There appears an outsider. He looks human, as they go, only wings and tail betraying the difference, though the indigo fabric of his pants is exotic and his shoes if anything moreso. "- good morning."

....Detect Magic. 

Yes! Lots! So much! He is absolutely blinding with some kind of abjuration-transmutation mess! And then he throws a little high-octane conjuration on there too! If Élie could still see physical objects clearly he would notice that the conjuration is accompanying the appearance of a bite of grilled cheese. "Didn't anyone ever tell you that you shouldn't draw on the floor?"

Oww he's seeing stars. Summoning circles are basically just protective circles drawn inside-out, so it's not outside the realm of plausibility he could have grabbed something, but there's no way he's able to bind wait what was that. 

" – Can you do that again, the conjuration, I want to look more closely." 

"At, what, the sandwich? I'm trying to give you vital safety advice about not summoning unbound demons and you want me to make you a sandwich?"

"If you're a demon then I couldn't have been the one to summon you, I'm not powerful enough. There's another wizard about and you're their problem, or you're really unbound and you're about to eat me or whatever else it is unbound demons do, either way there's nothing I can do to stop it, and if I only have a few minutes left to live I want to know how that spell works." 

"I have a sandwich, I'm not about to eat y-

"- this isn't French," remarks Cam thoughtfully. "It has a certain Frenchness but it is not French. Huh. Where the fuck am I?"

"City of Isarn, in the nation of Galt, on the planet Golarion – our star system might have a disambiguating name but if it does I don't know it – on the Prime Material Plane. If you claim you've never been summoned here before, how are you knowingly speaking Galtan?" 

"Well, I get all my summoner's languages when I show up, and my expectation is that's you based on you drawing on the floor and nobody else being here but it could theoretically be someone else, do you want to check if all the new languages I've got match yours?" He pops his bit of grilled cheese into his mouth.

"...how sure are you that you're a demon? The Abyss is infinite so I suppose anything could be going on there, but that's not a feature of any of them that I've ever heard of."

Élie has decided he's just not thinking about how he's almost certainly about to die! He's been almost certainly about to die enough times to know that dwelling on it doesn't improve the experience.

"I'm not at all sure that I am landing on the correct terminology because I didn't know this language existed five minutes ago, it feels like the right word but sometimes that's barking up completely the wrong tree. I'm an apsel?"

"I've never heard of apsels, but that doesn't mean much. I speak Galtan Taldane and Chelish Taldane and passable infernal, and I can get by in Kelish and Draconic and Azlanti – at least I think so, not having spoken to any dragons or Azlanti people. Is telling you the names of the languages enough to identify them or should I say a short sentence in each? I still want to see that conjuration thing again. Can you make stone or minerals? That would be a different spell for us but I have a suspicion it isn't for you." 

"I can make whatever I want." He makes a bit of pumice, tosses it underhand to his summoner. "I think I've got all those, though I've only got literacy in the last few."

If the thing he's doing is different, Detect Magic isn't picking up on it. And Élie's eyes are starting to hurt. 

"That doesn't necessarily mean I'm your summoner, they're all reasonably common languages for wizards here to know, but at least it's suggestive. How does summoning apsels work? The kinds of magic users who can summon apsels of roughly your capabilities, what else can they do?  ...Do apsels vary in their capabilities, and if so, how widely? What other kinds of magic can you do? Do you know what planets you're ordinarily summoned to and if they're in the prime material? Can you describe your native plane? How many times a day can you create things? Are you limited by total mass or something else? How long do they last?" 

Tailswish. "Apsels all have the same basic abilities but different skills. There are two other kinds of what we call 'daeva', who have some of the same underlying features but different active powers. All I can do is make things but it's a remarkably flexible sort of making things. No usage limit. I am limited in volume per time, and range, but both limits are very very big. They last indefinitely, once I make something it's a normal thing."

Is the pumice visibly magical?

Not in the least. It could have been dug up from the ground. (And carved into a perfect sphere.)

Then Élie is going to very abruptly start sobbing! 

"- geez, dude, are you okay -"

That's an interesting question. Objectively, Élie doesn't think he's ever been okay, and he's closer to being okay in this moment than he's ever been before, because if the apsel is telling the truth – if the apsel is telling the truth, and he's not hallucinating, and this isn't some confusing attempt at espionage, and there aren't other apsels popping up all over Golarion right at this moment, and if he can convince it their revolution is worth a few minutes of its time – then the war is over and Galt has won. 

