In dath ilani fiction economicmagic is a completely separate type of alternatephysics from faster-than-light travel but presumably real life doesn't follow dath ilani tropes.

"Is that how you got here?"

"Presumably. I didn't actually come here on purpose, but I must have accidentally landed somewhere I wasn't supposed to be because your government immediately started trying to kill me." (She gives no indication that she finds this unacceptable. Someone who somehow managed to teleport into the Imperial Palace past the Forbiddance would absolutely be Maledicted and killed on sight. Someone who did that in Osirion would probably also have very little chance of surviving it, even if they wouldn't be Maledicted.)

He's—not actually that surprised, that Civilization would murder innocent people to protect its secrets. It's not the sort of thing he actually wanted confirmation of, but.

"Ugh. And I suppose you're why they panicked and melted all the computers."

"I don't know what a 'computer' is. Is it related to building some kind of nonmagical version of a 'god'?" She's using the Taldane word.

"What the ass is a 'god'."

She explains this.

Oh.

Kalorm is rather neurodivergent for a dath ilani, but he still grew up there, and aside from his peculiar learning disability he's actually fairly smart. It's obvious, now, what his father couldn't tell him, what secret Civilization has been keeping that they'd kill to protect. The worst part is that he can't even argue with the moral logic of it.

"Yes. Yes, it is."

—and if they pressed the button to destroy all computers, they must have (falsely, but perhaps reasonably) concluded that someone who wasn't them had built an Artificial Intelligence of their own.

Specifically, his father. Because that's actually what he was trying to do, wasn't it—rightly not trusting that Civilization would create a being that would build the best Future for their family—

"I think my family is also wanted for something they didn't do right now," he says. "I need to warn them—"

This person appears to be Chaotic Good. That's—going to get incredibly annoying, eventually, but Chaotic Good people are also stunningly easy to manipulate. And his family, to whom he's loyal in spite of presumably enormous ideological differences, is part of a conspiracy to take over this planet by building their own god using 'computers', whatever those are.

They sound like useful allies, at least until she gets her bearings well enough to find the true center of power on dath ilan and strike at it.

"I could try a Sending?" she offers.

"How does that work?"

"It's a learnable-economicmagic-ability of the fifth topological-degree-of-complexity" okay it's objectively reasonable for their language to not have short words for magic stuff but this is still annoying "that sends a message of up to 25 words to a creature familiar to the caster—I'm not actually sure it would work, you typically have to have at least seen a person to get a Sending through to them." She starts the casting anyway; it takes ten minutes and she can always cancel it.

"What's it like to receive one, for someone who's never done that before? Are they authenticated?"

"Like hearing a voice that isn't coming from anywhere in particular. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'authenticated' but you can recognize the sender if you know them—that would be me, the 'spell' itself can't verify that the message would originally be coming from you, if that's what you're asking. In—where I'm from we would sometimes use passwords, random words that we'd add to the beginning or end of a message that it would be hard for someone else to guess. You'd have to have set that up in advance, though."

"Yeah, we've thought at all about establishing-trusted-communciations-over-an-untrusted-channel* but if it has to be in-band that's going to eat some of the apparently precious bandwidth. How the ass are 'words' a meaningful unit of—nevermind, conceptualmagic, right. Anyway, I'm trying to decide whom to send it to—my oldest brother is probably already looking for me but he'll turn you in. My father is the one I trust most not to do that but he's probably already at or on his way to our safe-place and if he leaves now he'll alert Governance to where it is. I suppose we could try one of my other siblings, or—

"How does your instantaneous travel thing work?"

*Three-syllable word in Baseline.

"Greater Teleport, seventh 'circle', instantly transports me and up to five other willing" or unwilling with insufficient Will saves but there's no reason to mention that "people to any point on the same planet that I can identify unambiguously. I can cast up to six seventh-'circle' 'spells' per day and have so far used two."

"Does it destroy the body and reconstruct it elsewhere or does it transport you through a higher-dimensional space with non-planar geometry such that distances are shorter than in our 3-space?" He does not really trust that the former thing is not 'death'.

"It transports you through the Ethereal Plane. I have no idea what the fuck you just said but between those two things it's probably the second one?"

"How 'unambigously' do you need to identify the destination?" Can she just...teleport into their secret base.

Yes, but only because he thought about it while she was reading his mind.

She doesn't say this.

"If it's a place you haven't been, either a picture, or an address, or a point on a map, or something like that. It can't be used to find secret places unless people are very bad at keeping secrets and it can't be used to test whether a place exists." All true, but, see above.

Okay. He should probably, like, think about this at all.

(Kalorm is Chaotic, but he's not actually that low-WIS, especially by the standards of a place that isn't dath ilan.)

The most likely possibility is probably still that he's hallucinating. Unfortunately, he doesn't even have a way to test this while out in the woods a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement. He could—ask the woman to teleport him somewhere there are people—and then tsi-imbi, and if he never experiences leaving the woods, then it's probably because teleportation isn't real, and if he hallucinates the teleportation too—well, he doesn't actually think his brain can generate a convincing version of his father or any of his siblings. The most sensible thing to do is to teleport to Khemeth, but Khemeth will turn her over to Governance to be killed because he's the sort of person who—prioritizes avoiding tiny risks of massive downsides over real people who actually exist—

—how sure is he that there isn't, in fact, a massive downside risk here?

