She died hard, actually.

Hard enough that she didn't go to Hell.

She died so hard she ended up with the old man and the tea.

This is not the canonical depiction of Pharasma but the gods are beyond such mortal things as gender anyway. 

The cups of boiling water seem kind of fragile for use torturing people. She can't actually think of another use for cups of boiling water.

She kneels. 

He'll agreeably kneel at the other side of the table, and pour her a cup of tea.

"Sit, sit, my dear.  Have some tea.  I expect you've had a troubled time before coming to me."

....she obediently sticks her hand in the cup of boiling water.

"Not from a culture with tea, I take it.  You're meant to sip it, lightly, and savor the flavor.  I suppose we could also go straight to business if you're of such mind."

How is she supposed to savor the flavor. Burning water will burn your tongue until you can't taste anything for days but the dead skin. 

She'll try it anyway. 

She still does not say anything because nothing this being said was actually a direct question.

It's not actually meant to burn her tongue!  This is perfectly good tea here!  Just because it's still lightly steaming a bit, at the present temperature and altitude, doesn't mean it's boiling hot!

This seems really quite different from how she expected the afterlife to go. 

She has so many questions and is absolutely not going to ask them. She was told to sip tea and savor the flavor so she will do that. The tea does not really have very much flavor. It's kind of...herb-y. She will still get a good grade at savoring it, somehow.

Well, to be totally 100% honest here, after a while at this job, he's kind of liking it with not the endless stream of questions.  They should send him more of whatever she is.

"A world I oversee has gotten itself into a bit of a... state that it ought to get out of," he says, and waves his hand to show it to her.

"As you can see, about a third of the surface area is currently on fire.  I'd ask if you're willing to help me with that, but in fact, by the time the System sends you here, there isn't really much of an option there.  So, that's where you're going."

"- not to the part that's currently on fire.  You won't be ready to go there for a bit."

.......she would answer that, possibly with some questions, except this being still has not clarified how They are styled and she can't just blurt out 'uh, what?'

She'll just....nod, like it makes perfect sense that instead of being sent to Hell she is being sent to this deficient planet that is not yet entirely on fire.

"I can only aid you by a bounded amount, and most of that goes to the baseline enhancements.  Vast magical potential, ability to learn any affinity, quick Skill gain, all the usual.  Still leaves some left over for your Unique Skill.  Is there some great unique capability you'd wish for, that will go well with you, define you, make you iconic?  Would make a nice flagship epic ability to grow into, that sort of thing?"

Oh no!! A direct question!!! That is too confusing to answer!!!!!

She tries extremely hard to savor the tea while she thinks.

Nope, nothing for it, she's going to need to ask at least one clarifying question.

"....we get to keep our abilities in the afterlife, Your Majesty?"

"Hm?  I'm not familiar with the concept of an 'afterlife'.  You'll have to explain that to me, if it's important.  It'd be normal for you to keep whatever powers you already possessed, in your new world, but unless those powers are really quite impressive I expect them to be rapidly overshadowed by the new potentials that I gift to you."

......what. 

It's some kind of test to determine how cool she is, that's all there is to it. She needs to fix this only-partially-burning planet for Asmodeus and then she will have ultimate magical power and also be perfected. 

...it doesn't quite hang together as an explanation. Not really. 

She savors a bit more tea. She thinks she hates tea. Hopefully that counts as a kind of savoring it. 

"I'm an arms and armor enchanter, Your Majesty, and I'd like to be a better one."

"Then you shall be the greatest arms and armor enchanter this world has ever seen or is likely to ever see for a while, at least if you can manage to survive a relatively short time to train up those Skills.  And..."

He sighs inwardly.  He doesn't really want to explain this... ever again, in fact... but it's possible that he'll be letting himself in for needless trouble if he doesn't say something.

"...just to be clear on things, young lady, what happened to you is that you stopped existing inside your previous universe, and, when that happens, people end up somewhere else that has a use for them, as a rule.  The System had a use for you, which is perturbing my planet out of a trajectory that won't end particularly well for it."

"Whatever else you think is happening, isn't.  Just look with your eyes open and figure things out from scratch."

And now she's standing in a sort of generic-looking town in the middle of a generic-looking market street with a bunch of storefronts!

- what????

She stopped existing? But that shouldn't have been possible!!

.....it is sort of reassuring to think that if you stop existing you get sent somewhere else where there's a use for you. That's how things should work. But how does she know what her use is, he didn't even tell her what to do - 

'Just look with your eyes open and figure things out from scratch.'

She really thinks by the time you're a god you should be better at giving orders than that. 

Her eyes are open. Does she see, for instance, anyone who has noticed her. 

There's various adventurery sort of people standing around!  She's actually dressed pretty much like one of them, at the moment, ready to blend right into this unknown city!  Nobody seems to have noticed her teleporting in, either that, or nobody thinks very much of the teleport...

Nobody's visibly staring at her, at least?

....cool. In that case first priority is to find somewhere unobserved where she can prepare spells because otherwise she's not going to speak the local language. (Right? They aren't conveniently speaking Taldane here?) 

...does one's spellbook survive getting killed and sent to another universe. 

If she tries to listen in on that woman bargaining over a strip of faintly iridescent leather, she'll find that...

...actually, everybody here apparently speaks Taldane!  In a standard Chelish accent, even!  Go figure, huh.

Is she perhaps just having a very stupid dream. Or a very stupid hallucination. Or - 

- once there's no one obviously in earshot - 

"I'm still loyal to Asmodeus and I'm still obedient to Her Majesty's government and I want to go home," she tells the sky.

Fine. 

Spellbook, yes or no.

Then a man eight inches taller than Carissa and looking vaguely like one of her former(???) coworkers will go back to the town center about half an hour later. It seems deeply unwise to let anyone know that she is new in town, and deeply unwise in general to be a woman if one can instead avoid being a woman, and deeply unwise to remain this confused.

Her top priority questions: 

- what is this stupid place

- why does it need a person from another universe

- is the fire preferred or dispreferred

- is the Church of Asmodeus here (really that one should be first, her bad for not putting it higher up)

- did everyone ELSE also get here via a TEA GOD

- does it have food and water and spellsilver and basic necessities like that 

- who is in charge and what is she supposed to believe about them

- what is the afterlife situation HERE

Okay sure sure but she's going to need to pick out a particular person to talk to and somehow introduce any of those questions.

They've got all kinds of people in the town center, including one of practically every kind of profession that Carissa finds legible and some she probably doesn't.  Though nobody here looks particularly like a priest of Asmodeus.

(Oh, and it doesn't look like this is some benighted non-Chelish area with Prejudices?  Men and women seem equally distributed between professions, including violent ones.  To a greater extent than Cheliax, even, with equally distributed male and female advanced fighters, or male and female probable-prostitutes.  There's also a distinct lack of visibly hurt people, like the sort of place that has channeled healing.)

The possible explanations for the sex ratios are an incredibly comprehensive tyranny or magic that changes everyone's sex trivially and probably involuntarily. Either way she approves.

She does not have money. She does not want to draw lots of attention to herself with weird questions. She does not want to be here, she wants to be back at the Worldwound where she belongs.

....fine. Nearest person who doesn't look like they could take her in a fight. "I'm looking for the Bog's Bed, which way is it?"

"The... Bog's Bed?  I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know."

"It's a tavern. There can't be that many of them, and I wouldn't expect them to change their names too often. I am in Henset, right?"

"Oh no.  Oh dear.  I was trying to get to - Midvale - I don't even know where Henset is I must be in completely the wrong place right now -"

Great, mission accomplished. If only she had a Dimension Door she could sell the service of taking this poor idiot to Midvale. ....possibly she can do that with just a Minor Illusion, if everyone here is very stupid.

...Detect Thoughts.

She's trying to review in her head which of the recommended landmarks along the way she could've misidentified while flying here!  Under her own power.  For what was definitely not just a few minutes.

Also what was that Skill the strange woman just used, it was obviously a spell of some kind but it looked nothing like any kind of magic she knows and she couldn't figure out any affinity in the gathered mana at all.

They can see magic, so it's not worth risking. Too bad; she would feel much more comfortable here if she had some money. 

(She would never dream of just robbing someone. That's unLawful! She's a Lawful person! It is perfectly Lawful to say 'this is Henset, right?' and then sell transit to Midvale which in fact deposits the purchasers in Midvale, if they are gullible enough to believe you.)

She snorts in disgust and leaves.

Different disguise, different person. Question one answered, how about question two. 

"There was a man arrested here last night for being a public nuisance, screaming about the end times, do you know where they'd have taken him?"

"Do you know if he was screaming about the end times because he was drunk, or insane, or just, you know, couldn't handle the whole apocalypse thing?  Would they have triaged him to the drunk tank, a brain-healer's office, or a mind-healer's intake?"

Some of those words are not standard Taldane, though their phonetics fit with the rest of the Taldane language.  They seem quite understandable anyways!  Go figure.

She does not like this place. She doesn't yet know what to dislike it for but she doesn't like it. Also, she would like to stay far away from brain-healers and mind-healers. Those seem like powers to only have employed on you by people whose loyalty you've very carefully vetted.  

"Oh, I think he was just drunk. Though, you know, before the apocalypse he was a happier drunk." Is it a recent apocalypse.

"Weren't we all.  Drunk tank is halfway across town, if you have a flying Skill it's not far from the big iridescent dome, otherwise... keep walking in that general direction," she waves, "until you've covered half the distance from here to the wall, and then stop and ask for directions again, I guess.  You in Midvale for the big casters' tournament, or are you heading for that new dungeon that's popped up?"

There's that word again, Skill, as if people only fly around here if they have it as a native ability. She should probably not demonstrate flight; she doesn't know what else it'd mean about her in this magic system. "I hadn't even heard there's a dungeon that popped up," she repeats in carefully the same tone, "I've just been looking for my idiot friend, who is here for the caster's tournament. What's the word about the dungeon?"

Why would anyone deliberately go to a dungeon. Dungeons are places where you are tortured to death. 

"Oh, you hadn't heard?  Popped up around ten miles away two months ago, discovered a month ago, teleportation portal up as of just last week.  Nobody's reached the core yet but it's at least B-rank, and it sounds like this dungeon might be starting to figure out about how Transmuter Devices have changed market demand; fewer platinum or mithril drops, more Skill Gems and affinity metals and other things we can actually sell.  Lots of adventurer parties forming, if you're up for that while your friend's competing."

It's like something that's halfway to making sense, but doesn't quite. Dungeons...not in the sense of torture chambers, clearly, in the sense that people raiding an ancient tomb might cheerfully say they're going dungeoneering - pop up? Who pops them up? Maybe she just means the location is discovered? But why would the discoverer of a location advertise it to everyone instead of selling the information to the highest bidder who'd rather not have competition? And then she says "dungeon might be starting to figure out", as if it's intelligent, but why would anyone go adventuring in an intelligent sapient adversary that just showed up one day??? That's the most obvious trap she's ever heard of!!

"I dunno, maybe. I've never had that much luck adventuring with random strangers." That at least has to be a constant everywhere there are adventurers, that most of them suck.

"Well, you know the old saying: you are the only common factor in all of your failed relationships."  The adventurer gives a cheery wave and heads off, no longer looking quite as interested in Carissa.

Uninteresting is precisely the thing Carissa, or the set of distinct strangers she's pretending to be, are aiming for here! 

- what is this stupid place Midvale

- why does it need a person from another universe apocalypse, apparently

- is the fire preferred or dispreferred dispreferred

- is the Church of Asmodeus here (really that one should be first, her bad for not putting it higher up)

- did everyone ELSE also get here via a TEA GOD

- does it have food and water and spellsilver and basic necessities like that

- who is in charge and what is she supposed to believe about them

- what is the afterlife situation HERE

Different face! Different stranger! No one's acted like she's rude for demanding their time without payment yet, at least. Also no one's tried to rob or rape her. Really this is going unreasonably smoothly. "Is there an Abadaran bank here?" It's a safer god to ask about than Asmodeus.

"A what sort of bank, now?  All the banks are in the rich center of town, either way."

"The rich....center?" That's not how Corentyn's laid out; the rich people want to be far away from the smells and the docks. She doesn't actually know that much about how cities are usually laid out. It's hard to tell when she's confused because she's right to be confused and when she's confused about something completely reasonable. "Fine, which way is that?"

