"Asking if you knew what gods are made out of was a bit of a long shot -- I didn't really expect you to know, it's just that if you did have a simple answer that would have been really surprising and informative," she explains.

"As for looking at create water and light and thinking that I can extrapolate about teleport protections ..." She pauses to figure out how to explain this. "Dandelions and lions -- assuming these are the plant and the large cat we're talking about -- are very different, but they're made of the same stuff. If I had a pile of dandelions here and a template for how to make a lion, I could rearrange all the smallest pieces of the dandelions to make a lion."

"And your spells are made out of a kind of stuff that I'd never seen before -- that as far as I can tell, doesn't exist in my universe at all. But my fixity crystal was still able to see where it was, which is the same mechanism it uses to manipulate locations. If you'd like to do a test, you can cast create water again and I can try to pull the spell away from you and use it myself. I can try grabbing it without you casting, but I wouldn't want to accidentally grab your other magic at the same time."

"So it's entirely possible that different forms of magic are made out of something that fixity crystals can't manipulate, or that the teleportation shielding works in a way that prevents the fixity field from even reaching the things its protecting in the first place, but it would be ... positing extra complexity that isn't necessary to explain things. Every kind of magic being made out of the same flexible little components would be consistent with everything you've told me so far. That doesn't mean it's true, it just means that I'm more confident betting that my teleportation would work than not."

She takes another sip of her lemonade.

"I can see why you're recommending getting allies, though. It sounds like Golarion has a lot of unknowns where we're not sure how my crystal will stack up. One thing we might try -- although I don't actually want to do this until we've spent a while exhausting our options, because it would potentially reveal us to the gods -- is opening the door just long enough to grab a few likely allies with different magic and expertise before closing it to pause time again. If we did, who would you want to grab and why?"

"Maybe you're relying on the weird translation effect too much. Just because we call a lot of different things magic doesn't mean they're all fundamentally the same, language doesn't work like that - mine doesn't, anyway. Maybe a wizard would know, they study magic. Clerics just use it, so I can't tell you how it works."

"To me it sounds like you're saying everything you haven't seen or even heard of must all be one kind of thing. Like there can only be one thing in Creation that you don't know about. To me it seems obvious that there are lots of things I don't know about and they don't all have to be related to each other."

"I really want to try my own translation spell and see if it does any better. But I didn't ask for it this morning, because I didn't know I'd need it. So I'd have to pray to Gorum for it, and that might him notice us, and we don't want that."

"When you say grab some allies, do you mean going out to convince them to come here, or do you mean very quickly teleporting them with your power and hoping no-one notices?"

"It's not that everything ..." she begins, before cutting herself off and summoning a diagram of the standard model.

"Everything in my entire universe is composed of these twelve types of particles held together by these twelve types of binding. The spell you demonstrated contained many of these, but also an additional four types of particle that I hadn't seen before," she explains. "In my universe, that would imply the existence of a few more particles that I didn't see due to a deep tendency in nature called 'symmetry', but they would have related predictable properties."

"It is entirely possible that your universe isn't so clean -- clearly, things are a lot more complicated than I was expecting, given that apparently a multiverse exists, and the way that I thought things worked is wrong. You're absolutely right that we don't actually know for certain how things will work until we try. But those 4 extra particles in your magic and the others they imply look very flexible. I think -- although I haven't actually reverse engineered it yet -- that they probably suffice to build very wildly different spells, in the same way that the twelve basic particles of matter are enough to build cats, dandelions, boats, and stars. So in some sense, those few particles existing is sufficient to explain very different kinds of magic."

She gropes for a metaphor suited to his apparent tech level and life experience.

"It's like finding a house full of bodies with stab wounds, and a bandit standing outside shouting about how he stabbed the mother. Yes, it's entirely possible that the bandit only stabbed some of them, and that the others were stabbed by a secret group of cultists living in the basement, but if you had to put money on it you'd probably assume that the bandit was responsible for everything."

"So if we get the chance to figure out whether fixity crystals work through teleport barriers, we should. And probably we can figure that out in the first few milliseconds after the door opens, since you said we were near the Worldwound. But until we get more information, my guess is still that even very complicated magic will still be the same fundamental kind of thing as the magic you showed me."

