A barefoot man with no eyes walks in and is immediately perplexed by the flooring. He pauses to examine it and then, still confused, signs, "Lia? You around?"

Griffie has interacted with one (1) deafblind humanoid, namely a temporarily cursed party member who was, conveniently, wearing a ring so ey could receive communication over the message spell telepathically. It would be incredibly invasive and presumed-hostile to put a magic ring on someone without talking to them, and also somewhat expensive in that their telemessage ring is also their Ring of Sustenance, and it would actually also constitute touching them. Might as well try tactile sign, it's not actually less weird.

Someone is signing against Val's hand. It feels strange but is nonetheless easy to parse. Their hand is much smaller than that of an adult human, no real fingernails, what feels like clipped spines on it, is unusually cool to the touch, and has a waxy texture. "Lia is not around. I am a stranger to you and you are at a magic bar who is a person and takes doors."

"...What. How did I get into a magic bar?"

The hand is not really warming up even on extended contact with Val's, though it's not draining much heat either.

"Sometimes, when a person goes through a door, instead of going where they would expect to go, they go to a magic bar named Milliways. Time in the place you are from does not usually pass while you are in Milliways, as long as you plan to go back. If your door is in a safe location, you can hold it and invite your friends to visit, too. There is an infirmary staffed adequately to heal acute injuries people enter with and a security office staffed adequately to prevent violence in the main bar area, where we are."

"...Would you say this is an entire universe too small to fit a planet maintained by an inhuman power against the encroaching tide of nonexistence and populated by refugees from the lost world, and would you say it's friendly?"

"I would say she's friendly and this is a small universe of unclear size. You could probably evacuate people into it as quickly as you could walk them through the door if you could rent rooms for them to stay in, but the rooms aren't free. If you're considering it you should probably invite more people in to talk to her if it's safe. Usually when refugees come through here they try to find people who will let them follow into their universes." A pause. "You can't come to mine, mine is a mess that is about to explode when I open my door."

"Mine is stable, it's just small and alone and there aren't enough people to know all the things we'd need to know to maintain the kind of tech we could maintain if we had more people. - Well, it's not stable, really, but it's in an equilibrium. You hoping for a place to move?"

"No, planning to accumulate power and resources and go violently rescue it. I'm unaging and I work at the infirmary here, so I have a while. Want me to show you to Bar so you can take a seat and talk to her? She might start having floor markings for you eventually but probably not while we're standing on it. She usually talks with spontaneously appearing napkins, she can almost certainly do texture instead of color writing."

"She can write? The magic thing that maintains the universe? Can write things and you can read them? Is that related to why we can understand each other?"

"We can understand each other thanks to a language effect of hers. And yes, she can write things and I can read them. She also sells books and species-appropriate food and drink and maintains an atmosphere both of us can breathe even though the gases I breathe are inert to most people. She isn't the sole maintainer, she says she works for someone else and they operate the door, but they can't be found or contacted and she can."

"Huh. Books would be very nice, I can go bring some to trade if that's the done thing here."

"If you leave and don't have someone else from your world hold the door, then when you come back it will be a normal door. So when you open your door, you should probably call someone over. If that's hard I can play some probably-strange music very loudly with a tool through your door? The bar has copies of almost all published books. She'll take anything of market value – some worlds use rare metals, some worlds use fiat currency, some do something more exotic, and some people pay in various forms of barter. If you want barter to personally appeal to her, she's a fan of beverages and recreational intoxicants? Doesn't consume them herself that I know of, though.

"Thanks. I think I'll take you up on that - uh, if I have you help summon the government, is it going to be a problem that they can see, or for that matter that they're the government?"

“Both of those sound convenient. I can also see.”

"Is everything here except the mysterious imperceptible door entity safe to look at, then? And hear and touch and smell and so on?"

"Everything here is safe to use senses on right now. Is your world not like that? My world has parts that are not like that but it's rare. Sometimes there are people who do not want to be touched, or who do not want their possessions touched, and might react badly, but right now it's just me and Bar."