Are there, in fact, any churches visible, on her way into the rich part of town?

Not with an architecture she recognizes, at least?

Oh, and that teenage boy there looks like an obvious tiefling, what with the horns.  He sure doesn't look very... Evil, at the moment.  But he's dressed in red and black, at least?  And he's got kind of a collar going on but it does not really look very slavey, nor do the quality of his clothes.  

Carissa has no idea how slaves are identified in other places! It presumably depends on what's convenient and what's traditional and what's hardest for them to get rid of, which depends on the local healing magic. ...maybe that's how to identify the churches. 

She pulls out her knife and discreetly cuts her forearm. Puts her hand over the cut to stem the bleeding and also make it less obvious what a clean cut it is. "Where would I get magical healing?"

...the first person she asks about this will cheerfully just heal it herself!  This involves a brief incantation and some gestures that do not look like casting a pre-hung spell, nor like divine magic, nor like anything Carissa has ever seen before.

No, face totally unsurprised. 

"- that'll do, I suppose," she says instead with slight irritation because she cannot actually pay this person.

That's apparently fine?  She doesn't ask for payment nor apparently expect it?  The girl turns and heads on off with the cheerful smile of some Good person who's done a favor that didn't cost her anything significant and did help somebody else.

...or possibly that's a boy wearing a dress and a hairbow.  Also with two spikes of - obviously illusory? phantasmal? - ice, that are now manifesting around him/her/them, slowly fading, after she/he/they cast that spell.

They could also be actual aliens and have eight sexes, for all Carissa knows. It's incredibly bizarre that they speak Taldane, the kind of bizarre that suggests the whole thing is a dream or a test or that everyone is also a chaos beast which is being rendered for her as a human. Mostly as a human. If they were actual humans, they wouldn't have the apparent gender ratios; this place is clearly not enough of a tyranny to have obtained that. 

Well, she's not making much headway on question four: do they have the Church of Asmodeus here. What else can she try. 

....she can stab herself again, find an unoccupied area, cover herself with an illusion, write His holy symbol on the wall in blood, change disguises and get some distance, and see how upset they are to see it? Bit risky, though, when the magic system's unfamiliar and might permit pastwatching or something. 

Safer to put on yet another face and try "I'm looking for a priest, do you know where I'd find one?"

"A what?  Sorry, I'm not sure I heard that right."

"...priest? Representative of the gods?"

"Do you possibly have me confused for somebody completely different?  My name is Aya, and I'd have no idea where you'd find somebody old enough to remember when any gods were still alive, except for obvious ideas like dragons and high-elves and companions of Summoned Heroes and so on."

These people are weirdly gullible and trusting. No one in Cheliax would answer a stranger asking weird questions; she'd have been reported to the authorities several times by now. .....also there's a handy list of local immortality methods. "Well, I don't see any of those around, do you? I don't even know where I'd go to find a...companion of a Summoned Hero."

Whoever "Aya" is, she's not so trusting - or maybe, just not so altruistic - that she'll hang around having a conversation this weird and confusing.

She'll change faces but hang around to see if 'Aya' goes to the authorities about her or not.

Not visibly so for the first few minutes.  'Aya' seems to be heading on confidently towards wherever she was going in the first place.

(Aya was also heading in the same direction Carissa got thumbed-at earlier - towards the city center - and along the way, Aya will go past this lovely magic-item shop here, as the area gets visibly more expensive:)

Ooooooooooohhhh no no no, not looking, until she understands this world and has money she should not even glance at the magic items. That's how you die. Like APPARENTLY these people think ALL THE GODS died. 

....it's not impossible. Aroden died. You could imagine if the fight to kill him had been even worse. And now there are no gods, and the planet's on fire and there's no one you can pray to to fix it. 

Wow, for all of how their cities are rich and impressive, these people are so much worse off than people at home. Maybe that's why they're so gullible. What do they have to lose, anyway?

...she should save up enough money for a history book, that's what she should do. Head back to the poorer parts of town and ask if she can do laundry for money. Unless everyone here has Prestidigitation like many of them have Healing? Do everyone's clothes look unnaturally clean?

Okay, if random prostitutes are going around in ....stretchy white things....then she's not going to make any money off a laundry business.

She genuinely doesn't want to go adventuring. She's met adventurers, they're fine, there's only a handful she'd kill if she ever had the opportunity, and she wants them to be her customers at her magic shop where she doesn't do any adventuring. Furthermore, it'd involve using her magic, which is different from the local magic and will call attention to her. 

But that leaves making money without magic, and you don't save up a lot of money that way. You don't starve, if it's a good year, but it's not as if after a decade of working on the docks you'll be rich. You'll be a decade older and have back injuries that you can't afford to get touched up. -- well, maybe not the back injuries, here. 

What are her alternatives. A life of crime. unAsmodean and likely to get her attention she can't afford. Doing illusions like she's heard they do in Absalom, or being a Detect-Thoughts enhanced fortune-teller. Again might draw attention to her.  Selling translations. Works if everyone doesn't just speak Taldane. Prostitution and that genre, of which the least stupid version is probably getting friendly with the adventurers and then fucking them for a share of their riches if they come back alive. Profitability depends on adventurer mortality rates and whether contract law would be enforced in her favor, there. 

She doesn't like any of these options. She wants to finish out her term at the Worldwound and start her magic shop in Corentyn and not die. 

World's ending. And apparently it's not a big deal if she screws this one up, because some other one will grab her, but - probably more impressive people get grabbed for more desirable worlds.

She will continue wandering, looking particularly hopefully for places where adventurers seem to gather, and for any sign that anyone here doesn't speak Mysteriously Taldane For No Good Reason.

Possibly she should have asked the tea god some more questions.

A side wall of an alley opposite a shop that advertises "apartments for rent citywide, best prices" has this interesting bit of graffiti drawn on it.

- oh.

She feels enormously relieved, and also as if a bunch of usually-unused limbs had been in the process of finding their way out of the chest they were locked in and now needed to be shoved away. 

Does the art - suggest where to go to find the church of Asmodeus? Is the building it's on distinct from any of the surrounding ones? 

The graffiti is not on a building; it's on a long but solid wooden fence that separates buildings from an alleyway, and the other end of that alleyway is clearly visible and looks like it's another ordinary town street.  There's no other writing near the graffiti that hints of a church, of directions to a location, it's just some sort of fiery cat-girl with a pentagram drawn over her breasts.

It makes sense that, in the absence of the gods, the church would....deteriorate.

However, Carissa feels like "your advertising should communicate where and how to find you" is really a very low bar. 

New disguise, new person. "See that artwork over there? Are they some local cult or something?"

"If you've somehow managed to live your whole life without hearing about it, you're better off never hearing it, honestly.  It's a fundamentally stupid idea but there's always some arbitrarily tiny fraction of the population vulnerable to an idea of some given stupidity level, and this idea is apparently not quite stupid enough for that fraction times the population of this town to equal less than one."

"...the idea being that Asmodeus is a ....sexy girl with cat ears?"

"I can't imagine how you got into whatever state of partial knowledge you currently occupy.  There was a god a few thousand years ago named Asmodeus who like got off on torturing people or something, don't ask me about details, and was one of the first gods to run afoul of a sufficiently powerful Summoned Hero who got upset about that behavior, go figure, and who turned Asmodeus into a catgirl.  A catgirl who did not, by all sensible accounts, survive for very long after that at all.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably literally mentally disturbed and you should just walk away from whoever that is."

"That is indeed incredibly stupid. Have a good day."

As if a mortal could fight Asmodeus and win. As if fighting Asmodeus and winning would look like - Polymorphing him or something, as if he was just a very big very scary dragon. 

It does kind of suggest the Church is no longer active here, though. And that she shouldn't identify herself with it, because whoever won that war spread rumors that Asmodeus was the god of torturing people or something.

And now their planet doesn't have any gods and is dying in a fire. Carissa hopes that this entire excursion is meant to test her faith, which is very secure in how having gods is much better than not having gods. 

Searching on:  There seem to be a lot of adventurer-type people in clustered parties gathered around... whatever this place is... though the mixture of the crowd, if they are in fact adventurers in parties, is strongly suggestive that many people whom Carissa might otherwise have identified as "prostitutes" or "ordinary twenty-year-olds wearing unusually nice clothing (for Cheliax)" are standardly part of adventuring parties.  The adventurers are gathered in front of a big impressive building; also nearby is a smaller, less impressive building that could plausibly be a tavern.

She has definitely noticed the abundance of prostitutes! She is suspending judgment on that; maybe the government is deliberately trying to make everyone a whore for some perfectly good reason. It probably means you're less likely to get attacked if you aren't dressed like that, anyway. 

Do they happen to be having convenient conversations about ways to make a lot of money and also survive to age 30, or about what a Summoned Hero is and whether it's the same sort of thing where Hero's Companions are immortal, and whether this is presently on offer at any price? Do they happen to be having any conversations not in Taldane such that her translation services might not be useless? 

No audible conversations not in Taldane!  Nobody is saying anything about what a Summoned Hero is, let alone mentioning a Hero's Companions!  They seem to be mainly talking about various... adventuring quests?  Only in a weirdly organized fashion where cleaning the undead out of a ruined castle is said to be a "B-ranked quest" and they're wondering if they can find two other "C-ranked parties" to go do that.  There's talk of rare herbs spotted, not valuable in themselves, but indicating that much more valuable rare herbs might be nearby.  A young(-looking) man (probably) is bragging about how many horned rabbits with affinities he's got in his Spatial Bag; people nearby are rolling their eyes or walking away.

Somebody asks Carissa, sounding friendly about it, if she's here looking to form a party.

....maybe the dungeons are faked. A service by the Crown, a completely standardized difficulty, so you can level from them, and you probably level slower in light of everything being completely standardized and sanitized but maybe you do still inch your way along....and of course if that's what everyone does, you'd have to be a loon to go haring off after real danger, people only do that because it's the only way....

"I'm not local," she says flatly to the person asking to form a party. "I'm from Corborel and we rank spellcasters with a different system there; I don't know who I'd match."

"I didn't know there was anywhere that the Adventurer's Guild rankings were different... what's your most powerful Skill?"

"Weapons enchanting." Tea guy said so, and it was true before he said so too. 

"Oh, so you're looking for escorts for a dungeon run so you can level? - or do I have the wrong idea about why you're here in the first place and am just bothering you."

Ah HAH something about this world finally made SENSE. "No, that's about right. I can do a little bit of support spellcasting but mostly I'd like to have some starting capital for magic item making, and once I hit fifth circle I doubt I'll ever step into a ...dungeon.... again."

"I've got no idea what 'fifth circle' is, unless that means Tier 5 in which case ha ha ha ha very funny.  Are you looking to run a goblin dungeon with backup, slay some elder dragons..."

"In Corborel I'd run support for a team of people fighting babaus, nabasus, vrocks, the occasional omox. ... we had a lot of casualties. I guess while I'm learning a new system I'd want to go a step down from that."

"I've never heard of any of those monsters.  Who wins if an omox fights a two-hundred-year-old purple dragon?"

Okay, despite Carissa's determination to hate this entire flaming planet, this girl is growing on her. What a good way to invent cross-world monster comparisons. Dragons presumably are the same everywhere. (In Golarion they aren't usually purple, but dragon color only affects the difficulty of fighting them by a little.) "Dragon and it's not that close. The omox could probably take a younger dragon outside its lair, though."

"Taking out a dragon too young to be a caster is two upper-C-rank teams.  Taking out a young dragon with excessive casualties is two mid-C-rank teams.  If you were running support for a team like that, and want to take a step down but still benefit from the dungeon run at all, you're looking at a D-rank dungeon run."

"Cross-check so I don't send you somewhere overranked and get you killed, what's the most powerful weapon you've enchanted?"

Do they really have it down to that much of a system? Can it be gotten down to that much of a system?

"I've done a brilliant energy longsword, but - uh, as far as we know, all third-circle wizards, which I am, are about as hard to kill whether they paid attention in enchanting class or not?"

