Company isn't expecting her either!

"Fucking hate teleport traps. - uh, apologies, I'm Not Like Other Drow, I'll get out of your way presently, where am I - if you don't speak Taldane I've got others -"

She does not speak Taldane; she says something in another language while getting some distance and putting on a pair of gloves.

"...don't got that one. Tongues. I mean you no harm, I am here because I triggered a teleportation trap, I will be on my way given directions."

"You're in Zorvey in southern Rekk. I have never heard of a teleportation trap and would appreciate more information about that."

"Well, you know, sometimes you're in an ancient pyramid and it has traps in it and sometimes they shoot you with poison arrows and sometimes they drop you into a pit and sometimes they summon fiendish scorpions and sometimes they teleport you. Where's Rekk, what continent?"

"Rekk is the continent, also called Echai-a or Aruzon, and even if I made a habit of wandering into places people have trapped I wouldn't expect to be teleported because I have never heard of teleportation, and unrelatedly but pointing toward the same possible explanation, I'm not entirely convinced you're a species native to this planet."

"- the continents on my planet are Avistan, Garund, Tian Xia, Casmaron, Arcadia... Azlant? Sarusan? Any of that sound familiar? You might not be aware of my species because we are from a planet called Castrovel originally and also my subspecies lives underground usually."

"I can find a map of this planet but that's too many continents unless you're subdividing them or counting islands. The species that live here that I know learn to speak are humans and mermaids. I'm not confident about dragons or phoenixes, they might also. Does that sound like the well-known species of your planet?"

"Humans are very common, merfolk exist, dragons exist, phoenixes probably exist. There's also elves, halflings, gnomes, dwarves, orcs...?"

"I would expect to know if there were. I'd offer to have my cook fix you something while I find a map but apparently you're not any species I've ever heard of so I have no idea what you eat. Is this a comfortable place for you to wait?"

"It's fine. I can eat what humans eat."

"That's convenient." She gestures for her guest to follow her inside. "I didn't catch your name...?"

"It's Belmarniss, and you?"

"Tema Miara. 'Miara' is a hereditary surname."

"Nice to meet you, circumstances aside. Belmarniss is my given name, I'm not classy enough to have a family name."

"It's good to meet you too."

Inside the house, which shows no particular evidence of magical lighting, another human does a double take and then stares at Belmarniss, but not in a hostile way.

"And this is Tyela, my housekeeper," Tema says. "Tyela, have you seen any evidence of my being rendered unconscious while someone slipped past you to fake teleportation?"

"What? Um, no."

"Do you need me to show you - I don't have Teleport but I have Dimension Door, shorter range."

Tyela looks as though this is the coolest thing anyone has ever suggested.

"If it's not too costly for you, neither of us has seen alien magic before," says Tema.

"- it's a fourth circle spell so I can't do a lot of it, if it's all the same to you I'd sooner stick to cantrips."

"I'm not familiar with circles as a unit of measure. I can probably comp you for the materials if they're things we have on this planet."

"In that case before I go home I am going to want to completely fill my pockets with diamonds but circles and material costs are almost orthogonal. I can do cantrips as many times as I want and all the other circles a limited number of times per day."

"Diamonds, huh? Human magic uses crystals too and that's more similar than I was expecting alien magic to turn out to be."

"There's other stuff but diamonds are the really big-ticket. When you say 'human magic' what do you mean?"

"I mean the magic humans have, as opposed to the magic mermaids or dragons or phoenixes or subterranean purple people from the planet Castrovel have."

"- that's not how it works on Golarion, humans can be wizards and sorcerers just like I am. I do have a little drow magic but it's just seeing in the dark and more spells, other people can learn to do those."

"Huh. I wonder if you can also learn human magic or if people on this planet can learn yours. Anyway, you were going to demonstrate a - cantrip, you said?"

"Ghost Sound." She twitches her fingers a little and woodwind music strikes up out of nowhere.

Tyela applauds.

"That's certainly different from all the magic I know," Tema says. "Not that that's a surprise at this point. Human magic is all about changing the connection between body and soul - the most common kind just puts you to sleep but it's also possible to put souls in jars or switch two people's bodies. You probably don't want a demonstration, I expect."

"I can't say that I do. I have a sleep spell but I'd have to prepare it, at my circle it's not useful against anything much."

"At your circle?"

And meanwhile here are some stairs down.

"My level of magic advancement." Down the stairs she will go.

"Hm." And they pass some doors leading to rooms she describes vaguely and come to the kitchen where the cook is just finishing sealing some jars of pickles-to-be. "And this is Chanai - Chanai, this is Belmarniss, who showed me some alien magic and says her species is from the planet Castrovel but that she can eat human foods, and I need you to make her comfortable while I find a world map."