She shakes her head to clear it.

"I understand if that doesn't really convince you. I've spent my life working to understand the smallest parts of the universe, and that's given me some intuitions, but this is a very strange situation. The responsible thing, because time is stopped, is probably to come up with a plan for both cases -- what to try if my teleport suffices, and what to fall back to if it doesn't."

"As for calling allies -- I meant trying to teleport them here very quickly so nobody notices, although we could also duplicate them so that we could have them here without anybody being able to see that they had gone. I don't like to do that without asking for permission, though, because it can be very upsetting for people. Does that change your answer, though? Are there people who would be useful to work with only if not teleported, or vice versa?"

"I hadn't realized you could clone other people! Maybe you should just clone some trustworthy allies a lot - if they agree, of course. Yesterday I would have said that an army of a million powerful azatas, or ten thousand Felandriel Morgethais, could handily conquer the world and do a lot of the good things we'd want done, and it wouldn't be obvious where they came from or what other powers you have."

"I'm not personally well acquainted with any of the most powerful and useful allies I can think of. I have no idea who might react well to nonconsensual cloning, even if they'd agree given the chance to consider it. I assume most people would prefer to be kidnapped rather than cloned and also kidnapped. If they disappear, and merely mortal allies search for them, and time will quickly be stopped again, then I don't think there's a significant risk in teleporting them. Not unless the teleportation effect itself is so novel and unusual that some god would notice it the first time it happens."

"If the people we fetch don't like it, we'd have to hold them prisoner here, and I'm willing to do it but I really hate it. I'm sorry to say that I can only offer guesses, about people I know moderately well who might have better advice, and about people who are very powerful and knowledgeable whom I have not met and don't know how to find."

"...Actually. Go back a step. Can you clone a god?" The mind boggles, but, well - "If that's possible, and you can just have a lot more Desnas and Sarenraes and Milanis running around - they could probably handle the other gods for us -"

She nods along. "It makes sense that you're not directly acquainted with all the right people, and I agree that cloning people instead of just teleporting them is worse. I could see it still being worth it, depending on what exactly gets gods attention, but I'd certainly rather just teleport them."

She adopts a considering look, staring out past his shoulder. "My ability to clone things depends on being able to observe the entirety of their form, to acquire the 'pattern' to make more, and then on being able to synthesize the materials that they are made out of, or to pull those materials from elsewhere. I can synthesize all of the basic materials from my universe, and I expect to work out how to synthesize the magic particles I've seen from yours, although I think I need to see a spell 'decay' instead of just folding back up inside you in order to figure out how."

She refocuses on him. "So whether I can clone a god I think mostly depends on whether I can get a fixity field to cover them. You said you don't know what gods are made of -- do you know where they are? Do they live among people, or hang out in the theocracies you mentioned, or on other planes? Or failing that, could we maybe arrange for an allied god to come to a particular location?" she questions.

"Oh!" she nearly interrupts herself. "You mentioned that some gods are stronger than other gods -- do you know what resources contribute to that? Even if gods aren't in easily accessible locations, if they are empowered by something, I could plausibly just dump a lot of that resource on some of them."

Behind her, her clone at the bar has started doing something that involves slips of green paper rapidly appearing and disappearing on one end of the bar, and books appearing and disappearing on the other.

("Just give me the first cubic lightyear of your recommendations," she told Bar)

"I have no idea what gods power draw power from. Maybe the same thing that powers all magic? I haven't heard of them fighting over things or places for power, but maybe that just means there aren't any on Golarion. I've heard stories that gods get power from people praying to them but I think that's just something people made up so they can pretend they actually matter to the gods."

"Most gods have homes on other planes. Some of those homes are meant to be easy to find, although you'd probably be seen going there, and I can't plane shift myself yet. They can certainly go other places, if we can talk to them and convince them to do it."

"There are two gods that I know of who live on Golarion in the nations they rule. Neither is someone you'd want to approach."

