Someone walks in from another room, and just barely avoids tripping over em, because despite the fact that Milliways Medical takes her insurance, she's still not used to looking down where her glasses wouldn't've made things an undecipherable blur.

...She's a bit too leggy for her own good, really.

"Ack!  Sorry, sorry, wasn't paying attention there."

Griffith 'Griffie' of Suaal
Milliways Infirmary staffer
Sells related and misc. services
Will pay for math tutoring

"Yeah. I can see them.  Just missed you because of the door.  ...You want math tutoring?  I'm not exactly a proper mathematician but I know any amount of trigonometry and calculus and can probably download you Khan Academy for cheap."

"If that's some existing published content, I can buy it off Bar, but I think it'd help to actually work with a person. I hear 'calculus' is sometimes used as a nickname for 'infinitesimal calculus', is that what you're offering?"

"Well, the guy does do walkthroughs, it's videos and such.  Available free-ish, but I dunno if you have electricity so it might have to be me buying a tablet with a solar charger or something.  But yeah, sure.

"Yeah it's infinitesimals and stuff like that.  Rates of change, areas under the curve, all that jazz."

"Bar sells electricity-through-semiconductors technology and offers options for restoring electricity-producing-capacity to relevant energy storage devices, I have a tablet. Expensive, but worth it. And I do need to work on the calculus of infinitesimals and stuff like that. Do you know what your pricing for that looks like?"

"Hey Bar, how much for a download of Khan Academy as it presently stands?  Or I could find the door and rip it, I suppose.  Theoretically the technology where I'm from has enough single-device bandwidth capacity to pull that off limited only by the hardware!"

Not mentioning that the 1Yb chip pretty much doesn't practically exist, or the large quantity of drive space needed, but it could in theory happen!

A note appears on the portion of the counter closest to the human.

"...Right, space and time continue to exist," she says as she initially fails to have a note.

Once she's picked it up, she reads it!

"I offer loans of published media to customers without charge, meaning that Khan Academy and similar media are already available. Furthermore, I am discouraged from personally facilitating excessive exploitation of interuniversal price differences. I hope this does not interfere with your enjoyment of your time here."

"You can borrow it for free, apparently.  ...Anyway, what do you already know, mathwise?  In general."

Griffie has an eclectic range of mathematical knowledge!

• A decent if painstaking grip on algebra.
• Some practice with complex-number arithmetic that hasn't gone very far yet.
• More geometry than would be typical for a modern student at eir level of algebra, with a notable focus on tool-based constructions.
• Slide rule usage.

Huh, she's never actually used a slide rule; those are neat.

So does Griffie want to know the theory of it all, or the practice?  She's never been the most theory-inclined in her math study, but she'll give it a try nonetheless.

Slide rules are a pretty useful tool, yeah. Griffie supposes that if you always have access to fancier tech you don't need them.

Griffie's goal here is more to be more prepared to understand complex analysis than it is to do some calculations, so theory seems good, but doing lots of example problems is a good way for Griffie to develop intuitions.

"Alright, let's start off with..."

How much does Griffie know about limits?

"Oh, and Bar, could you run off a copy of my geometry cheatsheet, save me the trip? 

"Figure it'd be any useful hardcopy, with all the geometry you're doing."

(It's mostly about triangles on the unit circle and calculating sides and angles, and the definitions of trig functions.)

"Anyway, we're doing calculus."

Has this person published her geometry cheatsheet, or alternately is she sending it to Bar over the local intranet?

It was published by somebody on her planet, given to her, and then further annotated.  She can re-annotate, if necessary.

Bar can get her a copy but not with her annotations.

Griffie has ever heard of a limit, maybe, but does not know how to work with them. Also, pricing should be discussed before this person does significant work. Also, what's her name or preferred mode of address?

"Oh, um, you can call me Jane, female-gender-appropriate pronouns et cetera, and - I don't think that my brief stint dealing with obdurate individuals who refused to be tutored until everyone gave up actually counts, so...probably shouldn't exactly price highly, but also you're a fuckin' adventurer, and it's my general impression that if you're in the biggest tropespace I expect a high-fantasy adventurer to be from, picking up a gold coin from the floor might not be worth your time, absolutely fucking guessing at wealth-by-level and assuming you get paid at some sort of rate.  Or have equivalent treasure-finding interactions.

"Honestly I'm cool with a pay-what-you-want sort of model but - can you teach me magic?  ...I don't have any, my world's fucking boring.  Just artifice and cold, cruel physical laws."

Griffie looks awkward at the discussion of adventurer wealth. "So, while I do have some funds remaining from adventuring, I can't exactly go home, sell a bunch of reincarnations and loot the Vault of the Broken, and come back here. And being a medic here is great, practically nobody tries to kill me, even when I work the occasional Security shift nobody effectively tries to kill me, but, well, just as it isn't one of those high-risk professions it also isn't one of those high-reward professions. I can pay you about what I get paid per hour not including housing, if that seems fair?"

"And as for teaching you magic, I can teach you a bunch of theory, but you don't have a positive-energy soul, which is a prerequisite for all the magic I know. I've been doing some preliminary experiments exposing exotic-matter lifelike systems to positive-energy, but notably all of the subjects involved thus far are cheap-to-feed sessile non-persons, and you are a person who probably values freedom of movement and choice and is probably more expensive to feed."

"Regarding your final statement… I don't know if you want to argue about world quality or not."

"Ahh.  Yeah, I don't know why I didn't figure you probably didn't have a Milliways tuning fork for Plane Shift.  Not everybody's a high-tier caster, and you're a...druid?", she guesses, seeing no obvious holy symbols.  "Is it even on your spell list?  I mean, you could use scrolls, but that'd be expensive.  And yeah, I probably shouldn't convert my structure to Elemental matter.  It seems very unlikely to go particularly well."

"I have a baryonic-matter-based algae culture that's holding onto the smallest amount of positive-energy that'd stick, the issue here isn't the body structure it's the soul structure. …tangential. And I haven't even checked if the relevant tuning forks are too magical for Bar to sell me, the reason I can't do round trips is that pretty much as soon as I open my door again there's going to be a giant mess I am in no way prepared to handle."

"Ooh, that's cool, keep me posted; do you have a mailing list or something?  ...Damn, what's after you?  And, Bar, are the tuning forks too magical to sell?  I'm curious."

"Bar can relay messages while you're in here. And … Charon's the big one, but the fact that I'm here and am accumulating power and resources with more than all of the time in the world instead of reporting this place definitely puts me in violation of the big interplanar treaties. Though I could sort of call that Charon's fault, I wouldn't be being this escalatory if I had longer timelines."

"...Charon, if he is being deathist at someone you care about - as I guess he is being due to sharing the name of a prominent psychopomp in my local mythology, can sod off.  Good luck."

"Psychopomp? Those are different. …plausibly his fault but different. Psychopomps form from dying people's responses to death, Charon … 'is death' is maybe an overstatement but only maybe, he talks like he is and he has a point. Not that I'm a fan of psychopomps either, but they're not all bad? And thanks for your well-wishes."

"Yeah, well, mythology; it gets screwy, especially when you consider the world as fiction hypothesis.  Dresden Files and Percy Jackson and the original myths and also tumblr dot com and Hades the videogame - hereafter Hadesgame - all have different interpretations of the same guy my world calls Hades who's Charon's boss and god of death...adjacent, I suppose, Thanatos does exist...Anyway where I'm from Charon's the guy with the boat that you're supposed to pay for passage across the Styx.  And then the fantasy TTRPGs raided all that mythology for names for their gods since it wasn't like there was an organized Hellenic pantheon around to complain - er, there aren't actual gods at all, I mean, like, that religion as an organization, there's actually modern-day individual worshippers.  And that's why I have any idea who Charon is at all in your context, because I was basically guessing based on that."

"That's really, really weird. If you're curious: I don't recognize any of 'Dresden', 'Percy Jackson', 'Tumbler' as an, uh, website I'm guessing, 'Hades', and 'Hellenic'. 'Thanatos' just sounds like you're mentioning death in some language that your language is borrowing from, it's matching to the prefix used in 'thanadaemon'. Which I think if you trace the original etymology basically means 'deathy death creature', because there's this class of creatures formed from death that work for Charon or so, and they get called things like 'hydrodaemons' if they're death-by-drowning, and a thanadaemon is death-by-senescence, so it got named, well, after death. People don't always settle on the most organized names. The Styx is familiar, it's Charon's river. Technically thanadaemons, which look like Charon, will sell passage, but I wouldn't recommend dealing with them. Just avoid the whole place. Which should be easy for you."

"Yeah I am not going anywhere near the D&D cluster until I actually have class levels worth mentioning, if I have any say in the matter.

"First two are series of books, Thanatos is I think the actual guy who does the death-ing so it makes sense that thanadaemons are demons that represent death...

"Hellenic is an adjective for the various ancient cultures that were where what now is Greece.  Before the Romans showed up and did their syncretization of the local gods into their pantheon, which actually produces a plot point in the Percy Jackson...expanded universe, I suppose is the best way to call it, because a whole bunch of ancient gods exist in there including the Greek and Roman ones, semi-independently, which is an interesting thing to have happen when the Roman religion insists they're the same gods, no really.

"And then Christianity happened to the Roman Empire but let's not go there, that one's Explosive Runes waiting to happen to really get into discussing because it's still a culturally-extant faith.

"And yeah, Tumblr, spelled like a thing that tumbles but without the 'e', is a website.

"Or, if you will permit a stupid meme or two, a webbed site notable for its hellsite(affectionate) status.  A trashfire disaster of web development, that people use because nobody else's social media platforms suck less even if they work more.  The rest of the big few are all scraping up everyone's personal information to sell to whoever buys."

"Selling other people's technically-consensually-disclosed information sounds a lot more infernal than poor functionality is, but that could be a translation issue, 'daemon' and 'demon' don't seem to be translating the best. And Charon's old, it would not shock me if he managed to get naming information from outworld or vice versa. Anyway, since I can't get you magic would you be okay with paid for math tutoring in money? Bar can transfer my funds to a tab for you, and you can use it to get a room here and spend time waiting for people with more shareable stuff. And there are some worlds where you can get advanced technology from Bar for them if you can pay, you might be from one of them."

"Yeah, it is; that's why Tumblr is hellsite affectionate.  As contrasted with Twitter's hellsite derogatory.  And you're right, I only have making-a-demon-daemon-devil-etc.-distinction in my language because I've played some TTRPGs that did that.  Probably not yours; 5e normally doesn't give gods statblocks.  ...Does making high-end magic items cost 'experience'?  Either way, I bet there's Some Bullshit the minmaxers have for you, if we can ask them.

"...Oh right, math tutoring.  We were doing that.  ...Money to a Milliways tab sounds fine?  I'm not sure if - Bar, do you do currency conversion?  How would that shake out in this case?  ...I'm kind of nervous about suddenly being rich...ish...because I'm getting paid in gold at material-value, let alone potentially considering how much genuinely alien coins would sell for to a numismatist, not gonna lie, even if it really would solve some problems of mine, as money-enough-to-live-on tends to do."

"If I paid you in coins I have, you would likely not be able to sell them to a coin collector because they would likely disintegrate on leaving Bar. Tabs make more sense in this case."

Griffie pokes at eir tablet and shows Jane a currency conversion. It's on the higher end of what someone without a bunch of credentials and work experience would be paid for tutoring, but not shocking.

"Oh thank goodness, I won't have to explain myself to the IRS later," she deadpans.  "...Taxmen."

Griffie blinks. "If they're doing an income tax, why wouldn't 'An eccentric wealthy person wanted a math tutor while in a bar and I was there' plus whatever fraction of income they're demanding work?"

"You have to...

"...Okay probably I'd just need to file self-employed, but the joke is that I probably won't make more money than the minimum they start making you fill out taxes at, this way, like, I do not know...nine thousand over fifty...four hundred fifty hours of math education, not from where you're starting, I think - compared to the alternate case of 'where the fuck is this money even coming from, did we even issue those bills, subpoena the bank's transaction history,' that I'd get for showing up with a few weeks' gold or silver in material value."

“…right. Fiat currency. Not really used to it, at home it’s metals or gems or bank balances.”

"We still ran our economy off the gold standard til a century ago or less - a noticeable factor in the Great Depression - and there's still goldbugs jittering around even nowadays, but, yeah.  ...Technically it's banks all the way down!  And the mint."

"Anyway. If we're agreed on payments, you were going to start with limits?"

"Right, yes, math.  Bar, would you mind keeping an eye on the time?  I'm certain I'll forget.

"Anyway, yes, limits, because you need to take a limit to formally define the derivative.

"Annnnd let me look up the formalization of limits...

"Right, so, there's your infinitesimal; my mathematicians call it epsilon.

"And the limit of a function f of x, which is to say something where you plug x into the algebra and get a number out, is...