"Yeah, there's - I don't know what you can sense - you don't want to see the magic but it's inside the mountains, you can't get to it without someone warning you, and in general humans can't hear it from here, but if you can that would be bad."

"I have some exotic senses but they go out to 60 feet. Are the mountains more than 60 feet away? I have better hearing than the average human, I don't know how I am compared to the best human. I can wear earplugs just in case."

"The mountains are farther than that but a mage who's carrying magic around might come that close, or someone might use magic that close. Humans do usually need to be touching a mage to notice anything but you haven't said what your extra senses are."

"I can sense some spirits and souls out to 60 feet, though a lot of worlds have spirits and souls incompatible with it."

"That's the kind of thing that might be a problem. It might also not be, and it's sometimes possible to notice that you're perceiving the magic too clearly before it's too late but you do need very good reflexes if you're going to rely on that and I don't know how quickly you'd go mad from some sense I've never heard of before. But it's completely possible there's no problem for any of several reasons. Do you happen to be backed up?"

"No. But I can borrow a tool from Bar for you to play music with if you press a button, then wait in the bathroom until you call me over? Or Bar can send messages to my computing tablet and I can go even further away. If you walk while touching the wall to the right of the door, the wall and floor will start being large square ceramic tile instead of wood, the wall will make some turns, and then you're in the bathroom."

"That sounds like a good idea. And I suppose it'd be silly to ask you whether the music is safe, if you didn't think so you wouldn't offer, and it's not like you needed my informed cooperation at all. - Unrelatedly, are you or Bar selling blueprints for computing tablets?"

"Bar sells blueprints for lots of computing machines, but tablets like mine have so many fancy tiny parts that they take lots of factories to make. Bar can likely recommend you a better starting point than this. The music should be safe, does a simple pattern of a few pure tones seem safe to you?"

"I assume so? I wouldn't really know. I don't even know what makes a tone pure. I didn't even know there were such things as impure tones until you implied it just now."

"Do you know what a sine wave is?"

"Yeah. And I know that sounds are vibrations. I can maybe guess what you would mean in theory but I don't have any idea what it'd sound like in terms of any qualities that'd determine people's responses."

"Oh. It's safe for me and for the humans I've met. I'm going to go to Bar to ask to borrow a device, do you want to come with me? She's about 10 feet away."

"No, I'm irrevocably attached to this exact spot, can't you see my roots already starting to wreck the floor? Ten entire feet? No, that is far, far harder than merely traveling to other universes."

Griffie walks to Bar, holding onto Val's hand in a way that he could trivially resist if he tried. If he cooperates, ey puts his hand on a cushion at around chair height and a flat wooden surface at a highish table height, then lets go, causes the floor to move a potentially-noticeable bit, then reaches for his hand from a different angle that suggests ey's sitting on a cushion like the one ey showed Val.

"Hello, Bar," he says, then runs his hands over her.

(In Sathend it's expected and normal to touch everything and everyone. He's being gentler than he would with most furniture, but firm enough that humans mostly wouldn't get ticklish and uncomfortable. He uses his hand rather than his foot to check for supports under the countertop and doesn't try to feel the far side. This is not the level of respect he would normally show a strange table.)

The countertop has solid supports. The wood grain on the countertop and supports can somewhat be felt, though it's beneath a well-maintained finish. The supports have some decorative carvings which are plausibly some stylized renderings of flowering plants. Also, on his second pass over a countertop area he already touched, there's a thin delicate-feeling paper tube with some ridges at the ends, with small knots that would be a pain for a human to tie without tearing it, reading "Hi Val".

Aw. He pats Bar and waits for the other entity to finish up.

There is now another piece of writing (this one on food-grade twine), reading "In addition to selling products, I also offer each visitor one free beverage, and as much free water as they'd like to drink. This offer does not expire if unused."