"Abadar rules Osirion. He's the Lawful Neutral god of banking and commerce and trade, which means he's happy to trade with Asmodeus as long as his coin's good. In his country women have no rights, they can't choose where to live or work or who to marry, they can't even leave their own homes without some man's permission. And some of the men are also slaves, of course. He tells everyone they must obey him to get to Axis, the Lawful Neutral afterlife, where they'll be happier for some reason, even though he also rules Axis."

"Razmir rules Razmiran, which he renamed after himself. He's a Lawful Evil god and he forces everyone to worship him, but he doesn't seem to care what they do other than that. He's a very new and weak god, compared to all the others, I don't think he's got anything but the country and most of the other churches won't acknowledge him."

"The really evil bastards like Asmodeus and Zon-Kuthon don't personally rule their countries, thankfully. But every god who owns a country is a Lawful slaver. Some of them just happen to be the lesser evil."

"I can show you some spells and you can try to copy them, I was expecting a fight and now I probably don't need these. You can also try copying my magic sword or my bag of holding." He opens the bag to demonstrate how it's bigger on the inside.

"Getting more spells requires praying to Gorum and he might notice I'm somewhere strange and look more closely. Or it might not work because time is stopped for him. Usually I can pray to restore or replace all my spells once per day, and I can pray for one more spell anytime today because I left one slot free this morning in case I needed something later."

"Here are the spells I've got right now that I can show you, once each."

"I can make a shield around me that looks like a soap bubble, lasts for a few minutes, and deflects arrows and some hostile spells, about one time in five."

"I can create a copy of my sword that floats in the air next to me and very rarely helps to deflect swordblows, and then I can throw it at someone in a way I can't throw my real sword, after which it vanishes."

"I can illusion myself to look like any other humanoid creature I can imagine of roughly my own size, including clothes. It only affects sight, not touch or sound, and smart people can figure out it's an illusion; this lasts for almost an hour. I can also become invisible; that only lasts for a few minutes. And I can make an illusory double of myself so people don't know which of us to hit."

"I can curse someone to have much less of - one of the six classical attributes of people, this is probably going to translate as a stupid fictional idea again. We think people have six basic qualities that interact with magic and other things. Strength and dexterity are obvious. Resilience or constitution is how healthy you are and how much damage you can withstand. Intelligence and wisdom are - two ways of being good at thinking. And splendour is understanding or persuading other people." He wonders who sorcerers have to persuade when they cast their Splendid spells.

"And finally, I can make a person or item hard to magically find or divine information about, for a few hours. Not, to be clear, in a way that would stand up to gods."

"I can also use the energy of some of these spells to instead heal someone's wounds. This works for some spells but not others and I don't know why. Separately from that, I can heal everyone within thirty feet of me, no matter how many people are there, four more times today. Every cleric can do that, and evil clerics can harm people instead of healing them."

(Gord is still a little bit incredulous that all of magic could be fundamentally the same, when a random third circle cleric's list of spells for the day is as diverse and weirdly specific as this.)

"... huh. That is such a specific set of powers," she replies.

"I definitely think it's worth getting a demonstration of those, though. Would you be willing to start with the sword-spell, and let me take a few swings at you with a blunted training weapon? That sounds like a good way to see a spell reacting to other things happening in the environment, as well as a spell that creates something that acts like an object while still being temporary (unlike create water)."

A notification from the spell research team pops up on her HUD.

"Oh, and would it be okay if I looked at your brain in more detail while you were casting the spell? I usually avoid looking at people's brains because of privacy concerns -- many people find the idea upsetting, and it's totally okay if you won't permit that. But I am curious about how the brain interfaces with magic, including things like whether the sword reacts to what you think subconsciously."

"I'm not objecting for reasons of privacy exactly but I would like to know what else you could or would do that information. If you use it only to learn about magic and forget it afterwards or destroy the records or however that works, that would be best, but you can look either way." He has things in his head that he's ashamed of, and things he regrets, but he only hides them for strategic reasons and he expects her to follow through even if she suddenly turns out to hate him personally.

"You should try to swing at me a few times before I cast the spell to see how often you can hit me. The spell wouldn't do anything to protect me if I wasn't trying to dodge."

And once she's done that, he casts hedging weapons, and a greatsword-shaped shiny force field appears in the air. It will try to distract and parry her blows! It's very ineffective at doing that, though, because it's also trying to keep out of Gord's own field of vision, so as to not distract him.