Chanai turns to look at Belmarniss and grins.

"Hello. Do you want to see some alien magic too?"

"Absolutely. What's your theme?" Chanai asks.

"I don't know what you mean by theme. I'm specialized in transmutation but I can cast from all schools. - Golarion magic is divided into schools." She does Ghost Sound again.

"Oh, that's very different - what I mean is that human magic all involves the alteration of the interactions between bodies and souls, and mermaid magic involves the creation of life, and I'm wondering if yours can be summarized like that."

(Tema meanwhile slips off to find that map.)

"No, it can't. There are some generalities - arcane magic is worse at healing specifically than divine magic, say - but not very many of them. The one I just did is an illusion, I'm not good at necromancy or enchantment, I'm all right at evocation and conjuration and abjuration and divination. Loosely, transmutation is making stuff be different, illusion is making stuff seem different, necromancy is making something be more or less dead except for complicated technical reasons it doesn't include healing which is conjuration, enchantment is doing stuff to people's brains, evocation is making stuff be on fire or whatever, conjuration is making stuff exist where previously it didn't, abjuration is protecting stuff, and divination is learning stuff."

"Are spells divided that way based on their own fundamental traits or based on how people use them?"

"Fundamental traits, otherwise there would be livelier academic debate about whether healing ought to be counted as necromancy instead of confusingly yet obviously being conjuration."

"Interesting! - I should be offering you something besides questions, would you like some berries?" Chanai offers her a bowl of them. "Or if you have questions of your own, I can try to answer them."

"Detect Poison... is this just a private residence?"

The berries are not poison to humans, at least.

"Yes, this is the Miara estate."

Nomf berries. "I appreciate the hospitality, at what point should I be making my way to a city or something though?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if Tema thought you were interesting enough to invite to dinner, but if not I'm hoping you'll stay put for me to quiz you about your magic - I can show you mine, too - at least until I have to get dinner started. You're free to leave now if you want to, of course."

"For the time being I would like my soul to remain in its current relationship with my body."

"A very common preference, that. If I were going to demonstrate I'd let you watch me prepare a sleep spell."

"That does sound interesting. I have one of those but don't have it hung today, it's not useful for most things that try to attack me these days."

"They don't sleep?"

"Spell doesn't work on more powerful targets."

"Sounds very inconvenient for everyone."

"If I want to put myself to sleep I have a different thing for it. Need to, actually, elves are immune to standard Golarion sleep spells."

"Huh! If you ever trust anyone enough to test ours I'd love to hear about it."

"Looking at it would be a good first step whenever that's convenient, just give me enough warning that I can have a detect magic up."

"I can grab the stuff for it and do it now - 'a detect magic'?" Chanai starts collecting herbs.

"It's a spell - most basic version is a cantrip but there are fancier ones I can prep if there's nuance I don't get a good look at with the cantrip."

"Huh! I don't have anything for seeing magic itself but I really wish I did." He lays out the herbs on a metal tray to burn them and takes an amethyst out of his pocket. "I'm going to prepare two at once since it's slightly more efficient that way and I can handle two more, but just let me know when you're ready and I'll start."

"Mm-hm - detect magic - give it a few to come to full strength -" Stare stare. "When."

And Chanai burns some herbs and - the spell doesn't fit neatly into the schools of magic that constitute Golarion's arcane traditions. It's sort of similar to necromancy, and sort of similar to enchantment, and for all that there's no way it could possibly have anything to do with conjuration it sort of almost looks similar to it if you squint.

He tucks the undamaged amethyst back into his pocket afterward.

"Huh, that was really weird looking. More like necromancy than anything else but with some enchantment and a splash of conjuration thrown in? Weird."

"Huh. What does it mean for it to look like those, is it a color or a shape or something?

"Sort of a texture, almost, though some people develop more color-ish synaesthesia."

"Are some of the textures more or less pleasant than others?"

"Not intrinsically, though, like, I have developed a bit of an aversion to the schools I don't like."

He nods. "I don't suppose you have any idea why it's so flexible?"

"Why - magic is? I mean, people innovate on it but I don't think anyone has invented an entire school so, no, no idea."

"I keep hoping there's something - deeper and more explanatory than just 'this is what magic humans can do, this is what magic aliens can do' - but so far it's just one of those mysteries." He shrugs.

That's about when Tema returns with a book containing among other things a world map.

"People say the gods invented it but even if that weren't true gods might say it, so it's hard to be sure..." She peers at the world map. "I might want to copy that tomorrow when I can drop a dungeoneering cantrip for a Scrivener's Chant."