"I don't recognize 'third-circle' or 'wizard'... but if you can do weapons I've never heard of, and my Social Skills aren't telling me that you're insane or bullshitting, that sounds like maybe you should just, like, make a couple of weapons that nobody's ever heard of and sell those?  What's a brilliant energy longsword do, combatwise, and what kind of mats do you need to make it?"

"Goes through all unliving matter. They're pretty cool, but I'd need thirty two ounces of spellsilver, minimum, and I don't think anyone's going to front me that."

"'Spellsilver'?"

"...have you not heard of it. I hate this place. I should have asked so many more questions of the asshole who dragged me here. It's shiny, silver, corrodes in the air and has to be stored in oil, worth its weight in gold. If you don't have it here then I guess I'm a support caster who can't do any enchanting at all."

"That does sound like a difficult position to be in, but I know a person and I might be able to get you sorted there.  Pure metal or alloy?  Would you know it if you were brought into its presence?  Does it need to have an affinity, imbued magic, or other Skill-added or dungeon-added qualities?  How much of it would you want, if somebody was making a one-time purchase for you?"

"Iiiii don't think it's an alloy. I will know it if I see it. It doesn't - where I'm from it doesn't need to have imbued magic, you do that while you enchant it, but for all I know that works differently here. I would want to owe them less than five years of my life and have at least a couple pounds of it."

"I've got some savings, and, like I said, I know people.  Follow me and I'll see if I can get you sorted?"

Well, if she dies, she'll know that next time she should not trust the first person to try to invent an interworld monster-comparison scale for her.

Detect Thoughts, though, when they're weaving through enough people to help cover the spellcasting.

The mysterious woman being insane, running a scam, or her being the Summoned Hero from far beyond Kekaro, are the only reasonable ways she could not know about how cheap any pure metal is to create now that Transmuter Devices have been popularized, not to mention the woman's total unfamiliarity with the rest of the planet.  Her running a scam reasonably has to be most likely, but Almys does not particularly want to chance the woman being actually the Summoned Hero, what with that being Kekaro's basically only hope at this point.

Fifty pounds of 'spellsilver' will be cheap, if it's an elementary metal that the woman can identify and Almys can get transmuted.  She'll see what the putative Summoned Hero does with that; if she can turn some ordinary metal with no affinities into an entirely new kind of magical weapon, then...

...Almys doesn't really know what she'll do after that.  She'll play it by ear.

......does that mean. this stupid planet has infinite cheap spellsilver. maybe it deserves to live just for that.

That's a lot more than she wanted to give away to a random stranger, though. Possibly she can just disappear with her spellsilver and be more vigilant in the next city. 

Are Summoned Heroes the people dragged here by the Tea God. Why does the tea god have to keep summoning more people here? Golarion solves its own problems with just its native population and it goes a lot better than this!!!!

Summoned Hero companions are immortal or at least outrageously long lived. Are summoned heroes? 

Why didn't Tea God explain any of this. 

....for now she'll follow along, still mindreading.

It will unfortunately take longer than 6 minutes to get to the shop Almys is heading for.  Before the Detect Thoughts run out, at least the following facts will have scrolled through Almys's mind:

- The Summoned Hero seems kind of adorably naive - if that's not a product of deeply streetwise cynicism trained on some utterly different universe, but Almys is mainly betting on 'adorably naive' - and that is absolutely going to get her killed, which is a problem because then the rest of the planet goes down with her.

- A lot of people would be on the Summoned Hero's side, and maybe 7% of the population will want to enslave her and 2% will want to kill her, and there is absolutely no way Almys knows to tell the difference in advance.  This is a legendarily difficult problem faced by a lot of Summoned Heroes when they arrive.

- Almys has absolutely no idea what to do about the giant sea of flame consuming the planet, which started around five years ago and whose origins are a secret classified somewhere well above her own upper-D-ranked self.  Hopefully the Summoned Hero can sort it all out; and if not, well, guess everyone on the planet Kekaro goes wherever the next step down is from Kekaro on the ladder of Hero Summonings (as is the best guess anybody actually has for what happens to people when they die).

- Hero's Companions often do really well for themselves, better than Heroes not that uncommonly, and Almys absolutely wants herself some of that.  Almys would cheerfully kill almost anybody, including her own parents and excepting the Summoned Hero, who got in her way about that.  Step one is going to be to pose as an altruistic kindly-hearted helpful person who would absolutely make a great Hero's Companion.

To make any decisions here, Carissa is going to need more information. She can decide to get it from this person because this person is the first person to have guessed that she's the latest Tea God drop, or she can decide to convince this person she's a fraud instead, or kill this person, and get it from a person selected by a process that is not that. 

This person seems.....fine? Like she'll kill Carissa for her own benefit but also like she thinks it's pretty unlikely killing Carissa would be for her own benefit. 

Probably she should attempt to be far more selective than that, but on the other hand - 7% of the population will want to enslave her and 2% will want to kill her sounds low. 

And she doesn't know how long she has before the fire swallows up the planet.

Probably not that long, actually, if it started five years ago and has swallowed a third. 

Why would someone be under the impression that being altruistic and kindly-hearted is the best way to become a Hero's Companion????? Who in the universe goes around going "I hope my adventuring companions are altruistic and kindly-hearted?" Maybe a previous Tea God drop just went in really hard on Lawful Good, either for real or in propaganda, and everyone decided that's how the Tea God selects people or something. 

She continues to follow, blinking wide-eyed at things that her persona to date would blink wide-eyed at.

- Also Almys is considering getting herself turned into a boy in case that works better for seducing the Summoned Hero.  She could always tell the Summoned Hero it was her preferred gender to start with and the girl self was a pseudonym-persona.  Seems worth checking what the Summoned Hero's sexual orientation actually is before doing that, though.

Summoned Heroes sure do have a reputation here and Carissa isn't sure she's impressed with it. 

If she goes to the place Almys is taking her, other people will know. Right now they don't. Probably she should make her decision now, when that means only needing to kill/fool one person, in a location that one person didn't pick. 

Noticing this doesn't seem to actually help with making the decision, somehow. 

Okay, killing her is probably out. This person probably has more competence with a weapon than Carissa and murder attracts attention. She doesn't have any poison, she doesn't have any allies, she needs to solve her information leaks in a murder-free fashion for now. 

So the best way to reduce suspicion is to clearly be running a scam. Can she run a convincing scam? She's genuinely not sure. She could flee with the spellsilver - is that a convincing scam? No, because no one local would go to these lengths to get spellsilver in the first place! And she doesn't know what their tracking magic is, and it's not like it won't occur to a reasonably smart and competent person that an uncooperative Summoned Hero, or even an uncooperative person suspected of being the Summoned Hero... is still potentially very valuable....

Which leaves one option.

"I prefer girls," she says, conversationally, with thirty seconds before Detect Thoughts runs out. "Though if you want to grow a dick, or tentacles, or claws, or whatever's locally considered most appealing I'll endeavor to take it in the right spirit."

You can read minds, Almys thinks.  Ha ha.  How funny.  Silly me for thinking I could ever get one up on the Summoned Hero.

She's terrified now, and invoking her Social Skills not to show it, for all the stupid good that will do her.  It's suddenly a lot more - real, personal - that these are the people who, in one age or another, as they individually took offense at one thing or another, killed off all of Kekaro's gods.

Is there a convenient alleyway or something nearby where if Carissa cast a Rope Trick it would not immediately be observed by all of the passersby.

She takes her Hero's Companion's hand, and walks into the alleyway, and casts a Rope Trick. 

Very calmly. They can't both be terrified, that'd just be embarrassing.

And she lets go of the woman's hand and climbs on up without looking back. If the woman wants to flee in terror that's very reasonable but disqualifying for help-Carissa-with-this-stupid-planet duties.

If Almys has an option of fleeing in terror, or deciding mentally to do that, without being immediately killed by the Summoned Hero's unknown magic, this fact is not particularly known to Almys!  She will obediently climb up after into the dark misty space of the Rope Trick.

Almys is not really trying to hide her terror all that much any more, there's no point; but she's keeping her composure lest she annoy the Summoned Hero.

Carissa would smile warmly at Almys but she doesn't actually know how that works and if she tried it'd probably just look scarier. 

"I'm new here," she says pleasantly. "Can you tell me a little bit about how this planet works?"

Almys assumes a concentrating look.  Possibly she is trying to think her answer back.

Which would just be good operational security except Carissa specifically timed this for when the spell was about to run out. "Aloud," she says. "I can only do that for so many stretches in a day, and might need to check other people today."

Obviously the Summoned Hero could be lying about that, to see if Almys will try lying.

"The planet we're on is Kekaro, second planet from its sun Ke, said to have been spawned by the System 16,122 years ago..."

The world of Kekaro has a cycle.  Every now and then a problem appears too great for the people of Kekaro, or Kekaro's gods when Kekaro still had gods, to handle alone; and the System sends them a Hero...

The first time it really became apparent that this was going to be a problem (say the eldest of dragons who learned it of their grandparents, and the last survivors among the first of elves) was when a Summoned Hero grew powerful enough to challenge the chief of all gods.

That Summoned Hero did challenge the god-chief, whose now-irrelevant name is recorded to have been Jehovah; and slay Him; and seize from Him His wife, the most beautiful of all goddesses, called Shelyn.  And before that Summoned Hero vanished to wherever overly-powerful Summoned Heroes go, he did burn Shelyn in pyre as his last act in Kekaro, to the weeping and fury of the gods who remained.

It was not, the legends say, an act of spite.  It was just that this Summoned Hero was from a far and alien place, with a far and alien upbringing.  To him it was honor: that the strongest man must have the most beautiful woman, and that she must have no other weaker man after him.  That is just how Summoned Heroes are - not that they are all exactly that way, but that they are all different.

"....why didn't your gods strike him down before it got to that point?"

"I wasn't there and don't have books in front of me, but - the impression I get is that the gods didn't realize, at the time, that Summoned Heroes could get powerful enough to challenge the chief of gods and win."

"Afterwards, it's said, and I believe it because it seems obvious, the next thing the gods tried, was striking Summoned Heroes down after they did their work, and before they could kill any more gods."

"It didn't go well for Them."

"Did you - before the gods all died - have afterlives, here?"

"'Afterlife'?"

"Our gods run the places where mortal souls go when their bodies die."

"I don't know the word 'soul' either."

" - you. The part of you with all your - priorities and goals and things you care about."

"So like - a soul is part of your mind?  Everyone's always figured, based on things Summoned Heroes have said about what the Old Man With Tea said to them, that when you die out of Kekaro you end up in some other universe that has a use for you, like as some sort of Summoned Hero, though obviously there are all kinds of possible uses for people besides being Summoned Heroes.  The massive uncertainty and existential terror of that is the keystone underpinning our world and everyone's sanity within it, and the reason why anybody stays alive and has children, it's said.  For if we knew we were to go to better places, we would not stay here; and if we knew we were to go to worse places, we would not have children."  This is said in the tone of somebody reciting a proverb and obvious truth.

"Well, we should fix that, I guess, and get everyone an afterlife. ....in practice where I'm from people mostly don't kill themselves even though they know what the afterlives are like, so I don't think that's an enormous problem."

"You knew you were coming here?"

"No, this is weird, I thought I was going to Hell where I'm supposed to go when I die. Something must've gone wrong -- probably with my soul on the way to Hell, I have no reason to think anything's wrong with Hell. But if you don't have any afterlives around here, then we can set them up, and they'll catch almost everybody. It's just a much less stupid system, I think. 

...to be clear, I don't, yet, know how to set up afterlives. But I doubt it's harder than murdering gods."

"I mean, I think you'd mostly get cowardly people or ones without any accomplishments, who didn't want to forge boldly into the unknown when they died or had no confidence in anybody anywhere finding a good use for them."

"Or kids! People who need to be improved before there's any point in sending them on," she agrees. "- you were telling me about the world, though, go on."

The world of Kekaro has a cycle.  Every now and then a problem appears too great for the people of Kekaro, or Kekaro's gods when Kekaro still had gods, to handle alone; and the System sends them a Hero; and the more gods those Heroes killed, the more problems Kekaro on its own couldn't handle, and the more further Heroes had to be sent there by the System.

