Unfortunately I'm not allowed to give you that.

Yep, whoever set up this system sure can die in a fire.

Warning that this conversation has now gone on long enough that it may start causing adverse effects soon. If you don't have anything more urgent than this, I'd like permission to retrieve otherwise-True-Dead people from dath ilan to Heaven, and create clerics here—once you have clerics you'll be able to resurrect people, if they'd rather not stay in Heaven.

"That's not my decision, mostly—only the Legislators can make decisions like that, and I think they'll want more independent sources of information before approving that. I can grant temporary authorization to retrieve the otherwise-True-Dead, unless the Legislators rescind it later, if you can swear to a few things about what Heaven is like and that people can choose to stop existing instead if they'd rather do that. And I'd also like you to swear to the truth and non-misleadingness of everything you said to Athpechya."

She can do that.

And the connection ends.

pop(location);

He lands, climbs out of the helicopter, and surveys the scene.

"Kalorm, you absolute dumbass*."

*With the tone marker indicating 'affectionate, but still genuinely quite irritated'.

"I fail to see how any of this is my fault."

"Did you consider," he says, in one of their father's conlangs that no one outside their family should understand, "that people with unknown mind-affecting powers might in fact be dangerous, and if Exception Handling wanted her it was for a reason?"

(Tongues: lol.)

"How the ass do you know that's even slightly what's going on."

"It's obvious if you understand decision theory."

He resists the urge to punch his brother in the face.

"They were going to kill her," he says, "because she landed by accident in the middle of their top-secret AI research lab that apparently no one was allowed to tell me about."

"Shit," says Khemeth, and then more intensely, "Shit!"

"If she landed there 'by accident' from her own perspective that is in fact worse than if she went there on purpose. Do you need me to explain why?"

"...no."

Sigh. "What...other alternatephysics-abilities does she have, to your knowledge?"

"She can teleport."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

"I suppose," he says, "that at this point killing her would not even help, and we ought to just preserve-as-much-value-as-possible-in-those-worlds-where-we-aren't-already-completely-fucked*."

He thinks for a moment.

"Take the helicopter back to the heliport and pick up Mallor and Ranthir," he tells Kalorm, "then bring them back here. They're supposed to call Exception Handling if I'm not back in a certain amount of time, and I'm afraid this is going to take longer than that."

*A one-syllable word in Baseline.

He does this, only a little reluctantly.

He turns to the woman. Doesn't draw any of the obvious inferences from her appearance—if she's an alien, presumably this isn't her real appearance, and was optimized for—something, she's incredibly attractive according to his mental models of people who are attracted to women, which obviously you'd do if you could pick your appearance and were trying to optimize over whoever you were talking to—and the style of her clothing suggests something in the vicinity of 'supervillain', which—is meant to optimize over his family specifically? Lots of people would describe his father as a supervillain, especially if they knew what he was really up to, but he doesn't really go in for the whole aesthetic of it.

(Her clothes are distinctly low-quality, which is a small point against the theory that everything about her appearance was carefully optimized.)

—he's way too gay to be sexually attracted to her, but there's still something—magnetic—about her—he's going to assume this is mind control. He's not a Keeper and cannot just tell the effect to stop that, but he can try to correct for it.

"Welcome to dath ilan," he says to her in Baseline, which she apparently somehow speaks. "—you are in fact not from dath ilan? I'm Khemeth."

(He does in fact have the second-highest level of First Contact certification, and would have been one of a few thousand people paged if Civilization had correctly deduced that that was the thing happening, for all that he is not at all representing Civilization right now.)

—that's very nearly the name of the pharaoh of Osirion. Which fact probably wouldn't even rise to the level of her attention if she hadn't already met 'Athpechya', but this man does look a bit like the Ruby Prince, if one ignores the bright red hair.

Is this entire world just composed of absurd Lawful Good versions of people from Golarion???

At least this version of him presumably does not have magically enhanced Sense Motive, or a +6/+6/+6 headband, although it doesn't appear from reading people's INT scores that this planet needs that particular enhancement anyway.

"I am not. Abrogail Thrune, Chief Executive" she drops the 'hereditary' from the compound word that Tongues wants to use for 'Queen' in this language, Good people sometimes don't like hereditary monarchies "of Cheliax, in Golarion." On reflection it might not be the best possible idea to tell people she is/was the Queen of Cheliax, in case they do ever manage to contact Golarion and figure out what that means, but how are they going to do that without magic, and she does not actually want to test 'Khemeth's' Sense Motive. "Well, formerly. I don't expect I'll ever go back."

She had some sort of reaction to his—name? Almost like she recognized him, and was surprised by it, which—makes very little sense in combination with her supposedly being an alien. It's a point in favor of her lying about that, actually—his name isn't widely known but it has ever appeared in a newspaper.

(His innate social senses are of course parsing her as human, which she almost certainly isn't, but it's not as though he can turn his intuition off and it's still information in some narrow slice of worlds.)

"Is this your natural appearance?" he asks. He's not expecting her answer to be particularly informative—she'll probably say yes either way, and the worlds where that would be a lie are precisely the worlds where he doesn't expect to be able to tell that she's lying, but he asks anyway. At a certain level, the whole idea of having a conversation is premised on the other party's responses having some consistent relationship to their model of reality, even if he has to also mentally track the world where they don't.

She's claiming to be the Chief Executive of—some faction on her world? If his intuitions are valid, she's not lying about that.

"The clothes are an illusion because your government took mine, and I've had some—beauty treatments—done, but if you're asking whether I'm human, I am. I don't understand it either—there are humans on many planets in Golarion's vicinity, but to my knowledge we originated on Golarion and I'm not sure how you would have gotten here without economicmagic. Possibly your conceptualmagic-superintelligences are just uncreative."

—the presence of superintelligences isn't actually an update. If economicmagic and conceptualmagic existed without something superintelligent behind them, that would in fact be way weirder.

Still, aaaaaaaah.

Faster-than-light travel is if anything a positive update: if there's no causal speed limit, then anything that wanted to eat dath ilan would have done so a long time ago. He'll leave musing about further implications of that to the Keepers.

"Humans on dath ilan were not, to the best of our knowledge, created by any intelligence." Admittedly if they had that might be the sort of thing you screen history about. "Do you know if any of your world's—conceptualmagic-superintelligences—might be responsible for your appearance here, and if so, which?"