"It will stay around for a few minutes. The real benefit is throwing it before it disappears, because most people don't expect me to throw a sword and cleanly decapitate someone across the room." 

"I would certainly be surprised by that!" she cheerfully agrees. She conjures a target at the other side of the room. "Go ahead and throw it at that."

"As for what I will do with the things seen inside your head: I promise to only keep notes long enough for the group of me currently working on reverse-engineering magic to figure out the interaction with your spells, and then promptly destroy them. The group of me that sees the notes will not communicate their specific contents to anyone else (although I intend to share the abstract summary of how magic connects to your brain), nor attempt to deliberately remember them once their work is done. I don't actually have a way to make myself forget things," she apologizes.

In a spacious physics lab in polar solar orbit, a group of Weeping Cherry's forks peer over the data. They trace the decay reactions as the spell comes unwound at the end of its duration. They examine the way that it reaches out to the environment to sense the other combatants, and the way that it imparts forces to the things that it touches. They look at how it attaches to his brain, a tiny specialized structure embedded there to permit his control.

There are weirder things in his brain. A different type of exotic particle, and other complicated structures that they infer are his other spells, plus some bits that they can't determine the precise function of.

As promised, they ignore the majority of his brain, and don't even try to decode his thoughts, beyond checking to see whether his visualization of the space around him affects the sword at all.

In Milliways, Weeping Cherry smiles at him again.

"That was very useful, thank you! I want to see your other spells, but let's give the rest of me a chance to pore over this one, since we have time."

She seats herself at the bar again.

"To change topic a bit -- what gods would you recommend approaching?"

Hitting a stationary dummy: easy! He could probably do that with his real sword if he practiced. The conjured sword cuts through it cleanly before disappearing.

"I haven't met any of the gods, so all my knowledge is secondhand. Even with Gorum, the first time he gave me spells saved my life, and he answers my prayers when I need something specific or new, but he doesn't talk back. Even the gods with the best reputations probably have a lot of motives and goals I wouldn't know about, and even good and honest clerics might mislead people about their gods. Maybe we can find someone trustworthy who knows a god better than that and will recommend them."

"But since we have to try someone, here's my best guess."

"Desna is the strongest Chaotic Good goddess. She's the patron of distant travel and the stars, so she will probably like your scheme and know things that could be relevant."

"Milani is the Chaotic Good goddess of rebellion and freedom and slave uprisings. She's one of the ascended gods, so she's very weak by comparison with someone like Desna and has very few clerics - I only ever met one. But because she was mortal once she understands people as well as we do and she can talk to us without problems."

"Sarenrae is the Neutral Good goddess of healing and redemption and forgiveness. Her clerics say, and I have seen nothing to dispute this, that she really wants to help everyone, but she doesn't really understand mortal people and can't easily talk to them. So she only does things she's really sure won't hurt anyone, like healing people, and not - more complex schemes. But if another god can persuade her she can help a lot because she's one of the strongest gods there are."

"There are other gods who might in fact be a better choice, but I don't know enough about them to say. Adventurers come to the Worldwound from all over. I've heard about gods in Tian Xia who aren't worshipped in Avistan, and there are probably more in other places. And there are many more - smaller gods, or really big angels, or some other kind of thing, who might be great allies but I don't know which ones to approach. Although I can think of a few people I'd ask, if I had the chance, without revealing why I'm asking."

"And there's Iomedae, because I know her name will come up somehow even if I don't recommend her. Her church is all over Mendev and she outright owns the country of Lastwall to the south. She is the ascended Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil, and she is the goddess of painful tradeoffs. I guess the best thing I can say about her is that - she will always pursue the greater good, and she's competent to do it. And I might even mostly agree with her about the Good, as an end goal. But her greater good requires a lot of lesser evils, and she pays for it with other people's lives, without their consent, and that's not something I could ever accept."

"The other reason I don't trust her is that she's Lawful, which means she makes promises that she literally cannot break. And I don't know what she might have promised Asmodeus or Abadar or some other god I never heard of that would require her to betray you to them because she didn't foresee you turning up."

