"Especially because...proteans.  I do not want to be a vessel of the formless ever-changing chaos the moment I step into Suaal, thanks."

"...That said..."

"It's interesting that the protean said that.

"It gives me the impression that they're vehicles for meta-fuckery even as they're also...well...vehicles for Random Shit Happening.  Do they ever make...references to nonexistent-but-coherent things?"

"Yes, they do! A protean we fought with once drew power from what I've now figured out was a Swedish-language pun – turned perceptive people into zebras, and offered us meatballs. And Elysium mentions as a chaos magic option tapping into the power of that which is beyond being beyond."

Griffie pauses, then continues. "Also, some people would describe alternatives – other branches in the Suaal worldsheaf, where summons come from – that way, but they just really straightforwardly exist. …I mean, you exist, but I got here from a very powerful Elysium thing, I'm just going to call this place 'beyond being beyond'."

"Yep, your proteans are specifically aware of Earth.  Which...damn.  That sure is a something."

"The meatballs are also part of the joke, in case your wanderings through Earthly culture haven't introduced you to IKEA."

"And yeah, Milliways sure is beyond being beyond, alright."

"Notwithstanding that its name is also a reference, which scares the shit out of me if I think too hard."

"I don't see why an interdimensional location being named 'thousand ways' implies it's … secondary somehow to an author naming a place that?"

"It's not just the name; there aren't cows that want to be eaten anywhere around here, anyway."  She shudders at the thought of that.  "It's the overall vibes.  There's...I can't put words to it."

"It just feels like this is the sort of establishment where I might walk right into a plothole if I look too hard."

She makes a frustrated, inarticulate noise.

"My friend says that agreeing to disagree when the value of information is sufficiently high is only something you do when you disrespect the person, but … a lot of stuff is just hard to communicate, unfortunately. Does it help at all if I tell you that Bar is fully capable of asking customers to avoid putting strain on her?"

"It's..."

"That's entirely orthogonal from my axis of concern, though?

"The feeling of apparent unreality is...

"Not directly Bar's fault?

"It's...more fundamental than that.

"That shit like walking into an interdimensional bar just...doesn't happen to Earthlings except in stories.

"And a lot of those stories are...poorly written, on top of it all.

"So I just...I'm worrying, now, that my story is shit or my GM will rockfall me, especially because I'm clearly playing somewhat to a specific frequently-despised sort of archetype.  And then there's the internal experience of believing I have, on my own behalf, enough metacognition to think about my character details, except - am I actually my own author, or simply a puppet on the other side of a page?  You have surely observed that there's only so smart that even arbitrarily smart things actually act, when there's any chance they might have to explain what they did, no matter their INT; that happens for a reason, and it's because the people playing them are, in fact, just ordinary people!

"Gods, I don't know."  She slumps into her homegrown existential crisis, dejectedly.

"It's cool and all but I'm also terrified that I won't be entertaining."

"There are people at home who conclude the world there is a story, too. The speculation, at least, uh, as of a few centuries ago and published in books I've read, skews towards saying that it's pornography for outer gods, but I'm not even sure how sincere it is? Certainly I don't think you should push yourself to have sex you don't want about it, plenty of entities in my world don't have sex and they're fine? And no, I haven't noticed that people are constrained in intelligence when there's a chance they might have to explain what they did, the party wizard and for that matter you and I are just straightforwardly smarter than ordinary people. …or you've done a lot of absurdly hard work and I'm just attributing more of it to general capacity than to effort than I should be, that could also be the case."

"No, no, the problem is that the agents that are meaningfully More than any human still behave as if possessing human mental capacities.

"And if this story was porn, I'd be doing something else.  As I am not doing something else, this isn't porn.  Proof by contradiction, Q.E.D.

"But you're not wrong, I think, that there's people voyueristically invested in your world - it's just that the what has been misidentified.  The average DnDer is there for the fights and actively refuses to do sexy stuff on screen.

"Somehow I'm guessing that yours aren't anywhere near average, mind you; you've actually managed to pull off pacifism and you're working in a setting that's just...so much better designed than Golarion ever was, but...the stories matter."

"Are you saying that the things agents beyond any human successfully explain to people with humanlike mental capabilities are comprehensible to people with humanlike capabilities? I'm not sure what you're claiming we're not seeing. And regarding genre speculation: We've managed to pull off having a very low rate of killing people, yes. That hasn't actually stopped us from having a fair number of exciting fights. …though frankly I think Arcane Olympiad or such has a better track record for that than adventurers do, Arcane Olympiad never does 'bait the mindless fiendish insects into going after the person with a tower shield, then just kill all of them while they conveniently line up for you to do that' as an event and there's a reason why they don't. And we have literally gotten a Scarf of the Suggestive Dance as a gift at one point, though we ended up selling it, and I've compromised on party-internal privacy for security enough that they could probably make some pretty good guesses about my sexual preferences, Pack Empathy is just too useful to not use."

"I'm - no, I messed that wordslinging up something fierce.

"You can't write a character that - has substantially more ingenious plans than you can.

"And higher beings should be able to do that...and yet aren't."

"So, I've met higher beings who I'm pretty sure have more ingenious plans than I could make? I don't know what kind of evidence you're saying is missing."

"Show me a working plan that no human-scale sophont could have masterminded, could have conceived of.

"Show me - consideration of a thousand narratively notable factors.  Not just a thousand things, because there, authors can cheat - a thousand specifically noted-and-notable details.

"Show me the interactions of those details in large groups, manipulated to achieve specific preregistered outcomes.

"And that's where I start to believe gods definitely exist as more than authors' plot devices."

"Are you predicting that if I went to a Star Archon and asked them why they did a deployment, they couldn't generate very many charts of how it would impact various people?"

"They might be able to, but I would never be able to read all of them.  And trust me, I'm good at reading random shit I happen to have in front of me.  The thing that would stop is the universe.

"...Fuck.  I've just realized that this is unfalsifiable without an oxymoronically helpful and cooperative Protean."

"I think those are called 'Azatas', plenty of them are ex-Proteans and Proteans are good at not losing power when they transform. Also, is your hypothesis that an Azata would tell you the gods are fake? And also I'll just say this up front: Plenty of gods are not that smart, or they … don't apply their intelligence well."

"It's not the power, it's the connection.  If Azatas make Earth references too, then maybe it's workable.

"But - no, my hypothesis is that the author would tell me, through the said potential mouthpiece, to stop making them make all these damn charts.  ...Then again, whoever came up with Suaal clearly loves worldbuilding.  It'd be a lot more obvious on Golarion.

"Yes, some gods are as intelligent as a box of non-elemental rocks that aren't even silicaceous.  But some probably shouldn't be like that.  Lawful Evil especially is where I'd look for evidence; Good is...a lot better at self-determination mattering."

"I have met highly intelligent devils. Limiting them to even partial wins took significant resources and advantages. I'm … not sure how entangled with them you want to be."

"Obviously none of us do.

"But the thing is that - if you go up the hierarchy, you should see a superintelligent devil who can effectively only be countered by an equal and opposite counterpart, even if you gave a human all the resources and might necessary to theoretically accomplish such a task.

"Is there such in the way I described?"

"Do magical intelligence and wisdom improvements not count as 'resources' here?"

"Do they actually increase measures of ability to make plans?"

"Yes, at least decently."

"How are you checking that?"

"I'm not our headband crafter, but I'd guess that there's quality control standards for testing to make sure they work properly?"

"...yeah see, that's authorial cheating, right there.  That's - nobody has a solid measure of generalized intelligence!  And therefore you will get something that might sound plausible but falls over if you poke it hard enough!"