Whatever Kekaro was in its beginnings, it is not now.  There was a Summoned Hero who was offended by the practice of slaying wild magical creatures for their body parts, and of nations going to war with each other to level their noble children in battle.  Now there are dungeon cores, and dungeons; and, because that Summoned Hero didn't think things through super duper carefully in all edge cases, Dungeon Breaks, when a dungeon spawns somewhere remote and grows and grows never being culled.

It's said that the gods, once, were the sole source of affordable healing.  And then the Hero Merrin created an artifact that could create Skill Gems for a trainable Healing Skill, and also that artifact could copy itself.  Some of the gods didn't like it, some of the gods tried to do something about it, those gods failed; but, it's said, when the people of Kekaro did beg Merrin not to slay any more of their remaining gods, the Merciful Hero did relent.  She is considered one of the kindest and most successful of Heroes, and her name is remembered honorably.  But from that day, people no longer needed to plead to the gods for healing, and that tore something out of Kekaro's pantheons that all the previous casualties had not.

One Summoned Hero was really upset about the general state of sexuality on Kekaro as she found it, in the old days when it wasn't easy for men and women to transform back and forth between sexes, which apparently led to some people having not enough sex and other people having too much sex for some historical reason Almys doesn't remember.  The Sexy Hero's solution was to create an artifact that could transform men into women or vice versa, and also that artifact could create copies of itself.  Her name lives after her in the artifacts she made, the camerons.

The reason why Kekaro has undead is that a previous Summoned Hero was also disturbed by people having to suffer from the existential terror of death.  Their solution worked great for ten years after that Summoned Hero was gone, and then broke, because it turned out that the planetwide enchantment built upon and keyed to that Hero's irreplaceable Unique Skill was not literally zero maintenance.

The world of Kekaro has a cycle.  Every now and then a problem appears too great for the people of Kekaro, or Kekaro's gods when Kekaro still had gods, to handle alone; and the System sends them a Hero; who, when their work is done, often creates new problems.

"Where do the heroes go, why don't they stick around -"

"I think they just get too powerful?  Heroes can't stop getting more powerful."

" - why not?"

"- if anybody's ever asked that question before it wasn't covered in my history lessons."

"Understood. Summoned Heroes inevitably grow more powerful and shape the world to their liking and then vanish and generally leave the world more in need of Summoned Heroes because they've broken all the power structures that were not 'them, personally'."

"Is it - considered right and proper, by you - that you slay me, or punish me, if I say anything less than perfectly to your liking?"

"I don't know how I'll answer that question once I'm - powerful, and safe, and understand what's going on. But right now, seems like not hearing anything I don't want to hear will definitely get me killed. If you're not working against me, I'll keep you safe."

"People who the System sends us are always, always, the sort of people who'll be driven to fix whatever problem we have right now.  And the problem, from our perspective, inside Kekaro, is that we're then left with - a very powerful person who's the sort of person who wants to, fix things, when there's some part of Kekaro that isn't the way they like.  It's said that the Hero to slay the first chief of gods, I mean, he did kill the giant blob-monster-thing whose name I forget that even the gods couldn't slay, because that was what strong men did, where he came from, kill the most powerful monsters.  And the problem is that, the way he saw the world, the way the world had to be, the strongest man also needed the most beautiful woman."

"The last god we had was named Erastil.  All He ever did was help people farm, He didn't manipulate people, or demand worship from people or lord greater power over them, the way that lots of Summoned Heroes didn't like, which is why Erastil even lasted that long, I guess.  The dragons and the elves and, everybody who wanted there to be any gods left at all, tried so hard to hide Him, His existence was a secret.  He wasn't even helping people farm, anymore, which people didn't need anyways because a Summoned Hero had invented better farm-crops that didn't need any divine help to grow, nobody even profited when Erastil died, not even grain-merchants.  And they say that the Hero who slew Erastil was really sorry and apologetic about that to everybody, but to him, it was just, not allowed, for something bigger and more powerful than the ordinary mortal creatures of Kekaro to exist.  So that Hero tracked down Erastil and slew Erastil and then slew himself as apology, and now Kekaro has no gods at all."

"There's always just, some aspect of our world, that some particular Summoned Hero can't leave alone, because it's too important to them and their alien values."

"I'd ask if you can just not make us any 'afterlives' but I can already guess how you'll answer that.  But I - really wish you wouldn't - and if our world wasn't literally dying in flames, probably more than half the powerful people in the world would try to kill you about it."

"Do Summoned Heroes get killed sometimes by people who think we'd better off without the summoned heroes?"

"Yes.  That's the other reason we still have undead.  The System sent us a Hero who could've stopped it, probably, or at least it looked like that's what that Hero was supposed to be about, but the Hero got found out early, and somebody decided they'd rather have a continent be overrun by an undead plague for a while rather than let Kekaro get permanently twisted around even further.  I can't remember if it was recorded what that Hero wanted to do."

"And there's no record of anyone who just solved their problem and left without wrecking things?"

"No, I think that's like, two-fifths of the cases."

"And I don't think we regret the existence of camerons?  I mean there's places on Kekaro where they're not allowed but I've never heard anybody say that life is better there.  Not everything that Summoned Heroes do turns out terribly, from our perspective, just... most of it.  And it's kind of really obvious that your 'afterlife' thing is not going to be one of the good cases."

"Then I'll let you all keep dying, if everyone feels that strongly about it." She is actually thinking that clearly what she should do here is bring back the gods. "How does this world's magic system....work."

There isn't any visible look of relief on Almys's face, but if she doesn't believe in that reassurance, she's not saying it out loud.  She launches into an explanation of the world's magical system instead.

Basic Elements:  Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Light, Dark.  Dominance cycles go Earth > Fire > Air > Water > Earth; Light and Dark are mutual opposities and dominance depends on the particular spells.

Tier-2 Elements:  12, for example Earth+Fire = Metal, or 13 if you count Chaos.  Trying Light+Dark, Air+Earth, or Water+Fire all get you Chaos.  Do not mess with Chaos.

Tier-3 Elements:  The 8 possibilities for one of Earth/Air, one of Water/Fire, and one of Light/Dark, avoiding any Chaos.  Air, Fire, and Light gets you Plasma.  Earth, Water, and Dark gets you Murk.  Earth, Fire, and Light gets you Mirror.

Tier-4 Elements:  Creation and Uncreation.  Basically everyone who gets this far picks Creation because it's way more useful than Uncreation.

There's 23 major Root Classes (in the Adventuring Guild's classification, which is worldwide ever since a Hero created an extensible worldwide teleportation-portal network), but in very broad terms they could be said to boil down to "casting spells using affinity mana, making stuff using affinity materials, and hitting things with arms and armor made out of affinity materials".  Not everybody can be an Adventurer because there's only so many dungeons to go around, and competition to enter the Adventurer's Guild is very intense; people widely suspect you get to have more fun after you die if you have more Adventuring experience first and are a more desirable Hero.

But, like, the basic idea in magic is - basic affinities that people have, more complicated affinities they can acquire, and then that determines what you can do with aspected mana, or forge from aspected mats, or what kind of weapons and armor you can use?  But unless you're literally the Summoned Hero, it's not enough to have four Basic Elements and five Tier-2 affinities, you still have to party up with enough other people to cover lots of different bases in affinity-dominance contests?  Is any of this helping?

" - not really. What is magic, as you think of it, where does it come from, can only humans use it, what do you use it to do."

"Every living creature has at least one Elemental Affinity, and I don't know of any obstacle to casting spells with your affinity that isn't about - being smart enough to understand what you're doing at all and practice the Skill for a while?  Two-year-olds can't cast spells because they're too young to learn, not because there's anything in magic that says they can't.  Magic is what you do with affinity-aspected mana.  Mana is just everywhere, the base state of everything, but the vast majority of it is unaspected and untouched by Creation so it doesn't turn into spells or planets."

"How do people find out what their elemental affinities are."

"They touch affinity gemstones as soon as they're old enough to channel?"

"Which is how old."

"Uh, I was four, two is smart, six is dumb.  It's just like - hey feel this mana I'm making flow through you, now, you do that into this little jewel here."

"What determines which elemental affinities people have? Is it like hair color, coming from parents? Is it random?"

"A little bit inherited, like two Earth parents probably have an Earth kid, but not like two Plasma-potential parents have a Plasma-potential kid."

"Most people have one affinity? What share have more?"

"Don't remember exact stats for everything... but one in thirty people can be Adventurers without a special exception, which requires potential for at least three Tier-2s, and that's three unopposed elements or maybe four elements with two opposed pairs.  Having both Light and Dark is very rare but I don't remember how rare."

"And then you adventure, you level, you pick up some of the Tier-2 elements, if you're really unusual you pick up some of the Tier-3 elements. How many people are, uh, Tier 4?"

"Uh... maybe twenty, I'd guess?  Not counting elder dragons and so on."

"Do summoned heroes usually have their own magic from their own world, or just very convenient elemental affinities?"

"When they get here they can do little incredibly strange things but not huge ones.  I've never heard about them reading minds on arrival but that doesn't mean it never happened, it means it wasn't in my history book."

"So where do they get the power to do - huge things, if they didn't arrive with it? I can become higher-tier in my system and maybe fix the fire that way but it sounds like that's - probably not what the Tea God had in mind."

"I think they usually just get a lot of power within our system?  Like, sometimes they've got uncanny knowledge from beyond Kekaro, and sometimes they mix in a bit of their unnatural powers into their great workings.  But mostly they have all the affinities and can channel a ton of mana and they form Skills rapidly.  If you're thinking that sounds like the System could've just made one of us be the Hero, when our world needed it, you're not the first person to think that."

"I assume someone has tried killing the Tea God and that is widely considered an even worse idea than most other meddling?"

"I don't think the Old Man With Tea is a god, if he was a god I'm pretty sure a lot of Summoned Heroes would've murdered him."

" - it seems like whether or not He's a god doesn't have much to do with whether to murder Him? Or do you mean more - He holds together all Creation and to destroy Him is to destroy it?"

"No, I just mean, he's probably not a sort of thing that can be killed, because if he could be killed, one of the Summoned Heroes would've killed him by now."

"I see. - I don't particularly want to kill Him, I don't have anything against gods, it just seems like He's your problem much more than Erastil is."

"I don't think he chooses Heroes, that I've read, he just - talks to them before they get here.  And, whoever or whatever he works for, his annual bonus sure doesn't depend on the Heroes getting good directions."

"If you somehow interfere with the part of the System that chooses and summons Heroes, our planet will die the next time it catches on fire.  I mean, I don't think you can, because it's such a big important part of our reality that a Summoned Hero would've definitely messed with it before now if that were possible.  But if you were the first who could do it, we'd die."

"I'm not trying to kill your gods or your overgods or whatever! It sounds like a lot of heroes just do completely random horrible things, but I'm from a Lawful Evil place that isn't going to either try to destroy everything or dogood about it all when no one wants that! I would like to not die, and ideally also get rich! I assumed that other people also wanted that but if actually they are terrified of anyone messing with anything because the lunatics keep murdering your gods along the way, then I won't! Whatever! I am not going to be more invested in whether someone dies than they themselves are, that sounds like a horrific waste of time!"

Almys is unreadable, at this point, without Detect Thoughts.  "What's Lawful Evil?"

"It's how we sort people where I'm from. Lawful, not-Chaos, keeping your oaths, obeying the law, having a chain of command, not doing things on random whims. Evil, serving your interests and not your self-image or the story in the histories that makes you look noblest or your version of other peoples' interests. I imagine you'd sooner have Lawful Good, most people would, but from my perspective it sounds like you've mostly had too many people trying to dogood at your planet and you just need someone to make it not be on fire and not try to leave a grand legacy.

"Lawful sounds - promising, I guess.  And Evil sounds like me, so maybe I'm not as bad of a Companion for you as I thought.  But are you going to still be Lawful when you've doused the fire, and look around and there's no one on this planet, let alone any gods above, who could still oppose you, and you see that your interests say the world could look a little more pleasing to you, if it were different from how it was?"

"You don't have to lie to me about this part.  I'll work for you either way, if I get a Companion's rewards and the fire gets doused.  If you wreck Kekaro a little more, I'll be sad about that, but if you don't do whatever, the next Summoned Hero will."

