Kramsi leads Groya across the city towards an inn that straddles the line between "inexpensive" and "cheap".

Almys stares particularly into the part of himself where his boy-mind seems to think that kneeling to the Summoned Hero and serving her feels more natural, and less like something to grin about and joke about and negotiate salaries about.  He would not appreciate that more than a spark of humor in a subordinate, if he was his liege.

...yeah, he's gonna want his own cameron so he can shift more freely, if they keep this up for more than a couple of days.  Last time he tried going male it wasn't this bad; which could just be that he was younger then and less set in one brain biology, or it could be that at the time he wasn't trying to impress anybody or do anything important; but either way, being male is more uncomfortable than it used to be.

There's people who swap freely between sexes and genders and seem to feel that they're just themselves no matter their form.  Almys is not one of those people.  He wonders if his liege will be, when she gets to try it.

Carissa is thinking about how to fix this place. 

She knows, she knows, she's been warned not to, and it's certainly not worth doing if everyone local is like "please, no, don't dogood at us, leave us alone", but it seems like a universe with no gods but the Tea Entity looking out for them are doomed in the long run, and also it'd be really terrible if people are wrong that you end up a Summoned Hero when you die and instead you just end up in the Abyss or wherever. Or even in Hell. These people have not put very much work into shaping themselves to handle Hell. 

It seems like probably she can come up with a fix to that which the locals are genuinely happy about, if she can make all the magic items and cast all the spells and become more powerful than Nex and so on.

Twilight's fallen, by now, and they're cutting through a poorer part of town.  People don't look disreputable or poor in the way that Carissa might be used to, but they're wearing more worn clothing with fewer shining bits of armor attached.

There's more graffiti.

This one says in artistically scrawled text, "SHE'S WAITING."

Carissa has as many as several questions about the Asmodean cult once they're in private!

It'll take a few moments to get into private.  The inn isn't dirty - cleaning spells (cleaning Skills?) are still a thing - but the wooden construction is old enough to be visibly worn.

Almys haggles for a couple of interminable minutes before paying seven "credits" for a room for two over the next three days, which includes a cleaning service and unlimited hot showers, but no meals and definitely not alcohol.  He has to show his guild reg to get the room, but Carissa evidently needs no papers of her own; Groya is just an adjunct to Kramsi.  A few people give Groya curious glances, but nobody tries to talk to her nor regards her with outwardly visible lust.

Honestly it's incredibly reassuring that in some ways this world, for all its bizarre traits, still works like a normal world, and that reasoning from what would make sense in Cheliax still works. In Cheliax no one'd be looking twice at her because they don't really want to pick a fight with the adventurer, and no one would want to make her situation their business for the same reason, and his buddies might tease him for dragging one girl around with him instead of having one in every city but only if it seemed to them like he cared more than anyone ought to. 

It's nice. Feels like home.

Of course at home Carissa would never unless her life depended on it get into this situation, but in this case not only her lives but possibly the entire stupid planet depends on it, and also she doesn't actually have to fuck him. And if she wants to he'll say 'as you command, my liege' which really soothes over many injuries to one's pride. 

Groya waits patiently, making sure not to catch anyone's eye, and then casts a Rope Trick as soon as they're in the room.

Finishes checking around the room and the lock integrity, then climbs up the rope.

"I am curious about the catgirl pentagram graffiti. I've seen several instances by now."

"Cult of Asmodeus, one of the most unpleasant gods and hence one of the earliest to die, back when people hadn't really... gotten used to that being a thing, I guess.  They went into denial about their god being really dead, invented elaborate stories about how much She secretly wasn't dead and was totally coming back eventually, and getting turned into a catgirl was really all part of Her master plan to end up controlling everyone's post-death fate.  Really owned the adorable-catgirl thing, turned it into a whole movement symbol, which, you know, somebody else might think had been successfully meant as a particularly humiliating way for their big scary god to die..."