"Well.  There's one-sided and two-sided limits.

"A one-sided limit is the value of f of x plus-or-minus epsilon, as epsilon gets smaller and smaller until it's effectively nothing - but not actually nothing; an infinitesimal amount.

"A two-sided limit is when you see if the one-sided limits agree.  Most of the time people do this rather than one-siders, but one-sided limits are still meaningful.  Is this helping any?"

Griffie is taking notes and would like to try to go through the exercises in chapter 6 of this textbook – chapter 6 is the applicable one here, yes? – with Jane watching, if now seems like a reasonable time for that. She seems to be doing a decent lesson structure so far especially compared to non-interactive options?

Huh.  She's kind of surprised, but then, it's entirely possible that teaching things the way she'd want to be taught helps Griffies learn math.

Sure, she can do that; let her grab a copy herself, and then they can do some exercises.

Attempting to reason through problems aloud reveals a lot of holes in Griffie's current understanding of the limit definition of a derivative! Let's go over those areas again, shall we?

Yeah, right, okay, so let's step back a bit, jumping ahead before you understand what you're doing is a good way to land on your face - but here are some formulas and she can demonstrate working an example of each of them -

Landing on your face in training is a good way to really notice issues with your tactics. Ey didn't expect immediate success. Watching Jane go through examples is neat. Ey tries to follow along.

Huh.  Yeah, math's not much like personal combat; there's some very big blunders you might not even notice you're making if you ever do formalized proofs of stuff, just because you started off with flawed bases.  There was a practical cataclysm of set theory when someone posited the town's barber that shaves everyone who doesn't shave themselves, if she recalls correctly.  She could probably get into the details a bit more, but it's not something she formally studied, so, more calculus?

"Practical cataclysm of set theory" sounds important but if Jane can't cover it Jane can't cover it. More calculus!

"It was basically that you couldn't define 'the set of all sets', because it's inherently recursive.  Dunno exactly what replaced it."

Anyway, yes, more calculus!

And attempting to do exercises is going better now!

Jane is probably going to want to call break on this before Griffie does, unless Jane is also notably high-stamina.

That is honestly something she doesn't have a good idea of how much she has, for INT tasks.

(She definitely doesn't have it in STR, that much is blatantly obvious.)

That said, verifications are generally easier than proofs, even when you're doing them on human spaghetti brains instead of computers!

Griffie will call break when they both seem to be flagging a bit, then. Which takes a while. Does Jane want to chat, or not really?

For soneone who will happily ramble off on tangents given half an excuse, she's actually pretty shy - but she is vibrating with questions, even if it's unlikely she'll express them unprompted, especially being this intellectually drained.

Griffie has gotten a fair amount of practice trying to guess what people are thinking when they're being actively deceptive about it. Jane isn't trying that, and they've also been interacting for an extended period.

"You look like you want to ask me questions. Feel free to go ahead."

"So I picked up a lot of the - you've got a positive energy plane and souls and probably alignment bullshit of one of several flavors and don't get me started on just how bloody stupid alignment is as an interpersonal indication, because it was originally designed as a faction system, but how does your matter work?  ...Oh wow I should show you some Opus Magnum it's got this - it will either be eerily accurate or hilariously wrong about everything ever and I don't know which and it'll be interesting to find out, I have a -" .gif of a solution handy!

Griffie looks at the animations. "So, substance names tend to translate interestingly when I talk to baryonic-matter people. I'm going to say some words a few times and you should try pushing on the translation effect. I'll comment on the animations after that, I just want to get us on the same page. Anyway. When I'm in the bar with people like you, Bar maintains a safe-for-everyone mix of air and Air so all her clients can breathe comfortably."

Griffie then repeats 'air' and 'Air' a few times. Pushing further on definitions expands the first word to "gaseous quark-based exotic matter" or "diatomic nitrogen and oxygen and such" and the second word to "Elemental Air" or, if Jane really pushes, "Suaal-typical gaseous matter for breathing" and such.

"Mhm, Air isn't air, Earth isn't earth - well, I imagine that time it kind of is a bit more than the Air/air distinction...Anyway.  Fire definitely isn't fire, and Water's also probably not water, and who even knows - well, you would - about how positive and negative energy interact with that, and then there's the Astral probably, plus...Huh, how is heritability happening in your world?  Is that a soul interaction, or is there a DNA analogue, or something else?  ...And then there's however magic works as a force, plus divinity, and...well, if there isn't a profound amount of emergent complexity I'll be very surprised!  And I'm guessing you don't have a quasi-elemental plane of Salt in your locale, or, if you do, that it's not an atomic primitive in the way this depicts.  Let alone the separation of metals from Earth entirely.  ...If salt's Earth plus negative, would metal be Earth plus positive, or does it need Fire?"

"Salt is not earth plus negative energy. Why would something as biologically important as salt be negative-energy-ish. The silveriness of the Astral plane is a positive-negative energy interaction, not an elemental phenomenon. Fire is not oxidization, Water is not molecular, Earth is not a planet known for its carbon-based organisms nor is it … I think your rocks are mostly silicate minerals. Anyway, Earth is not that either. Metal is also a form of Earth. Getting more specific, there is not a publicly known alchemical process for lastingly converting [Earth] lead into [Earth] gold, and [Earth] mercury is not known for improving other metals. It's actually pretty bad for [Earth] aluminum, for one. There is a bioalchemical information storage structure affecting heredity, though developmental environment is also important. A soul is drawn from the positive energy plane by the developing body in a natural ritual, the parents' souls don't reproduce. Explaining quintessence would get into alignment and divinity, do you want to keep talking alchemy or do you want to switch to that? It's definitely not a fusion of the four elements, though."

"Beats me why Salt would be that way but I've sure seen it built like that once.  I think it's because people think of it as a dessicant.  And yeah, this alchemy is clearly only superficially similar to Suaal.  ...You have a meaningful Quintessence in your cosmology slash physics model?  ...The other question is, how the hell do you have - wow, I'm finding a lot of things weirdly absurd considering that I know nothing - how do metals happen from Earth?"

Griffie looks amused. "You could say that quintessence is the meaningful thing in my worldsheaf's cosmology slash physics model. Which is not really fair, I'm not going to say that your experiences are fundamentally meaningless, but… you haven't been radiating particles of math-teaching-ness that I know of, and I have in fact been radiating particles of math-learning-ness. I mean, I haven't assembled a proper quintessence inspection toolkit yet and it's not very much quintessence but based on my understanding of physics I was in fact radiating particles of math-learning-ness. And metals are molecular, consisting primarily of Earth, though mercury is notable for its Water content."

(Griffie has made jokes about entities that don't produce quintessence being fundamentally meaningless before, but ey doesn't want Jane to actually think Griffie thinks she doesn't matter.)

She bursts out laughing, though it's...perhaps strained would do; she seems shocked.  "That's certainly quintessential, alright!  How does it happen?  It's so - A fundamental particle of meaning!  It's - wondrous and fell, absurd and straightforward, meaningfully meaningless...Oh, if only I could truly express the fundamental contradiction!  There's a meaning to your everything, except that it's only understood by what you make of it!  Well, except for the alignment nonsense."

That, of all things, the snark that seeps into her voice as she Has Opinions About Alignment, seems to get her head screwed back on straight.  "Really, I'm not sure how it persists in the designers' handbooks; I suppose it lives via inertia and expectation?  But you don't find something in the space your world buckets in without the concept of alignment somewhere, no matter how vestigial, and the definitions get weirder by the day even as the rules significance reliably decreases.  Fourth edition only had Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil as linear extremes, and then 5e pretty much didn't even have alignment affect anything except Outsiders in the first place, which...well, if they had to, it made any sense, but really, they could have just dropped the names and gone for planar entity soul buckets sorting according to specific traits or something rather than having the grand go-'round about what the hells Law and Chaos actually are again, or the deontology-vs.-consequentialism, or the 'what the hell actually is Evil, anyway' question, like, there's any argument to be made that selfishness-vs.-selflessness is what most clearly maps to that axis but then the rules text of the spells that make undead say it's full-stop Evil no matter what the fuck you're doing or how the fuck you're doing it, without a single diegetic explanation, and - fuck!  I'm ranting about alignment!  I wasn't supposed to start ranting about alignment!

"Anyway, the 3.5e-and-Pathfinder cluster tends to have rules consequences and narrative consequences to alignment, which is actually part of why I assumed you were a druid earlier - you just don't strike me as quite Lawful enough for a paladin despite the absurdly worthy quest you're on, you're not cursed like an oracle to my admittedly limited ability to notice, there's no holy symbol on you so you're clearly not a cleric - well, unless you're self-powered, which I can't rule out, exactly, but I think there's still a holy symbol required for casting, and there's nothing with that pride-of-place - and I don't know anybody else who gets Cures on their spell list.  Maybe binders, but you're not spookily channeling a vestige.  I suppose there's celestial warlocks from the 5e-sphere, for healing spells, but...nah.  You're not that sort of aggressive negotiator.  And you wouldn't want to be in debt to a higher entity even more than you didn't-want to be in potential debt with me.

"...Wow, I really don't know what the fuck that was but it sure...was, whatever it was.  Do remind me to link you a copy of the relevant rules documents and RPG Stackexchange, even if I'm sure there's no way the peasant railgun is real there's probably something useful there.

She remembers something, and blinks.  "I forgot to consider the half-casters!  Damn!  Wait, are druids half-casters or is it just that turning into a bear sometimes helps?  ...Unlike giant snakes.  ...And inquisitors are fucking sneaky, if I recall correctly, so maybe they wouldn't need a symbol, but frankly, that's just reaching on my part.  Still, my best guess for what you do for adventuring is 'druid', and I'm really curious if I got that right.  ...Oh, and you can't be a monk in that armor.  ...I suppose there's also multiclassing...

"...Good grief, I opened my mouth and then that happened."

"You seem to have interacted with some games somewhat related to my world but not quite and keep asking questions based on that. So I guess I'll ask you: does your world have a 'crown plague' that's made going places difficult, a 'bay of good herbs' that's a place some people want to move to, or people building very large machines? Anyway, I don't really know where to start with responding to your queries so I'll just go out of order."

"Regarding your speculation about my capabilities: I do tend to delegate negotiations but even if I was much better at aggressive negotiations I probably wouldn't have bothered here, I want to pay you a reasonable rate for providing me value and you don't seem to disagree so there's not much to negotiate. I actually currently owe my party members some money, I just don't like open-ended debts. And some people do non-divine magical healing with arcane alchemy or tapping into the power of narrative and such, I'm just not one of those. I'm currently sphere-5 capable, same as the party wizard. I haven't used a bear or a snake form, but I don't see why the latter wouldn't be helpful, I've done some good work with a snake summon."

"Regarding alignment: What would you expect it to be if not a factional approximation?" Griffie fishes in eir bag and pulls out a small vial of a clear liquid.

"This is a vial of quintessence-infused Water. You can call it good-aligned, or celestial, or holy, or you can be rude and refer to the caring of the Upper Planes as pity if you like. But all of those are words, and they're only approximations. This was produced by a town-dwelling cleric of Iklena, so it's probably specifically high in quintessence for working together for a common benefit, helping those in your community who need it, cooperation, understanding, that sort of thing. And I call these good, and a lot of people call these good, and they circulate spell patterns for detecting this sort of thing and call their spell patterns 'Detect Good'."

"And given that individuals give off quintessence, you can detect it and make judgements based on that, but measuring it on the typical person is a massive pain. Worse, there's ways to get quintessence on yourself without having done something it's fair to judge you for. Being a victim of a ritual sacrifice might coat your soul in gunk that makes it easier for torture-y gods to grab hold of you, same as performing such a sacrifice, but that doesn't make the victim and the murderer both morally responsible! I met a fairly nice fellow once who was, perhaps, self-centered, but from a quintessence standpoint he looked incredibly evil due to having been stuck in the court of a powerful evil sorceress. And he probably did some bad things ever, but mostly he ran illusory dance parties and he was a very helpful person."

"Undead seem to have backdoors in their souls. There aren't known examples of intelligent undead capable of reliably refraining from immoral actions, and not because nobody would be interested if such entities did exist."

"Not that I know of, but Bar, do you have any responsive documents for mention of 'Suaal' or any of those other terms, from my world?  That sure sounds like someone's campaign.

"As far as alignment goes..."

She pauses a moment, to collect her thoughts.

"Alignment originating from quintessence-detection actually makes sense in a way some platonic Lawful Good existing doesn't, and I bet that the AI safety researchers would kill to be able to have the toolbox to design those sorts of spells, because...It actually detects alignment with a given set of values.  For some values of alignment, at least, and honestly in a vacuum that's all they'd need.  I'm guessing you have Malediction or something like that, which could be a complicating factor, but still, the ability to concisely express things like that...