And after a short pause, Griffie hands Val a boxy metallic and plasticky device with a handle and a button.

"What exactly do I do with this?"

"You tell me you're ready. I go to the bathroom. You carry the device on your person, open the door without leaving Bar, hold the device through the door, press the button, and wait. If there's a problem related to the device, you press the button again to turn the device off. Then once people show up, or it's been implausibly long for people to not show up and you think there's a problem, you set the device on Bar and find me in the bathroom."

He does that! Some time later he fetches em back to introduce em to an elected representative, someone taking notes for said representative, and Val's wife who did most of the actual fetching because the Milliways door is in her house.

Griffie will visibly sign on Val to greet everyone else (assuming the rest of them can see?) while keeping Val in the loop, and assume that this is at least plausibly a way for things to work as long as nobody corrects em on it. Ey introduces emself as 'the Suaal-ite' and fingerspells eir personal name, saying that the demonym should in this context be uniquely identifying.

That works and the representative does likewise.

"I'm Carey, part of Sathend's elected government, and I'm delighted to meet you. Are your people also refugees from the lost world?"

Well, if Val is okay with being a communication surface then Val can be a communication surface.

"To the best of my understanding, we are not. My world contains a planet with a population on the order of hundreds of millions, and even going back to mostly-lost prehistory, lifeforms in my world are fundamentally different from beings like yourself. Also, for clarity, while I am happy to interact with you, I do not represent anyone in Milliways besides myself."

"We'd be delighted to trade knowledge with you and maybe invite you for a visit if that's logistically feasible, regardless! But it does seem like I should also speak to Bar - is that her over there?"

"A visit may be feasible, but it's likely to be costly, as when I'm not here or in Suaal I need to work to avoid rapid disintegration. And yes, that's her. As Val has noticed, she can understand sign but prefers to communicate in writing."

"If it will make her feel more comfortable if we write her letters, we can do that. We have lots of string. Do we just place them on her when we're done?"

"Oh. No, she's fine with being signed to, she just prefers to answer in writing. And apparently knot-based language gets expressed via spontaneously appearing twine, usually she does spontaneously appearing napkins with ink on them."

"Interesting! Thank you."

"You're welcome. Feel free to ask me questions as needed, and while my capacity to assist any individual is limited, I may be able to spare time or other resources for some problems."

She thanks them again and goes off to talk to Bar, taking her notetaker with her.

"You know," Val says, "being at risk of disintegrating wouldn't necessarily be that much of an obstacle, everyone else is too. It's not our world, we don't belong there either."

"Huh, that's interesting. What's the cause of the disintegration for you?"

"I guess there's just not supposed to be anything there. There are universes that are stable in the sense that they don't spontaneously disappear and we don't live in one. - There might be more known about it but not to me."

"How confident are you that your world's disintegration problem is a local phenomenon that doesn't, say, possess agency and want to destroy other locations?"

"I have never heard of any evidence that it had agency. Maybe there's evidence no one ever mentioned to me, maybe it's well-known and I just don't know, it's - not much evidence when a mage hasn't heard of something - but I do know it behaves in a really predictable, basically unchanging way, and that I never previously heard of anywhere else disintegrating and that I do think there's a reasonable chance I'd know everything extremely obvious about other worlds because I'm a scout. I think... if I had to guess... I don't think the magic is anything reasonably glossed as scared, and I do think the magic would know what it's up against, but that's a very speculative line of thought for something there might just be an answer to."

""Is the disintegration associated with— actually, you mentioned backups to me earlier, could you tell me more about that?"

"If you're remembered by something with the power to reconstruct you, from a state it's safe to restore you from, you can be brought back. In our case, for humans, sleeping in our universe does it."

"Elaborate on 'remembered by something with the power to reconstruct you'?"

