"Hi, can I take some of them? She's deep in research mode."

"Who are you?"

Despite the question, Nenio's tone is more quizzical than dismissive.

"I'm her brother, so I know some of the same sorta things."

The incomprehension continues for a moment, then the enthusiasm is back in full force.

"So you're also from another world, the same one as the girl? What world is it? Do you naturally look like this, or is it something you chose to fit in? What are your world's scientific achievements like? What species do you have there? What were the first five differences you noticed about Golarion after your arrival?"

"I don't know the place to have a name. We look like this, we're humans, everybody's humans there actually. Ky had to special order movable type, so I guess maybe we have a little more invention going on in areas that aren't magic? Magic is really different. Noticed the not everybody being humans thing too. Also it's cold here though probably my world has some cold places I've just never visited before. People are awfully religious in a way they're not back home. Is that five - I guess it's four - uh, the whole, demons attacking everything, thing, is pretty conspicuous."

A few things will quickly become apparent. Firstly, that Nenio appears to be an incredibly prodigious writer, especially considering her refusal to do things like stop while she's talking. Secondly, that Nenio has an awful lot of questions written up and an apparent willingness to keep asking them indefinitely.

"Fascinating. What does magic look like where you're from? If you're less religious, what gods do get worshiped anyway? What do people do about healing with less clerics around, is it just herbology and surgery or can you do it with arcane magic? Is this unusually cold by your standards in general or just for summer? Do people in your country have a statistically significant lean towards a specific alignment or is it mostly an even spread? What are the primary methods of transportation you're familiar with?

Yep, that's obvious. He just wants to keep her off Ky for a while, she's in a book fugue over there.

"Magic at home all looks like Ky's, more. Like, not paper in particular, different people have different domains, but that general sort of deal where you can control some specific thing. It's herbology and surgery and some magic but there are pretty few people whose domain is flesh that you want to let poke you. It's cold here in general, winter at home sometimes snows but not much and it doesn't get this - bitey. Nobody's domain is alignment so I don't know what anybody's is. People walk, or ride horses, or get on boats."

"So there aren't any empowered clerics at all? Some people have theorized that religion wouldn't survive as an institution without their influence, but if the difference is just the fervor that has interesting implications. As for the domains, I'm not aware of any kind of magic like that; it sounds vaguely similar to the abilities of some outsiders like elementals, but there aren't elementals of paper or flesh, and while sorcery and divine empowerment can both be said to have themes corresponding to the bloodline's source and the god in question they aren't limited to that. Is there an established progression to how someone's magic grows in strength, or is it ideosyncratic and varies person to person? How large do your boats get, and do they usually rely on magic to travel or just sails and oars? How many languages have you heard of your world having? If you don't have a way to check alignment, does that mean people mostly muddle by with guessing or that they don't know what the concept even points to?"

"There's some religion but much less, totally different gods, and it's like, much less important to everybody. There's sort of a progression, but like, somebody whose domains is birds is going to have a hard time making birds out of nothing the way Ky can make paper out of nothing even if they're the same amount progressed or even if they could beat her arm-wrestling. Boats can... carry a hundred fifty tons, I think, some of them? I don't know how long they are or whatever. Usually no magic, or they're constructed with it but aren't still magic after the magic guy leaves. I have heard of... uh... at least fifteen, but I'd be really surprised if I'd heard of even a quarter of them. I think people care about being law-abiding versus not and about being good people versus lousy ones but there's no, like, objective answer you can just discern, you'd have to look at people's criminal records or something."

scribble scribble.

"I see. Are there notable patterns in what kind of domain people get, such as based on personality or ancestry or place of birth? Are some domains more common that others? How do people progress their domains? Do domains ever get more broad as they get stronger, or just more powerful at doing the same things? Can you detect how powerful someone is? Does everyone have a domain? Do you have a domain, and if so what is it?"

"No, it seems pretty random, mine is mushrooms. Ky's just lucky she got one she likes so much. No domains are really common but some are maybe especially rare? They don't get broader, just more powerful. You could detect it with like... arm wrestling or something maybe? Everyone has a domain, or like, would if they were powerful enough."