"No way to check if Asmodeus is actually successfully controlling peoples' post-death fates, though? Where I'm from that would be a real possibility."

"If that was ever possible to know about anything, it would drastically change the whole existential character of all life as we know it, and have the same sort of meteoric impact on people's psychology as when Transmuter Devices destroyed our entire world currency and banking system previously based on precious metals."

"I concede that in this particular case it would refute their whole weird doctrine about how Asmodeus is actually somewhere above the Old Man With Tea and created our whole reality as a kind of elaborate gaslighting loyalty test to see who goes on believing everything the Cult of Asmodeus says when they've been given no sane reason to do so, and then that determines how badly they get tortured after death."

Carissa decides not to press further even though she thinks there are very good odds that's just true. "Are there other weird cults I should know about?"

"Cult of Asmodeus is number two on the list of weird cults the Summoned Hero ought to worry about.  The Cult of Asmodeus would want to kill you because nothing could possibly convince them that you were not out to hunt down their god and kill Her, no matter how much they proclaim that's not actually possible.  They've also been saying that the consumption of the world in Fire means that Asmodeus is ready to wrap it all up and bring forth judgment.  I don't actually understand the psychology of it."

"Number one on your list is the Cult of the Minus Sign, which thinks Kekaro ought not to exist, and sticks around and has kids so that someday their children's children can make it not exist.  The more it looks like the Fire is going to consume our world, the more adherents they've gotten proclaiming what a great thing the Fire is really, presumably as a form of cope.  They are a lot bigger now than they were when I was a kid.  I think if it was announced we'd gotten a Summoned Hero after all, some of their new adherents would leave, but a lot of the copers would proclaim you were fake or maybe double down on their new Minus Sign doctrine and try to kill you, so they could go on coping.  I don't need to know why people work that way to see that's how they do."

"But I'd put governments and nobles and admins ahead of all those weird cults put together.  They do want the world to go on existing, but there's always somebody who thinks that the Summoned Hero could do her work just as well with a slave collar.  It almost always ends badly for them, but not, unfortunately, literally always.  There's always somebody who thinks they're just that clever and the previous fools weren't.  And they're the ones with the power."

"Yep. In my world a seventh circle wizard can laugh at governments; a weaker wizard very much cannot.  - are slave collars a specific thing, a particular kind of magic item, or just the word for a wide range -"

"In simplest form, collars that hurt you or kill you if somebody presses a button, or you go out of the controller range, or anybody tries to tamper with them without the controller code."

"In scarier form, things that are like - Skill items of not being able to escape being a slave.  Of being bad at suicide.  That sort of thing."

How reasonable. Carissa is pretty sure she could do way better, but that'd probably be taken as a bad sign about what kind of summoned hero she is going to be. And anyway it can wait.   "I'll make you some items for emergencies, if I get captured or similar. That will probably require spellsilver, unless I have a breakthrough at the local kind of casting. Last question before you go out - the fire. I assume it is not amenable to normal ways of putting out fires, and not possible to live in with Resist Fire up?"

"That is something I feel nervous answering questions about, given how much I'm not a specialist.  I definitely couldn't just walk through it on the strength of my Fire affinity - which I'm not mentioning casually, you already know about my Fire affinity because I've told you I have Metal affinity.  I also know the Fire has allegedly been scouted, not successfully finding any levers to pull inside, but scouted.  But that was the sort of scouting party where they could've had three Creation mages in there."

"In my own opinion and guess, we're noticeably not being told how the Fire started or what it's made of."

"Ah huh. All right. I have no more urgent questions; go purchase us some books."

He obeys fucking stop that, brain, just go buy books for the Summoned Hero like a normal person.

Carissa is going to try to activate the dagger herself now that she's seen it done. It's using...Earth channeling...and she has an Earth affinity unless Tea Entity really ripped her off, so it should just happen. 

