"Do not get underway on the food stuff. If piles of grain start appearing everyone will assume it's poisoned, or it was stolen and they need to arrest whoever did it – and they'll find someone to arrest. That isn't the kind of thing that happens in our world, without a catch.

They don't tell us we're condemned to eternal torture. Just that we'll be tortured for hundreds of years until we're cleansed of imperfections like free will, and that we'd better not think we can escape by going to one of the other afterlives because Asmodeus will conquer them all eventually and use our recalcitrant souls as paving stones over pits of eternal flame, et cetera, et cetera. I'd tell you why I think that's horse shit, but you might want to form your own opinion." 

"- I mean, I'm learning lots of new things today, maybe this is in fact a going concern and I should be trying to recruit a gigantic daeva army to take Mr. Eternal Flame down?"

"I – if you can do that, you should. I would have said five minutes ago that it's the most important thing in the universe, now I'll just say the most important thing in the universe that I'm personally aware of, but only on account of the hundreds of millions of souls in torment right now, not because he's going to get everyone else." 

"Cripes. I don't actually have army-recruiting experience and there has not historically been a lot of use of daeva in warfare for, like, anti-proliferation reasons, but -

- I think probably if the situation is complicated enough that I shouldn't even make sacks of grain appear, maybe I shouldn't actively do anything right now and just read up? What should I be reading?"

"You definitely shouldn't do anything until you have more context."

Élie can recommend lots of books! He's got books on introductory theology and cosmology magical theory and the history of the inner sea region, sometimes in both censored Chelish and non-Chelish versions, and Asmodean apologia too since if he was in the outsider's position leaving it out would look suspicious. For himself, he wants a catalogue of the biggest library of ancient Azlant. 

Cam is going to...

...not actually make those books at all! He is going to do inscrutable things to his mysterious device which he controls with his mind and looks as magical as a thing can possibly look without registering to Detect Magic, and then make something else and pop it into the mysterious device.

"What's the library of ancient Azlant going to do for you?"

"Azlant was an ancient civilization with much more advanced magic than our own. They were destroyed a few thousand years ago when the moon crashed into the planet, that's a thing that happens sometimes around here. We don't know a lot about them, but if half the histories are true then they had incredibly cheap, sophisticated constructs, arcane healing, flying cities. In our civilization, the only way to get better at magic is using it while you're in life-threatening danger." And apparently that doesn't always work. "It's stupid. It means wizards mostly develop spells they can use in combat. It's why every wizard sees every other wizard as a potential enemy, and hoards their spells instead of sharing their work freely. It's why magical progress is so slow. Azlant escaped that equilibrium and I'd like to know how they did it.

Obviously every wizard in the world wants the power of ancient Azlant for less humanitarian reasons and in your position the safest assumption is that I'm lying about my motives."

"That sounds like a great reason but on top of not having a way to verify your motives I don't know if this is the best time to conjure up incredibly valuable informational treasure while you are dealing with your evil god problem?"

"Oh, I'm just bored and trying to kill time while you decide whether or not you're going to help us. – I assumed you wouldn't go for it but I'd feel like an idiot if I didn't at least ask" 

"Relatable! Would you like to take in some otherworldly theater or something while I'm reading? If I make you lunch are you going to assume I've poisoned it?"

"If you wanted me dead I'd be dead. I'll take dinner. I want to contact friends of mine who can do more than I can to verify your intentions and figure out how you came to be here, but I'm not sure if you'd consider sending for them a hostile act." 

Cam makes a little tray table with a plate on it (chicken Caesar, mashed potatoes, fruit compote on rice pudding) and a video player (Atriama). "Depends what they're gonna do," he says, making himself a chair and kicking back in it.

"Ordinarily they'd check your alignment and ask you questions under a truth spell and maybe read your mind. In this case I think they'd mostly want to understand the limits of your abilities? If the things you make can be used as spell components, how we can use it to spy on the Chelish government, things like that. They're going to want to know how to protect ourselves against you and other things like you, but they'd much rather do that with your cooperation than use you for target practice. ...I'd also like to know how to do that but I'm very weak as magic users here go so I figured there wasn't much point. They'll have a better sense than I do of what we can offer you." 

"Reading my mind would be a remarkably hostile opener! Let's skip it," says Cam. "I could actually stand to be slightly target practice - something I can replace, a wing - see if my defenses hold up to magic here the way they do to everything else. Anything that'd do worse than a papercut on a normal person will suffice to tell the difference."

So that crazy abjuration stack holds up against physical damage but not divinations and probably not enchantments. Interesting. 

" – So you know, the information I gave you doesn't discuss certain classes of magical attack and defense which are common in our world. I'm being honest about this because the ability to cooperate with you matters more to me than quite literally anything else in my life, but I'd like to leave the poor people of Golarion some options in case you decide you'd like to cause another Earthfall. 

What else would you consider hostile? My friends and I were all raised by Hell-worshippers, so our expectations might be a little skewed."  

"Oh, uh, anything interfering with the uninfluenced and private operation of my mind? Uh. Sexual assault I guess. If I turn out not to be impervious to magical damage then I guess that would be bad too. Earthfall? Did the earth fall?"

"Thing that destroyed Azlant. It was actually an asteroid and some alghollthu magic and several large chunks of the moon. 

What counts as influencing your mind? Do you mean exclusively by magical means or are there conversational gambits I should be steering away from? How do you feel about illusions?" 

He takes a bite of his mashed potatoes. 

"Conversational gambits are fine on this axis though I will be separately annoyed about nonmagical disinformation, communicative illusions are fine."

The mashed potatoes are really fucking good and contain six kinds of cheese.

"Do you have strong objections to the thing where I'm giving you incomplete information about things we might use to try and fight you until I know more about your whole deal?"

"That seems reasonable of you, I will just have to be conservative accordingly in what I do. I guess it would make me nervous if I did not think I was probably impervious to physical damage and I am in fact pretty nervous about the mindreading thing and might have to take some precautions if anyone I'm not expecting shows up."

"Huh. They don't have mind-reading where you're from? That sounds nice."

"I have never had quite this visceral an appreciation for its absence but yes, it is!"

Élie's own visceral reaction is that anyone who expects to protect their mental privacy by asking nicely deserves what's coming to them. It's the sort of ugly, Chelish instinct he thought he'd learned to suppress. Something to worry about later. 

"I'd like to test your other defenses, but nothing I've got would get past the damage reduction on an ordinary moderately powerful outsider. You should do your reading, and I'll think about who I'd like to introduce you to first." 

"I am not an ordinary moderately powerful outsider, whatever you've got going on here is completely new to me. If it would do worse than a papercut on, I say again, an ordinary person, it will do for my purposes, just warn me so I can anesthetize a wing."

"You seem to be working off a model where your native invulnerability is orthogonal to our magic system such that any kind of magical attack is equally likely to get past it, and that seems pretty non-obvious to me? When I look at you with Detect Magic up there's some kind of horrible Abjuration-Transmutation tangle, which admittedly doesn't look like anything I've ever seen before, but it is recognizably magic and if I spend enough time staring at it I can just about get a sense of what it's supposed to do. If I can get you with Acid Splash – very weak combat spell, small children practice it on each other – that'd be some information, but if I can't it seems just as likely you have what we'd call, uh, batshit high spell resistance. 

I guess it's still worth doing the test, but I don't expect anything to happen. Say when."