"That's a convenient thing to be able to do. We're about here - " On the smaller of two continents, or arguably the second-biggest of several if the islands count as continents, labeled Rekk on this map. They're south of Liru-a and a few other countries, also on Rekk, and north of the Federated Southern Islands, not also on Rekk. "Definitely not your planet, then?"

"Definitely not."

"I'm sorry, though I'm glad you landed here if you had to land somewhere. If our food agrees with you I'd be delighted if you would join my household for dinner tonight."

"The berries weren't poison and tasted good too so I'm optimistic on that."

"I'm glad. Hey, suppose we get this book out of the kitchen and you clean your hands and come see my library?"

"Prestidigitation." The berry juice disappears from her hands. "Is there anything that you want to ask before I lose the ability to answer your questions? I can understand and read for a large fraction of every day no problem, but talking is a higher circle spell."

She starts walking toward the library. "A lot of things - how soon will that happen, maybe we should set you up with writing to point to...?"

"That's not a bad idea, I can't write it myself because Tongues only does spoken language but I can point to it no problem. It'll happen in about... forty minutes? Seventy or seventy-five from when I cast it, about."

"Oh, that's not as bad. I'm not sure what I should be asking but I suppose that's itself something to ask."

"I don't like the sunshine. I have to be careful about overeating so I hope you don't have a culture where I have to eat a lot to be polite. I can see in total darkness, though not color and not for great distances. Some of my possessions are magic and/or irreplaceable and I don't want other people handling them. If my friends come looking for me they'll be any subset of three human men, darker than you, beards, similarly silly-looking outfit situations. Or I guess they could subcontract, but that would still probably get you human men, darker than you, silly-looking outfit situations."

"I don't want to get in the way of them retrieving you but at some point I would like to do something about people unexpectedly appearing on my property."

"Can't help you there, Forbiddance is a sixth circle divine-only spell. For whatever it's worth I don't think it's especially likely to keep happening, it was probably random where it sent me - unless this place was really interesting a couple thousand years ago? - and my rescuers would be looking for me, not you."

"I see." She lowers her voice a little. "Do you think they'll find you too soon to worry about whether you'd be able to teach your magic to people here?"

"Might depend on how much trouble they have with the rest of the dungeon - I can imagine sequences of events that would hold them up for months, and that's plenty of time for a really talented person to get a cantrip or two down."

"In that case, there's something you need to know before you let anyone sweet-talk you into trying to teach their darling child a sleep spell. There used to be another species with their own magic, besides humans and mermaids and dragons and phoenixes. They're universally evil. The spell that denied them their own magic made them reincarnate into human bodies, but they're not actually human, and they don't have human magic."

"People like to say my species is universally evil. We're actually just very poorly incentivized."

"Well, I hope your species gets to try reincarnating without pain-powered magic as individuals among human societies, it - helps, from what I hear from the societies that let them live, in that sometimes they turn out cooperative or law-abiding or useful, but they don't feel bad for the poor and they think hurting people is fun no matter how you raise them."

"There are species that are so overwhelmingly evil that I wouldn't stop to quiz one if I saw them someplace I didn't expect to doing something shifty before I killed them. Not mortal species, critters from the evil afterlife planes mostly, certain kinds of dragon - not that I can take a grown dragon - undead. I'm just - first pass skeptical of the description about a species I have no previous experience with because it gets to be very easy to repeat without checking. They'd want the sleep spell for passing as human?"

"Yes. And knowing it was something they could learn would have effects on - everything we build on being able to tell, in places like this. If it's widely known to be teachable then probably some bleeding heart who doesn't like killing even evil children will do their best to make sure it's well-known to be well-known, get everyone to give up on screening. It wouldn't destroy society, just - getting rid of them tends to go along with abolishing slavery, and it's something that societies that have more scientists and philosophers tend to do. Someone's coming by who's met some, if you're still here tomorrow maybe you can talk to him."

"Sounds interesting. I can hold on to the sleep spell but - I can imagine sequences of events that take the question of whether and how there should be ongoing contact between our planets quite out of my hands."

"Yeah. It might not be worth going out of your way to worry about it."

"Good to know anyway. Anything else like that we should discuss before all communication is one way?"

"Thoughts on whether you should sleep here, rent a room, or actually don't sleep at night?"

"I sleep, though my schedule wanders all over the place when I'm above ground. Here's fine if I'm welcome, if you don't want me in the house I can magic up some shelter but that might attract attention if you get passersby."

"It's really up to you how many more people you want to explain yourself to. What kind of magic shelter can you make?"

"Sphere thingy where the bottom half goes through the ground, it's cozy inside and keeps the rain off."

"You can probably find a place for that, depending on how big a sphere it is. We're in a city."

"Twenty foot radius. Sadly I do not actually have Rope Trick prepared, my party member usually handled that."