"You're Evil," she confirms. "I mean, I don't have the spell to read it off people, and I bet the spell wouldn't even work here because there's no system keeping track, but you're the kind of person who'd read Evil at home unless that was really inconvenient in which case they'd patiently donate money to orphanages or whatever to get up to reading Neutral. It's why I decided to talk with you. I don't actually like Good all that much. 

I don't know what I'll want, if we do this, and save the world, and I get to rule it, or whatever. I'm - suspicious - that there's something Heroes eventually learn, or eventually see - at minimum they've got to be different once they're smarter -

- but you can be Lawful all the way to godhood. People've done it, where I'm from. Law isn't actually just about it being smarter to obey than to disobey. And - and if we go somewhere else, after this, if it's just world after world after world -

- well, I think it might be as important to be a Lawful person as to be a capable one, in terms of what places want to let you in."

"That sure is what all the governments teach, but they don't actually have any way of knowing and they have an incredibly obvious reason to be biased in what they very sincerely expect to be good for us."

"Well, in my world there are afterlives that let everyone in, and they mostly suck, and then afterlives that let only Lawful people in or only Good or whatever, and they're much nicer. - Hell isn't actually pleasant but it makes you stronger and better, unlike the Abyss, for Chaotic Evil people, where you just probably get mugged and die again. And part of why Hell isn't pleasant is that it's Lawful Evil but takes anyone, even people who aren't Lawful, because Neutral Evil was eating their souls so Hell started letting those in too. 

Anyway, I don't really care if most people are Lawful because it's not like they'll be Lawful often enough you can rely on it, in a place where you can't just read it directly, but I think I do recommend it."

"I think the vast majority of people here wouldn't want any of that.  Going somewhere utterly unpredictable and unknowable when we die is unnerving, but there's all kinds of things I can foresee going wrong if you try to change any part of it.  Governments are awful enough as they stand.  If obeying the law made the difference between going to a good place and a bad place and people knew that for sure, governments could get away with so much more, because they wouldn't have to worry about people still obeying the laws no matter how horrendous the laws got."

"Following worse rules for a couple of decades seems pretty small compared to spending eternity in a worse place because your first life didn't teach you any of the stuff you need to get into a good one and then your second was the Abyss and transformed you into a chaotic evil frenzied demon only wanted by places that want chaotic evil frenzied demons to fight other hordes of chaotic evil frenzied demons. But again, I'm not going to go around caring about peoples' lives more than they bother to themselves.

How do I test which elemental affinities I have?"

"If you're the Summoned Hero you start with all six base Elements, and most people do not have six base Elements, so this is not a good thing to walk into a pediatric office and try to test where other people can see it."

"Understood. And to get any Tier-2 things, I have to use magic in combat?"

"Affinity, magical capacity, and Skills are all separate capacities that all grow from being used when there's real stakes on the line, stakes that matter to you somehow.  Arrogant and prideful people often become great and powerful, because it's easy to get yourself into situations where your pride is on the line, if that deeply fucking matters to you, like the fucking casters' tournament they have around here.  Sensible people like me have to risk our actual lives chasing unreasonably large bounties that will maybe get us killed, if we want to grow the same way."

"To start practicing a Tier-2 affinity, you've got to level up two Tier-1 affinities to where you can aspect mana two ways at once.  But even a normal kid with Fire affinity, trying to learn a Fire-starting spell, will do better after a year channeling unstructured Fire mana to warm up lunches that don't taste as good cold."

"Does the Summoned Hero usually do a lot of adventuring? I'd expect that'd lead to people dying more often than - that one undead plague."

"I assume that's why we get Summoned Heroes who can't already oneshot elder dragons with their own world's powers, so that they can still benefit early on from running a kobold dungeon and get stronger inside of our own world's system."

"Do Summoned Heroes arrive predictably, have traits other than being confused and having lots of magical power, are there spells to look for them, are there mindreaders, is there prophecy..."

"'Prophecy' is unfamiliar, mindreading sounds like not something where they'd tell us that it existed or how to get it, and spells to find Summoned Heroes aren't something that they'd tell people like me who might tell the Summoned Hero about it."

"We were expecting a Summoned Hero to arrive earlier to deal with the sea of fire.  The only predictable thing about Hero timing is that they show up when there's trouble.  I figured, most people figured, that we'd gotten our Hero two or three years back, and somebody killed them, and that was it for Kekaro."

"Right. In that case, I propose that we go to some other town, in case someone noticed I was confused earlier when I was determining where I was and what was going on - I was disguised, but still, I don't lose anything by changing towns unless you lose a great deal - you teach me basic spellcasting in your magic system and acquire me spellsilver, and once I can credibly pretend to be your kind of adventurer then we do some dungeons.

In Cheliax, the normal way to solve the problem that people only level from stakes they really care about and sensible people don't care about contests is to torture people for mistakes. However, people in other places generally can't handle it. I would ideally like to have companions who can, but if in fact you can't handle it I'm not going to waste time trying anyway.

If you betray me and I survive I will absolutely torture you to death. If you decide you can't take it and don't betray me about it, we can work something out. If you make some kind of stupid mistake and tell me as soon as possible, we can work something out.

Objections?"

"Define 'betray'.  If it's something I can do without strongly deliberately wanting to, then this whole scenario potentially leans toward my exiting Kekaro and going on to wherever my next destination is, rather than risking you torturing me."

"For example, finding someone who wants to kill or enslave the summoned hero and telling them where I am. You can't betray someone accidentally, if it's an accident it's just incompetence."

"I may have further questions later, but those terms as I understand them seem acceptable to me, assuming you otherwise mean to keep me around as a Hero's Companion... which often ends up entailing, say, that you make me some incredibly powerful items, once that's easy for you.  Including the sort of incredibly powerful item that will channel mana through me and allow me to level faster than I could by using just my own mana capacity."

"I could also be bought for an amazing amount of money, but there are fewer risks I'd take for just that.  I'd have more questions about under exactly what circumstances you might torture me or somebody else, if it was just that."

"I was planning to make you very fancy magic items as soon as it's feasible. Are Heroes' Companions a magical category, or just - the people the Summoned Hero adventures with -"

"My textbook claimed unsettled debate about to what extent Heroes' Companions are a distinct function of the System that brings them here, or a pattern-worn-in-reality*, or just the way things end up working out a lot in practice."

(*) One syllable, not in standard Taldane.

Indeed not, Taldane reserves its one-syllable words for 'cow' and 'pig' and 'leg' and 'run' and 'fuck' and so on - so does everyone, she's pretty sure - and theologians have to coin new words if they want to talk about ...prophecy-related things. Carissa is pretty sure by now she's under some weird permanent translation spell and she has no idea what if anything to read into the words it gives her that aren't Taldane.

"I have no idea what you mean by that but I want as few people as possible to know who I am, and I want them to consider themselves very well-paid."

"Do things not get easier to do the more you do them, where you come from?  Because if so, I've got great news about Kekaro."

"....things do generally get easier to do when you have more practice, where I'm from."

"Okay, so the question is, does the System put Heroes where they'll find Companions, or did it just happen enough that it started happening more easily without there having been any special piece of the unknown Hero machinery that does that, or is the whole thing just how stuff often works out in practice... I'm trying to chase down cases where you say you don't know what I mean because it seems like all those cases might be important for you."

"...things get easier with practice for people, because people have the ability to learn. Things do not get easier with practice for the universe, because the universe....does not have the ability to learn. Where I'm from."

"If it rains on a mountain and the water flows down the same path repeatedly, the path will deepen and widen and become a river.  Someone with Air, Earth, and Dark affinity who learns to cast a Flight spell and who repeatedly casts a Flight spell will eventually become somebody who can just fly because that's - a kind of event that's happened a lot before.  The Flight spell itself is probably much easier to learn now than when it was first invented."

"Water thing is true in my world, Flight spell thing is not true in my world. The reason you can fly with a Flight spell is the spell, and if you don't have the spell cast, you cannot fly.  Someone might invent and share a more efficient version but they'd have to do that."

"Then I guess you'll have an easier time gaining power here than in your former world, won't you?"

“It does sound like that. If I go around with spells up they will just be made permanent after a while?”

"If you were anyone else?  I'd tell you not to get your hopes up until you'd cast the spells so often you could do it without thinking, and fought with them up many, many times."

"You?  It wouldn't surprise me if the answer was, yeah, sure."

“Okay. You know, this could be fun, if we don’t die horribly.

What’s a plausible name and life history for an adventurer like I’ll be able to pretend to be in a few weeks?”

"Okay, so now back to awful practical difficulties."

"If you can make a powerful magical weapon out of an affinityless metal, that nobody needs any specific affinity to use, anybody who hears about that immediately wonders if you're the Summoned Hero.  Or, I did, and it is not the case that everybody else in this town is much stupider than I am."

"We can't pass the guards on any registered dungeon unless you have an Adventurer's Guild registration that you can't get without identity papers you don't have, and even if we manage to find the right sort of criminal with the right sort of connections to fake those for a lot of money, the Adventurer's Guild will fingerprint your affinities when you register, and when they see you have all six affinities they are immediately going to think 'whoa who is this all-affinity person I've never heard of before and is she possibly the Summoned Hero'."

"We can't cross the borders out of Midvale County unless you have forged papers and get a travel permit, which I think we can do without anybody fingerprinting your affinities but is still going to cost money."

"I am... still trying to figure out exactly how we can navigate all this.  I don't suppose you ran into any interesting, incredibly competent criminals before you ran into me?  Or the daughter of the City Lord?  On the theory that reality tries to set Heroes up with useful Companions."

"If I ran into any competent criminals they were so competent I did not immediately identify them as such. You need travel papers to leave the county? This place is so tyrannical!" She says it approvingly. "....can you just, you know, cross the borders while flying and invisible?"

"You can cast invisibility."

"In my magic system, invisibility and mindreading and pocket dimensions are not hard. If they're impossible here, though, I guess I'll have to be cautious about using them."

"Spatial:  Tier-3 affinity, Air, Water, Dark.  Invisibility:  Legendary fucking Tier-3 requiring Earth, Water, Dark for Murk and Earth, Fire, Light for Mirror so at least five elements including Light and Dark.  Mindreading:  Sounds like unusually advanced Creation magic but maybe there's a simpler way to do it and it's just secret."

"I don't suppose your 'Lawful' thing is sufficiently flexible that we could just, you know, declare you're a government and go tax some people?"

"That seems likely to get me into conflicts with neighboring governments! And - I assume someone with the ability to cast invisibility, in your system, also has the damage resilience to go with it, but I presently have the damage resilience of a normal third circle caster, which is to say that jumping off a four-story building probably won't break my bones but I go down to a sword only slightly slower than a commoner.

Can we impersonate, possibly through kidnapping or murdering, someone who does have guild credentials and a legal identity?"

"I meant, like, declare to ourselves that you're a government, and then walk invisibly into the house of somebody we don't like and collect a few years of back taxes."

"Permits are magically bound to users, I don't know what kind of affinity or spells you need to fool those."

"That's a lot of social control." She still sounds impressed but also slightly annoyed, at this point. "I see why you worry about your governments being even more capable of rulemaking. My main worry about theft is that it'll draw attention to us, which is a bigger problem if we can't even skip town; if you're pretty sure people can't scry for items, and we are skipping town, I'm all right with taking some - back taxes - with us on the way out. Who issues identity permits for the adventurer's guild, how hard is it to mind-control them?"

That's... slightly less 'Lawfulness' than Almys had been hoping for, actually, in the Summoned Hero; she makes a mental note not to rely on any of that, until she finds out what 'Lawfulness' constitutes exactly.

"Two-key system, specialized mage and Guild Admin.  They won't have any defenses specifically against mind-control, I would guess, because of the part where that sounds like unusually advanced Creation Magic and doesn't correspond to any other affinity I know - it's not the kind of thing for an affinity, mind isn't like, the inertia of a physical body.  But the Guild Admin will be heavily defended against magic in general."

"So that's probably a bad plan. 

...do you in fact have a way to get maybe-spellsilver cheaply? Weapons might be conspicuous, but I could figure out some headbands and then we could revisit options for getting a legal identity."