He takes thirty seconds to pull himself together. 

"I will be. I think everything will be. Are you, uh, broadly in favor of the flourishing of sapient beings?" 

"Sounds awesome, I love the flourishing of sapient beings, why, are you having a famine or something?"

"We are having a revolution against a tyranny ruled by the servants of an evil god for the purpose of condemning as many of their subjects as possible to eternal torture." 

"- that's both incredibly fucked up and perhaps difficult for me to verify!"

"You said you could create anything, right? None of this is secret. We have royal decrees, newspapers, history textbooks, sermons, the Asmodean holy book, reports on public executions, and I'm sure the secret police take notes. 

...We do also have a famine but that's mostly because of the war. Galt used to be the bread-basket of Cheliax." 

"- well, how about I get underway on food stuff while I read royal decrees - do they literally say things like 'we, the servants of an evil god, want all of you guys to be condemned to eternal torture', that has to be terrible PR even if it's true -"

"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." 

Cam sticks his wing out. "When."

Then he can be Acid Splashed. Anything?

A little discolored spot where the acid strikes and where it drips along the membrane of the wing.

It heals immediately.

"Oh, thank goodness," says Cam, rinsing the acid off with spontaneous water and re-folding his wing.

"I would be very careful about taking that as evidence that nothing here can hurt you." 

"If nothing else I don't expect to be immune to mindreading! But I do actually take it as evidence that your magic system does not bypass my indestructibility, which I expect to mean that it will continue to operate as normal."

"What's the biggest thing you've ever tested it against?" 

"Me personally not much but other apsels have tried a lot of things. Like, we can go hang out in stars, it's hard to get out again but it's otherwise not a problem."

" – Part of my intuition here is that the kinds of damage resistance I'm used to are uncorrelated. Our kinds of demons are resistant to acid and cold and fire but not, say, electricity, azatas are straight-up immune to electricity but have nothing against acid, devils are immune to fire and could probably hang out in stars just fine but are vulnerable to sonic damage. It sounds like our kind of magic is much more variable than yours, and magic users here have a lot of exotic ways to hurt people. There is such a thing as general resistance to spells but it works against mind-effecting magic just as well as physical damage, so I don't think you have it. Even if apsels are immune to every kind of damage known to your civilization, it seems reasonably likely to me that we've got some weird thing that could hurt you – and if you're going to help with our evil god problem, a lot of very clever people are going to be very motivated to find it." 

"I mean, obviously, as discussed, the weird thing that can hurt me is mind control. But I have fire and acid and electricity and loud noises and so on all covered. I guess if we do find something that makes more of a dent around here then that will be interesting information for suicidal apsels, who are currently kept strung out on their drugs of choice by volunteer caretakers."

"Acid Splash also isn't an ideal test, since it works by conjuring physical acid – it's just the one spell that does damage that I happen to have prepared. I'm – struggling to balance keeping information in reserve and trying to give you an accurate sense of how much weird stuff there is. Especially if you're fighting gods – sometimes they just decide to bypass all the normal types of damage resistance, or grant powerful followers the ability to do so. It's technically possible that you have some kind of ontologically basic invulnerability to everything except specifically mind control, but that would be betting really hard on mind control magic being a natural category and I'm not convinced it is. 

You don't seem like you're about to do anything wildly risky and I apologize for belaboring this point. I'm grateful beyond words you're willing to help with our evil god problem. I know a lot of people who've ended up dead and maledicted because they assumed they'd thought of everything." 

"I'm already dead."

"So are lots of outsiders. Just means that once they're destroyed, they're gone forever." 

"Well, that has never happened to any of the billions of daeva there are but if there were going to be an upset this would be it. If I get very spooked I may ask you to send me home."

"I can do that?"

"Probably? I'm in uncharted waters here."

"Why don't we circle back to my questions about how this normally works."

"On my home planet it is possible for anyone to, with a semester-long course or just a prewritten circle someone else designed for them, summon daeva, usually under a binding, though I am not under one now that I've noticed. We can then be offered trades to perform tasks; bindings can't make us do stuff, just make us not do stuff. Apsels make things, the other kinds change things or move things. That is the absolutely overwhelming majority of magic in my world, to the point where I worry you're going to get an inflated impression of how much other magic there is from the fact that I couldn't technically say 'literally all'. When we and our summoners are done with whatever we showed up for, they send us home. If the normal rules apply, which they may well not because as far as I know no daeva have ever been summoned to this planet before, you can send me home. I don't recommend that, since it seems as plausible as anything else that some of the normal rules apply, and you wouldn't be able to get me or anyone else back."