"Anyway.  Your alignment precedes and causes the observed factions, it is not your factions which precede and cause your alignment.

"Which happens the other way around in most sourcebooks."

"...And jumping back to something else: Undead have soul-level exploits?  What the fuuuuuuuck.  That's really weird.  Never roll your own crypto, I guess, even if in this case it's negative-energy Soul-OS.  Who's even exploiting that?  Evil gods?  How the fuck do they?  That's so weird...  Like, not that it's implausible, but - oh, so do positive souls, that's just enchantment.  Duh.  Damn.  Someone wanted that behavior.

"...Well, on an exdiegetic level one must assume that's game-rules-aligned, rather than necessarily malicious in-universe action, but it's still fucked-up."

Is Jane interested in the fact that the Arabic for "question" as a noun sounds kind of like Suaal, especially if you mispronounce a transliteration thereof? If not, Bar doesn't have publications from Jane's world on the subject.

"The conventional wisdom is that gods and mortals probably co-evolved, because gods are quintessence beings and there's a feedback loop there. And enchantment takes work to develop, and charms and compulsions both have failure modes. I suppose 'Lawful Good is just a fundamental thing' might make things simpler for fiction, though."

"It sure does.  Doesn't make it good writing, though."

Oh, a napkin.  Suaal being mispronounced Arabic?  Doesn't sound cromulent.

"...Hmm."

She muses.

"Anything for a 'bay of good herbs' or 'crown plague' slash royal plague in general?"

"...Wait, is that just a word for pandemic?  Historical pandemics around big industrializations...

"'Bay of good herbs', probably in a not-English language, plus...Spanish flu, maybe?"

Bar?

Bar can get Jane some Wikipedia articles from her world on coronaviruses and haemophilia in European royalty, the latter of which led to hemophilia being called "the royal disease". As for a bay of good herbs, there is Yerba Buena (meaning 'good herb' in Spanish), now known as San Francisco.

"...I meant that to be a logical and, but thank you, that's helpful.  San Francisco, huh?  Then search Spanish flu."

"I try to be of service."

She nods.

"...Anyway, yeah, that's all I've got; I'd suggest looking for historical analogues of your people, but it won't help all that much even if you're really in a San-Fran-alogue.  Too much potential variance."

"I did hear that a lot of Earths have an Emmy Noether. Not usually an archmage, though."

"I think she's a mathematician, which is sort of like an archmage because computers are the closest thing my Earth natively supports.

"So what even is the crown plague?  What's it do?"

"It was in a game some people I know were playing. I didn't play in it and it's not a publication, I can't actually tell you much about it?"

"Oohhhhh.  I get it now.  Yes it is possible that you had fiction go back the other way!  ...If you exist in someone's TTRPG campaign, that has a TTRPG campaign of real-Earth - real in this case being 'clearly not mine anymore' because it would've very probably had Suaal...

"I wonder what level of fiction I'm on?  And how many degrees of separation from Suaal-itself.

"Anyway, infinite multiverse, infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, probably not my circus.

"...What's up with those -" She catches herself before she says something, with a wince of reflexive self-critical distaste like she thought something wrong - "fellows, anyway?"

"With all the cushions? They're using an intoxicant, not one I'm familiar with. They wanted help with safe administration and some monitoring at the beginning, but at this point if something was going to go wrong it would have. I'm still on call, though."

"Seems a bit disingenuous to be doing that and math...homework isn't really right but it's close enough, but you're the professional.

"...In other news, have I asked your pronouns?"

"I'm on call right now, not on active observation duty. They've got a bit of automated monitoring. And I know a lot of pronouns but probably you don't speak the languages they're in, why?"

"...Bleah, right.  Sorry, I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and despite whatever intelligence I have sometimes I still fail my spot checks for things directly in front of my face, or in my ears as the case may be.  I guess that's why at least 5e has Perception under WIS.

"...Why do I want to know your pronouns?  So I can refer to you appropriately in my brain?  And uh - as long as you have the requisite grammar-ish, I'm pretty sure English can take 'em.

"She has a bit of a habit of following other languages into dark alleys and mugging them for spare vocabulary, after all.  's how we got...schadenfreude, zeitgeist...lot of German, actually...fiancé(e) is lifted directly from French including the annoying grammatical gendering...Quite a few Spanish-language food items, though I'm not sure how much that counts...the Anglo-Norman meat versus source animal disjoinment way back in, what, middle English...An absurd amount of mashed-up faux-Latin-faux-Greek science words...

"Anyway!  The pronouns you'd prefer?  Or should I just use your name if refer to you I must?

"...English!  The language where you can do that, and still have it be meaningfully intelligible, despite the order words come in theoretically actially mattering, because...fuck if I know where it came from - I'd bet Asiatic languages, they originated - oh, koan is another bit of English kleptomania and kleptomania is the faux-Greek-faux-Latin again, and the faux in that is just 'false' but in needlessly pretentious French - anyway, at some point somebody decided that theoretically ungrammatical particle orders made things sound wiser, and everyone's just rolled with...ugh, which way around is it?  Verb object subject?  Not a linguist I am, so answer surely I cannot!", she says, failing to not do a Yoda impression.  "For some reason a famous fictional character I am continuing to imitate!"

"Anyway yeah English is several dozen languages in a trechcoat; adding Suaali pronouns - oh, what is the demonym for people from Suaal? - won't hurt me any.  Assuming there isn't some translation-effect that'll vanish later and leave me to realize I was pronouncing them wrong the whole time, but that's only embarrassing."

"I think you should refer to me with whatever existing English pronouns are appropriate, because pronouns are supposed to be convenient and not involve you having to remember more things. But also I think this preference is sufficiently obvious that I wonder if I'm missing something about your question, or if people are just unusually interested in novel linguistics in your world?"

"Pronouns are often metonymic for gender in and of itself, and as someone who has," she...winces?  "Quite a bit of gender-related stuff going on in her life, though now a bit less thanks to Bar...gendering people as they prefer to be gendered is just common courtesy, no matter if it involves me having to invent a way to - to use a fictional example - conjugate a pronoun referent of a specific caste in ways it probably was not intended to be conjugated, from a language that believes one's gender and-or sex to be a matter for only intimate partners at its most liberal and quite frankly thinks that even then might be pushing it.

"That author did a whole...well, any parts of, a conlang, at least - about it; if the character felt that the Correct Signifier was that caste, I'd damn well use that particular pronoun for them even if I had to trip over my own tongue every time.

"...Damn, now I'm really getting distracted by the possibility of lightsabers.  I'm not a Jedi, dammit, I shouldn't get distracted by Jedi-locked things unless I have reason to believe I can actually use the Force.  And I don't!  As much as the glowy laser swords are really cool and also actually plasma."  She doesn't actually pout, but it's a near thing, from the dejected slump she does.

"As for whether my world's some sort of outlier on caring about novel linguistics, I shouldn't think so, but I'm definitely not a statistician with the right sort of data to make that call and I'm probably a couple standard deviations above norm on caring about knowing things in general.  I'm basically a knowledge hoarder, really.  If I could download the entire multiversal Internet, I would, just for the knowledge's sake.

"Don't have that kind of money, nor the requisite storage space, though, so I haven't."

"Ah. I generally expect people speaking languages with grammatical gender to just use the neutral case for me, since there's no obvious way I fit into the humanoid sex system? And I have no particular objection to that, I could signal affinity with a humanoid sex if I wanted to and I don't."

"Gender isn't actually sex, though.

"Like, I know people with genders of 'not even a human' despite their incarnation in fleshly form.

"So it's...

"I don't want you to feel like you have to settle for 'use neuter'; I want the shiniest pronouns you have.  What makes you happiest.

"Maybe that's 'I really have no fucks to give about this', but...I don't actually feel like that's what you're saying?  Am I wrong about that?"

"I don't … if you ask me 'what pronouns make you happiest' I might say 'well, I have fond memories of how excited my friend was about the efficiency of the Draconic pronoun system' but that's not a gender. Pronouns are a shorthand? If I want to feel understood the obvious way to do it is to tell you about me, not to ask you to add an extension to your language. I would find it annoying if you said 'ah, Griffith is a man, because he's a combatant' or 'ah, Griffith is a woman, because she's not a child but her voice is high-pitched and she's beardless', but if you say 'ah, Griffith is probably neither a man nor a woman, because usually plants aren't and it's not like this one has a bunch of obvious evidence to the contrary' that seems just straightforwardly correct in my case. I guess it'd be nice if, in the world where Corin didn't want a beard, he still wouldn't have to have one to be seen as a man by humans, and I like it when systems are good for people, but the system I'm used to is working fine for me."

"Ahh.  Yeah, I think I get that.

"And I do agree with you, Corin shouldn't have to have a beard!  Beards are just the worst!  For multiple reasons!

"In my personal opinion, at least; some quite like them and I don't begrudge them the choice.

"...Also, wouldn't it be more accurate to say most plants are bigendered slash genderfluid on account of having the capacity to produce both stamen and pistil - excuse my probable butchering of the anatomy, but, pollen-generating and pollen-receiving organs?  ...I think that's something that's true, at least, given that the other day I saw an article about a specific tree that had previously presented only one reproductive organ developing chimeric expression of the other reproductive organ?

"But yes, I think I get how your pronouns work."

"Modeling the typical plant at least in Suaal as having an internal experience of a humanoid-like gender including genderfluidity among the humanoid genders is incorrect, I've spoken with them and it's not like that. There's some vocabulary in Sylvan and Druidic for plants by reproductive style, and they don't actually always match that well to mammal-stuff or translate amazingly? Plants have a lot of diversity. But if we're not speaking Druidic or Sylvan or some other language you probably don't speak, I go in a catch-all taxon. I mean, I like being part of a 'species' without a natural reproductive method, I think it has societal-structure advantages, but I don't think you need to bring that up every time you refer to me."

"Yeah, obviously plant culture doesn't really have any reason to be remotely human-legible.  And no, I don't speak anything but English, curse my formative education's lack of follow-through on second language acquisition."

"Anyway, it's nice of you to care about these details but I am actually pretty content in a gendered language with the animate neutral."

"Then they/them/their/theirs/themself it shall be, presumably."

"I'm not actually multiple entities in a relevant-to-personal-identity way?"

"...which is why 'themself'?  People've been trying to get a properly singular gender-neutral pronoun off the ground for a while, but they mostly haven't succeeded.  I can probably find a list of the attempts, though?"

"…they've been trying to get a properly singular gender-neutral pronoun into circulation but they haven't succeeded. I did not consider that as a possible failure mode for a language. Don't the kinds of people who write dictionaries want to avoid seeming provincial?"

"The problem is that English is a consensus-driven frankenlanguage and there are fifteen competing standards, and nobody can stop that."

She shows Griffie a comic.

A relevant xkcd, in fact:

"And then presumably the status-fixated people will either learn all the standards so as to embarrass those who are less up-to-date, or try to get some of the standards deprecated. …but I still don't see how that leads to the go-to gender neutral pronoun being that linguistically awkward. There are a lot of standards for how to arrange silverware for fine dining, but that doesn't mean that if I ask for a fork I'll get a spoon someone clumsily cut 'tines' into."

"It can mean that if you ask for 'a fork' you can get anything from one of those tiny pokey things I think people use for cheese, to an actual pitchfork, and nothing that you'd use for your salad, though.  The problem isn't that people won't learn pronouns, it's that no-one wants to make their preferred neopronoun everyone's pronoun, because that would be very rude.  And singular they has some history behind it; the same thing is why there's no second-person singular.  There's only you."

"And that's why you ask me what pronouns make me happy. Just do something that seems sensible to you, I think that's what I prefer. If the sanest available scheme in your language involves sometimes grouping me in with swarm consciousnesses, I guess that's how your language works. I suppose your languages wouldn't be subject to the same pressures as mine, anyway."

"Yep!" 

After Griffie's done, she shrugs.  "We don't really have swarm consciousnesses, either; there's, like...emergent complexity from bees and ants and such but they're all individuals communicating with eachother.  Bees have bee-language-for-bees that even us humans can sometimes interpret; ants communicate through chemicals.  There was an experiment where someond doused an ant in a chemical dead ants emit - safe for the ant, mind you - and the ant in question basically went 'huh, I smell like I'm dead, I must be dead' and stayed in the corpse pile til it wore off, when the other ants moved it.

"...Also, fun fact, sporks actually exist, though I will admit that I've never seen them be fancy."

"At home, if you can't confidently and accurately talk about genderless people, it suggests that you're some isolated rural farmer – not that people like that deserve to be insulted, but it's a thing – who isn't important enough to have had any interactions with Axiomites or Inevitables or such. My guess is that that's not a pressure on English?"

"We do not have Inevitables, no, and there are additionally political blocs that hold that reproduction is the intended use of a uterus and anything that gets in the way of that must be purged, and other such essentialist bullshit, who are...