"Depends on how alerted you think people are about a Summoned Hero already.  My previous plan was to find an office with a Transmuter Device - introduced by the last Summoned Hero, we don't speak his name because he ruined the city of Omelas, which was the proudest jewel of our planetary civilization before that - anyways, find Midvale's transmutation facility, ask them for sample jars for all the kinds of pure metals that Transmuter Devices can make, have you come in and look them all over and say as little as possible, and then I'd order fifty pounds of whatever you pointed out.  It'd be around - a week's cost of living, for me, probably?  The main thing it'd be helpful to have beforehand is a plausible reason for why we want fifty pounds of a metal that has to be kept in oil to prevent it from oxidizing; it's a bit much for us to be metallurgists trying to invent a new steel alloy, and I couldn't bluff my way through that conversation anyways."

"Also, what are 'headbands'?"

"A kind of magic enchantment that makes the wearer cleverer. I could stand to be cleverer, if we're going to do all this. Does this world have metal enchanting that isn't distinctly summoned-hero? Spellsilver's very malleable, I could imagine it being useful for other things if it were cheap."

"Dungeons make affinity mats in general, including metals.  It's theoretically possible to get affinity mats without a dungeon or a rare natural source, but it's way harder, unless you're trying to literally make Water-affinity water or Metal-affinity metal.  The weird parts of your creation wouldn't be that they were enchanted metal, it would be that they were enchanted metal without an affinity."

"Maybe it wouldn't look affinityless, though?  I don't know very much at all about your magic at this point."

"Is wearing headbands mandatory for your Companions?  I might have - at least some questions about what they do to people, you've discussed concepts like 'soul' that sound like they take parts of a person's mind out of them and, do something with them, and - this is not a kind of magic I find familiar."

"Headbands...make you think better? You don't have to wear them, though where I'm from everyone who can does. There's also a spell that does the same thing. How do things look like they have affinities? Is there a spell to check or is it just something you can see by looking?"

"If somebody with a decent affinity touches an item or mat with that affinity, they'll usually be able to tell.  If the item was made to accept mana with that affinity, they'll definitely be able to tell that by running mana through it.  People with very strong affinities can sometimes tell each other the same way, just from getting close.  Professional mages with high affinities have Skills for perceiving those affinities of mana that are supposed to be almost as sharp and effortless as vision."

"The concept of a headband that makes you think better again raises so many questions.  Like - is planning to ask a Summoned Hero for a higher salary a bad thought, which a headband will help you not think, because it helps you think better thoughts than that."

" - I don't set what better is, it's just - well, are there skills that make you move better - walk faster, not trip, balance on things, climb more easily, dodge more easily -"

"Sure.  If you practice a lot of dodging and do a lot of combat dodging you'll eventually be able to dodge magically accelerated crossbow bolts."

"Yes, that's how it works where I'm from too. And if there were a magic item that made you better at moving - which there is - you wouldn't expect it to mean 'makes you march up to the caster and go where they tell you to', right, it'd just - improve all of those skills?"

"The entire reason that normal people practice dodging instead of there just being, Bracelets of Dodging, is that, if you tried to make a Skill-infused bracelet like that, it would make you Dodge the way that the bracelet's creator or first wearer had practiced dodging.  And the whole point of martial arts schools where everybody learns to dodge exactly the same way is so they can have items like that getting passed down through generations of masters."

"- huh. Our equivalent just, you know, improves your reflexes and reaction times. You dodge your own way but you're better at it."

"Boosting your dodging speed is all kinds of much easier.  That's just Mass affinity to lower your inertia."

"Huh. Well, in my system, you can just make the body work better, and you can just make the mind work better, not in any particular direction, but I'll be careful if I try to reinvent it here. I'm not that kind of enchanter at home anyway, I mostly just do weapons, and I think the Tea God - Tea Entity - said that's what my special skill would be here, too. 

.....maybe I can do it without spellsilver. is that the kind of thing a special skill could be?"

"Have you noticed how I haven't mentioned my affinities to you?  I mean, maybe you just plucked it out of my mind already, but maybe you didn't, if you were telling the truth about it being a Skill with a cooldown.  Either way it's not a thing I'd just blurt out without thinking about it."

"You either have your magic already clutched around my heart and a spell that warns you the moment I intend to betray you, or you were careless with who you told about your Unique Skill, just then.  Some Heroes die or leave Kekaro without ever saying explicitly what Unique Skill they had."

"I think - I'm not saying this is who you are, deep down, but here you seem kind of - innocent, in a way that leaves you very vulnerable.  If that's a deliberate illusion because of how deep I'm actually trapped inside your web, you can ignore that, I guess, but if that's not so then it's an act of loyalty that I warn you of this."

- nod. "I don't know anything about - which things imply which other things, which things people would guess just by looking at me, which things there's an easy spell to find out... which things it's even useful to keep secret. There are some obvious things from my magic system - I'm not going to tell anyone my name, I'm not going to let anyone see my face, I'm certainly not going to explain how my world's magic works even though it'd save us some time on planning - but when it comes to things that are possible to keep secret in your world and about your world's magic system, you need to warn me. 

Would turning up with tons of magic items not suggest to people a magic item related skill?"

"Lots of Heroes have been good at crafting.  They get good at a lot of things.  If you come up with a ton of weapons specifically that do things that should be impossible, but nothing else, they might start to suspect."

"Or do you mean - doing that in town?  If you make a bunch of daggers with affinities drawn from Fire, Air, and Light elements they'll figure you're an enchanter with Plasma potential, or that we're merchanting for an enchanter like that, but that doesn't sound bad to me."

"If that's not risky, then maybe we start with that. How are magic items made, in the local system, what do you actually do -"

"I mean, for the most basic sort of item, you hammer around affinity mats until mana getting pumped through it will come out as a spell, which is a lot more complicated than somebody just casting that spell?"  Almys reaches into her left pauldron, detaches a switchblade from the bottom, unfolds it.  "This one is more complicated, it's got an Earth enchantment that keeps it perfectly sharp, and requires somebody to run some Earth mana through it occasionally for that to stay true.  You could guess that maybe I've got Earth affinity, from that, but I could also have a friend who does it for me; I maybe keep this around to fool people, especially if they see that it was apparently hidden like I wanted to keep it secret.  Or maybe I'm showing it to you now because you're my liege and we're predictably going to have to form an adventuring party at some point."

Does it look like anything to Detect Magic?

It looks like a child's concept of a magic weapon that couldn't possibly work.

It contains no spellsilver, hasn't been imbued with the potential that spellsilver carries; there's just magic stuck to it for no visible reason, like a few bits of somebody's scaffold got stuck in there and impossibly stayed in place.  And that magic has some unfamiliar - color, texture, flavor, something, that Carissa has never seen and cannot offhand imagine any way to do to a piece of magic on purpose by Golarion methods.

The foreign magic is structured - carelessly, sloppily, in huge scribbles, not just by Carissa's standards, surely, but by the standards of anyone in Golarion who could make a magic item at all, right.  Any kind of spell you could cast by pumping mana through this awful scribble would have to be three spell circles simpler than a cantrip, and even then it couldn't work unless the mana itself was somehow just way easier to work with and shape into spells.

HOW have there been MANY PREVIOUS HEROES who thought that FIGHTING ALL THE GODS was a higher priority than FIXING HOW EVERYONE ON THIS PLANET DOES MAGIC ITEM MANUFACTURE. 

She's going to be so incredibly cool here if she doesn't die or get betrayed and enslaved or both!!!!!

"How much do I owe you if I break this?"

"Twenty currency units that I imagine don't mean anything to you.  Two weeks of my living expenses.  If this goes anything remotely like I expect it to go you can owe me a pocket knife that oneshots young dragons and we'll call it even."

"Slaying weapons are usually one-off," she says absentlymindedly, and starts picking apart the pocket knife.

Magic items need very specific instructions or, obviously, they won't do what you want them to do. If they need to have an attribute, you need to have built that attribute in, and anchored it exactly properly, and run some magic through it a bunch of times to make sure you don't observe any clumping or sticking. Mana does not want to cooperate with your magic items; mana wants to dissipate like water wants to flow downhill, and you can make water flow through a precise sequence of hundreds of gates in order but not by vaguely hoping it will.

Forget spellsilver; spellsilver is for copying out the attributes of mana that you need to get it to behave precisely enough, copying out the willingness of magic to stick to metal at all. 

This mana wants to do what it's told. But no one in the history of the universe has known how to tell it anyway. The spell needs occasion refreshing with Earth because it's leaky; the spell just keeps the blade sharp because there's no precision in its mandate.

Can she in fact just start prying up the mana and telling it exactly where to go and exactly what to do, like she was working with spellsilver even though she isn't? Can she tell this knife that it is not only forever-sharp (all magic weapons retain their edge!!!) but also spell-storing, and concealed, and agile? 

Not on literally her first try, no.

She can pry out a bit of the strange mana-flavoring-structure, presumably Earth-affinity mana, from its underlying material; she can hold the resulting Earth-affinity mana for as long as she cares to; but once she takes the affinity-mana out of an underlying material she can't put it back, just like she couldn't have done that in Golarion if she was trying to burn magic into something without any spellsilver to help.

The entire structure of the blade looks like... actually, it looks like somebody used smithing tools to lay down a pattern of affinity material, rather than burning a magical pattern into the material using outside power - as you might expect, given that there's no spellsilver involved.  You can literally see the outlines of the magic physically in a pattern of the blade alloy.

Carissa could potentially refine that pattern some by selective ablation, or maybe by pinching the affinity-magic that runs through a material to be a narrower more intense band in places; without her having to reforge this whole blade, or her getting a few dozen pounds of spellsilver and learning how to produce the flavored mana.

Before then, it might help if Carissa had any idea of what it looked like to actually activate this blade, because right now, based on any laws of magic she knows, this spell-pattern cannot possibly work; she can intuitively see how it's trying to yell "SHARP" at the metal, and she can definitely see how it would leak mana while yelling that, but not how that yelling actually... helps.

It would be a great time to assassinate the summoned hero, if you wanted the world to end: she's totally absorbed. "Can you show me how you activate this?"

"Noting that you're asking me to reveal my Earth affinity for definite, if I have one, and that's something you shouldn't tell to other people.  To be clear there's all kinds of people who'll call themselves the Plasma Mage or whatever, but sometimes they're running a complicated bluff using items and batteries and only their adventurer-partners know all of their affinities for sure."

"That said, yes, sigh, fine, most people think I have at least a Metal affinity and they're right."

Almys takes back the blade, and activates the sharpening.

Fact one:  The weirdly textured mana behaves in a fashion that one can only call merely three-dimensional.  It takes a shape, as it bounces through the grotesque messy pattern, and mostly keeps that shape modulo entirely visible tensions, and doesn't twist off into complicated dynamics with lots of hidden state requiring mathematical analysis to predict.

Fact two:  The pattern seems to want to - correct itself?  The blade-pattern presses impressions into the magic, and those impressions develop into deeper divots and form more precise curves, for no reason evident in the kinds of laws of magic this affinity-mana seems to be obeying.

The structure of mana that fires, once it's been built up, still looks a bit sloppy and wobbly; it wouldn't hold together for even that fraction of a second, if it was normal mana; but that final magical-action makes way more sense than the magic item's pattern, and is definitely more coherent and less sloppy than the patterns of the affinity materials.  There's features the pattern developed, while pouring through and building up, that seem entirely inexplicable in terms of the much cruder structure that built it.

- huh. 

"Change of plans," she says absently, "I just want to quietly live in your cellar or something for the next couple days, see if I can make existing items that look like a normal enchanter made them but that leak less or are more powerful. If I can do that then we have a nice inconspicuous way to make some money, and I think while I try I'll get a handle on - the thing you all are doing. One thing that might be worth building is something that blocks an affinity of the holder, so I can go get Guild-registered with a set of abilities. I think work I do in spellsilver will be very conspicuous, and might want to wait until we have an independent power base. 

Am I right to guess that while dimensional spaces might stick around longer than at home, and might be persuadable to get bigger even though I don't know Create Demiplane, this seems like the kind of thing where the next summoned hero is dealing with a dimensional goo incursion?"

"I don't think I understood that last part but that lack of understanding is itself not something I'd consider an encouraging sign."

