"So, we get stronger through combat, right? And one way to have that is to be in an army at the Worldwound, but the other way is to be a mercenary, and what a lot of people will do is form mercenary groups with a few of their friends with complementary abilities - that's how you guys parse, as an adventuring party - and that makes it somewhat less dangerous, because your buddies will save you if you get trapped and maybe even raise you if you get killed - and there's a lot of problems a small group of spellcasters and some powerful soldiers who can protect them can solve."

"If we get contact with Earth I bet a lot of people from here would love being enclave guards. Well, contact and some way to prevent mals from coming across. They're way too good at getting into anywhere magically accessible."

"Huh. ...contact with your world sounds almost undescribably valuable and I bet the command would figure something out. Maybe prevail on an archmage for a specialized permanent demiplane setup where magic doesn't work at all in one of the demiplanes in the middle? Or maybe everyone could Plane Shift between worlds going over Heaven as an intermediary? I have no idea, this is wildly above my area of competence. But we can consult Iomedae for important matters like 'is this transit method going to introduce reproducing demons to Golarion'."

Abigail blinks. She hadn't really understood how far Lastwall would be willing to go for regular interaction between the worlds but now that she thinks about it it makes sense. They're bigger than any group of people she's used to and can make bigger investments if the payoff is enough. "Lastwall has spells for traveling between planes? Do you have any that just do communication? There are information mals but a lot fewer of them than the physical kind, and it might be easier to secure travel if we could coordinate from both ends. Asking Iomedae might still be a good idea for that depending on how difficult it is; information mals are also pretty hard to kill."

"Information mals? 

...Lastwall only has, as far as I know, the capabilities to travel to other planes we've been to and designed targeting items for. Which includes Heaven, and various demiplanes we've made, but definitely not your world. But there is a Good archmage, archmages can travel to planes without a targeting item, and also the command probably knows some things we can do which I don't. 

There is a fourth circle spell, Sending, for communication that works across planes. The priest here can prepare it, though if we'd want to ask Iomedae first which depends on what an information mal is then that requires communicating with Vigil."

"Information mals are--hm. Do you have computers? Or telephones? Or the concept of a ghost, a disembodied mind?"

"No computers no telephones definitely yes ghosts."

"Okay, so then I guess the best way to explain it is that an information mal is a malicious, hungry ghost that's also a message. They can travel between places when information is passed between those places even if nothing physical moves from one to the other, and they don't have physical bodies but that doesn't stop them from sucking the life out of you. There are also psychic mals which are similar except they move through space like physical things despite not having bodies and they mess with your thoughts and emotions as part of killing you."

"Wow, I hate it. Does Protection from Evil work to block them?"

Yeah it's really hateable, he's so right. "That sounds like a really useful thing to test and I have no idea how we'd test it without having mals here already. There are spells in our magic that can shield against them; the trick is finding out one is nearby in time to react and then killing them before you've spent too much mana shielding. . . . I guess we could test whether your kind of shielding keeps out our magic and that would be at least somewhat informative on how it would stack up against mals."

"That seems worth a shot, yeah. Protection from Evil is at first circle; I can prepare the equivalent spell Protection from Good, if you want to test how your magic interacts with it. ...Protection from Evil won't block your spells because you're not Evil."

"That seems like a good test. I can try to hit you with a very small amount of lightning that won't injure you even if the protection doesn't work."

"Sounds good, though it's pretty weak as a shield spell, what it's most useful for is protection against possession and mental tampering, which it blocks completely."

"I don't have a lot of stuff I'd call mental tampering but I could do the interrogation spell again. Or if you'd rather not I could try to make you hear colors. It's a pretty useless spell because mal senses are too different to be affected, but it was in a book I read once. Uh, spells are sticky, once you learn one you basically never forget it even if it's stupid."

"That's cool. Sorcerers are usually like that, I think, but wizards don't have that, if you ripped a page out of my spellbook I'd have a bad time reproducing it from memory. And yeah, I think the spell you used on me earlier ought to be the kind Protection from Good is good against."

"Sounds good, we can do that." Wow, if her kind of wizard had to hang onto a physical book with all the spells they knew that would be so difficult. "Do your spellbooks ever get annoyed and escape or is that just ours?"

"No, a wizard's spellbook isn't intelligent and stays where it's put even if it's put in a pocket dimension, as is fashionable for powerful wizards."

"Yeah, that would definitely make it easier to hang onto all the spells you need. And I can stop talking so you can prepare Protection From Good."

"Sure, give me another twenty minutes. Sorry. Some wizards learn speed spell preparation and it sounds super useful but I don't have the knack myself yet."

"No problem." She can join Kevin in low-key mana-building for twenty minutes. (Franklin is sitting across from Marcy, reading her accumulating notes upside down.)

And eventually he has a Protection from Good. They can watch him cast it, and he can talk about why it looks different than the Share Languages  - it's an abjuration, they're hung differently, and first circle instead of second, and it won't last nearly as long, you can see from watching how minor destabilizations ripple through the spell...

Then she'll be prompt about attempting the interrogation spell on him. If it goes through she'll just immediately stop putting mana into it.

It doesn't go through; the protection spell blocks it.

"Cool," Marit says. "I mean I guess if your magic just ignored all of ours you could take over Cheliax in like a week, and that'd be even cooler, but this makes more sense."

Conquering a country even with unstoppable magic is a very intimidating hypothetical but it's not like she can't see his point. "Yeah. Do you have combat spells we can try shielding against next?"

He looks sheepish. "I don't actually prepare any combat spells, either. ... wizards are scary in fights against humans, even at my power level, but demons are generally a lot stronger than us, so I mostly only have spells for strengthening our combatants, like the haste I did earlier when that flock of vrocks came at us, or utility spells. Tomorrow I can prepare you some things."