"I probably shouldn't let myself get distracted asking about that. What kinds of things do you think I should write for you?"

"Great question, uh, please and thank you, where is the insert-thing-here that I might need to find, yes, no, maybe, it's complicated, numbers one to ten?"

"Don't figure you can count on having your fingers for that last part?"

And here is the library. There are several bookcases and some tables and a big window and writing supplies. Tema heads for the writing supplies first.

"Well, if you add mathematical operators you can get to larger numbers."

"Sensible." She writes all the suggested things so far including arithmetic operations. She's being efficient but not writing too small, since the text needs to be easy to point to.

Belmarniss looks at the bookshelves while she's doing that.

Economics. Military history. History of Zorvey. History of Miomir. History of Liru-a. History of the Federated Southern Islands. History of human-mermaid relations. Biographies of ancient emperors and kings. History of Sealing Day. Adventure novel. Romance novel. Collection of plays. Textbooks for two foreign languages. Travelogue. Botany. Geography and navigation. Political philosophy. Religious poetry. Secular poetry. Recent scientific publications. Magical theory. Spell collections. Dragons and phoenixes. Child psychology.

"There's room for more. What have you most often found yourself needing to talk about with strangers?"

"Uh, let's see, when have I needed to talk to strangers in a language I barely had any of... sometimes I make statements about alignments, I don't know if your magic can discern those at all, it can be reassuring in tense situations. Directions, north south east west. Proper nouns but those we don't need to have in the phrasebook. Haggling but I don't expect that to come up before I have another Tongues."

She writes directions. "Maybe you should explain alignments while you can."

"Lawful and Chaotic, Evil and Good, Neutral on either axis, nine results, these correspond to the afterlife planes, they can be detected on sufficiently powerful people with magic I do not have but even low-power people get sorted into afterlives. They are similar but not reliably identical to the commonsense concepts of the same names. I'm Chaotic Good last time somebody checked me but I get along fine with plenty of Lawfuls and some Evils depending on the details."

"I have questions about that but I'm not sure if it's the most urgent thing to have more questions about." She writes four words and doesn't at this time construct an entire grid. "Why has that been useful to discuss with strangers, though?"

"If somebody's scared of me they'll often be reassured if I say I'm Good, if somebody's doing... petty crime or something, they will be relieved if I say I'm Chaotic, if someone Lawful is concerned about how I'm Chaotic it will often be mollifying that I am also Good. Like, uh, if I went someplace and decided to buy a slave to go manumit later then this would be the thing to tell them so they'd believe me about that."

"I'm not sure you should expect that to work here."

"Good to know, if I have time to say three words I will try to pick ones more locally useful than 'I'm Chaotic Good'."

"If I knew what you should say instead I would tell you. Hmm, what else - maybe an explanation of your translation magic? And something about what you're doing here?"

"Comprehend Languages is a first circle spell that lets me understand and read any language, and it only works on the caster, 'bout an hour but since it's only first circle I can do it a bunch of times if I want. Tongues is a third circle spell that lets me understand and speak any language for about an hour, but doesn't help with writing coming or going; that one I can cast on other people. There is also a second-circle spell called Share Language which lets me grant a language I speak to another person complete with literacy; that one lasts for a whole day, so if it winds up being that I'm mostly talking to just you or while you are handy to translate, I might preferentially rely on that one going forward. I'm not sure what information I should recite to convey that efficiently for people."

"Probably not the circle thing, that won't be familiar. Hm." Tema writes something approximately summarizing that.

"Thanks."

"Do you have any idea what you'll want to do while you're here?"

"Oh, let's see. Arbitrage, maybe, or at least scoping out the possibilities for my priest friend if he shows up. - he's a priest of the god of trade. I can teach people spells, do research, that kind of thing."

"So maybe you want something about prices, and I'm not sure what recurring repetitive things might come up in teaching spells and doing research. Is the religion thing going to be important?"

"Uh, I guess he might decide the place is ripe for evangelism but that's not my speed."

"Probably not worth coming up with vocabulary about it now." She writes down some things about commerce.

And at length the Tongues spell runs out and Belmarniss focuses her attention on the shelves, looking for something that will give her plenty of high-level information.

A Brief Survey of Magical Theory? Record of a Journey from Liru-a to Thania? Great Battles of the Western Hemisphere? Sealing Day, or, the Triumph of Righteousness Over Evil?

That last looks plausibly important!

The book alternates mythic-style ancient history with recent observations.

Once upon a time there was a species of pure evil, which used others' pain as fuel for magic that warped bodies; they would use a fraction of their power to heal their victims whenever necessary, then torment them yet further. In bygone days in a great working, the details of which are now lost, they were deprived of their magic and imprisoned, powerless, in human bodies, to reincarnate as humans for all time.