Hearing that lawful gods can bind themselves like that is ... interesting. It definitely implies that even the ascended gods think very differently from humans, but it also raises the question of why they haven't undergone a values handshake and consolidated into one entity. Maybe they have, and they merely present different faces for different purposes?

"I think being able to make unbreakable promises is possibly useful, but if the first promise you make isn't 'I will never knowingly betray my allies', you're not really doing it right," she remarks. "Being knowably trustworthy is actually really valuable. If we could somehow get a list of what promises she's made, that might give us a better idea of how to trust her -- does her country publish an up-to-date list of her promises? If it doesn't, that's a bad sign, because it implies that she makes promises she doesn't want people to know about."

She drums her fingers on the bar for a moment, thinking about the other things he's said.

"When you say that Sarenrae has trouble understanding mortals -- does that include ascended gods like Milani? I'm just trying to get an idea of what the problems are with communicating better with Sarenrae, because 'get the most powerful Good god to support your plan' sounds like a great idea."

"I'm not sure if Iomeadae would betray her allies, but either way her existing oaths might prevent us from becoming her allies, and she might tell someone else about our attempt at contacting her."

"Lastwall publishes some promises she's made, I don't remember all of them offhand, but I'm sure she sometimes promises someone something in confidence and then it's not published, or she just has - secret plans that involve promises that she doesn't want her enemies to know about. I guess she could promise that she hasn't made a certain promise, but that would require asking her if she's made a certain promise, and that would give away information."

"And I'm not speaking from personal knowledge, but my best guess is that Milani is better at talking to Sarenrae than we would be because Milani is smarter than us and knows what it's like to be a god and has a lot of practice at talking to other gods, not because Sarenrae is better at understanding Milani. Although she might be better at it too because she's been talking to her for a while."

"Oh, I see what you mean!" she says. "That makes sense. If we can do it cheaply, we probably want to pick up a copy of that list, just in case she's done the sensible thing and promised that anyone who comes to her under a flag of parley won't be worse off for having done so."

She shakes her head.

"If Milani is already working on 'explaining people to Sarenrae' and hasn't made noticeable progress, I'm not sure if we have an angle on speeding that up. Maybe we can try contacting her and asking if there's anything which would speed that work up, but either way it probably will be too slow to help with whatever our initial action is."

"Oh, unless! You mentioned possibly being able to pray to Gorum to get his attention. Is there any downside to trying to pray to the non-Lawful Good gods?" she asks. "Except, I suppose, the possibility of betrayal, so we should probably choose wisely. I don't really expect it to work, but if we can potentially get feedback or help from them without needing to open the door at all, that might be worth trying even if it's a long shot."

"Praying to a god is the traditional way of contacting them! But there's some disagreement on how it works."

"Some people say it only works if you understand the god well enough - what they care about and want from mortals and how they see the world if they're the kind who doesn't understand mortals very well. Some say you have to be, yourself, aligned with the god, the same way that clerics are always close in alignment to their god and share some of their ideals. Clerics are often first chosen when they pray. Some say that gods can actually hear all the prayers but those are the conditions for them responding, so maybe they'd respond anyway if the prayer was really interesting or important. Maybe you have to be all of those things at once."

"Churches usually have instructions for the faithful or for clerics for praying correctly, as part of teaching about their god. Maybe different gods are just - different. I've never seriously prayed to anyone but Gorum."

"Powerful clerics have a spell that lets them talk directly to their god, and others that let them ask their god to send an outsider as a messenger, so you can talk to them and have them carry a message back. I'm not strong enough to have those spells yet, I'm only third circle."

"Anyway, I don't see how praying would work if time is stopped for the gods while the door is closed."

"Yes, that's why I think it's a long shot," she agrees. "If it did work, I think that would actually be really concerning and we'd have to move fast because it would imply that the promised time-stop was not actually absolute. But it's also something that we can try quickly before opening the door, just in case."

She conjures a floating whiteboard on which to diagram.

"My other selves have been keeping notes, but our plan is getting complex enough that I want to write it down so we have something to refer to," she explains. She writes "Examine Gord's Magic" at the top, "Try to contact gods (which ones)?" below it, followed by "Open door", and then by two different options with a line drawn to each: "Kidnap likely allies (who?)", and "Kidnap everyone". Below this she writes "What if teleport doesn't work?" and "Try to contact gods again?"