(She's not sure if firmly believing she has ridiculous powers will help make it true or not. It sounded from what Almys was saying like some of what's going on with Summoned Heroes is that the universe has a concept of them, but some of it could also be that they know themselves to be destined to have incredible powers. 

None of this is how magic ought to work, it ought to behave consistently like it does at home, but she'll surely use it while it does.)

She doesn't get it on the first try!  Or the third try!  You're supposed to have somebody else run Earth mana through you so you know what it feels like!

She is however both the Summoned Hero and Carissa Sevar, so she'll get it on the fourteenth try even though you are not really supposed to be able to do that just by trying hard.

Well, she doesn't know you're not supposed to be able to do it just by trying hard. (She also doesn't know that being Carissa Sevar is very notable. Her superiors have gone to great lengths for the last five years to make sure that her performance reviews communicate that she is fine at what she does but not as clever as she thinks she is and certainly not talented enough to be of any substantial note.)

She is annoyed it took fourteen tries, but okay. She'll make herself a Ring of Sustenance and then make up for slowness at magic with extra practice.

What else can you do once you've learned to channel Earth mana? Can you use it to ...pick dirt off your shoes? Smear blood around the floor of the Rope Trick? 

You're not supposed to be able to just invent your own spells EITHER.  You're supposed to look up spells that have been cast a LOT and where mana really easily falls into the resulting ruts in reality.

...yes.

This isn't even actually a Carissa Sevar thing.  Anybody who can cast spells AT ALL in Golarion is going to be able to figure out simple tricks with affinity mana.

Once she's manipulating it, she'll be able to feel that all the usual forces that she expects to affect her mana are still there, weakly tugging at it.  It's just that Earth-aspected mana experiences additional forces, stronger and much easier to find balancing points for.  It's as if this mana has all the same physics as Carissa's previous universe, but with a new set of physical laws and forces and mana types added on top of that as addenda, designed to allow people to cast simple spells without... studying very hard.

Carissa holds the entire population of this universe in immense contempt. 

(Well, not really. Probably some of them have learned real magic and just kept it hidden, and plausibly a previous Summoned Hero made a strategic decision to make it look this way, and it's even probable that Summoned Heroes always understand magic and that's why they have to be from out of universe and for whatever reason they've all made the decision not to teach anyone, for good reasons - which would mean that people will recognize her magic and it'll instantly identify her as the latest summoned hero. 

She holds them in suspended contempt pending figuring out if any of this is true. 

Also, not that she'd previously considered it possible that this magic system beat Asmodeus, but hahahahahahahaha this magic system did not beat Asmodeus.)

Can she prepare Earth-aspected versions of her own spells, so her magic doesn't look aspectless to someone looking carefully? That'd involve getting two different complex structures to interact, so it'd be a hassle, but if she can get an Earth-aspected Mage Armor then she can send Almys out magically armored without giving anything away. 

Can she, if Earth-aspected improvised spellcasting can smear blood around, use that to make an offensive combat spell? She'll test it on herself, she's supposed to believe herself to be in grave danger anyway.

There's no such thing as lightly Earth-aspected mana; it either is or it isn't.  This means that, while she could maybe find places to stick stray bits of Earth mana into a spell without the whole spell collapsing, it's then clearly a tiny bit of Earth mana laid over a lot of unaspected mana.  You straightforwardly couldn't make a version of a Golarion spell entirely out of Earth mana without redesigning that entire spell from scratch, and even then, you just would not expect to find any way for Earth mana to move in those subtle and complicated ways.  Casting Detect Thoughts this way seems legitimately as far out of reach as the local sun.

She can probably get something like a spike of hardness jabbing at somebody, but not as powerfully as, like, poking them hard with your finger.  There's definitely going to be some way to take a big mass of this mana and condense it to where it becomes a tangible supersolid that can then be accelerated and flung beyond her ongoing control, but it feels like she's missing some primitives from the library of laws she'd need to exploit.