There are two recentish accounts from people who claim to have recovered memories from that time, claiming there were evil ones with claws and gleaming eyes who ruled over areas of unknown size in luxury the likes of which the world has never seen since. There are quite a lot of recent somewhat more trustworthy accounts of people believed to be unable to do magic; there are some no one ever caught at anything, but in areas where they can get away with it, they find excuses to hurt people - some of them have legal outlets like slavery, some break the law, some no one can pin anything on but bad luck follows them. The modern anecdotes get pretty horrible. The author apparently met one, who was nothing but polite, and got a chance to sketch the guy's slave (the sketch is included in the book and shows notable scarring and both legs missing from above the knee). Apparently the evil fellow (the book records that they've been called demons, and the fair ones, and the old ones, and the smiling ones, and "those we don't speak of", and the cold ones, and changelings, and wrong, and sons of ruin, but itself only calls them "the others" and "people without magic" and "the supposed third species"), on being asked why he did that, just smiled and said, "What, you've learned enough of my kind to write a book, and you have to ask? I wanted to."

There are stories of their vengeance, of famine and plague following the sealing. There are stories of towns seeing their first deaths in centuries - and stories of people thousands of years old pulled out of dungeons speaking no modern tongues and weeping at the sight of the open sky. There are stories of the heroes who reshaped the world, many contradictory ones, different sets of heroes and different nations of origin.

There are ruins and tombs that have been excavated recently that might be from before, and they do seem consistent with societies with a lot of leisure time and lower-than-current infant mortality. Some of the skeletons are warped and don't look as though they were pleasant shapes to be. There are rumors about excavated jars that could possibly contain souls.

The book talks about what Sealing Day means now (it's a story of triumph and hope and courage and, for some reason, people wear extra fancy hats about it), and how it came to its current cultural position (probably has to do with a fad a couple centuries ago for morality plays about ancient history and myth), and where the current customs come from, and whether it's actually celebrated on the anniversary (maybe).

Well, "demons" is just confusing, it'd be an odd demon who could restrain themselves to one legally purchased slave. Were humans immortal before this?

Only when the others were making them so, probably.

Seems like quite a loss if they couldn't be - rehabilitated somehow - but probably she should just be modeling them as evil outsiders or something. Kind of an impressive coordination project to get them all reincarnating magiclessly.

Magical theory book?

Human magic affects the connection of the soul to the body. Mermaid magic creates life. A long time ago there was magic that could reshape flesh. Not much is known about dragon magic since they live in volcanoes and don't really talk to humans. There's scholarly debate about whether the kinds of magic that exist are somehow related to the elements, and if so which set of elements. There's debate about whether all forms of magic are the same thing, whether they're the same as what the gods can do (and whether the gods are real, and there's a half-page digression into deism), whether they're the same thing as anything other than magic (like the way plants and animals reproduce themselves without mermaids carving statues of them), whether each species magic is actually one thing or several related things...

Different human magic traditions exist making use of different kinds of material components; mixing and matching has been tried, and doesn't do anything amazingly interesting. There are some rules of thumb for what components will go into what kinds of spells; one is that it helps if an herbal component already does something at least similar to the intended effect. Aiming works differently for spells that are prepared in advance, because of reasons that the book goes into.

Human magic can put souls in jars (they're not conscious while jarred), remove souls from jars, put people in new bodies, remove people from bodies, put people to sleep, numb body parts, blind people, deafen people, and facilitate the recovery of past life memories. Generally magically induced loss of sensation is temporary. It's a common side effect for people who have just had magic done to them to feel disconnected or unreal, or like the world around them isn't real. It usually goes away in not too long and is more common if the spell is done more sloppily.

That's such an interesting set of effects, how hard are those spells to learn?

Some of them are probably simple since both of these books agree that humans regularly learn sleep spells at three or four years old.

Dang. Can any of them be packaged for later deployment - oh, probably that's illegal because it would let the evil folks pass? -

It appears they can be prepared in advance and cast later by the same person, and the writer of the book on magical theory seems to be under the impression that they can't be transferred uncast like that, though there's the theoretical possibility of switching bodies entirely for that kind of deception.

Maybe if she's stuck here for a long time she should reinvent, like, the first half of Clone.

It's getting late. What are her accommodations like, or should she Tiny Hut in the yard?

She's welcome to this guest room over here and also to dine with the household but if she'd like something more under her own control than that the yard can... maybe fit a Tiny Hut? If it won't damage any foliage it intersects?

Guest room's fine.

Sleep.