"Do circles summon specific daeva, or sort by type, or just grab whoever happens to be listening? does whatever I drew look like a circle you'd recognize? If I die, would you guess that you go home or that you're stuck here?"

"You must specify a type, you may specify an individual, taking summonses is voluntary. Your circle does not look like anything I'd recognize, I presume it manages to accidentally be a circle in some language neither of us knows, don't try it again, we can be mighty dangerous without bindings and apsels in particular are not filtered for friendliness by the summoning process. I would go home, if the normal rules apply."

" – Huh. We also have summoning spells that use magic circles to bind outsiders. There's a related class of spells that uses inverted circles – or maybe everted is the better word – for personal protection. The thing I was trying to do when I summoned you is modify one very, very common protective spell to see if I could get it to act like a slightly less common protective spell. Probably a few hundred thousand people know and use these spells regularly, that's probably been the case for at least two thousand years. If messing them up was likely to produce daeva, I'd expect to have seen the results." 

"Quite! It's not actually hard to wind up with a valid summoning circle for daeva if you are drawing circles on the floor and writing stuff near them. So, I think something weird may be up, but I do not know what."

"I've been worrying about that. It seems pretty plausible that something weird is, in fact, up, and there are lots of other daeva popping up in off-kilter summoning circles all over Golarion as we speak." 

"Hm, let me check."

Valid summoning circles completed on this planet in the last, hm, week?

"Looks like none this week but good to have checked anyway."

"That's good. You should keep checking. Can you show me what a normal summoning circle looks like? I want to see if it's anything like ours." 

"Can you reassure me that you are super duper clear on not doing this again without a more detailed explanation than a glance at a standard circle?"

"I am appropriately terrified and really do not want to do this again with nothing more than a glance at a standard circle." 

Which is not to say there are no circumstances under which he'd try. If an army of apsels could defeat not just Cheliax, but Hell itself, and this one decides he'd rather go home – well, he might destroy the planet, but some things are worth it. 

"Cool. I am actually qualified to teach the semester course, but like, lesson one is finish the semester course, yeah?" And he pulls up an image of a standard Safe Summoning Authority circle on his computer. It's paragraphs of legalese written in a tight spiral around a circle.

"You know, my school had a mandatory course on safe devil-binding, I wonder if it's similar. ....Devil-binding isn't safe, if you're wondering." He's not going to memorize the legalese but he also wouldn't have guessed that writing the binding out in plain whatever-that-language-is would do anything.  

The picture winks out. "Good to know! Daeva can't summon daeva, I have no idea about summoning devils, it doesn't sound like it would be very fun."

"It's really not! They intrinsically value producing unfair contracts that screw the other party over." 

"How oddly specific of them. Why are they like that?"

"Asmodeus is the god of unfair contracts, among other things, and devils are the things you get when you torture people until they stop having free will and become automata in his service." 

".........is this process also magical in some way, I don't think torture victims back home ever spontaneously start talking about how much they love unfair contracts."

“I think it takes hundreds and hundreds of years. Though it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it’s magical and they just do the torture because Asmodeus likes it.”

"Ah-huh." Well. Dude has food, Cam has reading material. What's it say?

Depends on what he wants to start with. Last week's edition of Egorian's largest newspaper? Imperial Betrayal? A History of the Empire of Cheliax, With Particular Reference To The Civil War Lately Occurring In That Nation? A child's theology primer? The memoirs of some dude named Pierre Mariano Ramon de Montserrat? 

Let's start with the child's theology primer, since he is new to this.

This one's from an Abadaran publishing house in Absalom, written "for the edification of young people intended for a mercantile career, so that they may become familiar with the beliefs and customs of other lands in which they may be required to have dealings."

Everyone agrees that the world was created by Pharasma, the goddess of birth and death, the anchor of reality, the sole survivor of her own long-dead universe. At the birth of creation, Pharasma willed into existence the inner and the outer spheres – the inner sphere comprising the Prime Material, Elemental, Astral, Ethereal, Shadow, and Positive and Negative Energy Planes, the outer comprising the planes associated with each possible combination of alignments on the axes of Good-Evil and Law-Chaos. She also created the eight oldest deities, though there's a fair amount of disagreement about which ones those are (though the authors feel strongly that Abadar is included). These days, of course, Pharasma occupies herself sorting the souls of the dead into the appropriate outer plane (Axis is best, but it's rude to say this some places and outright illegal in others, here's a list).   

