"An unaging and highly durable animal or similar who's interested in working with me, though it seems potentially problematic to create a being from scratch who wants to work with me. Something like the 'illusion projector' I used to have access to, which allowed me to by an act of will instruct it to display an image of my choice – uh, I could give you specifications on wavelengths and intensity if you want that but I'd have to look things up, or I could get you some writeups and spell diagrams for Minor Image, or both, and honestly tactile illusions would also be of interest if those make more sense. I can list more things like that, which I used to have and I miss. Going less precedented, just listing some desiderata that I don't expect you to be able to fulfill, but you did ask: Prevention of the negative effects of Negative Energy exposure and Positive Energy overdose. Impersonating Negative Energy myself so as to hijack the god Charon's wearing. Gaining the capacity to request and receive prophecies without serious negative side effects. A full, sane copy of the goddess Aiyuna or some other deity in my faction, or Kenchlo, or any instance of Shyka the Many. Anything related to time travel, especially defensively. Shall I go on?"

"It might be possible to summon Aiyuna, I expect that'd be easier than copying."

"For clarity, I'm unwilling to open my door, which I suspect would make this prohibitively difficult. I'd accept a summoned Aiyuna, she might be doing something important, but I'm going to interrupt things anyway in what I really doubt will be more than seconds for her, so."

"When traveling between universes, we haven't previously used doors, but it's possible Aiyuna isn't retrievable if time isn't passing or that she's too big or that we can't reach Suaal or that you can't describe her unambiguously enough or that she has very inconvenient senses or that she won't fit or that she'll be too expensive to maintain."

"She has very inconvenient senses but has also engaged effectively with sensory hazards in the past. …but my risk tolerance for restarting time or for her sanity is approximately nil, so even if I can specify her well and she'd probably be fine this still may not be a good option."

"...That makes sense."

"Anyway, if you can't get an Aiyuna you really probably can't get a Kenchlo, even if I don't need him alive so much as readable, he was killed by a very powerful daemon specifically trying to destroy the information he had. Also I kind of owe him bringing him back alive, he got killed for defecting to us and he'd probably love Bar. And Shyka are on the wrong side of a Seal that among other things interferes heavily with information handling. I just figured I might as well list some highly unrealistic stuff."

"I don't think I can make that happen but it doesn't feel highly unrealistic. Is rescuing Kenchlo what you want time travel for?"

"I want anti-time-travel countermeasures, mostly, it’s a known divine capability if they’re fighting. I expect I can get Kenchlo back if my side wins without your magic's aid."

"I would be surprised if the magic can help with that, yeah. Are there entities that are like Aiyuna but less strategically essential who could be test subjects just in case it'd actually work great to try to retrieve them?"

"Hmm. There's giant bird entities who are sort of like Aiyuna but sleep with humanlike frequency and aren't strategically essential, but they're very expensive to feed and probably not interested in working with us and I don't really know where to find them. There's entities which are made of some of the same kinds of stuff Aiyuna is made of, but are much weaker, and some of them sleep, and probably the sleeping ones aren't in the middle of anything really important right now. I don't know if you can just search for, say, 'any sleeping entity that is a ball of light and made of such-and-such materials'."

"Maybe. What does it mean for an entity to be a ball of light?"

"There is a physical light-emitting substance that they are made of, and they are roughly spherical in form. Their substance is somewhat spongelike in response to pressure. I can get you more details on the substance but I'll need to look them up."

"I bet we can look for them but if they're that different from humans I'll also need to know more about how they sleep."

Griffie will have to consult with Bar about documentation but expects it exists, and says as much.

There are published texts on Lantern Archon biology.

However, Winlas's attitude towards accessibility skews more towards providing tools and assistants than to having everything be intrinsically accessible to everyone. Why should a library that overwhelmingly caters to flying patrons have a space-inefficient quantity of floors and staircases when it could just contain an accessibility lift? Similarly, there is no systematic effort by Winlas or other leaders of Upper Planes libraries to produce editions of texts that are nonmagically readable without eyesight.

Discretization efforts aren't complete as of the time Griffie left Elysium for Milliways, but have made some decent headway. It is possible to shove a text stream from those efforts into a tactile display, which Bar can offer as a loan. But this raises some issues: the relatively cheap tactile display option is still expensive as nobody here is from a world with its tech level (only relevant if it breaks or is stolen, but still), and contains an annoyingly small number of 8-dot matrices. Which it's possible to render Celestial in, there are bored linguists and 2⁸ is a decent number of characters, but it might not feel the most natural to read.

Alternately, Griffie can read a text aloud atouch to Val.

Val gets a piece of string and Griffie gets a napkin conveying this.

Griffie reads eir note and starts talking to Val once he's read his. "There's a third option here, which is that you borrow my magic ring that lets me talk with subjective sound into your head and I relay my computing tablet reading a book to you, but that for various technical reasons will briefly increase my living expenses, and you might not like it because of your past experiences with information from magic. And I suppose also an option where I just summarize the text for you instead of you getting the full text."

"Being able to transmit information that way sounds spectacularly useful if it's safe."

"It's been safely used on other humans with similar neurology to you and it shouldn't communicate anything if I don't send messages to it. I'm going to have to sleep 6 hours longer and get a lot more of some combination of light and sugar for each day I'm not wearing it plus seven days once I put it back on, but if it sounds spectacularly useful to you it's probably worth 42 productive hours and change for me to loan it to you. Also, this offer is only open if you consent to being prevented from stealing or destroying it."

"Prevented how?"

"Physical force applied by me, or security if they feel like handling it, if you try to leave my sight or Bar with the ring? I'm good at not causing lasting injuries and I'd heal you up afterwards if you did manage to get something that wouldn't be resolvable with a good night's sleep. Security's generally even better than I am."

"That sounds like more hassle than renting something from Bar."

"Bar can't sell or rent magic items like my ring. If you want to buy a machine to implant inside your head I think there are some for toggleable hearing, but those aren't for rent, they're single-user. If you want to propose some alternate set of conditions to assure me about the custody of my ring you're free to."

"Nah, I just want the tech one - hey, do I have to pay up front even if I'm going to return it later?" he asks Bar.

"No, it'll just go on your tab if you don't return it."