"People are ways of relating to information. That's not actually a statement of fact, it's a definition I'm using because it's intuitively reasonable to most people I know. If you have similar intuitions, then you'll agree that if you stop being conscious or doing things forever it's just as bad whether your corpse disintegrates or not, and that if all your goals and desires and opinions and ways of making decisions are replaced with just wanting to kill people and nothing else then that's death no matter how intact your body is, I guess unless you wanted that to start with but no human I have ever heard of started out wanting that. So if someone's going around being a perfect duplicate that wants what you want and thinks of the kinds of things you'd think of and feels how you'd feel, most people have the intuition that you're not dead, and most people I know still think so if you're missing some memories and in a worse mood, even if it's the worst mood of your life. If you're sentimental about your specific atoms, in some cases you can even be resurrected using them."

"I do agree that it seems like a sensible definition of identity. My confusion is that it's apparently feasible. And also whether 'replacing goals and desires and opinions and decision processes with just wanting to kill people' is a real-life example for you, it is what happens in Suaal if you try to put an extremely badly damaged dead soul back in a body and I'm trying to figure out whether the factors that I think cause that in Suaal also cause it in your world."

"It's what happens if you see the magic. What's a soul?"

"Broadly speaking, a soul is the substrate on which one's identity is stored. Most commonly, this is a brain or a somewhat-intangible magical construct with properties that vary on a per-world basis, but sometimes it's a machine or something else. In the case of Suaal, the soul is a somewhat-intangible magical construct. Many people's next question is 'do you have a brain, and if so what does it do', and the answer is 'yes', and it does sensory processing, motor control, and cognitive enhancement."

"Huh. Okay. And they get magic-touched if they're not in bodies and you have a guess as to why?"

"They get omnicidal if they're damaged enough, and they accumulate damage when they get disconnected from the body or when people try to hurt them or various other things. I don't think 'magic-touched' is the right characterization, magic to a first approximation isn't harmful to observe in Suaal, and to a second approximation, the main harm of observing magic is that if it's very strong you can get briefly distracted by an unpleasant stimulus. I do have a guess as to why, but I'm concerned about security so I want to keep asking you questions without saying what my guess is even though that's probably rude."

Shrug. "If you've seen magic and you're having a civil conversation and don't agree that it's harmful then your magic is probably a different entity. Which I already thought, because we don't have unexplained power draws that can't be traced to our world and it seems like it'd be hard to set us a separate self-contained budget. And because the translation in here is directly mind-affecting and doing something like that back home would be a terrible idea, and because I touched Bar and didn't notice any similarity to how our magic feels."

"There is harmful magic, including magic that it's harmful to see, but the normal examples of that are something someone did on purpose – 'reading this text causes the text to turn into a snake and attack you', for example. Does your magic have a name besides 'magic'? And is it more like a physical phenomenon, or more like an intelligent being, and if the latter do you have any idea what its preferences are? I'm confused that it makes people omnicidal if they see it but is also usable to restore them from backups, I wouldn't expect those properties to coexist."

"It's pretty hard to get it to restore them instead of something that looks like them and will kill you. If it has a name for itself, we obviously can't ask. It's agentic. I obviously can't ask it 'so, what are your preferences?' and other people would know more than I would and I might be completely wrong but I think it has preferences about things like magnetism and having people around and numerical sequences and, uh, I think it means well, and I'm not sure if you'd really say it prefers that people be in pain - it, uh, it eats pain. As a very approximate gloss."

"Huh, eats pain. I've seen magic that eats the caster's blood, inches of height above the ground, gemstones, et cetera, so possibly I shouldn't read too much into it. Is it possible to perceive post-disintegration regions or the disintegrating factor or such, and do you know what the effects of that are?"

"I don't think there's anything there to be perceived. I guess I could be wrong."

"I can ask Bar about publications. I'm still not opening my door, but I now wish I could, because it seems very important to check if your magic entity is just confused about how to interact with people without driving them mad, and maybe explain to it how to do that. My world has specialists in that sort of thing but I am not one of them."