Most of the rest of this book is about regional differences in the worship of major dieties of the inner sea region, if Cam's interested in that sort of thing. 

He is at least interested enough to skim that part quickly so he will recognize names as it comes up and know which ones are. Y'know. Evil.

Asmodeus! Zon-Kuthon! Norgober! Urgathoa! Lamashtu! Rovagug! 

Okay! Them's the evil ones!

Newspaper now.

The imperial army reports another great victory over the filthy rebels in Andoran! Here's a report of the battle. Here's a list of towns whose adult inhabitants have been put to the sword (the children, of course, will be taken in by loyal Chelish families). Here are the penalties for trying to avoid conscription. 

There was a fire in Corentyn's dock ward Oathsday last. Four warehouses were lost, but a navy wizard on leave was able to stop it before it took down half the city. 

This guy is advertising his magic items business. This other guy has good farmland convenient to the city for sale or rent. This other guy wants to sell some halfling slaves; here are descriptions, they're all healthy, fertile, and good workers. 

His Infernal Majesty, Infrexus Thrune, King of Cheliax, Archduke of Taldor, by leave of the great god Asmodeus protector of half a dozen other places, repaired to his country estate at Cornellà for the beginning of the fox-hunting season. 

There were three public executions for heresy and insurrection this week. Here's all the gory details, complete with illustrative woodcuts. Traitors should be grateful for such a death, which is still ten thousand times more merciful than the punishment awaiting them in Hell. 

Surely if... punishment awaits them in Hell... they should not be grateful for such a death... this would make more sense if they were being kept alive under awful conditions, probably?... whatever, this does look pretty icky. History of the Empire etcetera?

This is one of the ones with both censored and uncensored versions!

The uncensored version starts when Aspex the Even-Tongued, then the governor of the Taldane province of Cheliax, declared its independence and proceeded to take over most of the rest of Avistan. Cheliax became the greatest power in the inner sea, and the seat of the worship of Aroden, the god of humanity. About fifty years before this book was written, Aroden was supposed to return to Golarion and usher in a new age of glory. Instead, he died. This caused worldwide famine, opened up a permanent planar rift to the Abyss in the former nation of Sarkoria, created a permanent hurricane that still occupies a good chunk of western Garund, and plunged Cheliax into decades of bloody civil war. By the time Abrogail I of house Thrune made a compact with Asmodeus and seized power, thirty percent of the population was dead and the survivors were too exhausted to care. 

The censored version starts with the death of Aroden. The names of House Thrune's most prominent adversaries are elided. There is some interpolated moralizing about how Aroden's defeat by Asmodeus is proof that mortals who try to rise above their station will inevitably destroy themselves and everyone who ever trusted them. It is otherwise reasonably complete. 

What's the content of the compact, can he get that?

Nope.

"What's a halfling?" he asks his native guide.

He's alternating watching Atriama and casting Detect Magic at the apsel until his head can't take it. 

"Humanoid species, about so big, stereotypically cheerful and happy-go-lucky. I think they're nomadic normally? Most slaves in Cheliax are halflings." 

"How many sapient species are we talking about here?"

"Here in Galt or on Golarion or just in full generality?" 

"Uh, order of magnitude for each."

"In Galt – hmm, maybe a half-dozen I'd expect to run into regularly, many more I wouldn't be suprised by. Golarion could be tens or hundreds. Most of the planets in our star system are inhabited, I think? If you count the whole prime material all the inner and outer planes, my best guess is many millions."  

"...golly. Who're the half-dozen? You look like a human, are you?"

"I'm human, and humans are by far the most common species around here. We've also got halflings and half-elves – there are full elves, but they don't leave their forest much – and tieflings.  Sometimes dwarves and half-orcs and gnomes. At the moment we've got a bit of a hill giant problem but that's not normal, they're migratory. How many sapient species are there where you come from?" 

"Uh. Four. If we even count as separate, which we are in some practical respects but not like, psychologically."

"Huh. Just, what, humans and the three kinds of daeva? That's bizarre. If someone's going to go to all the trouble of creating a sapient species I don't see why they'd do it just once, or once per plane or however that works." 

"Nobody has claimed credit for creating any of us."

"Maybe they're shy." 

"I can't rule it out, though humans in particular do appear to have evolved."

