"I don't know if you want to hear anecdotes that your statements remind me of or if those would make you feel like I was attempting to undercut your concerns."

"Go ahead with the anecdotes, I'll probably parse them bonding-ly."

"So! I'll start with one of the times my party made interplanar news. My family was found to be doing life extension which violated interplanar treaties on senescence rates. The only reason Axis didn't try to have them killed or forcibly aged over it was that psychopomp terrorists attacked Axis, which was distracting. And the psychopomps were in favor of the ruling re my family, they just attacked in protest of a different ruling, namely that Zita Imbrex – friend of the party – getting death-induced soul damage reversed was permissible because a daemon reversed it, making it an 'internal Abaddon matter'. Which the psychopomps didn't like, because they think they have authority over death and they didn't approve of what happened to Zita."

"...I don't know if I'll ever be particularly useful in fixing things there, but you have my full support.  Fuckers."

"You're already being useful."

She makes a wordless confused "??????" noise.

"...How am I helping?"

"There's some advanced mathematics with plausible military applications which Bar will just lend out and sell textbooks on. I've looked up some guides for university students who want to learn it – apparently it's widely available in some worlds – and they've advised learning the calculus of infinitesimals among other things first. Which is itself well-known in Suaal, just, not by me because I was busy."

"Huh.  Which sort of advanced math is it?  And what's it for?  Is it for, like, doing magic, or technology?"

Griffie ignores Jane and looks contemplative for maybe a minute, then hastily pokes at their tablet, then turns back to Jane. "…yeah, no, the information usable to draw the conclusions I've drawn is published enough for Bar to get it into her library, even if I couldn't get it at the bookstore at home. No point in secrecy, it's already a problem if anyone else from my world is here anyway. Short version, I'd like to be able to model fundamental physics including under extreme circumstances like those of the last all-out godwar."

"Oh, wow, yeah, that's a doozy alright.  ...My brain is almost suggesting that what you want is an Aarne-Thompkins Index...or whatever the premise of that one was, the index of folklore.

"Because something feels off about only considering your physics mathematically.  It tells stories.  Gods are stories telling themselves.  So you need to understand the nature and motion of a story, in order to understand a god.  Certainly you want to then model that in a mathematical sense, probably involving Statistics which I've never actually taken...but I think math alone probably isn't going to be sufficient.

"Of course I am just making shit up, but...well, there's also the 'ain't nobody here who actually understands physics' problem, just look at the boundary conditions of black holes, and then consider your own infinite planes - which I'm sure you have - and how infinities really fuck up all the hu- sophont-scale math they touch...

"But there's a story to this.  You're a protagonist.  And if you can cultivate the right intuitions, I think that when the sort of shit you're worried about shows up...You can make it through.

"I'm tempted to direct you to TVTropes, but I think that'd be just as like to help as harm.  You are, no matter if the animus can be considered as having emanated from mine or any other context, a creature of your own narrative space.  But I think there's genre-savvy to be had, and I like to think I've any talent for lateral thinking in general.

"Of course, I'm basically a classless bard.  I'd think this anyway.  But I think it'd help to consider, if you haven't."

"So, you could say that 'infinities really mess up all the math they touch', but actually, there's specifically some higher mathematics for … finding a logical non-infinite model of seemingly infinite stuff, I think that's the right phrasing? Which is what I'm working up to here. Anyway. I'm not sure how you go from 'stories are meaningful to Suaal physics' – which is true, prophecies are a component of fundamental physics and they tend to be poetic – to 'understanding stories is going to help'? I mean, I'll give it a shot, I have time, but 'what happens when gods scream themselves at reality as loudly as possible' is something I am pretty sure someone in my world has already cracked the physics of and done pretty valuable things with. They just don't publish and wouldn't cooperate with me."

"...Was there a Specific Event That Broke Prophecy And Marked The Passing Of An Age?  Only semi-relatedly to anything.

"Yeah, there's maths for infinities like that; I recall an analogy of the Grand Hilbert Hotel used to explain various cardinalities of infinity, the once.  But what has me concerned that math won't suffice alone is that physics in my world does not like infinities.  Anywhere infinity shows up, the models are wrong.  But I dunno.  You probably know more about how your world works than I ever will, so if you say that that's someone's One Neat Trick to reality, I'm inclined to believe you.