"I don't want to give you the impression that they're how most people behave, most people are significantly more accepting, but they've certainly hollowed out a major political party in my home country to puppet around its corpse, and spread poisoned ideas in things pretending to be news reporting.

"It's honestly rather terrifying to think about too much; there's bad historical parallels.

"But that produces significant social pressure against proper recognition of non-binary genders, and furthermore against relationships that are not one man and one woman cohabitating, ideally for the purpose of sexual reproduction.  ...Ugh, they're just horrible and I guess I'm going to have to go questing about it because I can't just...There's too many people I could help, if I found something that would let me.

"...Fuck.  Curse you, overgrown sense of responsibility.  I'm not adventurer material!  Nor am I politician material!  Why am I going to try to meddle anyway!  ...Because someone has to if they want things to not become that, and I can watch the system failing around me in real time, responding to this encroachment by doing almost nothing that it isn't forced to; there's an election coming and it hasn't been preceded by the FBI raiding domestic terrorist cells, it's been preceded by the President who we all know won't reach those assholes saying nothing but words, and poll workers getting issued bulletproof vests."

She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose in evident frustration.

"The orange clown, whose name I will not speak, spurred on a coup attempt in his last days in office and still walks free at present!  I wouldn't be surprised if what he'd done is post bail, but he hasn't even been arraigned for, outright conspiracy to sedition!  I just don't understand how this isn't being treated like an existential threat to democracy as practiced, because it is one!  Leaving aside my own objections to the ruling party's policies, they're just...not handling this at all, hiding conciliation and appeasement behind procedural bickering while throwing out admittedly welcome voter-bribing that's nonetheless less than useless if the actual fascists successfully pull off their coup next time!"

"Politics is really difficult, yeah. It sounds like your situation has a lot of issues and I wish you luck dealing with things. I don't know if it helps to hear that from my standpoint, 'people responsible for sufficiently important government functions didn't need personal defense stuff' is the aberration, and if these people needing security is shocking to you you're doing well?"

"It helps, but not as much as I'd like, because if the government is that threatened, they can do a lot worse to the people the government's enforcement arms refuse to care about.

"...When those people who're doing the evil shit aren't already government enforcement agents.  That's a whole...thing.

"I suppose it's the power-trip.

"But poll workers are - the support staff of the support staff, not the actual officials."

"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."

Griffie is obviously avoiding visibly reacting to the prediction. "Want to expand on that prediction and/or put a likelihood estimate on it, or shall I continue?"

"80-20 on time travel at all, splitting that 80 into 65 'you travel pastwards via some means' and 35 'other temporal shenanigans' technically including 'sealed wedding-spirits in a can get opened' even if that's not really time-travel, either side nonetheless resulting in 'land spirits seeing impressive beekeepers pastwards enough that the present's beekeepers are either a continuation of apparent older tradition or just not actually there long enough to be worth distinguishing from famous past-beekeepers'."

"...80-20 on it being time travel contingent upon the artifact being what it says it is."

"Alright, thank you."

"We heard adventuring stories from the groom. We visited the chapel, which contained a cleric of Adrissa trying to pick out blessing stones for the happy couple, which we discussed with her. Ended up going for something about a long life protected from evil and the past. It turned out the horseshoe game was currently a solo game because people were intimidated by the half-orc in war paint who was playing, but we joined in and got other people to be more comfortable with him. …he was wearing traditional wedding guest war paint for signaling willingness to defend the wedding but if you're unfamiliar it just looks intimidating even if you're a welcome guest. Translation issue, I suppose. We'd have been fine even if he did attack us so it wasn't scary to us, but adventurers are a special case. We put him on a group message channel in case of future security issues since he was apparently participating in security. I told him about my family, he told me the legend of the Barrow King. …long story short there, orc leader tried to save his tribe from Charon, but Charon set him up to be misparsed as a necromancer by a paladin and attacked, and the only soul he had a grip on by the end of it was the paladin's. Anyway."

"Party continues to a pre-party tradition known as the Box Social. They auction off desserts the bridesmaids made, the dessert comes with an opportunity to eat it in the presence of the bridesmaid, and the proceeds go to the couple. I dropped by because it seemed interesting. For a little while it goes basically smoothly, but then this gnome Lumi Reasonknot goes up with her honeyed pumpkin bread, and a partially bleached male gnome who wasn't invited to the wedding shows up. Er, bleaching is a problematic senescence-like condition that gnomes can experience from boredom, and it can be lethal if not halted. Anyway, the male gnome keeps making increasingly large bids, Lumi looks uncomfortable, we get her on Message, she says he's a persistent unwelcome admirer, and I, uh, end up getting in a bidding war with him on the basis that I am very wealthy and it'd be nice to not let this ruin the wedding. He ultimately bids his life savings, I outbid him while annoyed by it, he runs off into the woods. I go on an, er, 'date' with Lumi, whom I have absolutely no romantic interest in, and whose bread I also cannot eat. I ask her about her unwanted admirer. His name is Tenzekil, he'd been interested in Lumi for a while, but when he lost his multi-year track record of winning honey-harvesting competitions to the groom he got really depressed. And it shouldn't have been a big deal, he's a talented druid and beekeeper, but it was for him, and he started bleaching, left his farm, went wandering a lot, got less sane and more obsessive. We discussed Tenzekil with others, asked if he might cause problems, they noted he was a pacifist but overall weren't sure."

"I go talk to the trees about Tenzekil. The trees don't recognize him from my first description and mention that both the druid and the forest change, and ask why the forest changes. I speculate about wood-harvesting and fae. The tree I'm talking to asks around about the druid for me, and I hear that he repeatedly walks to the point of exhaustion, burns himself and cries, sometimes flies around, and overall they don't understand him. They don't know where he is, because he did what they do not understand. They don't know why he talks, he used to be very kind but he and things around him became strange. Furthermore, the trees he passed by did not know where they are."

"At this point we're kind of concerned and we send our lantern archon Liel to check in with people about it, but 'the trees are disoriented' isn't actually very much information to go off of, lots of things can cause that – gases, diseases, insects, et cetera. We ultimately decide that even if we're concerned about some kind of threat, near the chapel is the most defensible area so we may as well hurry and do the ceremony now, and try to scry Tenzekil concurrent with that, though scries take a while to cast."

"The trees not knowing where they are seems pretty important.  It suggests they're being moved.

"That, or otherwise actively meddled with in some specific manner.

"And Tenzekil absolutely sounds like he has a desire to go back to the good old days...

"...he did 'what they do not understand'?  In those exact words?  That is a suspiciously specific phrasing that I would have inquired further about, since they seem to understand self-harm.

"...damn, poor guy, though.  Senescence also really sucks."

"Yeah, it really does. Anyway. Moving on."

"We plan to cancel the bit where everyone closes their eyes so any hidden celestials can bless the couple, it's traditional ceremony component but it's kind of a security risk and also we do have an archon to openly bless the couple. The ceremony gets started. A few bees are disruptive, and there's a spiritual presence near the trees. I'm going to pause for prediction time now but if nothing new comes to mind I'll go ahead."

"...Bees were disruptive how, exactly?"

"Stung the officiant."

"Was there anything that would make the officiant a natural magnet for very angry bees?"

"No, nothing."

"Enemy action, check!"

"Something Weird Happening also check."

"Shall I continue?"

"Yeah, I think so.

"Currently...Hmm.

"60-30-10 odds 'someone in the guise of the druid is interfering with the wedding', 'the druid is interfering with the wedding', 'something else is happening'.

"Actually, make that 50-30-20.

"And put an outside bet on 'the officiant's secretly evil'....so maybe more like 40-40-20."

"I take air elemental form because it's useful for engaging tiny fliers. Thousands of bees, formed into swarms, head for the crowd, and walls of thorns spring up around them. Naturally, people panic. I also observe that the swarms are people, which limits our combat options a bit, though we are pretty specialized in nonlethal. We discuss options, we plan to negotiate first and disperse the swarms if that fails. I ask the swarms for a truce, they say they have to help Tenzekil, I tell them that even if he wants this it won't help him. Conversation does not go productively. I start vacuuming up bees, we start advising the other attendees on self-defense."

"...See, the question to ask here is 'help him with what?'."

"But yeah, this collapses into a 90-10 'druid's doing some bad shit', though I've certainly any odds on time travel still."

"We hear Tenzekil yell at us, and he's … not doing great. Says we'll regret shunning him, which we didn't do, and supporting the 'violent man who stole his farm', which is a wild mischaracterization of the groom who has been taking care of his abandoned farm, and … oh, I'll just quote. 'I follow a woman far more powerful and dangerous! All of you, know your doom has come! When Queen Rhoswen arrives, all will perish-you will choke upon her mist, die by her thorns, and fall before her armies! May you forever suffer the curses of the Fellnight fey! I, Tenzekil shall have my revenge on you all!'. Three bramble spriggans walk in through the thorns … uh, generally-evil-ish planty gnomes, can manipulate thorns and travel via thorny plants of sufficient size. I do swarm cleanup with the help of some summoned air elementals, we fight the spriggans and hand out weapons for same. We can't actually find where Tenzekil is, unfortunately, so we get people some anti-poison stuff and finish up the ceremony while waiting for the thorns to be gone, since carrying all the civilians out over the thorns or such would be a huge hassle. Once that's done, we head into town to talk to them about being ready for the promised armies, and on the way there we notice a cloud of fog rolling in quickly."

"Oh, great, cloudkill.  Really doing a good job representing the Neutral Evil slash Chaotic Neutral segments of the druid alignment chart, Tenzekil, that's just great.

"...Wonder if there's faerie beekeepers."

"Anyway at this point there's not much worth bothering to try predicting, per se.  Tenzekil's gone and spoiled everything in his monologue and attack; you'll be facing fae and his boss probably knows Charm Person."

"Would you like me to stop storytelling at least in this format and tell you how you did?"

"Sure.  Though I do want to hear the rest of the story!

"...I'm vaguely predicting a beekeeping-related fae grudge, too."

"…to be clear, there's some stuff I would have benefited from figuring out in advance that I in fact didn't and also don't think I had adequate evidence for at this point in the story, so I think this exercise might be worth continuing. But I will tell you now that the fog was not an inhaled poison, it was in fact safe to breathe for extended periods. I made people do anti-inhaled-poison precautions over it, which were pointless, and this was used to argue against my party's credibility later. Do you want me to comment on time travel accuracy, or not yet?"

"...But why would 'just in case, you shouldn't breathe that suspiciously-timed fog' be a signal of lacking credibility?!  Who comes up with this?!"

"Oh hmm.  If there's more to this..."

"...Well, first off, telling me that lets me cheat, so you shouldn't've.

"Also, thinking about it, how solid was the evidence of the groom actually living up to his PR?  And what did you then know about the bride?

"...And, tell me what you could have learned from the bees?"

"It became fairly obvious the fog wasn't poison fairly quickly, I don't think it's actually letting you cheat when I don't think too much stuff happened before we noticed that. We got caught in the stuff with only some improvised wet cloths on our faces and it felt, uh, thick and damp and ominous when it hit us, not poison-y."

"The evidence of the groom living up to his PR was … people really did seem to like him, he gave us genuinely useful information when he could have just not, he was cool with us bringing an archon with alignment detection to his wedding instead of, say, just not inviting the adventurers who rescued his sister to his wedding and maybe sending us some money or maybe ignoring us entirely? We didn't know much about the bride, she was a local and a non-adventurer. I'm not sure what I could have learned from the bees, they were really uncooperative."

"Ah.  Thick damp ominous fog sure does sound like time-travel or realm-shifting in this context."

Griffie makes an I-heard-you noise (kind of weird-sounding, but it translates, apparently Bar can at least sometimes handle vocables) and continues storytelling.

"We go to the town council, dropping the spriggans off in jail on the way. Council argues that we falsely gave warning over the mist, and in general we have an annoying argument. …they're obnoxious about the thing where the groom thinks Tenzekil is worth trying to save and has plausibly been exploited by 'Queen Rhoswen', and also about proposals to team up with the local fae. Groom brings up that lumping all fae is like blaming townsfolk for same-species brigands, which is somewhat effective."

"Council decides to have a closed session with just the locals including the groom, so we're outside and we talk to his adventuring party. Apparently the groom doesn't like how the council is being about Tenzekil because his adventuring party had a gnome in it who died of bleaching, cursed by some obscure incorporeal undead. Wizard uses the Holy Book of Infinite Guidance…"

"I haven't explained that, have I. So! Our party's wizard invented a technology called Discrete Storage, but even though it's a fine name, if I don't force precise translation it often gets called something like 'digital data storage'. Which is not my favorite term, plenty of people think about math and information without having fingers, but whatever. He cooperated with some requests about format – it was magically useful for the Plane of Law for it to use a chunk size meeting specific criteria and he picked 16, which is actually pretty standard in a lot of places, and so he got some rewards for that. One of these was a 'Holy Book of Infinite Guidance', which competently downloads situation-relevant materials from Upper Planes libraries, but has a fixed amount of 'charges' to do so with, and only slowly recharges, and also drains the user if used repeatedly."

