"Meep! Meep meep meep. Meep meep meep meep meep?"
"I don't trust your 'legibility', Nethys, and before you ask, no I'm not going to run the full verification procedure. This conversation is already a lot more expensive, relatively, for me than for you. If you keep wasting my attention I'm going to stop communicating with you. See how legible I'm being about that?"
And Kireh feels a splash of divine magic and all her senses are jarred by the change in surroundings. Instead of the cold soft snow, white on the gray and brown rocks, the wind sighing in her ears and ruffling her fur, and the scared-determined-happy-exhausted smell of the petitioner, there's now -
A city, of the sort mortals make, all wood and green-grey limestone arrayed in a myriad of ways, buildings rising crowded around a street full of people of all the myriad kinds the world has produced - humans and orcs and elves and dwarves and warforged and darfellan and goblins and a few even stranger sorts. The appearance of an outsider causes people to start back and shy away, but if she's not immediately attacking, then people will return to what they're doing, while giving a bit of space to the unknown. They have things to do, even if those things are just hawking street food and carting charcoal.
...willpower issues but not the kind straightforwardly fixable with pain, it's something deeper. Maybe assign her to do some sort of art with a painful technique. What kinds of art does the petitioner -
...Okay. Abrupt disorientation memory items:
Is the situation comprehensible? Yes, she's in a world with three dimensions, causality, weather, gravity, and mortal races (most of them are even humanoids).
Look around with all her senses, but not using spells. Is she in immediate danger? No.
Look around again with all her senses, still not using magic. Are there any urgent opportunities? No.
Is she causing trouble for anyone, currently or imminently? She's slightly in the way. She moves to the side of the road, with her back to one of the pretty gray-green buildings, close but not touching it.
She mentally recites the appropriate poem:
A suddenly-flustered fox
nestled into the rocks.
Studied geology,
gods, mortals, and all decree;
complement and cause of the shocks.
The locks remaining intact,
made effort to pray to the backed.
If thoughts are corrupted,
just the Thief was disrupted,
taking no other act.
If the fact of the place was decided,
and that decision abided,
sought out the enemy
or the anemone,
without information elided.
High did possibilities flood
or sunk down into the mud,
the goals stay the same
for this fox and their name;
Marra does not make a dud.
which is a mnemonic for
Abrupt disorientation non-normal checklist for cantor marrenai:
Find a safe stable place and observe the world you seem to be in, its gods, its people, and its laws and culture. Introspect: before the disruption did you observe a mind-affecting spell or other cause? Are there any other effects on your thinking?
If you're under a hostile effect, pray to Marra. If you're genuinely somewhere else, pray to Marra, Irori, Lissala, Minderhal, Zepar, Aroggus, Ulon, Erecura, Arazni, Norgorber, Lorthact, and Abadar.
If you seem to have been transported to a precise location and you're still there or still with the people or organizations that were there when you arrived, openly seek out enemies and allies.
From here you're on your own. Figure out how to support Marra's interests in the particular situation you're in, working with your particular abilities and personal goals.
She's already in a safe stable place, at least for the moment.
She's probably in the Prime Material plane. Not Golarion, though; some other planet.
There wasn't any mind-affecting spell that she can remember. She's reacting to this as she would expect: going through the checklist, staying alert, no significant emotions. She multiplies some numbers, visualizes a terrace in Heaven and a bile fountain in Dis, and imagines how the petitioner she was just working with would respond to praise - her mind seems to be working fine.
Are there any recognizable divine symbols? Are the people haggling much? Are they armed? Are there any children? Is anyone doing magic? Is anyone behaving deferentially to anyone else?
She's clearly subject to *some* sort of effect, since she is entirely capable of comprehending the various languages being spoken on the street despite never having heard any of them before.
There are numerous emblems and articles of jewellery which could be holy symbols, but none of them are ones she recognises. People are haggling extensively. Many people are armed and armoured, more often "adventurer" types, of which there are many, than civilians, though many civilians are also armed. There are children, playing in the street under the watchful eyes of mothers and grandfathers. Someone is casting a decorative illusion to supplement thier storytelling as a form of street performance, someone else is sitting on a balcony and copying text from one book to another with a spell chanted out of a third. Magical lighting is common, anywhere where stealing it would be difficult. People behaving unusually include someone flying overhead on a giant wasp, a team of people in matching armour glaring suspiciously at passers-by, and a floating skull burning with green flame, who, as he is also selling street food, is not strictly speaking acting differently, but nonetheless stands out.
Ooh, truespeech! She's missed that from when she was an angel. This means it's less likely that she was simply kidnapped. It doesn't distinguish between being sent on a mission by Marra and sent into a trap by Marra's enemies, but Kireh is not focusing on that anyway; Marra's instructions are for her to simply pursue Marra's interests and her own personal goals given her best judgement of the situation, and not to worry about tricks.
(Marra has two reasons for this policy. First, She's very possessive of everyone who's Hers and would retaliate viciously to a kidnapping anyway, so the additional cost of also punishing attempts to twist Her outsiders against Her is cheap. (Yes, this is a partially a threat, but plenty of entities respond to threats.) Second, Marra has an extremely limited informational intervention budget, because writing Her holy books before ascending was not the clever workaround she thought it was, so She values being able to send Her outsiders on missions without warning or guidance.)