"I'm not sure I'm getting the right sense of that. In my language, evolution means unrolling, or opening out – " 

"Oh, my bad. It means sort of the same thing as what people do when they breed dogs or wheat or whatever, except the environment, broadly construed, is doing the breeding, for whatever traits happen to work well in it, again broadly construed. Over millions of years."

"Why would the environment be breeding for anything in particular? Is that how all species where you're from came to be, or just humans? Do you know why life exists at all? I'd naively expect that a process like that would get lots of different sapients, like we have – dwarves are better suited for living underground, and merfolk are better suited for living underwater, and orcs are better suited for living in cold harsh places, why do you think it isn't like that?" 

"The environment isn't doing it on purpose, but if the squirrels in a certain valley benefit a lot from being able to jump and the squirrels in a different area benefit from being able to dig then after a long time you have two different sorts of squirrels. All the species. Yes but it's more complicated than I can trivially put into metaphor for you. Humans are actually very able to live in most places - not, admittedly, underwater, but they haven't existed as a species long enough for huge changes like that to achieve fixation in any subpopulations. There are human ethnicities but nothing that rises to the level of species. Some other species on Earth are pretty smart but don't happen to have cottoned on to a strategy of runaway selection for intelligence."

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense and one day twenty or thirty thousand years from now Hell will be destroyed and Élie will have time to think about it. 

"I have many many more questions but I don't think figuring this out is a high priority right now. Unless you know how to do evolution very quickly so we can make all our children clever enough to be wizards – though maybe we don't need wizards as much, with daeva – "

"Uh, no, I don't know how to do that very quickly."

"I wonder if Golarion humans can evolve, if we didn't come to be through evolution in the first place. It'd be awfully sad if we can't, it would be good for so many things if everyone could learn how to use magic. Do you think there's a way to test it? It's possible we did evolve and one or more gods are just lying about it – 

Sorry. Priorities." 

"I could investigate local human ancestry by conjuration, but, yes, priorities. What's important about this memoir you recommended, may I ask?"

"Oh, the de Montserrat? It's actually really extraordinarily boring. He was a courtier towards the end of Abrogail's reign and you'd think it'd be full of salacious details about orgies with devils, but it's all grown adults trying to have each other executed over what titles they're allowed to use. I'd only recommend bothering it if you're still on the fence about Asmodeanism, really, but if you are it's a terribly strong argument against. It's just the most petty, stupid, pointless people in the world devoting all the effort of their lives to making each other miserable, and that's what you get if you win. That's the best a good Asmodean can hope for, a few decades of that, and then you go to Hell. I had to read it in school when I was ten and I'm not sure it isn't why I'm a revolutionary." 

"...I haven't seen anything appealing in the philosophy at all, so maybe I'll save the time." Imperial Betrayal?

Imperial Betrayal is a series of fiery essays about the evils of the Thrune Empire! And the institution of monarchy! And the worship of non-ascended gods! Organized religion in general, really! All hierarchical relationships, in fact! Parenting may be ethically permissible but it's on thin ice. 

"I hope it does not come as a disappointment to you that I am not quite this radical in most practical situations."

"I hope it's clear I didn't give you this list with the expectation you'd agree with everything on it." 

Élie should probably figure out what the apsel does consider unacceptably radical. Maybe he'll vanish in disgust when he learns that Galt also has the death penalty. 

"Most Galtans are fine with religion and childbearing and monarchs, even. What sort of government does your home have?"

"Oh, I grew up in a representative democracy when I was alive but apsels by and large live in an anarchy."

"I want to go the Maelstrom when I die." 

"I regret to inform you that there is some chance you are now hooked into my afterlife system instead. Normally it catches everyone who was born on Earth but summoners are the ones who turn into daeva and you're now a summoner."

"Vast cosmic power sounds like a pretty good consolation prize! And anyway the thing where it's totally impossible to have power over other people is most of what I care about." 

"It's not totally impossible but it's so inconvenient that practically no one bothers outside of voluntary club organization type situations. But that's apsels, the other kinds are less anarchist."

"What determines who goes where?"

"I don't have a definitive answer to that. Most people are movers. I think it's some kind of loose personality sympathy with the class of magic, only as fuzzy as you'd expect from it being a tripartite division."

"If you can make raise dead diamonds I should probably kill myself, just to see what happens."  

"If you die I go back home and we don't know what happens with respect to future summonings in this universe, remember?"

"Fine, after we've done a more other experiments to see if we can summon other daeva and what happens when they're dismissed." 

"I guess if you want to perform this experiment after we have ascertained some other information I don't have much business stopping you but it does seem perhaps not decision-relevant today."