Dath ilani are pretty well primed to understand that even aliens who superficially look human may not actually share much or any of human values. Kalorm doesn't read much fiction, but even he gets that. Why is he failing to realize it here?

—because she's incredibly hot? No, he doesn't really think that's it. It's not that she isn't, mind, but that hasn't typically been something that unendorsedly influences his decisions, and she's not his type anyway. He's not one of those people who sees one attractive person and has their standards permanently ruined; a not-insignificant part of the reason he took to spending almost all of his time in the wilderness was so that he didn't have to deliberately make himself uglier to accommodate people like that.

—because she spun some story about being a fugitive from murderous Governance that she could have just made up? It's true that he has no evidence for this but her own word, but—the average dath ilani would hear that story and probably assume that Governance had good reason, and if they believed that the Keepers had approved the killing (almost certainly true here) they'd pull the trigger themselves, and he—doesn't want to be one of those people.

But maybe it's, like, worth figuring out why they might have wanted to kill her, even if this is objectively a horrible thing to do?

Obviously they're scared. He knows that he's not as scared as he should be; the possibilities surrounding scalable artificial intelligence are still unfolding in the background of his mind, and he sees, now, why the Keepers thought it worthwhile to utterly remake Civilization around the goal of just buying enough time to survive it, even if he doesn't necessarily agree. And if, as he suspects, this woman accidentally teleported into their top-secret AI research lab, then of course the people there would have been especially primed to believe they were being attacked by a hostile superintelligence, the sort of thing that probably couldn't be defeated at all but, if it could, would require them to utterly destroy anything that had come in contact with it with no thought for collateral damage in the worlds where it didn't even exist. He doesn't actually have any doubt that, if one were to shut up and multiply about it, the number at the bottom of the 'kill her' column would be larger.

Does that make it right? Obviously not. But he isn't debating whether or not to kill her, which he really doubts he could do anyway. What—is he debating? Whether to accept her freely offered help. What, exactly, are the possible downsides there?

Whatever gave her her powers is obviously throwing around a lot of computing power. If even a small fraction of that power is devoted to optimizing against dath ilan, they've already lost no matter what he does. Even in the worlds where it's just her, of approximately-human intelligence, but secretly evil—well, he doesn't want to make her privy to any secrets, but he wasn't going to do that anyway. She's the one with the magic powers. Her helping him doesn't grant her any new levers. It's just her helping him.

"One more question about Sending. Does it transmit actual sound, or just the impression of hearing that sound inserted into your brain?"

"Other people can't hear it."

The latter, then. Of course, without any understanding of the underlying phenomenon, one has to assume that something that can insert the sensation of hearing words into your brain can also be doing arbitrary other things to your brain. But—if she could in fact mind-control people from a distance, she would be doing that to the Chief Executive or the head Keeper already, and the problem with the teleportation plan is that all of his family's residences are going to be swarmed with Security, and teleporting into a public place is likely to be even worse on that front. They'd be safe at his family's secret base, but he's not taking her there.

"Do a Sending to my brother Khemeth. I'll dictate the wording. In the end he's the best person to contact about this, and I think I can persuade him not to turn you in—if I'm wrong, well, you can teleport."

(Even he's seen that episode of Science Maniac Verrez.)

(Abrogail has never heard of Science Maniac Verrez, but she does have something in common with the villain thereof who gave that advice.)

Some time later Khemeth gets a Sending:

"Watermelon interval redistribute. This is Kalorm speaking through a proxy. Requesting pickup at [coordinates]. Do not alert authorities. There are decision-theoretic considerations-too-complicated-to-be-explained-over-this-channel.*"

*A single word in Baseline.

Not very far away, Khemeth, currently flying a helicopter low over the trees while his sisters scan for any sign of Kalorm, suddenly startles.

"Tsi-imbi," he says. "I just experienced a female voice claiming to be a proxy for Kalorm and knowing his verification passwords, requesting pickup at [coordinates]."

     "I didn't experience it but given current circumstances I don't think that's actually much evidence of it not being real," says Mallor.

"That doesn't mean it's not a trap. If it can write to my brain it could also have read Kalorm's passwords out of there."

          "If it is Kalorm we can't just leave him," says Ranthir.

     "Obviously not, but we should send Exception Handling to the coordinates rather than going ourselves."

"The message said not to involve authorities for complicated decision-theoretic reasons."

          "Okay, that's a trap."

"So if I had to guess, I'd say Kalorm met the person actually responsible for whatever made the Keepers panic and melt all the computers, and now he doesn't want her to get arrested because she managed to convince him she did nothing wrong. She might even be telling the truth, but—Kalorm isn't even cleared to know about the risks we're dealing with here."

     "So should I call Exception Handling?"

"No. I don't actually want to incentivize Kalorm against telling me stuff—the alternative is that he'd still be out there with Omega-knows-what, and we'd have no idea about it. I suspect that's what he meant by complicated decision-theoretic reasons, even though that's not quite how decision theory works.

"What I'm going to do is I'm going to land at the nearest heliport, leave you two, and go get him myself, and if I'm not back in the expected amount of time, then you call Exception Handling."

And he does this.