"So becoming more capable in your domain also makes you physically stronger? There are physical correlates to being capable of powerful magic, but it's mostly just resilience that increases more. Perhaps domains are more attached to the physical body? Or maybe there's some trigger required to strengthen physical capabilities that most people on Golarion haven't uncovered? Or perhaps a consequence of divine healing, creating a pattern for enhanced durability that acts as a path of least resistance? None of these seem like they would have predicted that result in advance, so probably it's none of them and I need to spend more time generating hypotheses later. How does one get powerful enough to manifest a domain; would it be something that probably would have already happened on Golarion if people here were capable of, or something specific that if I could go do it to a hundred people I might be able to get a proper sample of golarion domains?

"Yeah, more powerful people at home are stronger and faster and more agile. We don't have divine healing, so if there's lots of that going around here maybe that's causing some of the differences. If people on Golarion could do it then they definitely would've already."

(Un?)fortunately, Nenio is completely undiscouraged by - and likely oblivious to - Iskander's efforts to politely elide the source of his and Kybele's power.

"In that case, I need to make optimal use of the sample size I have! We'll need to get a complete baseline of your current abilities; grip strength, lifting capacity, running speed, endurance, reaction speed, and so forth, as well as of course any measurable traits of your domain like range, and then graph their progression against each other and time as you get more powerful. It'll need new units - maybe more than one set - and rigorous measurement, but it'll be a start to measuring the correlation between different traits and maybe even get some insight into the causation. For best results, you should be getting stronger at the same rate each day, or at least from the same inputs."

"I do not have the kind of control over my power level you are imagining, can people here do that??"

"Thus far, my data is inconclusive! Increasing your channeling capacity for magic involves using it extensively in high tension and risk conditions, especially risk of death. However, for some reason almost everyone is extremely unenthusiastic about participating in my experiments to measure it! I only have my own data to work on, which is full of confounders since it's hard to separate my own subjective estimation of risk from recorded absolute risk, and I am very easily distracted!"

"That does sound hard. I don't mind... squeezing things or whatever... so you can watch my progress. Ky might not be as game."

"If so, that would be disappointment - a larger sample size is always better. Still, we can get a lot of good data just from you!"

The girl then takes off her badckpack, and bends over to go digging through its main compartment for a minute before triumphantly emerging with a metal spring, which she proceeds to measure the stiffness of by counting how many of the books in her bag she needs to balance on top of it to depress it by a third, before awkwardly trying to squeeze it herself and only managing to slightly compress it. She presents it to him with one hand, while the other holds a piece of string with regular markings on it - presumably for measuring distance.

"An imperfect measuring tool, particularly if you end up getting much stronger, but luckily with springs there's always a linear relationship between the strength required to compress different springs! Now to test it - how far can you compress the spring with one hand?"

Squish. He's stronger than her, but not out of distribution for adult men. Maybe out of distribution for adult men with his physique.

It's not exactly a hard task to be stronger than her, given that she pretty much is out of distribution for adults in the opposite direction, but she also takes notes on how objectively far he can compress it. Unless he pushes back or stops going along with her, Nenio will try and measure his deadlift by stacking books until he struggles to pick the pile off the ground before pulling out an hourglass and asking him to run laps around the library so she can record his running speed.

He'll run but objects to unshelving books; Ky would be sad.

Nenio is not usually one to let people being sad stand in the way of scientific discovery, but once Iskander brings up that objection she also realizes that books don't have a consistent weight and it would be more ideal to count with bricks, or better yet materials of uniform composition and easily measured volume metal ingots or water. She moves on to the next task on her list and by the time she finishes recording his running data seems to have put out of her mind entirely. Is Iskandar willing to have his flexibility, balance, finger dexterity, hand-eye coordination, durability, and endurance, and do his answers change if she reminds him it's for the sake of science?

He's up for having these things tested except for his durability, and doesn't get any more enthusiastic about that upon being reminded!

But it's one of the clearest overlaps between their forms of progression! It'll be uniquely useful for making a comparison!

When these lines of argument don't end up being more persuasive than the proceeding ones, Nenio will absentmindedly thank him for his contributions to her research and then get started trying to see if she can find any patterns. Given long enough, she'll finish that and then start hitting the stacks; as plans to distract Nenio from interrupting a research subject to interview go, feeding her another one seems to be wildly successful.

Oh, good, mission accomplished.