"I expect so, it doesn't really do things that make me think it's malevolent. Other than the obvious."

"Is it at all movable? Bar's very mentally resilient."

"...Sort of."

"How so? I do agree that making a safe path through a populated area for it would be very expensive, it just seems potentially worth it anyway."

"Oh, that's not the problem, the problem is I can only transport small fractions of it."

"Ah, okay. That seems potentially useful, but I'm not in a hurry and you don't seem to be either, so maybe we or the rest of your delegation will come up with a better plan first."

"Maybe. It'd be convenient to be able to look at it safely but with the ability to move here and take a break without needing to worry about the world ceasing to exist I think at minimum we can make everyone a lot better off."

"Possibly! Bar's probably suggesting plans for that, she doesn't like to have one group monopolize things but that doesn't close off that many options if you're treating her as a nice area to rest and hang out, that's pretty core to her nature."

"She doesn't want long-term residents?"

"She's fine with long-term residents who rent rooms or earn them through working for her. She objects to long-term constant presence in the main dining area due to this making it hard for her to arrange that mutually incompatible groups be able to enjoy the main dining area, and she strenuously objects to long-term monopolization of the door. …the delegation's probably had her temporal nature explained to them but you haven't. Time doesn't flow consistently for different non-communicating groups in Bar, if you leave the main bar area for a few minutes and head back she can probably fit in a decade of unrelated-to-you visitors if she wants. This usually doesn't get too problematic because people can just arrange to meet up with each other after a certain subjective duration for either of them, and she's a nice person."

"Huh. We're two for two on extremely powerful inhuman entities being nice. Weird."

"You've met two, I've met more and a lot of the ones I've met are terrible. I wouldn't rely on the trend generalizing if I were you."

"That is less weird. Worse, but less weird."

"Yes, I'd agree on both those points."

"What's terrible about them?"

"Omnicidality. Torture as in hurting people because you want to threaten them or such, not as in finding whoever's available to supply pain as a component. Promoting diseases because they like it when people have diseases. That sort of thing."

"...That's weird again. Those are - none of those are 'they don't really care if humans have happy lives, they just want to arrange golden ratio spirals of rocks and destroy farmland to do it.'"

"I think powerful inhuman entities with preferences totally unrelated to people are both unlikely to be produced by my world and likely to just leave it if they’re there. Also I don’t know of human-specific deities and I’m not a human, if you want you can, say, touch my head and notice that it has leaflike structures.”

He does this. Ooh, leaflike structures, very cool. "I like your leaf hair. I haven't run into a word that includes all humans and includes nonmagical people with hands and language and doesn't include non-people animals or magical people. I am really intrigued by the idea that you know how to make powerful inhuman entities, though."

"I like my head too. At home to talk about people who are not Milliways or your world's magic or such I'd probably say 'mortals', but I managed to patch my personal senescence problem and thus don't want to define myself by it, and I don't really know why that word implies 'person' even though I think it does. I'm not sure the thing you want to talk about is actually a natural category, I'm magically created and I have some innate magic like turning into a non-humanoid plant, but I have language and use hands and we seem fairly cognitively similar. I have hypotheses on how to make powerful inhuman entities of a specific type, but I haven't tested them, they'd be risky if I'm even slightly wrong and take a lot of input of resources I don't have. Unless you count 'what if there was a big strong animal and someone made it intelligent' as making a powerful inhuman entity, in which case I just straightforwardly know how to do that."

"I wasn't counting that but separately I've never met a big strong animal before and now I want to - anyway, but you have your own innate magic and hands and you can talk, that's amazing."

"No large animals in your world, or just no opportunities for you? Either way, that's unfortunate. I could shapeshift into a large animal at some point – that's not innate power, that's from a source I work with, but it's not particularly costly to me – if that'd help with anything. Also, do you want speculation about how humanlike people including humans and non-humanlike powerful entities co-evolved in my world? Because it sounds like that's where this conversation is going."