Things that happen overnight do not escalate to the point of waking any but a fairly light sleeper. The birds start in on their chattering before dawn. By the time it seems likely for Belmarniss to be getting up Chanai has rounded up some breakfast that will tolerate waiting a bit if he's misjudged her wake-up time and brought it to the hallway outside her room. (And then decided to grab a bite and stand there having his own breakfast of conspicuously the same sorts of things as she's being offered.)

Belmarniss pokes her head out before preparing spells. Consults her phrasebook, points at the breakfast: "Me?"

He holds the plate out to her. "Yep, for you."

"Thank you!" She eats while she preps; she's done eating long before she's done prepping, and she doesn't usually leave many slots open but she does today, apart from filling up on Tongues.

Does she object to Chanai watching?

If Chanai wants to watch Belmarniss stare at various pages in her spellbook and make careful gestures in midair that is fine with Belmarniss!

It's fascinating!

And then after it's been going on a while it's boring but, first of all, he should probably not just disappear, and second, what if he looked away and then it finally got interesting? He'll watch the whole thing and wait for her to signal in some way that she's got some kind of translation working.

It does not suddenly get interesting but she does close the book after a bit. Doesn't immediately cast Tongues since he doesn't obviously have anything to say.

 He gestures for her to follow him.

Following, sure.

He can show her to where Tema and Tyela and a stranger who seems to have appeared overnight are waiting. Tema is pleased to see her; Tyela is excited to see her; the stranger was not really prepared for her to be purple and kind of blinks at her.

Belmarniss gives a bit of a wave.

Tema asks if her translation magic is active yet.

Nod nod.

She introduces Belmarniss and the stranger, Velya. "He's traveled in the south where they don't check kids for magic like we do here."

Belmarniss tilts her head.

"So if at some point you want to ask questions of someone who’s met the old ones, that’s an option. Anyway, I hope you slept well."

Nod nod. It's not obviously time to cast Tongues yet but maybe when she thinks of some questions. Anybody else have remarks for her before she goes and reads books?

Just something bland about it being nice to meet her.

She goes and looks through books for a bit.

There continue to be books about history, spell collections, novels, poems, and occasional science books. Chanai and Tema will both also spend some time in the library.

And some time later she will venture out of the library and cast Tongues. "Hello, it's nice to meet you, I'm Belmarniss," she tells the visitor.

"You too."

"Did Tema explain about my translation limitations? Did you want to see a more obvious spell to demonstrate that I'm not a sort of person you're familiar with?"

"She mentioned that you have a spell for talking to people and a spell for understanding, and I believe you about it but I'd be interested to see something anyway if it's cheap. She also mentioned you might have questions about the old ones."

She casts Prestidigitation and starts turning random objects colors. "So on my planet," she says, "there are species that people will tell you are always evil. This is wrong - no species there is literally always evil - but there are some that are so overwhelmingly so that you'd need to sort through a few billion to find an unambiguous exception, and there are others that are basically normal people but with an evil culture, so if you happen to meet one and have nothing else to go on, they're probably bad news, but if you adopt one, it's fine. And there's a range in between. I'm one of the evil-culture kind but I'm not personally evil - we have magic that can check that. I'm curious where the old ones fall on this spectrum."

"They don't much resemble either of those descriptions. Closer to the first, they don't have a culture of their own at all anymore and the ones I've met who were raised by humans are - how do I put this. There's a... way that they are, something inside them, that makes them want to hurt people and not particularly want to give to the poor, and all the ones I've met have whatever that is, but I wouldn't call all of them evil. I've met an unspecified nonzero number of them who I'd trust absolutely - if I found myself tied up in their basement with all my spells spent I'd shout for them to come find me; if I needed somewhere to stash an orphan I would ask them for help. But they're still... cold and sadistic."

"What leads the nonevil ones to be nonevil?"

"I don't really know. I could guess but I'd just be guessing."

"I'd still like to hear the guesses."

"Patience and thinking ahead. Happening to really enjoy the company of someone who wouldn't want them to be evil and not feeling like having that person around and hateful is good enough. Objecting on principle to being limited and predictable. Abstract philosophical arguments. General benevolence."

"How do they come by general benevolence if they are cold and sadistic by nature?"

"I would really like to know. But - hm. You know how - actually I don’t know if things are similar enough where you come from for this analogy to work - do you know the thing where you don’t stop liking food if you fast?"

"Intimately."

"I think it’s like that. Not - the way they are on balance, necessarily. Just one of the ways they feel."

"I'm not sure I follow you."

"And I'm not sure I'm right. But I think they all get hungry for - evil, I guess - and I don't think they're all neatly lined up behind it."

"I don't suppose they can satiate it with exotic kink?"

"Some do. I'm not sure if it's an entirely adequate outlet. I suspect it isn't but it seems like a very personal thing to ask about."