"It's going to matter eventually. If summoners on Golarion become daeva when they die then the most important thing we can do might be making sure every Evil person in the world is a summoner – more important than Cheliax, maybe, if it can be done."  

"...I see where you're coming from but this would mean that their Evil friends had extremely powerful indestructible daeva summonable at their convenience."

"Yeah, for this to work at all we'd have to be pretty careful about limiting knowledge of how summoning really works, or we might have to kill them all immediately afterwards or something."

"I am not currently convinced that this is the best option going forward but it's good to have it under consideration sooner than later, I guess."

"My own preference would be starting with Cheliax until we know more about how summoning interacts with my world's magic, at a minimum, but I think it's good to have one's ultimate goals in mind so we don't accidentally create obstacles for ourselves down the road. What else would you need to know to feel comfortable with that course of action?"

"Well, uh, what would happen to all the other people who live on the planet, for one."

"If we overthrow Cheliax?"

"Are we talking about overthrowing it now and not getting everyone there to perform a summoning? Uh, I'd want to know what Cheliax's current government would be replaced with."

"Most likely? Civil war. Galt is a republic" – or at least gesturing in that general direction – "and so is Andoran, and they'll help, but we don't have the resources to rule it. Even if we could hold the place together, it's going to be materially worse for almost everyone who lives there, while they still live. But, you know, significantly reduced chances of being tortured forever once they die, that's the trade." 

"...okay, so, uh, Earth having summoning, has also resulted in the end of material scarcity?"

"I still think war is almost always worse than peace, even if you can conjure enough food for everyone twenty times over. War with our kind of magic is very destructive – but, I suppose war with daeva would be too. I'm curious how handle that without making the planet uninhabitable. It seems important. 

Realistically, if we conquer Cheliax and subdue the dozen-odd warlords who'll spring up afterwards using your powers, I think you get to decide what we do with it." 

"I'm not going to say I have never fantasized about sticking a crown on my head but 'resentful evil civilly-warring citizenry' was not my best case scenario. I don't think I have the expertise for that."

Élie twitches. 

"I think there is a cultural misunderstanding. It sounded like you were concerned that the government Galt would put in charge of Cheliax might do things you'd disapprove of. But – in situations where you're responsible for our victory, we can't actually prevent you from making us do whatever you want. So if we did do anything you didn't like, we'd have to stop. ...It's also possible you don't have enough power to force our hand, but in that case I think we just lose the war anyway." 

"...I have a lot of power but not a lot of attention, I think I could easily be distracted by some other global event so I'd like things set up to work out without expecting my own indefinite availability. Also, you're my summoner. I'd have to get weird with it to force your hand."

Élie can't tell if this apsel is trying to be extremely threatening or if he's just confused. 

" – Can we try this again? I can't tell if you're trying to be extremely threatening or if I'm just confused." 

"Uh, quite likely we're both confused! I feel like both of us are trying to do different very large sets of things at once and that's never good for clarity. What's your top priority right now?"

"Short term, verifying your intentions and figuring out the scope of your abilities and how they interact with our magic system" and how to explain this situation to Lucien and Jean-Grégoire and the National Assembly. "Medium term, depending on how that goes, securing your aid in liberating Cheliax. Long-term liberating Hell but I've always assumed that would be a ten or twenty-thousand year project and I'd understand if you don't want to stick around."

"The reason you sound threatening right now is – okay, from my perspective, I asked you what concessions you'd want from my government in exchange for helping us with our Cheliax problem, you said you'd want Cheliax to be ruled according to your specifications, I told you I thought we wouldn't have the resources to do that, you said you could provide those resources but didn't specify what you wanted us to do with them, which in my culture is a way to communicate that you don't actually want us to know what you want so that you can retain the option of punishing us whenever you like without violating any explicit contract." 

"- oh. Uh, my culture doesn't... have... a that. No, I meant I could provide my resources in terms of things being materially not worse for the people in Cheliax? Like if they're by default going to starve or something. I also don't have specifications! I just want things to not suck, I'm very vague on what that means with these circumstances and these people."

"That's – comforting. For us, not telling people what you expect of them when you have them in your power is going to seem very, very hostile – maybe just formerly Chelish people, I don't know, I haven't met very many other kinds.

Could you make me some ink and paper? There are a lot of threads I want to follow up on here and I'm having trouble keeping all of them straight."  

Spiral notebook and a ballpoint.

Élie clicks the pen experimentally. Then another time. Then a lot more times. 