"I don't have a cellar.  I rent a bedroom, in a house with a shared kitchen and shower.  But finding you a cheap inn somewhere is... something that should be relatively not that risky, if you don't give yourself away somehow, strangers rent rooms in inns all the time.  Midvale has the sort of government that doesn't approve of anybody except the government robbing people..."

"You know, never mind, I'll spend twice as much money and get us both rooms in the same inn."

"I don't know a lot about making magical weapons, but I know that magesmiths have, like... smithies.  I'm trying to think of weapons I've seen that wouldn't require that... maybe arrows, carved from wood and bone mats?  But I don't know how much it would cost to buy the carving-tools, probably a significant chunk of money, and I'm not sure whether or not it's the kind of thing you can rent."

"Oh!  And I should definitely be able to rent you some textbooks on crafting, if you think that'll be helpful at all, or buy them outright if you want to take notes in the margins.  I recall that some Summoned Heroes are from places that don't have cheap books and they're often excited when they get here and find out how cheap books are - just one day's wages, here, ever since the time of the Book Hero, Myne, who didn't break anything."  It's occurring to Almys that this Summoned Hero also needs positive role models in her life.

"I'd love some textbooks on crafting," she says. "I can probably - at home I'd be able to get the use of a smithy pretty cheaply if I'm willing to use it at night, I don't know if that holds here. I'd also like a book on exercises for children who've just identified their affinity to strengthen it, if you have any of those. What's the law on self-defense."

"It's going to go a lot better if you've got a friendly witness who isn't a stranger in town, or the perpetrator is known to the guards as a not-well-connected criminal.  In your case, given your total absence of papers, I'd say that the law on self-defense is to kill them while there aren't any witnesses and get me to help hide the body... is that okay with your Lawful thing?"

"It's not ideal? If self-defense is legal but you don't have truth spells so I'd have a hard time convincing the court I wasn't lying, I'm fine not reporting it. If I'm actually just not supposed to defend myself - well, ideally we'd go somewhere where I'm allowed to, but I can probably just Grease them and run away unless that looks like Obvious Summoned Hero."

"It's legal, but you're theoretically supposed to report it every time, except nobody would do that in real life unless they were real confident they had an in with the town guard or the local government, so actually the reporting requirement is there so that if they feel like arresting you or blaming you they can do that because you didn't report it."

"Grease... if that's what it sounds like, it sounds like something you could do with Mud affinity or even just a clever Water spell.  The thing I'm worried about is whether you doing literally anything in front of a sufficiently high-level caster is going to inform them that you're not from this planet.  I don't have reason to be sure that's true, it's more of a guess, but -"

"I mean, just for a start, if what you're doing looks like casting with mana that doesn't behave like any known affinity then a sufficiently high-level mage might notice something about that.  See, you can get Skills around working with mana you can't generate; most really good Tier-3 mages are going to have the ability to do crude spells with all six Elements, they just can't do it with their own mana.  So they're not all going to just assume - your spell must have an affinity they don't have - and even if they do assume that, what if they compare notes and exclude all six basic elements?  What if you do the Grease spell in front of a mage with high-level Water affinity and they're sure there's no Water in what you just did, including as the Mud complex affinity?  If you're advanced enough you could possibly cast Grease, if that does what it sounds like, using all kinds of weird mana, I'm not saying it's a giveaway, but good mages will notice."

"Makes sense." Sigh. "This seems pretty unlikely to come up, but, what procedures are there for preventing spellcasters you arrest from just...escaping."

"If they're probably not a mid-tier Void mage, put a Void collar on them with a tamper-explosive and use a reinforced cell to catch pure Physical Skills.  If you think they might be at least a mid-tier Void mage, put a way more expensive collar on them and have people watch them in the cell."

"So I can leave, but that'll definitely tip people off. 

All right. I'm going to prepare some more spells - I didn't do them all at once, wasn't sure what I'd need - and you should come up with my cover story, and then we can get out of here and get started. 

- I feel some urgency around this because it looks like the fire is actively growing, is that right?"

"It sure is.  If the System isn't - just deciding to fuck with us, now - you should have arrived here in time that you can stop it if you try.  Whether the Fire first consumes ninety percent of our remaining habitable landmass is a separate question."

"Right. Great."

Spellbook. She should have two more second-circle spells left, two more first-circle spells left, and one more third-circle, which is going to be Gaseous Form.

She feels pretty much as fresh as if she just woke up from her night's sleep, actually, like her previous round of spell preparation made no difference.

" - further question, do local spellcasters have a fixed amount of mana they can channel in a day, like, enough to cast a couple fly spells but not do it all day?"

"Some Skills have cooldowns, because the original unstructured activities were so complicated or fatiguing that reality learned that people can do those things, but not do them twice in a row.  Aside from that, living creatures have innate channeling capacities, measured in thaums per second, and affinity transformation capacities, also in thaums per second; dragons have innate mana battery organs, so they can store up breath weapon attacks; some very powerful dungeon monsters are created with a core, which initially contains dungeon mana, and can be taken off their bodies if you know how and then recharged and built into an expensive weapon."

"But most non-dungeon biologically-reproducing sapients don't have innate mana batteries, including humanoids.  We don't produce or store affinity mana, we channel mana and transform it."

"Right, sorry, carry on with inventing a backstory for me."

...can she hang SIX Detect Thoughts? ...no, because she's not actually skilled enough; she can't just pretend she's an eighth circle caster in terms of her low-level spell slots just because she has the channeling capacity, she doesn't know how to hang them all successfully without them interfering. But she can hang three and a Rope Trick and four Disguise Selfs and a Gaseous Form and a Fly and a Haste like she just woke up.

....and then cast the Detect Thoughts. Just to be safe.

Almys is trying to figure out what's the weirdest and quietest sort of person she can fit into a backstory, because her new liege has now given away that she has an innate mana battery that can be exhausted and needs to 'prepare spells' and Almys - should think about how to say 'THANK YOU FOR TRUSTING ME WITH THAT INCREDIBLY VALUABLE COMBAT INFORMATION, MY LIEGE' in a different way because the last way apparently did not take, and actually Almys is just sort of rehearsing this internal screaming for the twelfth time and not thinking of any different things to scream internally about it.  Her liege is not just incredibly concerning but, also, yes adorably innocent and naive, and that is going to get her killed, and then the world will end and Almys won't get to rule any countries as a nearly immortal goddess-queen for a few centuries at all, so her liege's backstory role needs to be somebody who's weird and quiet.

Monks are quiet.  There's no realistic way her liege passes as a monk.

Research mages are weird.  Research mages also talk a lot.

Who's WEIRD AND QUIET.  What kind of person.

She feels like she could ask this question to somebody who was good at riddles, and they'd answer immediately, and it would sound really obvious.  Almys is not in fact good at riddles.  She stabs things so hard they melt.  This is her primary life skill.

Carissa thinks this is an entirely unfair assessment. She has one ally on this planet at this time, she vetted them with mindreading, and having done so she's given them strategically important information because there is a continent on fire and it doesn't seem worth playing coy and therefore being confused for an additional month, much less slipping up in front of anyone she hasn't vetted because she didn't even know that was unusual. However, if she were to reveal that she's mindreading her vassal again in order to contest this totally unfair characterization, then she would be being stupid, so she just moves her hands through a bunch of nonsense that has nothing to do with spell-preparation while she listens to Almys think.

Okay, try a different angle on this.  Her liege is going to... be consuming some affinity mats, Almys is going to be renting crafting textbooks for her - if they're cheap enough, maybe Almys should just buy them, so that there isn't a record of rentals - and possibly at some point they'll be selling some fine but totally normal-looking weapons.  Almys might have to buy 'spellsilver' and come up with an account of that...

Librarians!  Librarians are weird and quiet!  Or... somebody studying the history of weapons who's a crafter themselves but mainly interested in history...

What if somebody asks her liege about history.

Could her liege just be mute.  No because there's such a thing as sign language and somebody might know that sign language.

'Librarian' is good for weird and quiet, and it doesn't get subjected to easy challenges about 'what does this book say' because librarians don't necessarily read the books they organize and protect... Almys thinks you don't have to read a lot to be a librarian, right, you just have to be in charge of a library...

Maybe Almys is overcomplicating this.

Weird crafter who doesn't talk to anybody except Almys!  And there's a reason she doesn't talk, but nobody can know it because it's private so fuck off!

...this sounds incredibly suspicious.  But maybe that's just because Almys knows the truth.  Like.  No spy would take an incredibly suspicious role that would prevent them from talking, right?  So smart people will realize that her liege is like obviously not a spy.

Oh god they're all going to die.

"Okay, done," says Carissa a while after she's done. "Is this language spoken everywhere in the world?"

"The Common Tongue?  I think so.  It's the language that's been so widely used, for so long, that practically any sapient race can learn it, even if they don't have the right mouth equipment."

" - weird. Okay. Do people around here have families - cousins, sisters, that sort of thing - or did some Summoned Hero take issue with that."

"Not yet.  We've still got our families for now."

"Good for you. What's my backstory."

"If your pride permits the disguise, my liege, I suggest - meaning no disrespect and you can read my thoughts about that later - that I am the crafter experimenting with weapons, because I can be rude and not talk about that while knowing how not to make that suspicious in any other ways.  I'll go male, which is helpful in any case for breaking an obvious trace to Almys because I've been female around here, but doesn't affect my legal registration at all; and then when not otherwise disguised you're my useless hanger-on woman who trades sexual effort for getting fed by me, who I think nobody will look very hard at, which is the sole and entire point of that suggestion and again you can read my mind about that later."

It's a plan that'd work in Cheliax. They're not in Cheliax but that's all Carissa has to judge by. "Saves us money on rooms," she says, and casts Disguise Self again, to make her outfit resemble the excessively stretchy excessively white fabric that's popular around here and to make her face, without being all that different, clearly not that of the same person. "Do travelers usually have any trouble eating local food, do you know?"

"Not if you're traveling in mostly-human territories, I think?  And, my liege, if your spellcasting ability burns a limited internal resource, should your baseline self not be one that you need not burn magic to look like?  That was part of my reasoning - that you could use temporary magical disguises, but just a normal physical disguise for the person you were most of the time."

"It turns out the resource is not especially limited, I'd sooner have my real face known to no one, and I was thinking it might make a good test case for whether, if I change my face enough, I can convince this strikingly pliable world of yours that I have shapechanging as an at-will spell-like ability.  If there are lots of people who can see through illusion, though, and find it notable I was cloaked in one, then it'd be better not to be."

"Now there's a fascinating question I've no idea how to test.  Maybe they can't detect it as anything distinguishable from background because you're using unaspected mana - if that's true, it's actually just something I'm guessing based on which questions you asked.  Or maybe they see you walking around with a disguise that's visibly based on unaspected mana with a completely unfamiliar structure.  I really can't guess, and can't think of any safe way of finding out without trusting a high-class mage... who would also be some of the least safe people to use your mindreading magic on, if we didn't already trust them."

"My liege - I suggest we use your disguises sparingly.  If you were already walking around with them, for a while, there may already be rumors, or even reports, about the person with the unaspected-mana disguise spell.  Or maybe just spell, they wouldn't be able to guess it's an illusion if it doesn't have Light in there."

She considers this for a moment, sighs, and lets the Disguise Self melt away. She's six inches shorter than she looked and substantially thinner; her hair is longer and brown instead of the locally popular bright colors. 

She's pretty, though. It'd stand out more in a world that hadn't been somewhat recently rearranged by the Sexy Hero. 

Okay hopefully her mind is not being read right now because her liege is, in fact, kinda hot... this thought is going to turn up sooner or later and hopefully Almys survives the subsequent embarrassment.

"Do you have colors of your service that I can and should wear, when I'm presenting as a man and a crafter?  Going to need some new clothes anyways, for that.  And hopefully nobody kills me while I'm not wearing Almys's armor, because I can't lightly afford new armor."

"I should get you lower-quality and... bluntly, trashier, clothing, to wear.  If your pride permits it, my liege.  Appearing as your true self, you look like an interesting person of worth, in a hard-to-identify foreign style, that many people might find worthy of trying to talk to."

"I can armor you with a spell, but that runs into the same question of whether my spells can be seen. 