"I was sort of assuming that anyone who'd tell you they were one of these folks was already on pretty personal-question terms with you."

"...Zorvey is the only experience you have of our entire planet, isn't it. The islands aren't so..." Shrug. "If I knew of any here I sure would have to be on pretty personal-question terms but then I don't think if I made a habit of keeping quiet about capital crimes like that I'd tell total strangers about it."

"I assume there is enormous global cultural diversity but also that a project to arrange that all old ones forever reincarnate without magic would require pretty strong consensus."

"That isn't remotely recent enough to tell you anything about modern politics. And even if it had been last week, Chanai thinks it didn't call for a majority of humans to get involved, and doesn't think it would have been very easy to pull off being surgical about it even if they'd wanted to leave the better half of them with their powers, and I'd trust his guess about that kind of thing."

"Okay, so more like 'small circle of archmages' than like 'widespread consensus'."

"Probably somewhere in between. Maybe more of a large circle of archmages."

"On Golarion you don't get large circles of archmages, even single archmages are really rare, but maybe less so here."

"Do we mean the same thing by 'archmage' given that we have different kinds of magic in the first place?"

"Probably not, that's just why my mind went there. What do you mean by 'archmage'? Do you even meaningfully differ in power levels?"

"I mean people who've studied magic in enough detail that they can invent new spells without much guess-and-check, their spells don't leave you feeling unreal, and you couldn't trick them into thinking a spell does something other than what it does. Humans do vary in how many spells we can have prepared at once but most of the difference in power comes from differences in your budget for materials."

"Okay, yeah, then you don't have archmages in the way I mean it."

"How do you mean it?"

"Wizards increase in power - not just knowledge, but also power. If I had a ninth circle spell in my book I couldn't prepare it, and that would hold even if I were as brilliant as, say, Nex, famous legendary archmage, and understood it perfectly, I just lack the raw ability. But that raw ability grows with experience, centrally combat experience."

"Amazing. That’s even worse than getting magic power from being rich."

"It might sound worse than it is - like, it's bad, but there is no shortage of genuinely bad things to fight and I don't think all of them are themselves derived from this incentive system."

"Sure, okay, in that case your planet sounds just perfect."

"Absolutely not, it's lousy in so many ways, I just want you at all calibrated on which ones are how responsible for the general fog of nastiness."

"Reasonable of you."

"I don't know if you want to hear more about it or nah."

"I'm interested but I know you can only say so many things in a day."

"Yeah, but every day is another opportunity to say things and we might as well use this spell since it's already running. Ask away."

"Well, what is the worst thing about your world?"

"Gigantic planar rift letting in hordes of demons held back only by huge budgetary outlays by some nearby countries who hate each other's guts. Or possibly the universe-annihilating monster sealed up inside the planet but it's dormant lately."

"Wow. And here I thought polio was bad."

"We have that too! Though rich people can get it magically healed."

"That sounds better than 'rich people can swap with someone healthier'."

"That we don't have but, like, I'm not actually sure you'd get a bad afterlife for accepting a lottery to be somebody's younger vessel, so it might be fine."

"...A bad afterlife?"

"We don't reincarnate, we have afterlives. Some of them are bad."

"...Bad how?"

"Like millennia of torment bad. Culminating in annihilation or turning into the native evil outsider varietal."

"Are there current projects to change that that I could affect from here?"

"That last bit being an important caveat, I think not."

"Maybe worth revisiting that if it starts looking like I could visit. So. What got you curious about the old ones?"

"People'll describe my species as 'always chaotic evil' and it's just - people being wrong about things, so I wondered."

"Well. It's not just that."

"So I now understand. Does it work out all right, not testing people and letting them grow up? Do they ever grow... more... up, in a moral direction?"

"Honestly, it works fine, though I’m not totally sure what you mean by growing more up."

"Developing, like, a more refined and sensitive and emotionally-rooted appreciation for reasons not to hurt people."

"For specific people, definitely, for people in general, I don't know and I'm not sure how odd it is not to have even one definite example."

"It'd be weird on Golarion, but this isn't it. And your entire pool of souls is working on different rules so I can't generalize as much as I would about some obscure Golarion species."

"Were souls something you studied on - I thought I heard your species was from Castrovel but apparently not?"

"The species is, but there are some of us on Golarion. Two major subspecies, surface elves and drow, I'm a drow."

"Cool!"

"If you say so! We have this specieswide problem where we don't like babies, which drow solve with slave labor and surface elves solve with slowly going extinct, so I assume Castrovel is different in some important way, but I've never been there."

"...That's weird. And there's not ongoing communication so you could ask?"

"Nah. You'd have to be an archmage. A Sending would probably make it but you'd have to know somebody and they have a hell of a word limit."