"No big animals, we try not to make things too crowded, the world's only thirty miles across. I would appreciate either or both of speculation about that or the opportunity to pet a large animal."

"Thirty miles is tiny, that's smaller than some demiplanes, though probably yours isn't dominated by a featureless desert. Speculation first, this language doesn't work amazingly with paws or such."

"So, when life in Suaal, including very simple life, does or experiences things, it produces 'quintessence', which is an intangible substance that contains meaning. So if an animalcule holds onto some chemicals it finds for future consumption instead of immediately expending them on an energetic task, that might create a tiny bit of quintessence of 'preparation' or such. More complex life and particularly more cognition-prone life produce much more, it's actually pretty hard to detect contributions like that and these days animalcules are of course part of a broader ecosystem. But maybe they historically weren't. Anyway, the thing with quintessence is that it likes to clump together and have more of itself, and it can act towards that. So maybe you end up with some tiny spirit of holding onto resources, or such, and it goes 'hmm, I will help life hold onto resources better', and then the life is stronger and does more things and has more experiences and such, and this produces more quintessence, et cetera. And if you keep running that for a while maybe that's how you get humanlike people and gods of humanlike things, like laws and slavery and agriculture and friendship."

"So what you really need is a coordinated project to all be extremely nice to each other and not drive each other mad and achieve cool things, which I suppose you would definitely never have thought of doing otherwise since that has no other upsides whatsoever."

"Basically, yes. Is there a convention for semantically meaningful sighing in tactile sign? Anyway, my actual plan here is to hang around accumulating resources and then eventually fight all the entities in that class who I don't like, effectively putting the remaining entities in charge."

There is such a convention and he can explain it and also explain the "lol" gesture he made at the end of that last sentence.

"Are you going to want to find out if you can make some kind of deal with ours?"

"I mostly want to see if Bar can do any type of communication at all, so it seems premature to think about deals."

"I guess, but... if you only start thinking about what you want to say after I've brought some of it here, I'll be hanging around with it the entire time, and I'd like to minimize the amount of time I spend doing that."

"Ah, sense. I approximately want to communicate 'Have you considered not being intrinsically hazardous, then people would interact with you more, Bar probably will lend you as many books about not being a hazard as you want' but that's not really a deal with me except in that it's towards my values. I don't really know what sort of things it offers or could offer, generally."

"It would surprise me if it was doing that on purpose. I know it can do things including but not limited to conjuring things out of nothing, for values of 'things' that include space as well as mass."

"Huh. If there's a non-ongoingly-magical object I need and have information to specify I can buy it from Bar. I'd appreciate a larger space-warping bag than I have, but those might be more complicated than other ways of creating space and I'm not sure your magic would be up to it. Mostly if the magic concludes I've done it any favors or wants any trade with me it might well be simplest for it to pay Bar – your delegation will probably be told about payment details – and ask Bar to give me some credit with her."

"Huh, I guess that makes sense. Are there other things you want, in general, that I might not think of to mention?"

"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."

Cool, he'll get one of those and a book about the light-emitting people Griffie was talking about and - "Actually, do you have any works criticizing Griffie's faction?"

"Griffie has represented emself to me as an adventuring Celestial-aligned druid working closely with the goddess Aiyuna. I can get you criticisms of celestials, or of druids, or of the goddess Aiyuna, or of Griffie's species, or of Griffie and their adventuring party personally, but there aren't criticisms of 'celestial-aligned druids working with Aiyuna' that aren't specifically about Griffie."

"I'll take something about Griffie and something about Aiyuna, unless they're in the vein of 'Griffie snores all night and gets mud on the nice rugs'."

"Alright." And Bar will walk Val through the controls of the device he's borrowing.

Griffie is an abomination against the order of life and death. Druids are supposed to maintain nature, and ey defies it. While the rest of their abominable construct clan is at least insular enough to keep their soul-warping false life to themselves, Griffie and their party used a twisted ritual to return a young murder victim to some semblance of life, seduced her into their twisted ideology, and violently destroyed several psychopomps who attempted to extract her from their web.