She looks at that for a moment, and then adds "Copy books -- Iomedae list/other references" under "Kidnap likely allies".

"Does that all make sense?" she asks. "Or should I note it in a different way? Here," she adds, adding a selection of differently colored whiteboard markers to the bottom of the whiteboard.

"It makes sense. We could also talk to prospective allies without kidnapping them, if we can keep the door open without drawing attention."

"I think the biggest question is - what actions would be noticed by gods? Keeping the door open for long enough? Taking your fixity field into Golarion? Copying something, teleporting something? Only the absence of something important that was teleported? We need to figure that out to know what risks to take."

"You can try closing the door and seeing if time stops completely in your world until you open it again. And I can show you the rest of my spells in case you learn something useful."

She adds "talk to allies w/ sneaky door" to the diagram.

"Yes, I think you're quite right that our main goal is to act before all the gods notice. I'm not really sure how to guess what will get a god's attention, other than the supposition that normal things that happen all the time in your world probably don't," she agrees.

"Playing around with the timestop effect on my world makes perfect sense. We should definitely do that," she continues. "That might mean I have to disconnect from my connection to the rest of my selves, though, because they would be stopped. And I really don't know what it would do to one of my wormholes to have one end frozen in time and the other one not. I guess we should find out."

She summons a beach-ball sized pale golden crystal that she sets to hovering near her, just in case, and then walks over to the door and closes it. Her self-tree remains connected.

"So that didn't stop time in my world, but I bet that's because I'm still connected to the rest of my other selves," she explains, opening the door again. She lets her wormholes float back through, and closes it again. This time, the fixity field from the far side cuts off as soon as the door closes, and she loses the connection.

She waits a count of five, and then opens the door again. Her selftree reports that the door seemed to close and then open instantaneously.

"But the timestop effect seems to work fine when I'm disconnected."

She tries a few more variations -- unraveling a wormhole, dropping it into a tiny black hole, trying to measure the time between the door closing and opening more closely -- before returning to the bar.

"It looks like the timestop effect only works when there's no connection from one side of the door to the other," she concludes. "Which is good to know, because it means I definitely shouldn't put a permanent connection between Earth and Golarion until we're sure we don't need the timestop anymore. But it also means that a god who notices the door might be able to figure this out and get a connection of their own through to stop us being able to pause again."

She gets a notification from the particle physicists that they have a working temporary sword spell. It takes a small brain modification and some weird supporting femptomachinery to attach, but it seems to work fine.

"It looks like the versions of me who are working on understanding magic are ready for the next piece," she remarks. "Can we try your invisibility spell next?"

Gord becomes invisible, along with his sword! Any small objects he picks up and puts in his pocket also become invisible, as if the invisible material is obscuring them, until he takes them out again.

"If you're careful, you can make objects partially invisible, the part that's inside the pocket or bag. I heard a story once where a man used this to look into a closed box without opening it."

She blinks repeatedly.

"Wait, what? Like, he got inside an invisible container, and then held the box partly through the opening of the container such that the lid became invisible, but the contents didn't?" she clarifies.

She doesn't let her confusion stop her from trying various different wavelengths and angles of light on him. What happens if she drops a little flour on him? What happens if she looks for a difference in refractive index, etc.?

"Actually, could you put your hand in this bucket for a moment, so I can see how the spell handles the transition between water and air?"

The flour settles on him, creating an outline of his body. (This is in fact a standard anti-invisibility security measure.) After a few seconds it turns invisible, unless she dumps a whole bag. His footprints leave visible impressions in the flour on the floor.

His hand remains invisible inside the water, but the invisibility is still mimicking air; it looks as if the water is mysteriously avoiding a hand-shaped volume.

"He was wearing a backpack, which became invisible with him. And then he put a locked box into the backpack. Half the box was sticking out of the backpack and remained visible, so he could look into that half through the exposed cross-section."

"I think if you do that, the inside of the visible half-box might stay dark, but it could work if you have darkvision and the box wasn't perfectly sealed against light to begin with."