"...Are you likely to be stuck here?"

"Weirdly enough going to another plane is easier than going to another planet! It may take months or years, and I suppose my party members could decide to give up at some point in the process, but I do think they will be able to find me if they keep working on it - having a known person to target helps with a lot of things. I could maybe finesse it myself if I managed to circle up enough but I don't know if the right sorts of adventuring are present here."

"What sorts of adventuring are right?"

"Inconveniently it seems like it needs to involve high stakes risks. Traditionally to one's own life or freedom but there is some reason to think that sufficiently dire consequences to others or one's status or something might also work, it would explain how people from noble families who aren't allowed to go on dangerous adventures sometimes wind up with an odd level of power regardless."

"Probably better than being able to get more powerful by killing random people who can't fight back."

"Yeah, that doesn't work even at low circles."

"I guess if you desperately need to get into fights there are some that aren't necessarily a bad idea to get into but none that I'd recommend to someone with the amount of context you have."

"I don't need it desperately, but I won't be able to plane shift till I do."

"Got any idea what else you'd do with yourself here if you don't immediately get rescued?"

"Sell spellcasting services, probably, maybe teach some people spells but I have been exhorted to skip teaching sleep spells specifically."

"Well, it would be pretty hard on the fabric of society if you did."

"Would it be as bad if I handed out the one that only works on oneself?"

"Probably not."

"Good, it has other neat uses, it's one that only does something less powerful than its slot would suggest but lets you pick from several and you don't have to decide till you cast it."

"...That sounds very cool."

"You didn't even ask what the effects were!"

"The fact that you can make decisions after it's already prepared is cool! I would also like to know what the other effects are."

"An hour of painkiller, a bit of an edge at one task, recreational hallucinations and intoxication - those I don't generally want, though I have tried the hallucinations one before - lucid dreams if you can get to sleep on your own, ten rounds a little tougher and better at shrugging things off, putting off being drunk for an hour - you still spend the same amount of time drunk but it'll let you get home without falling down a hole or whatever - second wind if you're a bit beat up, and feeling particularly awake for a couple hours even if you've been up all night."

"...Okay, it’s separately interesting that those things are so different from each other."

"They aren't in spellcraft terms - they're all low-circle harmless-technically transmutation effects targeted at the caster. Totally different from, say, Ray of Frost, which shoots a cold ray at something, damage-dealing evocation with a target you have to aim at rather than just specify."

"And the difference between targeting the caster and targeting someone else is important in your magic?"

"Yeah. Twice, actually, as a range limit and as a target limit. And targeting a location is different still."

"I'm amazed Chanai isn't clinging to you like a limpet."

"I'm happy to talk to Chanai but is there a specific reason -?"

"He studies magic."

"Well, I don't know if any of it's cross-applicable, but he can interrogate me whenever he wants. Even if I don't have translation I could write down the questions and have answers ready for the next time I cast it."

Nod nod. "Anyway, anything you're dying to say?"

"I guess I should know how long I have to find a way to not be a guest in the house but you may not be the person to ask."

"I would think you have a while. You're interesting. I wouldn't be totally stunned if you could convince Tema she wants you around forever, though I wouldn't expect you to want that."

"Not forever forever, no, but I could carve out a year or something from my busy schedule of fighting monsters and pirates and stuff."

Nod.

"Would you want to learn wizardry?"

"Yes."

"What about it would be most exciting?"

"I think I ought to say 'the way we'd use cleaning spells to improve public health' but the true answer to what excites me is about how it'd shatter limits I always thought were unbreakable. But it really would improve cities."

"Cleaning spells are good for laundry but not actually great for cleaning large areas - laundry you can fit an amount of it that represents a ton of work into an area easily covered by Prestidigitation, but street sweeping or whatever not so much. I suppose I don't actually know how wretched public health might be in a place with no clerics and no laundry wizards."

"Huh. Well, what do you tend to use it for, then?"

"Prestidigitation specifically? Laundry is by far the most high volume use but people use it to make their drinks cold or warm depending on the weather, or make their food tastier, or make little dioramas at a lower circle than a decent illusion, or turn things different colors just to be silly... you can be pretty profligate with cantrips once you know how to catch them. Magic in general, well, I do a lot of combat with it because that's how you get stronger, but I like flying and the ones that make you smarter and also the ones that shrink stuff are fun."

"Do those last two make it as easy as it sounds to transport things?"

"No, but there's one that triples carrying capacity."

"For how long?"

"Hours - if I cast it something like nine or ten."

"Sounds useful for construction, maybe."

"One of its main applications is actually making teleportation higher leverage, because teleportation takes a certain number of creatures and what they can carry."