This appears to be a prosperous, Lawful city. The flaming skull might be undead, and depending on local fashion might have an 'Evil aesthetic', which are both weak evidence for Evil being tolerated here.
Without moving away from the wall, she tries to listen in on the storytelling. If they are really using a Silent Image in a simple street performance, this city is very prosperous indeed! Or if the performance is subsidized, like Marran cult performances, she's interested in their goals...
They're telling the story of a unnamed adventurer (They're a sword and board sort, deft and agile and cunning despite thier armour and lack of magic - besides a bottomless backpack full of potions and enchanted swords at least) who delves into a deep and well-guarded barrow (the guards are fire elementals and undead, the former wild and animalistic and the latter given to comical philosophical musings as they fight) to confront the lich within, whose experiments (left unillustrated) were so vile as to see her exiled from even the Lichocracy. She is slain, but her "dying" breaths reveal her soul jar was hidden elsewhere, so she will return once again! But that is a story for tomorrow! The art style is cartoony and unrealistic, but rich with colour and emotion.
A lovely performance!
Maybe it's trying to improve the image of the undead?
But first, before following up on that, time to pray.
She loves Marra, who made her strong and gave her what Heaven couldn't, but that's irrelevant - Marra only cares that she's vain, rule-abiding, and does her duty. Which right now is to think over everything she's observed and ponder how she might conquer it for Marra, being careful to deal honestly of course, and what she might like to do with it once it's hers. She doesn't know enough to have a lot of specific plans, but she thinks about the storyteller and how she could train their mind and push them to practice their art and how they would be grateful to be made into something awesome.
She's not expecting a response. Marra never sends visions.
Irori, look at this fascinating situation I'm in..., which will push me to refine myself.
Lissala, I'm not Yours but look at how obedient I'm being to Marra. In particular I'm obediently observing this situation as follows...
Minderhal, I want to be strong so I can bring justice to this place...
Zepar is a Lord of Hell, concerned with abduction, rape, and transformation. Close enough to be easy to pray to, but she doesn't want to let the information get to Asmodeus if He doesn't already know. She skips Zepar. (This is a standard approved option, not disobedience.)
Aroggus, if I was kidnapped to this place, which I describe as follows..., let me have glorious revenge on whoever did it and ironically twist their plans to serve Marra instead.
Ulon, I seem to be isolated in this place... thanks to Marra I can thrive in isolation. If I am here on Her behalf to enact a conspiracy, let me be cunning in my manipulations. (While still being Lawful.)
Erecura, look at this situation I'm in... where I need to be subtle and make deductions to learn more. And of course I love mind-reading and hope to do lots of it here!
Arazni, apparently they have lots of liches here!
Norgorber, I'm greedy and want to rule this whole place...
Lorthact is another Lord of Hell. Concerned with exiles, but, again, she's not leaking information to Asmodeus until she's more sure that He already has a presence here.
Abadar, hm. Marrans use money to disrupt the perverse network of unspoken social obligations that Good likes to bind people with. Abadar likes freedom, and this brings freedom. Although Abadar likes more freedom than that... Marra is fine with freedom once one's duties have been met, but She's opposed to unlimited freedom.
Abadar screws over people who don't have anything, not even talent or potential. That's like Marra not caring about hopelessly boring people. (Which Kireh has slightly mixed feelings about. It's a relief for her to be able to say 'not my problem, I'm Evil' to distant tragedies, but she does, as a personal goal for the far future when Marra rules Hell, want to make everyone awesome and vain and reliable and, yes, happy.)
Abadar, here's some information. Marra will probably pay you for it.
She approaches the storyteller. "Hello. I'm not from around here. What's the Lichocracy? I don't have money to pay you for information."
Obviously they're going to say it's an affront to civilized people everywhere or something like that, but what else will they subtly add?
It is not particularly in the nature of the gods to answer random prayers (especially not random prayers misdirected only hazily in the direction of a misnamed and misunderstood version of themselves). For most people, in most places and times, what they have to say doesn't even get past the spam filter, or it gets added to an automated aggregate log, or it gets passed to an automatic system for resolving the specific problem they're praying about. Gods are busy people, after all, and the world is a busy place.
But, some gods do in fact have an automated system set up for situations like this one.
You are very lost, little one. To seek insight and grow, visit a temple of the god Understanding. This is an automated message and will not repeat.
Ooh! "... and where might I find a temple of Understanding? I can trade mind-reading, secretarial work, sex, light adventuring, errands...?"
The storyteller is packing up their things and laughs nervously at the questions. "Ah, it does me no good to charge for information that's common knowledge, even if you are a stranger ignorant of it. The Lichocracy is a great city-state to the east of here, ruled by a senate composed of every lich who choses to attend the senatorial meetings. So they're ruled by some of the smartest and most capable archmages still active in the world today. Some of them are even interested in governing." They chuckle at that, still a little forced but much more genuine.
"The nearest proper temple to Understanding is out of town a little ways - leave via the north gate, then cross the river at the ferry, then you should be able to ask someone more local for directions. It should be pretty safe, that's all well-travelled farmland."
So positive! "What is it like to live there? What laws do the liches follow? What laws do the non-liches follow?
On that topic, what laws do people follow here in this city? Particularly regarding gods, outsiders, mind-reading, and mind-control."