"Anyway, wizard makes a query about Rhoswen with the Holy Book of Infinite Guidance, and the book flickers and he gets really drained and the book is smoking a bit."

"I think the root's not in fingers but in tens.  But heck if I know."

"...Well, that sure is something I could've seen coming.  Divination never works on the bad guy when it'd be convenient."

"So, 'divination never works when it'd be convenient' seems like … if I followed that rule and skipped sufficiently useful divinations, my enemies wouldn't even have to spend effort on anti-divination measures? I've done plenty of useful divinations before. And we do get some result from the book. There were readable-ish titles, mostly mentioning 'Rhoswen, the Fellnight Queen' but also mentioning 'The Fellnight Realm of Queen Rhoswen', 'The Fellnight Prison of Queen Rhoswen', 'The Crook of' … indecipherable after that point, 'The Binding of Queen Rhoswen', 'Fellnight Magic', 'Queen Rhoswen's Crook', 'The Fellnight Realm', and 'Queen Rhoswen, Lady of the Fellnight'."

"More like 'you should expect sufficiently useful divination to actually cost you something, and generally that divination will not provide immediate solutions to problems', if I expand the process that generated the sentence out properly."

"That is just … how divination works. Prophecies are often cryptic and almost always take expensive material components, and scrying is… well, would you expect spying on someone for a five-to-twenty-minute period, that's almost certainly badly timed because a scry takes an hour to cast, to focus primarily on details whose relevance is immediately obvious to you? That would be typical of an unrealistic story, no? Anyway, I think our usual use of scrying is checking in on friendlies and maybe sending a teleporting messenger."

She rubs her forehead.  "Something in that feels like it's just...somehow been parsed wrong.  Can't tell you what, though."

"Well, sorry about the lack of telepathy."

"Eh, it happens.  No big deal."

"Anyway, want to predict what the implications of the download result we got were?"

"Obviously she is a sealed evil in a can sort of threat.  Probably the source of the Trees That Didn't Know Where They Were.  And very probably that you'll have to go to the Fellnight Realm and beat her up, if you don't manage to diplomance your way through this.

"She's indubitably a caster, probably a greater version of the fae you fought earlier, the odd item out might actually be a key to her chains in some way, especially because more effort was expended upon scrubbing out identifying details...

"She's probably the source of the bee-swarm allies whatshisface deployed.  ...Tenzekil?  I'm horrible with names.  Or at least, her realm would be.  Which neatly ties up the 'why is there so much beekeeping involved in this plot' if it's true, if there's a bee realm or something just...sealed away in the corner and some of the traditions were preserved.

"And the forest wouldn't forget.

"Which would otherwise be a plothole of 'why are this region's beekeepers a fixture to the trees?'

"Anyway, do continue."

"How confident would say you are that the download failure here is enemy action?"

"85% on 'direct interference by Queen-Rhoswen-et-al.', 10% on 'Actually there's an Even Bigger Fish invested in obscuring this', the remaining 5% is probably divvied up between 'it's a property of alignment' slash 'trying to search an infinite chaos plane is just really fucking hard actually' slash 'archives coincidentally got exploded'.  Actually, more like 75-20, there."

"...Actually, break that 75 into like....45-20 on 'enemy action' versus 'doesn't actually exist'.  Yes I know that doesn't add up to 75, sorry.  45-20-20 on those plus bigger fish."

"And by 'doesn't actually exist' you mean 'records don't exist, we just got some titles anyway' or what?"

"...Now that you're prompting me to think about that, and there's gods and infinities of bullshit on the table, I'd like to update my estimates to 45-40 enemy action vs. 'error: search target impacted by or causing an XK or CK event'."

"Sorry, I'm not familiar with those acronyms?"

"Yeah, my bad, I dropped into SCP-land for a moment.

"40% probability that it's reality that is fucked in some way, whether it's time paradoxes or acausal existence or extraontological intrusion or hostile antimemes or The Glitch," she pronounces With Capital Letters, "or...yeah, I could go on all day."

"Want to tell me about what's making you revise your predictions, or nah?"

"Infinities fuck up physics and you mentioned a godswar at some point.  So there's plenty of room for such fuckery to linger, e.g. in causally unmoored existences or self-destroying information, or things that are Not that nonetheless want to become or destroy something that Is, or...lots of other things."

"Alright, good work keeping that in mind. I'll tell you the conclusion we reached shortly after this: There's a known phenomenon where data from Old Aiquzall – the world as it was before and during the big godwar – experience 'seal-scrambling', producing a fundamental instability not just in the records but in the information. The download's appearance and behavior matches that. Our lantern archon, on observing this, tells us that there are special sections in libraries for books like that, but you need special training and powers to be able to read them at all."

"So it is time travel, of the 'a very long way forwards' variety.  And memetic hazards!"

"Sorry, 'memetic hazards'?"

"SCP stuff.  An idea or concept that is, itself, somehow dangerous.  Most of this is actually anti-memes, things that can't be known, for whatever reason."

"I suppose you could call this that. Anyway, shall I move along?"

"Yes, please do continue."

"We start a Planar Inquiry call. I should maybe explain that. Planar Inquiry is a spell that calls over a local-branch celestial, but not with enough call strength that they can fight alongside us. Want to predict anything about that?"

"Prediction based off of what?"

"I'm pretty sure I've given you the information we had at the time, but go ahead and ask more questions? I don't know what you'd base a prediction on here, but your method is supposed to sometime let you get information from stuff I didn't think would be useful, so I thought I'd offer an opportunity. I can go on if that's not useful here."

"No, the - what sort of celestial are you going to try and call, what are you going to ask them, what would be good to have asked them...

"'I'm going to try and summon a Celestial for advice' isn't...really...something you make predictions about.

"It's just a thing you're doing.

"And the sort of advice I'd give here is mostly 'save the spell slot unless you actually have someone who can read the books handy or the outsider in question will be able to read the book you have'.  You've already gotten celestial input.  Getting more celestial input...is kind of redundant, unless there's more specificity to what you can request in that context."

"Oh! Planar inquiries are 'you send a letter and a payment, you get a response based on that', and they're often used to hire experts. As for predictions, you could say 'it turns out all the relevant celestials are too overworked to respond', 'all the relevant celestials are extinct or in hiding', 'the Upper Planes really wanted to communicate something unrelated to you and doesn't send the person you requested', 'the call doesn't go through', et cetera. And the celestial we have on our team is not actually the most intelligent or powerful. She's spent a lot of time in a library but she isn't an expert researcher. Her main work-relevant strengths are aerial ranged combat and teleportation."

"I'm putting a high chance on you not getting a particularly useful Celestial, maybe two in three, but I wouldn't be surprised if you got a Celestial that's theoretically useful but maybe only one additional useful fact such as the name of the seal-shocked Crook."

"Which is absolutely going to be important, by the way."

"The actual result we got here was that the spell fizzled, and the wizard concluded from that and observations that the fog was extraplanar, we were experiencing a large-scale planar blending effect, and our means of contacting the outside including our emergency line to Axis weren't going to work."

"Yeah, that was included in 'not getting a particularly useful outsider' and also I already predicted planar blending."

"So you did, good work there. This is the point where we found out at the time. If we'd been able to confidently predict that earlier it would in fact have been useful. …not sure how much earlier, but there would have presumably been a point where we could have still brought in the spacetime police."

"Yeah.  Alright, shall we continue?"

"We speculate about plane details more – there's a strong effect leaking over of sealing extraplanar interaction options, suggesting the 'prison' title is applicable. We try a really long-shot attempt to use a portable extradimensional space to bring in the spacetime police anyway, and it fails. We discuss some options, and the groom tells us the town wants us to look for the origin of the effect and drop off a message from them to the fae conclave if we're in the area. We check if our summon spells work, they don't. We're also asked to see if we can end up in contact with the druid Devarre, the town's usual contact with the conclave, and we get a map with indications of things including Devarre's rough area. Groom says he managed to talk the council out of trying to demand restrictions on us. And we make plans to head Devarre-wards. I inspect the changing leylines to see if they indicate much about Rhoswen, and they do have a tendency to enhance shadow magic, fey magic, pseudo-real creation, teleportation and interplanar magic, and scrying. I can go into detail on our overland transit plans if they interest you, but I'm not sure they do?"

"Overland travel isn't really something I have input on, no.  ...About the spacetime police, I have an irrelevant question...is your emergency contact method putting a portable hole in a bag of holding?"

She cracks a small, shyly sheepish grin.

"Alright, hmm.  Devarre.

"Not insignificant chance they're already dead, but it's definitely worth trying to get in touch with them and the local fae, who presumably aren't interested in being couped.  That or they're in on it, but I doubt it.  If there's an invasion from a sealed evil in a can, there ought to be allies.  ...though how Tenzekil found out about Rhdbvghl whose name I have already forgotten existed, probably needs an explanation.  ...If it's not the having immortality and thusly being pre-sealing..."

"Our emergency contact attempt was using a small mirror-associated pocket dimension and breaking a crystal we were issued within it. Axis does not want to incentivize people to create messes just for their attention. And the queen's name is 'Rhoswen'. …we actually didn't spend enough time talking about her to end up assigning her a nickname that I can remember offhand, huh. Anyway."

"Anyway, we head towards Devarre. We start off with a conjured carriage, but we're concerned about some fog interactions because it's a pseudo-real creation, so we ditch it. We find some lumberjacks cursed to be lost and we un-curse them … pretty easily, it breaks when we get them in sight of each other. Plausibly a prank from the local fae to discourage logging? We travel, we do some summons testing which suggests we can get at least some summons, we sleep, we wake up due to an intruder being detected. Someone presenting as a local dryad whose grove is being attacked, asking for our help."

"Highly unlikely the carriage would've exploded, honestly.  It worked in the first place and presumably kept working, and you were already on the inside of the wards.  Would've been different if your wizard had felt something hinky going on, but, nah.

"The lumberjacks...Yeah, likely not actually related to anything, just sort of there.  Still, that's evidence that the evil's tied to the forest.

"Alleged local dryad is very possibly a trap, but not one you can really afford to not spring; you need the information.  Ask them how the heck they found you; ask them if - and presumably how - they know who you are.  Their answers might be revealing; the weirdness with the trees earlier is...My brain thinks you might be able to dig out some evidence on whether they're friendly forces thereby.  But I'm leaning towards suspicion, because - this is Rhoswen's territory, now.

If there aren't internal control mechanisms up the ass, I don't know evil queens."

"Dryad communicated significant urgency, we didn't have time for a ton of questions."

"Background here: we'd also in the past gotten some prophecies about 'how do you save the souls of a forest's trees from a fire when you are not even there to stop it' and then later, after we thought we'd done it, 'worry more about forest fires'. So the wizard has a custom divination Locate Forest Fire and has a scroll of it. I've picked up Stabilize Nature Spirit, which helps spirits whose bonded natural feature is destroyed hold out for a replacement.
We, uh, did make a wand of it, but we don't have the wand, we made it for Friends of Trees in exchange for them covering materials costs, because it seemed like a good way of accomplishing the goal 'deal with forest fire we're not present for' and materials are expensive. We also have some info on specialized firefighting water elemental summons, which aren't workable here, and a firefighting halo magic item for our lantern archon, which is relevant. Sorry, I've been trying to tell things in order, but I didn't start at the beginning, because time. Anyway."

"So we use the scroll, we teleport in, there are in fact a bunch of spriggans attacking dryads. Axes, evil rituals, fire, et cetera. We fight the spriggans and win, with the interesting details that when we hit a spriggan with a blindness curse, it synergizes with the energies in the fog to … coat the spriggan in some magical-sensory-deprivation gunk, and that when the spriggans are clearly losing and we suggest the remaining conscious ones surrender, one of them says 'You think I would surrender? Queen Rhoswen owns me, what sort of fool do you take me for!'. In Sylvan, which we recognize, but with an accent we don't. We rescue a restrained unicorn, generally untangle tings, notice that the spriggans had been doing some kind of sacrificial ritual and cutting down paueliel trees, which allegedly have First World – uh, fae place connections. Dryads ask if Devarre sent us, we say we're looking for him. We discuss options for containing the unconscious spriggans, and the dryads say that Vinroot could do it if he weren't too drunk. And we go to interrogate the conscious-but-sensless spriggan."

"Not sure of the immediate relevance of the firefighting other than 'well, you've put enough effort into it that it not showing up somewhere dramatically relevant is a cop-out in story design'.