Val is normally very in favor of returning young murder victims to some semblance of life! But it can certainly go very wrong. If this publication doesn't manage to explain exactly how it went wrong in this case he'll ask for one that does. And also for criticism of this writer, who seems kind of alarmingly in favor of death.

Terrorists Attack Imbrex Hearing | Know Your Facts | Axis Newswire

Zita Imbrex was murdered. Imbrex was later found to be restored to life via an exotic daemonic effect, leading her to lack the soul deterioration associated with death and resurrection.

Noticing this, a team of psychopomps responded by attempting to kill Imbrex, who violently resisted this with the help of associates including Griffith of Erlonn and an assortment of celestials. Inevitables then followed standard deescalation procedure, sending the psychopomps and celestials home and scheduling a hearing regarding the cases of Griffith and Imbrex. (For more information about the Griffith case, see following article.)

At the hearing, Imbrex was ruled to not be in violation of the law, as death is Abaddon's domain, and if Abaddon cannot control their daemons, it is their affair. On hearing this, psychopomps launched a premeditated attack on Axis, using weapons including a massive supply of Spheres of Annihilation and a negative-energy-based lightning effect. No connection has as of yet been found between psychopomps and sceaduinar, and no other supplier has been found.

"The author of the criticism of Griffie I showed you is not personally notable but is associated with psychopomps, who are also criticized here, so it's multifunctional."

"Are they broadly agreed to be in favor of death? Is that any less objectionable than it sounds on the face of it?"

"They're broadly agreed to be anti-immortality and in favor of various cultural understandings of a 'good' death – dying in an honorable fight, dying painlessly with one's affairs resolved, that sort of thing. This often takes the form of helping people cope with the deaths of their loved ones, discouraging the use of resurrection magic that would cause serious harm to the recipient, interfering with 'un-death', a common phenomenon which causes people to be animate and capable of taking actions but either mindless or with their minds warped towards evil aims, rescuing those who are kept alive far longer than they would wish to be, etc."

"Do you know if 'un-death' refers to the same thing as happens in our experience when resurrections go wrong?"

"To the best of my understanding, which is based on published material, local foods, et cetera and not direct personal observation, 'un-death' in the Suaal context is technically defined in a way that refers to a specific interplay of two forms of energy which are not present in your world. However, the term is not unique to Suaal, and calling the result of a botched resurrection 'un-dead' would not be unusual in various other worlds, or even among uneducated people in Suaal."

"Hm. Do you get the impression people in Sathend get along better than people in other worlds? Because I'm starting to get that impression."

"It's not particularly rare for communities the size of Sathend to be comparable to Sathend in getting along. Typical worlds are orders of magnitude larger than Sathend, which creates more possibilities for conflict."

"Hm. Someone should read about that before our population doubles a few more times but it doesn't have to be me in particular. Do you think the entities in Suaal are powerful enough that we can't afford to fetch the wrong one?"

"Sources who don't have obvious-to-me reasons to collaborate on lies do suggest that Suaal entities are at the high end quite threatening, I wouldn't recommend taking an entity from Suaal here if you weren't confident in what you're getting. However, while sources suggest that a high-powered entity could impersonate a lantern archon, in practice it seems likely that the vast majority of intelligent glowing spheroids of the appropriate size are lantern archons and will-o-the-wisps, the latter of which are made from a material that's notably distinctive from lantern archon material."

"Are there areas where apparent lantern archons are even less likely to be impersonators, or types of lantern archon that are even less likely to be impersonators, or anything like that?"

"Lantern archons in high-security areas of Heaven are, according to records, less likely to be impersonators."

"How would you recognize an area like that? And if they're high-security are they likely to have dangerous defenses that bite us if we try to get a lantern archon out?"