...the colors of the force I served in, back home, were red and black, but I don't know if that has negative associations, here, you seem to have run through a lot of entities that could create negative associations." Including Asmodeus Himself, supposedly.

"I wouldn't be much of a fighter if I were helpless without armor.  It takes me down two-thirds of a rank, in which opponents I can face, but that's all."

"Red and black works for me.  Works for most boys, honestly.  It's not going to stand out much, but you probably don't want to?"

"I would indeed prefer not to stand out at this time. I suspect we can get peoples' attention if we have cause to. Shall I wait here until you come back with more suitable clothes for this disguise?"

"Your will, my liege."

"- do you have some other style of address I should be using, or a name by which I should think of you."

"'Your liege' suits me fine. I think I'll wait a while longer to pick the name I want to be known by here, and if I aspire to any fancier titles I think I want to go out and get them."

"Works for me.  I tentatively estimate two hours for the tasks set me, and when I return I will be male and wearing red-black.  I'll endeavor to stop by and give signal if it's to be longer than three hours for cause of some delay.  Any more time with no sign of me, and something has gone wrong."

"Shall I?"

"Go on."

...Carissa's going to burn through Haste and Gaseous Form and then re-hang them, repeatedly, for several hours, thinking LOUDLY while she does so that this is just the kind of thing Carissae can do and the universe shouldn't be so finicky as to make her prepare the spell all over again.

Okay, sorry, but if you're doing something that weird, and not even fighting anybody desperately with your life and world on the line, it may take the universe a while to pick up on the pattern.

...it'll get easier to hang the spells.  Possibly that's just regular practice?  Carissa is smart, after all, and most wizards don't get to burn and re-hang just those two spells while focusing on just that.

She'll take it. 

(Her life and world totally ARE on the line, but admittedly it doesn't viscerally feel that way right now, sitting here in her Rope Trick playing with magic.)

One and three-quarter hours later, somebody climbs up into the Rope Trick, and promptly kneels.

She does pretty well as a boy! ...Carissa is not going to say that, that's unprofessional. 

"Very good," she does say, which is arguably just as unprofessional. (And Detect Thoughts, so she can know if this is the first step in a betrayal of some kind, though at this point she really bets it isn't.)

Almys is expecting to have his mind read.  He did think about betraying her, once he was out of range of the Rope Trick.  He decided it was relatively improbable that she was following him invisibly and reading his mind, especially as he went past advanced-looking mages on his journey.  He could probably have gotten away with betraying her, if he'd felt like that.  He is guessing that her magic can't kill him from a distance based just on detecting the decision, going on a purely intuitive sense of which things she can and can't apparently do with her unaspected mana; especially if that magic might've been visible resting on him.

This left the obvious point that Almys doesn't want to kill the Summoned Hero and have the world end; and any course of betrayal that didn't end that way, would leave the Summoned Hero alive and powerful and pissed at him.  It definitely seems preferable to end up as the near-immortal queen of a country instead.  This continued to seem pretty obvious while he was sure nobody was reading his mind.

Sounds like a perfect foundation for a healthy relationship. "Did you bring me clothes as well?"

He's feeling weirdly more embarrassed about doing this as a male - it was easier to be confident about how this suggestion would be taken when he was a woman.  It doesn't help that she's probably still reading his mind about this fact.

Well, she's the liege, if she wants to say anything about it, she can, and otherwise he can not say anything out loud, and this works perfectly for him.

Have some relatively trashy clothes, loose/drapeable rather than tight because he did not have exact measurements on his liege.  They're not visibly torn or dirty, but they're definitely not expensive, and will hopefully signal that this is a person not to bother looking much at.

She'll change.

It's not that she likes being barely-not-a-prostitute, but it seems like in fact the best plan to not die, and she really likes not dying. Later on she can have a castle and people tremble before her and so on.  "Ready when you are, then."

"Can you possibly radiate a little less keen-eyed intelligence, my liege?"

"How's this? What's your name? What's my name? Where are we going?"

"...gives the impression of somebody trying to play a role with unusually poor Social Skills, but not in a way where somebody would find that very anomalous and interesting, just in a way where it looks like you had trouble picking up a standard Skill.  I think it works, but we should still minimize social interactions for now, because I bet you do get the Skill very soon and then there's a visible difference."

"I'm Kramsi, you're Groya, next stop is an inn and then you... disappear into this private space again and I go find you books?  Where my understanding of your will, my liege, was that we should not seek 'spellsilver' for you right away."

"There are social Skills? As distinct from people getting better at things with practice?"

"People have been trying to deceive each other and see through deceptions for as long as the world has existed, I'd guess, because we can't just read minds here.  It's worn very deep ruts in reality."

"Are the Skills comparable across people? Is it coherent to say that some people are exactly as good at lying as others are at seeing through lies, and if they got just one more Skill at lying then they'd always beat the other?"

"There's not exactly explicit contests and rankings about it.  Just - an ancient pattern we're all stuck inside, at the same time that we use it, and some people win and some people lose and afterwards we say the winners were better at the game."

"Ugh.  I don't usually talk like this.  Every time I go male I'm reminded why I don't usually go male."

"Huh, does it change your personality? Disguising myself male doesn't but I've never taken a potion." She climbs out of the Rope Trick and dismisses it. 

"In my case, yes.  I don't know if it's truly innate, or just that I look different and my mind thinks that means I ought to talk like the boy I end up looking like.  - We should maybe not talk about revealing topics until we're in your private space again."

He follows her down.

Groya will follow along quietly, not looking overawed at the city and not casting any spells at all. 

(There's a spell for spying on a whole city, right, she doesn't have it but she's heard of it, she should try to rederive it so they have a bit of warning if rumors are spreading about the Summoned Hero.)

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.

Almys returns, tentatively poking his hand into the Rope Trick to wave for lack of any other way to knock, and then climbing up when there's nothing resembling an objection he can detect.

He's got an assortment of used books, purchased at four different used bookstores in case anybody's looking for patterns.  (It's a noticeable chunk out of his remaining savings, but the used books are saleable-back, and Almys on reflection felt nervous about leaving the trace of a rental.)  Almys lays them out on the dark pseudo-floor of the Rope Trick:

There's a book on Plasma crafting that covers the sub-affinities (Air Fire Light), and a book on Murk crafting that also covers the sub-affinities (Earth Water Dark), purchased at two different book stores.  This is very clever of him and somebody ought to give him a cookie.

There's a smaller book about crafting crossbows.  Hopefully it covers crafting crossbow bolts and hopefully that part you can do without smithing.  From the same store, a really sadly simple introduction to crafting in general, which Almys himself plans to read so he can fake being the crafter slightly better.

A hefty worn tome on magical theory for Tier-3 research magicians or know-it-alls trying to show off, that covers the known laws affecting every kind of affinity magic and even talks a bit about Creation and Uncreation magic.  He actually did rent just this one, this one was too expensive to buy, but at least there's not a lot of interesting lending records pointing at the same person.

Almys didn't quite dare get children's exercises for developing every kind of affinity, that seems to him like too much of a "hey I just found a new Summoned Hero" tipoff, but he can hopefully remember the exercises himself for Fire and Earth, and he's got children's exercises that cover Air, Water, and Light, and hopefully if you know all those Dark isn't too hard or he can get the exercise book some other time.

Carissa is smeared with blood from her efforts to figure out Earth and is sitting intent while she hangs Fly and Haste yet again. She stops that, casts Detect Thoughts. "No problems?"

"No problems that I was allowed to know about."

Thoughts:  He's deduced that those gestures mean she's reading his mind, and while he didn't betray her on this particular trip (nor intend to for later), his mind probably is going to start doing the obvious thing with going helplessly towards more embarrassing thoughts.  Like how he tried for a wide wicked grin and stared at himself in a mirror looking like that, in hopes that he'd feel more like his female self (it worked a little).  Also he thought a few times about how or whether to seduce her but did not see how seduction could possibly be compatible with having your mind read out for seduction plans.

"If I want you I'll tell you." Mage Hand grabs the books and floats them over to her. "I think I won't easily be able to disguise my spells as local spells, unfortunately. I wasn't expecting it to be easy but it seemed worth trying to figure out. And I couldn't work out any of your combat magic, at least nothing useful for opponents who aren't crippled toddlers, but maybe that's because I haven't seen anything but Earth? It feels like I don't have enough pieces to work with."

"Yeah, you're not going to injure anyone by throwing a big clod of dirt at them, right?  I can demonstrate how it works with throwing a Metal bolt, but I'm not sure how much your Spatial walls can take in terms of magically charged impact."

"Wait, what do you mean useful for not crippled toddlers.  Do you mean that you already have a spell that can get crippled toddlers?  How?"

"Yeah, if a horde of crippled toddlers come after me I'm all set." She demonstrates. She isn't interested in keeping her current local-magic capabilities secret from him; it'll mean she improves slower, and it's going to be changing fast enough that the information is quickly out of date, and they don't at this time constitute more than a trivial share of her capabilities.

"Right.  I'd ask stupid questions like how you're able to channel and aspect Earth-affinity mana without anybody having conducted you through the awakening process, or why you already know any Earth spells at all let alone one that does something that obscure, but the answer is obviously going to be 'Summoned Hero' so nevermind."

"You showed me how to do Earth, earlier, with the dagger. I don't think I could've gotten it from a cold start."

"Right, well, if you're talking to anyone who's not supposed to know you're the Summoned Hero, bear in mind that normal people, as children, have a grownup with strong Earth affinity - or whichever basic element - come in and run a lot of aspected mana through them, until they start to be able to feel it, and eventually they manage to do something that feels the same way to them and start to channel.  And even all that would probably be a lot harder if we were back at the start of the world and it hadn't been done a billion times before."

"How'd you know the spell?"

Shrug. "Maybe Tea Guy thought I'd run into some crippled toddlers and need to know how to defend myself."

If he's not supposed to ask, okay, he's not supposed to ask.

...it's a very simple spell, or at least, it looks that way from the effect; he's not enough of a magician that he can sense the detailed structure of her magic.  So there could be a standard spellform for that simple effect, maybe as a piece of something larger, and the Summoned Hero could've run across it by accident while throwing magic around, and watched it snap into the shape-worn-into-reality, and then instantly acquired that Skill because Summoned Hero.

If she's just going around inventing entirely new spells with no worn-patterns for them to snap into... actually he's not going to deal with trying to explain it.  It'll be in the books.

She's not actually sure if that's what she's doing! She also still has no idea which things are worth trying to keep secret even from him! But she suspects after she reads these books she'll be a little more oriented.

She Prestidigitates herself less bloody and takes the books with the care of someone who indeed hasn't found books to be cheap, though the reason in her case is mostly that getting things to the Worldwound isn't cheap.

Does his liege want him hanging out in the Rope Trick or guarding the bedroom downstairs?  He'll probably fall asleep in an hour or two if left to himself.

"I was thinking I'd next send you out for food, actually, if it's not served downstairs, and then you can sleep. I should...probably also sleep soon." She doesn't want to, though; she wants to learn ALL THE MAGIC. The only reason she ever particularly prioritized sleep was to get her spells back.

"...sorry about that.  I sometimes forget food is a thing if I'm otherwise excited.  I'll go get some for both of us."

He departs.

She's never had a minion before and is not sure she understands how it works but she's pretty sure she is supposed to just torture him if he makes mistakes so they can avoid the horrendous awkwardness of him telling her things about his personality and mood and apologizing to her for things.

Is there a Skill for getting the hang of having minions? Probably. People have done it before.

-- anyway. 

Do these books perchance contain the secrets of PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER.

If she's skimming around in the beginnings, she'll very rapidly learn that all 'standard' crafting, like crafting anywhere before the upper ranks of Tier 3, is all about...

...getting spellforms right enough that they snap into the ruts worn into reality!  This explains the weirdness of the Earth-enchanted sharp knife!  It wasn't really crafting that spellform for sharpness!  It was getting it roughly recognizable enough that it'd snap into the same shape as a spellform cast a billion times before in this reality!

Or to put it another way, the fundamental basis of enchantment in Kekaro is a child scrawling a shape in the dirt sufficiently recognizable that their mother can pat them on the head and say, "Yes, dear, that's a very nice dragon" and correctly guess that it's meant to be a dragon rather than a roc.