"...And would you look at that, internal control mechanisms up the ass.  ...Right, sacrificial ritual, faelinked trees...She's obviously trying to unbind herself, and crash her empire back into the 'real world'.  Prime Material, I mean.  Very probable that she can see through her minions and possibly target on them or at least target them; there's a present and persistent threat for perceived disloyalty.  On the other hand, she doesn't seem very cunning, just commanding; she should have had her minions feign surrender and strike into your backs, if she was maximally concerned with Winning This Particular Endeavour.  And were I in her position, this would be the time to do it; this is the one time she could play that card and hide it again for later."

"Why would this be the one time she could have her minions feign surrender and then do it again? And … we've dealt with that move before, at this point while we prioritize the safety of people who surrender to us we don't actually give them much leeway in situations like this."

"'cause if you vanish into the dark forest there's no way information concerning your fates makes it out.

"...Good policy."

"Also, this sounds like regular tactical and psychological analysis right now, not story analysis?"

"Yeah, and I mean, you're not wrong that it is.  The 'they should backstab you' thing wasn't particularly meta-informed.

"The 'evil queen has iron control of her underlings' thing is...a bit more character-based than that?

"Like...I won't deny that a lot of it was just mundane inference, but it's also...'I'm an evil queen, what would I do?'."

"…I think the reason evil queens do that in stories is pretty much just because it's both practical for them and scary-sounding to listeners?"

"Sure.  But either way I approach the question, I find the same answer.  And - mmmm.  There's a substantial sense in which the evil queen rules through fear, and the good through loyalty.  And that informs the actions they're likely to take and the ways you can manipulate them."

"…okay, so, trying to model the psyche of a queen is pretty useful, but if you demonstrate your ability to do that, it's not going to make me think you can model the psyche of the Divine Flow or such."

"The Divine Flow?"

"The source of prophecy, that which touches outsiders lightly and which gods have a spark of and dip their oracles into, is a seemingly non-Asmodean force involved in confining devils to their 'proper roles', et cetera. My wizard friend described it as a structure that sends some information from the future to the past, focused around large events in our reality, bound by a need for internal consistency. The Protean interrupting his lecture said that it also enjoys doing riddles, eating pranks, and wrapping things in proteans."

"...I doubt I could predict individual actions of the Divine Flow without a much more thorough peek behind the curtain.

"However, it's a force of Be In Character on the world scale.  If ever there was a blunt metaphor for keeping the story on its rails at the GM's will...I'd definitely place it there.  I'm not sure whether I should have said that."

"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!"

"…you asked about ability to make plans. That's … I don't see how it wouldn't be testable? The brain makes the soul work better and the headband makes the brain work better at making the soul work better and there's plenty of ways to check if the brain is working badly, why couldn't you check if it's working better? I know a lot of merchant guilds aren't the most open but I'm sure somebody's published stuff at some point, you could ask Bar for that."

"I'm using 'plans' here as - synecdoche, for ability to model things and successfully enact change to the world thereby, to come to novel conclusions, to actually hold more than seven to fifteen things in your head at a time without cheating.

"If you can demonstrate, in a meta-timed test...

"No, that brings us back to the 'and why would the author let us construct a proof of our own fictionality' problem!  Fuck!"

"Well, they definitely help with working memory, that's really easy to test. There is a market in these things, if someone was selling headbands that didn't help with really obvious metrics like that there's no way their competitors wouldn't point it out."

"You're missing the point?  The claim I am making is that all boosts will push a person to one particular maximum of capacity and hard-stop such that no more bonus-stacking increases it!  If the game's in real time, anyway; there's ways to cheat working-memory tests if you can 'pause time' like a table doing round-by-round combat takes hours for seconds."

"…so your prediction is that there will be a hard limit, unless there isn't, and even then only under a circumstance we can't check for."

She huffs out a frustrated breath.  "I mean, you aren't wrong, but it's not impossible to get a collusively-minded author to do something indicative.

"And if my author wouldn't want to get in on this then I don't know why I'm being allowed to consider the idea.

"I think that the question is whether yours would?

"Do you think that the sort of person who'd dream up a you, is the sort of person who'd be willing to collude with the sort of person who'd dream up a me, to introduce evidence that there's - something strange going on, in a manner that I can produce predictions about?

"I have a test in mind, actually, if you're willing to try something a little bit strange."

"What's your test."

"I ask you for some 'random' data, but write down what I expect that data to be beforehand.

"Then, we see whether what you came up with matches my prediction.

"Admittedly, this only works if your author cooperates, but it's not nothing, even if it's not providing proper falsifiability - but it's hard to do that when you don't know the medium you're being simulated in!  Seeing if I can glitch through the walls only works in videogames, for example, whereas the working memory limit test only works in live voice RP, and I'm not sure what I could possibly concoct to prove myself against an adversarial book author writing asynchronously!"

Griffie gets out a piece of paper and scrawls 'Are we fictional?' on it in big, blocky letters while asking "How is your idea different from me writing 'Are we fictional?' on this piece of paper, putting it off to the side, and seeing if the word 'yes' appears on it, aside from using more of my time on rolling dice?"

"Because asking you to say the first nonsense sentence that comes to mind actually uses in-character capabilities instead of requiring Obvious Shenanigans that break suspension-of-disbelief beyond recoverability. Though I suppose Bar could do it. Still, what've you got, if I ask for a nonsense sentence?"

She has written something on her own (concealed) paper slip.

"There's a stock one that comes to mind, 'more people have gone to Axis than I have'."

"...That's a garden-path sentence even if it's also meaningless.  Wasn't even in the category of things I was expecting, so...I'm guessing somebody defected.

"Oh!  Oh oh oh I have a test that might actually probably definitely work!

"Because we know my author probably won't cheat!

"And we can also assume that there's some factor of time dilation occurring!

"We measure my cognitive capacity moment-to-moment, probably by math-explanation quality, and see if it has a weird fucking zigzag because sometimes the author's half asleep, when I'm not supposed to be!"

"Why do you think that you're being written by a different author, do you have some good reason to think we're in a role-playing game? Really, if this is a story, what makes you think this part isn't 'Jane tries to convince Griffie they're fictional, Griffie provides many counterarguments and isn't convinced' and no more detailed than that? Or for that matter that it wouldn't just include me convincing you as an atomic action that took a few hours for me but no time for the reader?"

Ey pulls out a book labeled "Murderous Maths: The Fiendish Angletron" and gestures with it. "Actually, mathematics books interspersed with stories to catch the reader's attention when they're distracted are a common genre! We sure haven't circled the conversation back to calculus in a while, so this is even pretty likely to be a brief summary, under your theory!"

"I'm having too much internal experience for someone to not be simulating this at some point, and 'are we fictional' is too much of a non-sequitur.

"Also, this conversation, funnily enough, doesn't have math in it!  So if the math is actually happening, and I want to point out that you continue to miss that my theory of this being a human narrative suggests that the math's more likely to be glossed than the whatever-this-is is...Well, this wouldn't be useful as part of a math-with-stories-in book, because the story parts should've tried to involve the math you just learned!"

"But wouldn't you… I don't know what to say to that."

"Yeah, I regretted it the moment it slipped out of my mouth.  But like.  I'm pretty sure I've displayed too much complexity to be readily glossed as 'cloudcuckoolander math teacher'?  I dunno.  Maybe I am actively being glossed that way right now.  Still, I don't think the meatballs came up for no reason.  And - it's a Chekhov's Gun; even a brief moment of discussion of fictionality is going to have readers going 'why's this here?' and absolutely panning the book if it's not actually explored.  Because characters having arguments about things that could shake their world's foundations are pretty weighty?"

"This is all a digression from your original argument that teaching me story logic would be relevant to my life. We could cut that short and I could give you my analysis of how you've done so far on that exercise?"

"Gods, yeah, that is probably better than letting me keep going like this; I'll perseverate for hours if you let me."

"The nature spirits taking pride in beekeeping has absolutely nothing to do with time travel, the village is just really good at beekeeping and a successful druid beekeeper interacted with them recently. No jealous wedding shades show up at any point. Tenzekil has no interest in time travel either. The marrying couple and the officiant are not to my knowledge evil. Nobody impersonated Tenzekil. Fae beekeepers are a thing, but if any of the fae we interacted with during this incident were beekeepers it didn't come up. Rhoswen knew at least the theory of charm person but it wasn't her primary tool with us. If she used it well with Tenzekil we wouldn't know, though. She's not the source of Tenzekil's swarms, he Awakened them himself. There is not a sealed bee realm that I know of. We found Devarre alive. And Rhoswen's army serves her out of loyalty, not fear, she can and has raised them from the dead. Gods killing her and them doesn't stick, so why should they serve an inferior master? They take a lot of pride in her."

She pinches the bridge of her nose.  "I forgot to adjust for you existing.  Obviously I still missed more than I hit, and I'm certainly not disputing that, but I think I can trace that flaw back to not correctly going noblebright."

“I’m not quite sure what you mean by that.”

"It's - you signify a more hopeful genre than my priors for your rules-space suggest.

"Where problems can actually be resolved with peace and love and care more often than not.

"Where there aren't apocalyptic threats around every corner, and Good, cooperation, has a decent chance of outright winning.

"And I'm from a shitty store-brand cyberpunk dystopia that doesn't even have the cool bits; my optimism circuits are busted.

"So I just...flubbed it, assumed the base rate of Eeeeeviiiiil was way too high.

"That's the root of the fuckups I made in my predictions.

"Does that make sense to you?"

Griffie isn't really trying to maintain a neutral expression at this point, and looks sort of amused in a sad way. "So! Under that theory, what happens when we confront Rhoswen?"

...Yeah.  ♪It would be funny / if it weren't so sad♪, alright.

"Talk-no-jutsu."

"...Excuse my half-baked reference, but...you want an equitable solution.  And you're damn well going to try and talk things out.  So you try.  And maybe you need to punch a bit, but unless Rhoswen has an unsettleable grudge against the world...

"Honestly, I'd still give 20% odds on things somehow ending in her permadeath, because pathos or bathos or Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan," which she pronounces with an actual seemingly French-ish accent, " - that was a joke - but...

"I almost hope that there's a way to bring peace in your time, between Rhoswen and any inheritors of her seal.

"Without, I should add, any fucked-up sacrificial rituals being utilitarianly mandated.

"But that's only a hope.

"I still kind of expect there to be a fight you can't escape or talk your way past in this."

"Couldn't talk our way past despite having a really, really good case. Couldn't reseal her without a fight. Couldn't make her stay down without harm to her after the fight, she can fight while her body's unconscious. I basically unilaterally decided to go behind a party member's back – she was Geased to protect Rhoswen, couldn't make a rational judgement – to smash Rhoswen's brain, with the understanding that this probably wouldn't destroy her soul, but that it might, and that would probably be preferable to the attack having no effect at all. It didn't even damage her enough to stop her interfering with us. We kept fighting, thought we'd pushed her to the point of expending all her power, and the wizard got started with the resealing ritual, and she hit him with an enhanced Dominate effect so we had to knock him out, Dispel it, wake him up, and start again. And really, we only won because she called in her army to stop us waaaaaay too late to matter due to some combination of pride and underestimating us. But once we did the ritual we were able to use it to keep her and her minions stuck a little while, take our time to loot the place. And also take home the guy who didn't turn us in because we were sincere admirers of his art."

"...Yeah, that's definitely the more dramatic outcome.

"I think I overcorrected.  Or maybe the numbers assigning machine just didn't work in the first place; I'm really not a good Bayesian-probability calculator.  I sure felt like it was a thin veneer of optimism over a sinking rock of doom in my gut.  It was a bossfight, what was I expecting?

"...that sounds like it really sucked to have to do, and - it's honestly absurd of me to think that it'd help any, but.  If you'd like a hug, or something, I would like to offer you a hug."

She seems kind of like she could use one, after hearing all that.

Griffie motions Jane over to eir barstool for a hug, given the logistical issues. “It’s … mostly nice that you’re not avoiding me about it. She was trying to kill us, it was self-defense, she couldn’t safely be kept down … still kind of feels like I broke some kind of principle there that I hadn’t articulated to begin with. The Geased party member was the one who’s the most merciful generally, it felt wrong deciding without her.”

There's a moment, as she moves to take Griffie up on the implicit offer in the beckoning, but must first round the table, where she simply stands there, struck still by shock, even her ever-present fidgeting coming to a halt.

Then, she starts pacing, punctuating her expression of frustration with sharp, choppy gestures of emphasis.

"Why would I hold acting in your party's best interests against a hostile mind controller(!), against you?  I'm just - amazed you're holding up alright!  However long it's been, that's...

"It's the sort of thing that wouldn't leave me alone, and for all that my experiences aren't universal, I'm guessing it hasn't left you, either.

She blinks away a tear she's trying to not shed.

