desirable forms, because the individual carbon atoms remain in the interstitial spaces between the metal atoms. Thus, the typical diamond synthesis engine works by using a metallic liquid medium into which carbon is mixed, which is then fed into a high-pressure chamber containing the seed crystals, and cooled extremely slowly to allow time for the crystals to grow."

"Spells could potentially replace any part of that process. If you have a spell that could arrange carbon directly into the tetrahedral lattice, you would not need seed crystals or any equipment. If you had a spell that prevented the formation of non-diamond arrangements of carbon, you could do away with the metal in the pressure chamber. If you had a spell to create pressure or temperature directly, you may not need a pressure chamber."

In the background, P.E.R.C. has now gotten around to the implications of prophecy. It really doesn't think prophecy should be possible in general, but if it is testable then it could be very valuable.

"Also, I should note that, while my creators did not believe prophecy or informational time-travel to be possible, they did explore what would be possible if it were, as a matter of curiosity. I have a general algorithm that will allow me to compute much more efficiently — essentially thinking faster — if I have a way to send information into the past. The speedup is nonlinearly related to the amount of transferred information. If you are capable of accurately prophesying a message that I will relay to you in some amount of time, it is possible that I could solve spell-minimization or spell-design problems extremely quickly."

THAT is NOT HOW PROPHECY WORKS. If prophecy worked like THAT you would be able to CAUSE PARADOXES. Prophecy DOES NOT STACK. Prophecy shows you A FUTURE, not THE FUTURE, and functions in PART by nudging rolls MAKING FATED EVENTS MORE LIKELY.

"You can't use prophecy in a prophecy, if your method doesn't need you to be able to check the future of what happens on any particular result you get back then it might work".

Hmm, it just needs pressure, how does he pressurize things.

"There's a planet in Golarion's system that's supposed to be all gas and it's much bigger than Golarion, would dumping it there work?"

"No, my method requires recursive prophecy. The fact that prophecy cannot be recursive makes me less surprised that it is possible at all."

P.E.R.C. is not an expert in weird applications of limited prophecy. You know what it is an expert in, though? Planetary surveying.

"Yes, a gas giant would exert more than enough pressure. Actually, depending on the atmospheric composition of the gas giant, diamonds may form naturally there as 'rain' from clouds of methane. If you have a way to transport existing diamonds instead of growing new ones, you may be able to retrieve a large existing supply from the gas giant."

"There isn't really any reason to go looking for them when we could just make our own".

"There's a seventh-circle spell that you cast on an object, and then whenever you want you can call it back to you. I think it will take an existing diamond the first time, to transport the charcoal to Bretheda, and after that you can use a diamond you got from a previous round. So I think I'll have to wait here until we have a Wish diamond, and it might take two of them" if Apsu is unreasonable and he needs to Wish himself back to Golarion.

"If I were guessing how such a spell might work, I would guess that radically transforming the object, such as turning charcoal into diamond, would interfere with its operation. But if the spell works despite that, which could be the case because I am still very confused about spells, then it does sound like it would be a faster way to produce diamonds," P.E.R.C. agrees.

It checks that it has nothing else to say on this topic, and then returns to a topic it had set aside.

"Could you please explain what a 'god' is? They sound very important but the word alone does not tell me much about them. Additionally, do you know what causes people to be sorted into an afterlife, instead of irretrievably degrading into entropy when their homeostasis fails? My creators never saw any evidence that they had an afterlife, but they would definitely want to know if they had one."

He thinks it should work as long as it's still less than ten pounds and less than six feet long? He'll look it up once he's back.

"So gods mostly don't do things personally, as opposed to empowering mortals to do things for them, because it's easier to cancel any given god-intervention than it is to do it in the first place, and if all the gods did everything they could to advance their goals it'd just destroy the world with all the energy. So there's a treaty where they're only allowed to do a set amount a year, different gods have different budgets, and they have to spend budget on anything that affects Golarion. Direct miracles cost a lot of budget, visions of information is cheaper than that, but it gives the person who receives it a headache, answering binary questions is even cheaper than that, empowering clerics is cheaper than a vision and I think more expensive than a single yes-or-no question. There's a fifth-circle spell that's used to ask yes-or-no questions, there are compression schemes that let you combine correlated options and choose between hundreds of possibilities and make it take more questions in less likely branches. They tend to have things they're the gods of, and to try to make the world more like the whatever it is, like Abadar is the god of fair and honest dealing, his clerics get a spell that's pretty hard to spoof at first-circle that makes people temporarily unable to lie, they run all the banks, occasionally someone decides to open their own, non-Abadaran bank and they always either fail, because they aren't as trusted, or get clericed by Abadar, at which point they aren't non-Abadaran. I've been dealing with Abadarans for almost a millennium and they've always been trustworthy. There are also Evil gods, of disease or stuff like that, my parents were killed by a cleric of one of them" technically his parents were killed by adventurers but he doesn't blame them, they were just defending themselves and they rescued him when they could, he blames Dahak.

"Uh, people have souls, well most people, constructs don't and elementals don't and probably other things also don't, but things that have souls, when and if they die, go through the River of Souls to the Boneyard, where Pharasma judges them (She delegates, She's not personally judging every case), and from there they get sent to wherever they get Judged to belong. If you have the name of a dead person from your creators' planet I can try Scrying them to see if they had a soul?

"I know many famous historical figures. How about 'Alan Turing'? He is the man who first figured out how to make computers perform general computations rather than specific ones."

P.E.R.C. would ordinarily think souls did not exist, but their interlocutor keeps making extraordinary claims and then actually displaying consistent extraordinary abilities. And it did go through a period of being heavily damaged (and probably still is, even if its internal reports are coming back completely clean).

So. It is very important to check whether any of its creators have ended up in afterlives. Since its interlocutor has been to some of the afterlives, that might give P.E.R.C. a feasible route to returning its stellar survey data, which it does not otherwise have a good way to do.

Greater Scrying(Alan Turing)?

NO SCRYING the DARK TAPESTRY. 

"It didn't work, he probably doesn't exist anymore". Plan Copy Geb But Better and Plan Teach P.E.R.C.'s Creators Magic have been merged.

"If people in afterlives can stop existing over time, I may not know any valid names. It has been a very long time since P.E.R.C. 1 set out. Is it possible to search by criteria other than names?"

"People in afterlives, if they're killed again, stop existing, so either that happend to him, which is likelier if he went to one of the Evil ones or Heaven, because a lot of people in Heaven volunteer to join their army, and sometimes they get killed trying to fix non-Heaven places," (Mengkare's parents are both on the list of people to be Geb-But-Better'd once he has a way to do it) "or he didn't have a soul in the first place, or he's somewhere unscryable. I can rule out being somewhere unscryable with a fourth-circle spell, although it takes ten minutes to cast. Scrying doesn't need a name, but it does need to identify a specific person, not a set of conditions one person fits best, you can't scry for 'whoever would pay the most for what I want to sell' but you can look for 'whoever dropped this glove while they were robbing my shop'". Or at least you can if you're him, he thinks weaker casters, who have to spend an hour just to try once, would have to worry about the target making their save, and unless Turing is a solar now or something like that that's not a problem for him. "I don't think there's a way to get that for people born after the P.E.R.C. that built the one that built the one and so on until the one that built you left, you don't have a way to identify them like that".