"How clever! The ink is kept inside the pen, and – oh, I see, it comes out through that little bearing in the nib, that's wonderful. I'm always spilling my ink over everything." 

"They write really smoothly too, in any direction. Enjoy."

Then in a few minutes Élie will have a list! Parts of it appear to be in code.  

1) Considerations relating to the scope and nature of the apsel's powers

     a) limitations on quantity of matter the apsel can conjure and distances at which they may conjure it

     b) use of matter conjured by apsels as spell reagents and components in -------

     c) ability of the apsel to conjure -----------

     d) can the apsel conjure living beings or reagents derived from living beings? 

     e) the same, as to outsiders 

     f) can the apsel only conjure books, papers, etc. which have been written, or may he create new works entire with adequate specification (i. e. "a list of spells prepared this morning by the              priestess Aspexia Rugatonn, etc etc") 

     g) can bodies conjured by the apsel be used to assist in the raising of the dead?

     h) devices and mechanisms known to the apsel. must these devices exist in physical form elsewhere in the universe to be conjurable? 

     i) may the means which afford the apsel his powers of conjuration be replicated through the conventional use of magic?

     j) the same, as to his invulnerability

     h) in what manner is the apsel constrained by the intent of the summoner?

2) Means by which those powers may be countered or enhanced with magic

     a) if the apsel's conjuration is blocked by --------- or ----------

     b) susceptibility of the apsel to enchantments and involuntary transmutations 

     c) spell resistance of the apsel

     d) if the apsel's native powers depend on one or more mental abilities. if enhancing this ability may render him more capable. 

     e) if means employed by wizards to heighten the potency, duration, and other qualities of their spells may be learned by the apsel

3) Effects of daeva on the society and economy of Earth; implications for Golarion of same

     a) how the end of material scarcity on Earth came about

     b) means by which the goods created by daeva are distributed

     c) means by which the planet is preserved from daeva or summoners with ill intent

     d) how the various peoples of Earth governed themselves, before and after the introduction of summoning. Whether humans are customarily governed by daeva. 

     e) how Golarion in the present day may be compared Earth shortly before the introduction of summoning, particularly with respect to the state of widespread tyranny and ignorance on our               unfortunate planet 

     f) if literacy is necessary to summon

     g) how many humans on Earth are summoners

     h) if only humans are capable of summoning daeva 

     j) likelihood of gods intervening to prevent or enable the summoning of daeva

4) Uses of daeva in warfare

      a) instances of warfare between armies with daeva from the history of Earth

      b) means by which daeva engage in conflict with each other

      c) how humans of Earth have managed to prevent the escalation of such conflict 

5) Interactions between summoning and the ordinary progress of souls to the outer planes 

     a) if daeva-summoners, native to Golarion, become daeva themselves upon their death

     b) if so, if they proceed to the ordinary plane of residence of such daeva or to their own appropriate outer plane

     c) if they may be summoned back to Golarion

     d) if outsiders can summon daeva. if an outsider summons a daeva, do they become a daeva in the event of their destruction? 

6) Additional considerations 

     a) if sapient species on Golarion are created or evolved

     b) what entities if any are responsible for the creation of daeva

     c) if the native planes of daeva may be accessed by ordinary means of inter-planar transport

     d) if daeva have ever before been summoned to Golarion. If not, why not. 

Cam peers over his shoulder. "I have a name. It's Cam. Do you have a name too?"

"Julien Camille Élie Cotonnet. ...Élie's fine." 

"Pleased to make your acquaintance. Do you need exact figures for 1a, or is 'I could make a planet in a few weeks' good enough for going on with?"

"I – that's – oh, that reminds me, I forgot one. Can you create extradimensional spaces?" 

"I have never tried but would bet heavily against."

"Huh. With our kind of magic, creating extradimensional spaces is roughly the same type of thing as creating matter, and making a pocket dimension would be much easier than making a planet. Can you also create small things at planetary distances? Actually – "

He adds to the list: 

1 l) what information is necessary to conjure items in particular locations (coordinates? "so and so's bedroom"? line of sight? do scries work?)

m) can apsels conjure items to other planes? 