"And your biggest concern was that I'd shy away because you didn't succeed in the impossible?  Gods, given the way your world's been treating you on that whole adventure path, I find that both reasonable and an unspeakable suppurating wound marring the quality of good sense exhibited by the average inhabitant of that whole damn village, if not the whole damn world."

Her voice softens from its prior fervent exasperation with everything, down to a soft, calm tone that's level, but nonetheless a front over her sympathetic grief.

"If you managed to not successfully talk her into doing something prosocial, my guess is that it literally couldn't be done.  That the rules of the world were constructed such that no argument would sway her, and whatever adventurers found themselves tied up in her plot would face that fight.

"That you feel you lost something to it only makes sense.

"I almost want to guess it's innocence.  The hope for a true golden ending, the belief that there's a happily ever after in every story.

"But I'm just an armchair...everything, really.  So...think about it, see if the shoe fits, but don't take my words to be some deep profundity.  I'm just muddling through, as much as you are, and just...hoping I can help a little bit more."

And now, speech delivered, she hugs Griffie, if that's not presently contraindicated.

"The townsfolk and the local fae didn't care, they wouldn't have minded if we'd just gone in there with killing intent. Wizard understood, oracle … understood we couldn't do better. My family isn't upset with me, they're impressed I could handle the situation at all, but … it still feels like you should be disappointed. And I agree, if Rhoswen won't listen to someone incredibly diplomatic whom she Geased into protecting her telling her to back down, she won't listen to anyone, but… It's not that I think we should have convinced her, I agree that was clearly doomed, it's that I hate taking potentially-irreversible violent action without consulting the people who ought to be consulted. Which is the story of my life, at this point" Griffie gestures expansively around Milliways "but it turns out I care less about that than I care about winning."

Griffie is definitely getting another hug.

"Griffie, it's - no.  No, there's -

"You believe your ideals are compromised because you can't carry your friends around in your pocket?  You're better than that.  You surround yourself with the sort of people who care.

"And it's not that I think the village was judging you for pacifism - it's that they dared try and brush off your experience to the point of - well, considering - trying to tell you how you were supposed to adventure.

"And - that's too much judgement!  You should not hold yourself to that unreachable standard!

"Gods know I've enough scars - thankfully, only mental ones - from trying and failing to live up to the image of social opprobrium in my brain; this subject I know quite well.

"You can't and shouldn't try to be perfect, especially when it comes to being perfectly giving.  That breaks people.

"You need to care about yourself, because so many others won't."

"The village was overwhelmed and in a bad situation and flailing for some control of it, of course they'd consider things like that. And … it doesn't take perfection to make a plan that amounts to 'learn how to design superweapons to compete with and hopefully beat the ones used in the last world war, then build them, then as soon as time restarts commit a first strike'. Most people never do that. You could argue that it's associated with false beliefs of current perfection, really."

She snorts.  "You definitely ought to talk to the AI alignment folks.  They'll be helpful."

"You're free to recommend me essays, if they publish?"

"Bar, please point Griffie in the general direction of Yudkowsky et al.?  I don't really know the field, I just know some of the people."

Griffie's tablet doesn't noticeably do anything from Jane's standpoint, but ey still takes a look at it a few seconds after Jane asks that question. "Bar sent me some files, I'll have a look later."

"That's good.  I'll be around if you want some help with the jargon.  It's very jargon."

"…do keep in mind that I don't have an intelligence headband, don't have magic intelligence augmentation, and am not at least in the near term working towards either. There are unaugmented humans who are smarter than I am, and they aren't incredibly rare. Even less so in worlds with good nutrition and prenatal care."

"Yeah, but it's not like there's a convenient Leareth around to do the god alignment project for you, so if you're going to be building superweapons...You should understand how you don't understand what you're doing, even if you don't understand what you're doing.  Which plausibly means 'being able to follow AI-alignment discussions'.

"Or other superweapon mechanism of action discussions.

"I have to imagine nuking Charon to death might be a little satisfying if you can be sure it'd work."

...

"That was mostly a joke.  Don't actually nuke a god.  It probably won't do enough.  ...Well unless you enchant it..."

"'Really large explosion' is not going to be adequate, and also we don't have a straightforward equivalent to 'radioactive decay' at least that anyone's published papers on. And yes, I need to know what I'm doing, I agree. But I just spent a lot of time on mathematical groundwork. I'll get there eventually."

"Honestly, the biggest problem they have is a fundamental lack of quintessence to measure values with.  From there's it's just...building something that's good at satisficing amongst identified constraints.  And uh.  Determining the right constraints, first."

"…part of what 'good' being a political definition means is that we don't actually have a definition we could fully trust the way you seem to be thinking."

"You can measure doing-actionness, though."

"Well, I can once I, y'know, save up enough to buy the raw materials for doing enough experimentation to build this stuff from scratch without a good teacher around."

"...Yeah.  Who even has that kind of money?"

"Well, working here isn't as profitable as my past work, but it's safe and steady and I got my soul fixed up, so … me, eventually. I'm not in a rush. And probably it'll be cheaper than stuff like my headband. Which I bought with loans from my party members, but still."

"The canonical Pathfinder economy is a picture of an economy thrown over magic item prices like the metaphorical rug you ineffectually try hiding things under."

"Magic item prices are a function of material and labor cost, plus, well, transaction costs, they're a pain to find on the market and to find buyers for. But economics has never really been my area of expertise, I always deferred to a party member and our wizard generally crafted our items unless there was some loot we wanted to keep. I can tell you about some things we've made money from or some non-magic-item purchases if you're interested?"

"Not that I'm not curious about Suaal's economy, but I think I've run out of complex-systems-understanding brain for the moment."

"Does that mean that I should let you sleep or otherwise rest and not ask you for more predictions?"

"I'm leaning towards either 'do that' or 'give me a minute and see if my ability to think properly has a sudden and inexplocable recovery'."

"Yeah, sure." Griffie can poke at something on eir tablet while Jane thinks.

Jane gets something to drink, and sips at it greedily.

"Ugh, I never manage to stay properly hydrated, I swear."

"Feeling better?"

"Yeah, I suppose so.  We were doing something, right?  We should probably eventually get back to that.  ...That's a weird thought to have to think when we were clearly just doing it."

"I was wondering if you'd like to predict what happens after we reseal Rhoswen, or just hear the story. Feel free to ask me for details on stuff we bring back from her realm or such, I'm not going to ask you to predict my actions."

"I don't really think there's much worth predicting other than 'you reseal Rhoswen and maybe the intrusion is "magically" undone'.  There's still Tenzekil and the wedding, but...okay, still out of predictions."

"Okay! So! We bring home Kenchlo who's a pre-sealed-war bard, Rhoswen's powerful shadow-manipulation staff, a bunch of ancient books of forgotten magic and history and such, Tenzekil who regrets helping Rhoswen and not just because she lost, some well-contained biological samples in case their fungus farm happened to have really tasty products or such, some prisoners Rhoswen was keeping polymorphed into songbirds for aeons, and, uh, basically try to cram our carrying capacity and that of our allies with the best allocation of everything valuable that isn't nailed down too thoroughly. The true unifying activity of adventurers everywhere, I'm sure. We get back and the realm-merge effect is becoming undone but isn't all finished so we can't call Heaven or Axis yet. We get the wizard uncursed and such. Any predictions from here, or nah?"

"Nothing really worth bothering to even register; you're in the falling action."

"What actually happened is that we were ambushed by a massive team of daemons who were apparently camping out in this forest the whole time."

"..."

"Your GM is a sadist."

"…do you have a model of how high the value of information of a pre-sealed-war historian and archive is? There are very strong reasons to really, really not want us to have it. And one may be in a good position to ensure that if one, say, engineered this whole foul mess."

"No, I really don't.  We basically don't have anything like that.  That doesn't mean your GM is not a sadist!"

"...So, a bigger bad, huh?"

"It's Charon. It's not like we've been subtle about opposing him, why shouldn't he return the favor? And our claims about the details of this incident are a matter of public record but I'm kind of tempted to rant at this point."

"Please, let loose.  It sounds like you need to."

"Not doing this one in prediction-soliciting form, to be clear."

"Initial wave that shows up is a massive group of death-by-magic and death-by-battle daemons, whom I'm probably just going to generically call 'daemons' from here mostly, they didn't have a specialized role beyond the extent to which 'melee' and 'magic are specialties, and a flock of death-by-daemon supporters, cacodaemons, to hang around and get the souls of casualties because why not. But more are still teleporting in, including Bibliodaemons, death by paperwork, known for modifying memories and records."

"We, uh, hope that their presence means the barrier went down sooner than expected so we can call in reinforcements. I check whether the Holy Book of Infinite Guidance has a connection. It doesn't. We're on our own. …that is, the entire fae camp including us is on our own, it's not the three of us and companions. We get to coordinating defensive efforts, more daemons show up, specifically thanadaemons – I mentioned them earlier, death by senescence – and some other powerful daemons, we continue fighting and coordinating a defense but start getting concerned this may not be winnable, but fae and treants and such in their own forest are however pretty powerful."

"And then an Obcisidaemon shows up, death-by-genocide daemon, could probably defeat us all on its own, but it instead burns Kenchlo to ash in a column of unholy fire, spears the cacodaemon with his soul, and leaves. Which … we have a thing about defending people who defect to us, you know? Brought one back from the Abyss before. But if the soul's destroyed there's nothing we know how to do, and if an Obcisi- is willing to leave the battlefield with a single soul, well … daemons are very skilled at soul destruction. I mean, now I'm thinking if I end up with an absurd amount of scrying maybe I can reassemble his soul from scratch with reference to scry results or something, but at the time he just seemed gone."

"And this is the point where if I knew Kenchlo as a person better I'd tell you about his virtues, but I'm not sure how much serving in an evil queen's court really encourages the development of those, so I'll tell you that he was a better dancer than you or I will be anytime soon, he probably threw cooler parties though I guess I haven't been to a party you threw, and his paintings are pretty great too. If I win and we still can't get him back … I don't really know what he would have wanted. Possibly a massive museum, some sculptures, general encouragement of people being upset by his absence?"

Griffie gets another hug.

"I'm sorry for your loss.  We've got pretty good diamond-synthesis techniques if that helps this any."

“You’ve got pretty good carbon crystal synthesis, and when we tried to find Kenchlo’s soul … I’m not going to say we weren’t funding constrained but we were pretty close to not.”

"Ah, right, proper elemental matter."

She sighs.

"That's horrible and I'm really sorry I don't have anything that's more helpful."

"It's doable or it's not. …annoyingly, while 'they wouldn't want you to waste your life grieving' is a common argument, I'm pretty sure in Kenchlo's case he would absolutely want that if it, uh, would have incentivized us to try harder or something. Really I think our only path to him being alive would have been leaving him behind, though, and we discussed our, uh, ultimately inaccurate model of risks with him before we brought him home, I don't think at the time he even would have wanted to stay there knowing what we knew. Anyway. Daemon fight summary."

"Yeah."

"...should've fucking known the main plot would show up to fuck up the unambiguous side-plot win; I recognized this as an interlude!

"My own inadequacies in practicing analysis aside...

"Well, if you want someone to help see if you can make proper Earth diamonds, I might not have much immediately applicable skill, but I'm certainly willing to pick it up if only for the chance to contribute to magic.  I'm irrationally fascinated with magic, really, even moreso now it's real."

"If you want to self-study from alchemy textbooks I can't stop you, though I'd really recommend starting with nonmagical alchemy at the very least for background. I haven't made alchemy a priority here, and I can comment on applied bioalchemy but I wouldn't claim to understand the fundamental theory. And there are ever people with more user-friendly transferable magic here, I haven't had luck with that but it does happen. Do you want the rest of the summary? It was quite an incident."

"If you want to talk about it?  It sounds...it doesn't sound like it gets better."

"I think this is actually the low point, we ended up doing some good work and getting very lucky. The wizard attempted to summon help with a not-that-powerful summon, and got a very powerful and cooperative entity which wanted to answer the summons for its own reasons. The daemons had a lot of objectives that they ended up essentially flailing to cover. Everyone besides Kenchlo whom the daemons wanted dead got to live. The bibliodaemons wanted to do some massive redaction of the books we'd brought home and erase our memories of the matter, but they only touched one party member's memories, which was just enough to show us what erasure they were going for, and we didn't do a perfect job protecting the books but I'm sure we got more than they wanted us to get. The thanadaemons were trying to do some self-erasing ritual to the polymorph victims, and they got disrupted often enough during it and eaten before the end that it wasn't amazingly erased. Some of the daemons managed to run away, but a lot of them got destroyed, and the bibliodaemons destroyed themselves before the fight was entirely over, presumably because they knew too much to risk capture. Gotta know what to erase to erase it, and all. …and they tried to destroy the lenses they were using for targeting extradimensional spaces like where the books were, but they didn't reliably manage that, and we got to loot the thanadaemons too. …powerful entity may or may not be a very private person whose characteristics they would rather I not comment on, and I'll say no more about them."