"Anyway - understanding the interaction of stories means you can make eerily accurate guesses about things that you shouldn't really know."

"Well, the all-out godwar being sealed sure did mark the beginning of an era, but prophecy is still working. And … I feel like we're talking past each other. Local physics models say a god truly going all-out has infinite power, and those models are clearly wrong, because an apparently non-divine entity or entities sealed the godwar, and the most likely candidate for those entities is a faction whose leading members can straightforwardly be killed via stabbing with swords, same as me. 'Anywhere infinity shows up, the models are wrong' seems in my favor here. But go ahead and tell me about story interactions? I've got more than all the time in the world."

"Oh hmm.

"I think I know where the thing is, and it's that the sum of all real numbers is negative one-twelfth.  ...May just be zero plus one plus two plus et cetera; haven't seen the statement recently."

"Because gods going all out at eachother cancel out, leaving mortal hands to shape the resulting chaos."

"…negative one-twelfth? I suppose I'll get to the point of understanding that. And I don't think 'cancel out' is the right model, gods going all out at each other clearly add up enough to shatter land into continents. The thing that really leaves mortal hands to shape things is divine non-interference treaties."

"It's...The infinities cancel.  But the negative one-twelfth still showed up somehow.  And I am absolutely mangling math when I think about framing any of this as the way vectors of infinite length in given opposing directions could cancel out, because infinity minus infinity is zero and infinity plus infinity is infinity, but it's not implausible that the numbers are just staggeringly large, either?"

"I think that the whole vectorization framing is why I think stories matter; you can think of...tropes, as things that distort the distributons of vectors in concept-space, and knowing where the attractors are means you can guess less randomly."

"Or something."

"I'm pulling most of this out of my ass as I go, pardon my language, and hoping it helps any amount whatsoever."

"The thing I'd really appreciate here is an example of using story logic to draw surprisingly correct conclusions, if you can offer one?"

"If I had one that was immediately coming to mind, I'd point you right at it, but a lot of the things I'm pulling out of the mental filing cabinet in my search are subversions.

"...Well, that's a trope in and of itself, I suppose."

"You seem to be sincerely helpful, and I appreciate that, but right now you sound a bit like you have a model which doesn't actually make predictions about the future."

"It's - the problem I think I'm having right now is making the model I have actually legible to people that aren't me, I think.  It's all...packed up into intuitions.  I would put some confidence in it being statistically likely to reduce unexpected surprises in the field.

"...does your spell list have proper telepathy on it?"

"I don't have adequate telepathy spells for this purpose, and furthermore, you still don't have a positive-energy soul, which is where spells like Share Memory expect your memories to be stored. And maybe if I feed you some information about stuff that's happened in my world you can try to reason out loud and guess continuations of that?"

"Yeah, go for it."

"Okay. We got invited to a retired adventurer's wedding because we rescued his sister. It was on another continent but arranging transit wasn't that expensive because we had access to an intercontinental puzzle-maze portal network and just needed an intracontinental flight. When we arrived in town, I asked the land spirits about the area, and they told me that it's well-known for its apiaries despite being founded fifty years ago, the beekeepers include druids living in the nearby woods, and there's fey in the nearby forest, whom the town has needed to interact with while doing logging. Land spirits tend to discuss the longish term, they're on a different timescale than us, and they do like bragging. Anyway, we arrived when the pre-ceremony wedding party was already going. They had a dining area, a receiving line, a dance area, a game of horseshoes, you know, party stuff. We were feeling fairly paranoid because we had some prophecies about beekeepers doing battle and I'm a beekeeper – well, was one, anyway. Haven't for a while now. So we magically scanned the area but everything looked pretty normal. The groom was wearing a complicated magic item which was a traditional headband of wedding protection, for warding off jealous anti-wedding shades – they'd been dealt with a long while ago but he found an authentic magic item and thought it'd be aesthetically appropriate."

Griffie pauses. "Uh, if I tell a story while trying to include details I noticed at the time, not just filtering for what was relevant later, it's going to be long. With me so far?"

"Yeah.  ...I'm immediately expecting time travel."