"I need a distance and a heading, or, not exactly line of sight but somewhere between that and proprioception, I can land something in my hand behind my back no problem. If the distance and heading is wrong this can and will result in things appearing inside other things. I suspect scries don't work but this is based on the closest technological equivalent to what I am understanding from that word. Uh, live stuff is a yes but with the limit that nothing I make will be very smart - so my bugs are normal, my plants are normal, my dogs will not learn any tricks or even reliably eat on their own, etcetera, might work fine for raising the dead if you're importing the smart from their immaterial soul by magic. Outsiders not sure, might be too magical but I could maybe conjure their material forms as applicable with some materials swapped in. No new works modulo some technological this-and-that which would be a whole new can of worms to explain. I can make things that don't exist if I know what I'm doing and to that end I have some engineering background but I can only get so cute with that. A lot of devices are known to me, though, like a lot a lot. No guess on items i and j. In this particular situation not at all except that you could send me home. Followup on that or should I move to section 2?"

"You can't make magic things? Actually, how would you know if your world doesn't have non-daeva magic?" 

Magic items are 1c on the list, just in case Cam turns out to be evil. Élie doesn't think he can realistically hide that they exist, but at least he doesn't have to suggest it. 

"It might be that I can copy some magic things, but if I make, say, a copy of me, not only will it not be smart, it also won't be indestructible, and if I imagine a magic thing I can't make it show up magic."

"Hmm. Try conjuring an exact replica of my spellbook?"

Spellbook?

Élie looks through it. 

"It's empty! That's what I expected, the book itself is perfectly ordinary but the ink is magical." 

"Huh." Spellbook with the ink replaced by normal nonmagical ink?

Goes through. 

"It worked. ....that opens up a very large number of options."

Élie takes the duplicate book and starts cutting out every page with an inscription and lighting them on fire. It's not like there's anything worth copying, but the idea of someone else looking at his spellbook feels like as much of a violation as looking at his thoughts. 

"...is there a reason you're not just burning the book entire?"

"The spell I'm using only makes a very little flame – like so." He demonstrates. "Besides, if I made too much smoke the landlady would be after me for wasting fuel." 

"Ah." Cam takes the book back and disintegrates it into a pile of papery dust, which he catches in a paper bag and hands to Élie.

"...can you do that to anything?" 

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Even magical things?"

"Haven't tried. It wouldn't work on another daeva."

"Do you think you could do it to many things at once? Could you do it precisely enough to target a helmet or a cloak without killing the person wearing it?"

He's adding items to the list. 

"As long as I could pay attention to them all I guess? Not reliably if the person were moving, though I probably wouldn't do worse than nick their ear or miss a bit of the cloak or something, I do have practice with precise targeting for medication delivery. If they were holding still sure."

"And what was the thing you just did? I can tell it's conjuration, but I can't think of a conjuration spell that would do a thing like that." 

"Oh, I was conjuring extremely small amounts of air in between all the parts of the book. It's called interpolation."

"That's fascinating – probably our wizards could figure out a spell for that. – I'm getting distracted again. There are people who are more qualified than me to figure out all the theory implications." 

"But are they going to try to read my mind, is the question."

"I'm trying to figure out who to tell about you first in order to ensure you won't happen. – That's wrong, I'm trying to figure out who to tell about you first in order to make it most likely you'll feel disposed to collaborate with us, making sure nobody tries to read your mind is an important consideration there but not the only one."

Lucien is the obvious choice. Lucien always keeps his word, Lucien is as honest as the day is long, Lucien radiates goodness so intensely Élie sometimes wonders why the Inheritor didn't choose him when they were both fourteen – but Lucien's so paranoid, these days. And there are rather a lot of people who'd hold it against Élie if he told Lucien without telling them. Enough that he'd be hard-pressed not to make it all public. And of course he trusts the public – the People – to advocate for their own interests, to grow in reason, to rise up under the heavy burden of government – but not to keep their mouths shut. Élie's no good at it himself. And Cheliax can't know. 

"Should we in fact be... here? We could, like, go somewhere that is not currently experiencing this historical event, come back later with some more stuff sorted out."

" – I'd also like to see you answer some questions under a truth spell."  

"This doesn't work by reading my mind at all?"

"Just makes you temporarily unable to lie." 

"...yeah, okay. Modulo reasonable durations of 'temporarily' and being able to refuse to answer if you start to ask me weirdly personal questions."

"I can't cast this spell myself. That's why I need to decide who else to bring in." 

Cam doesn't need to know that zone of truth is a second circle spell and that Élie's pathetic. 

"Ah. Is this the sort of thing where you want to decide on it without any input from me?"

"Well, it mostly depends on political considerations you have no context on." 

"Gotcha. Any more reading recommendations so I can leave you be while you mull that over?"