"Yes, one does not meddle in the affairs of very private people, generally.

"...I'm glad you managed to secure things that feel like victory

"...Not that I'm disputing this being a win?  Just that, in addition to it being a win, it felt like one."

"I felt successful after it. Lots of leftover fervor. It was mostly later that I was sad about Kenchlo."

"Yeah."

"After that the story is simpler. The polymorph victims appear to have had an aging curse forcibly applied to them that wasn't there before, which is presumably why so much erasure going around. And they also act birdlike at first when de-polymorphed, and even after recovery still don't have useful memories. We step up security a lot until we get a connection again, and we, uh, place a call to Heaven with basically all the movable wealth we aren't actively using offered as payment as soon as we can connect. Heaven sends a powerful team, cleans up a runaway daemon they can find… it's pretty impressive to see someone respond to a hostage-taker with 'not only are my weapons smart enough to pass harmlessly through the hostage on their way to you, I can also actually buff the hostage while I'm at it, and I'm really mostly focusing on reading this book'. We convince all the key witnesses to testify. It turns out that Rhoswen really did lastingly stop Tenzekil from bleaching, and she could probably have made him start again but she didn't get the chance, Heaven convinces him to retire up there in part so that they can use him as a reference for maybe curing more gnomes. We get access to high-power scrying resources to look for Kenchlo very shortly after we get in touch, but it doesn't go through."

"Ultimately, the gods hold a hearing about the matter. There's proof of lots of things Charon doesn't want proof of, like that Devarre saw warnings about Rhoswen's seal and tried to report it to Heaven only for the archon, on returning, to get killed by daemons before turning in the report, and in general a lot of suspicious death-y coincidences, but we don't have conclusive proof. Charon does get sanctioned, though, and the Planes of Law start planning a research expedition based on our claims. …I guess I won't know how that would turn out, but it sounded promising at the time. And if you'd talked to me several years ago, I would have ranted about the Horseman of War's behavior at the hearing, but I don't want to give her the satisfaction, so I'll just say that … she asked us some very harsh leading questions intended to throw us off-balance, though we basically stayed on balance. Mostly I went with a lot of 'I wasn't present for this event, so why is it relevant to the hearing for me to speculate about it?'."

"Oyé, how did you get a legal drama in your adventure fantasy?

"...It's the rationalism.  It's gotta be the rationalism."

"The rationalism?"

"The same breed of thought that produced the AI alignment people who I recommended earlier.  If your world's not premised on being a rational!Pathfindersetting, I'll..."

"Well.  I'll be very surprised.  You're fighting death.  That's a very common - tenet of faith, really?  That death is bad and needs to be stopped with all due haste."

"…in general, thinking clearly and avoiding death are useful for one's other goals. I don't see why ambitious people valuing them, combined with gods ever using legal procedures which are also useful, is evidence of much. It wasn't even very legal-procedure-y this time, I've been to an Axis hearing and those were orderly. This was … 'there was a concerning accusation, gods wanted to talk about it, Horsemen demanded the right to individually question their accusers but were talked down somewhat', and then also at the end of it Axis announced they were imposing sanctions on Charon."

"...Well, a), 'rationalism' qua being rational isn't quite...rationalism qua political ideology and associated praxis, and b) even if thinking clearly and avoiding death are useful to achieving one's goals, most people do not actually operationalize said goals to any effective extent.  Let alone the people that believe death is good because it's natural, which Suaal explicitly averts with Charon in a very rationalist-qua-ideology message of death being something not just defeatable, but to defeat."

"Oh, the general consensus is that while Charon is taking credit for all of senescence he's lying to make himself look like a bigger deal than he is, and the psychopomps certainly go around promoting the idea that death is a natural phenomenon to be accepted. …and make a fair amount of friends with their opposition to things like undeath and nonconsensual use of life extension on prisoners."

"...nonconsensual anything is honestly bad, but - they really oughtn't get net-credit for opposing one nonconsensual thing while not only condoning but promoting and practicing a much worse nonconsensual alteration to people's lives!"

"I think a lot of people tend to see dying of senescence at a predictableish time as a less bad thing than, to drop the euphemism, being kept alive for purposes of torture."

"Yes but the solution is stop torture not embrace deathism!"

"I don't disagree but if there are people going around who are maybe kinda involved in death-is-okay-ism when they're not even the main force that means you have to die anyway, but they also help stop always-evil undead and demonic torturers … one of those things is probably going to seem more salient than the other."

"Uergh.  Do Not Like That."

"Fair. …I don't know why there being legal drama is weird to you, if there's a cold war maintained by treaties and stuff happens regarding those legal drama seems like a natural consequence? What would you expect instead?"

"Because I was expecting a different genre up until I processed that."

"I thought I'd mentioned the divine non-interference treaties and such, I'm still confused by your expectations."

"It's..."

She wibbles a hand somewhat desperately, trying to figure out how to convey her thoughts.

"You know how I was going on about narrative analysis?  Well, there's any of that that's useful in rationalist fiction, but you actually shouldn't try to do as much of it in that genre, because the core conceits of the genre are that actors will act, well, rationally, or at least consistently, informed by their goals and motives in a way that is derivable from first principles if you know said goals and motives.

"And instead, I had previously assumed you were in a different genre, where not logic, but tropes and the rules of the game system, reigned; that the marvelous worldbuilding had been more incidental than - well, almost the core conceit.

"And Suaal's still tropey, don't get me wrong - but that's incidental, a consequence of working backwards from Pathfinder to a world."

"So, if this is a known genre in your world I'm not going to tell you it isn't, but from my standpoint it really seems like your claim that we're fictional is no longer making testable predictions. …also I'm still curious what happens instead of legal drama in the genre you were originally modeling my world as being."

"Yeah, see, that's exactly the sort of thing a ratfic protagonist would say when the narrativist absolutely bombs on testing because of her critically underexamined priors!  Now you tell me I'm just doing hindsight bias!"

"Hmm.  Instead of legal drama, which is very rationalfic, well...actual drama?  Not that legal drama isn't dramatic, but...theatricality.  If it was standard adventure fantasy, you'd have, like, monologuing.  Charon might carry out that ambush as did canonically happen, but it'd be...

"Both less and more powerful?

"In that there would not be a small army of daemons, just a group, but Charon, The Antagonist, would be much more invested in fighting you with them, probably possessing one to deliver a dramatically threatening speech or something.  That make sense?"

"I'm not going to lecture you right now, to the extent I want to make a point to you as opposed to wanting to test your claims for my sake I think the point has been made. Really, I think 'don't casually switch what you're testing halfway through a test and expect this to not be messy' was an issue here, which applies to both of us. …and that alternative model is a what would happen in the forest before the seal fell, but, uh, my question is what would happen afterwards when we called up Heaven to say 'Abaddon set up a plot to unseal and reseal a prewar global threat for their own benefit', if not legal drama?"

"Yeah, the experimental design here baaaasically wasn't.  As for what happens when you call up Heaven, in the Standard Adventure Fantasy universe...

"Well, you probably wouldn't be dragged into the politics so directly?  Even if it was alluded to.  I'd suspect you end up with a mission to gather proof of what happened more directly; Pathfinder isn't very heist-shaped but it sure can try."

"Huh, that actually makes some sense. Though wanting witnesses to testify is a pretty popular thing? I guess it could have been glossed over."

"Yeah, it could have; it might have still gone down the same way, but normally you don't have the big numinous forces being people-shaped enough for this in the first place, organizationally.  Like, your lantern archon friend would still be befriendable, but the highest-up ones..."

"It's not that they fundamentally at their core are as people-shaped as they look, it's that it's a thing they can do with some of their power and it apparently helps with having a meeting."

"Well, that at least makes the fundamental limitations of human authorship diegetic.  Well done, whoever that was.  I'm somewhat surprised that they did do that, considering that rational-fic's surprisingly willing to attempt to model superintelligences, for a genre that tries to maximize predictability above all - but they did, and neatly."

"I think I've mentioned before that gods are powered by quintessence from the Material Plane? A storm god isn't primarily a manifestation of the power of storms, they're primarily a manifestation of people's experiences of storms."

"...oh huh.  That does make sense.  Cool.

"...Is there a god of people's experience of gods?"  The question is surprisingly funny to contemplate, and she strangles another laugh before it can happen.

"Well, Winlas is a god of people's experiences of religious ceremony and ritual."

(Griffie is not going to bring up any discussion of the 'divinity domain' unless it is actually strategically necessary, which it does not seem to be.)

She allows herself one giggle.

One.  No more giggles than that.

What is she doing, that is definitely more than one giggle.  Stop that at once, future herself!

"Oh my goodness there actually is, I was going to make a joke but the fact that Paizo came up with Winlas is infinitely more funny than --!"

"…I still don't think that just because a deity in my world also appears in some publication means my world is fundamentally secondary to that publication."

"No, no, you are as real as I am, I'm sure, it's just - Pathfinder-the-rulebook just threw it in and yours has a fullthroated raison d'être!"

"I mean, there are a lot of deities, if I were selling recreational books I would probably not go into tons of detail about all of them?"

"Sure, but they still...did it really weirdly.  Here, look."

Griffie has a look at the webpage. "The library name is correct. This is describing a differently organized Heaven, mine doesn't have numbered levels and Winlas isn't in Requius. I've never heard of the Mwangi Expanse or Aroden and haven't heard of the herald mentioned either, but it hasn't really come up. And even without details on the source of divine power, someone occupying the role described there seems reasonable? Corruption of holy rituals and impersonation and such are problems."

"You probably don't have Aroden unless he set off the godwar behind the seal.  He's pretty...specific."

"And yeah, I guess that makes sense..."

"It's not like all gods are equally powerful or prayed to?"

"...yes?  That's just how polytheism is.  ...wait a minute, why's your Winlas Lawful Good, if - Evil people, Evil faiths, can have ritual experiences too, y'know?  How'd he pull that off?"

“A domain can have multiple gods and a god can have multiple domains. Axis covers documentation of stuff, Hell has coverage I’m sure though I don’t remember who, being a meta-ish deity in the Abyss probably isn’t smart unless you’re a parasitoid like Sifkesh, Protean Lords don’t actually publish handy org charts.”

She nods.  "Makes sense.  There's no Malal-Chaos-God-Of-Order lurking in this Chaos.  And he got retconned anyway."

“Proteans can turn Lawful but then they … aren’t chaotic.”

"Yeah, that's why you can't have a Malal."

"I mean, I suppose you could have someone in a similar role; 'fuck all of you in particular' is a very Chaotic Evil hat, but - well, here, look at him."

Griffie has a look. "It seems weird for gods to have sacred numbers, what do they do with them? Sorry, tangential."

Griffie looks further. "I think daemons, uh, Abaddon!daemons, are the only group in Suaal that I know of that manages to be that pure a destructive hatred including of their own kind and still be stable. If a demon is full of hatred for the Abyss and nothing else … maybe they leave, maybe they sign up with some other plane as a suicide bomber targeting Abyssal targets, either way they don't make it to demon lord. Big Ear, uh, sorry, the King of Wind Demons, was pretty fixated on his hatred for Lamashtu for a while, and was primarily known in some circles for working with the Upper Planes and Axis to oppose her, but it wasn't literally his only goal."

"Mostly, get their grubby cognitohazardous fingers into more pies than they otherwise would, as far as I understand that lore.

"It's a rather horrifying place."

Griffie is not discussing pervasive infohazards. “Mm.”

"Yeah.  Don't go there.  Like, ever.  Warhammer Chaos, whether that's in Fantasy of 40K, is really bad for everyone's health."

“Sounds like. I certainly won’t engage anytime soon, but after winning a godwar one might feel expansionist.”

"I'm sure there's ever been people who supplanted Chaos, but boy would I recommend extensive research on possible methods first.  And opening with rendering Tzeentch especially completely unable to act.  And having done god-scale combat against something at least aleph-null strong elsewhere first, that's less...

"Well, less like Chaos is."

“I’m very obviously a fan of extended research and preparation and appropriate exploitation of surprise.”

"Yeah.  I just have to say that warning, or think I haven't warned you enough.  Chaos: the worst thing ever."

"…no. Just because the Dark Chaos Gods as described in the published 'Warhammer' setting, which may or may not be based on an extant world or worldtypes, are terrible, does not mean that chaos is. Plenty of chaotic entities are wonderful people, and telling the chaos-inclined that evil is their only option does massive harm."

"Not your Chaos.  Your Chaos is fine and I think I'd probably scan Chaotic.  That Chaos?  Impossible to cooperate with on a utilitarian level."

"Understood, though I will reiterate that while it might be that if you were quintessence-producing it'd be somewhat Chaotic, as it is you'd scan 'inanimate object'."