Of course, she could just admit to being Evil and/or Lawful and intending to do something he'd rather die or be exiled to prevent. It's possible for her to say something like that, some Lawful people are very straightforward about their villainy, so he should at least ask.

"What kinds of things would you do in Golarion if you were there? What people or causes would you give resources to, and what would you ask in exchange? What resources would you bring with you? Are you speaking only for yourself, are there other people from your world who would come over?" 

"...are there things we could help you with, or that you want to buy, besides demonstrations of magic? I don't know what problems you have in your world but I imagine some places could be even worse off than we are." And benefit from a cleric of Gorum, if they really have no magic that means no healing and any society would care about that.

"I can tell you more about Golarion to help you answer that, and you can also tell me about your world. What is it called? Are you a particularly powerful or unusual person, or an average one who just happened to open this door?"

"You're right that knowing more about Golarion is probably necessary to figuring out exactly what I would do there, but my goals are generally to give every sentient being as good a life as I can. People are very different, though, so just imposing things on people doesn't actually work to make their lives better. Therefore, I focus on giving people the ability to get out of situations they don't want to be in, and giving them enough material wealth that they could re-start their life somewhere else if they didn't like any of the places they could go," she explains.

"As for your other questions -- maybe it would help explain them all if I told you a bit about my life story. When I was young, we hadn't yet invented the crystals that let us do things like duplicate ourselves, conjure materials, or bend space. And the world was fairly horrible. A lot of people were trapped in situations that hurt them, and people kept dying with no detectable afterlife. So I built the first fixity crystal," she continues.

She waves her hand and summons a picture of a fixity crystal to illustrate.

"Fixity crystals let you control the location of everything within their range. That may not sound very powerful, but it also lets you rearrange the fundamental building blocks that objects are made out of -- the tiny indivisible parts that link together to make larger objects. With a lot of work, that made it possible to conjure food and water, to stitch injuries back together, to freeze things in time, and to assemble more fixity crystals."

The picture changes to show a shining hexagonal castle rising from the sea.

"From there, I worked to assemble a fixity crystal large enough to cover the planet (called Earth), and then worked with the existing governments to provide food and water. I built an island in the sea and set up teleportation so that anyone could go there and use it as a stepping stone to found their own nation or to move on elsewhere."

"As far as I'm concerned, the fixity crystals are my gift to all sentient beings -- I think of everyone as being entitled to an equal share of what they can do. If you let me visit Golarion, I would install a crystal there, and it would permit people to teleport freely back and forth between Golarion and Earth, to create objects on demand, etc."

She dismisses the illusion.

"As for what I would want from Golarion in exchange -- I don't believe in charging for things that I would give away free anyway, but I would still be interested in buying all sorts of things. Magic -- both demonstrations and help learning and integrating it into what I can do already -- but also your knowledge of science and history, copies of your stories and great works of art, hiring people to work at various jobs, etc. From you specifically right now, I want to buy information about Golarion and transportation thereto. Being nervous about giving someone access to your world is very understandable, so I should also say that if you choose not to let me, I won't follow you through that door. When I say that people should be able to leave situations they don't want to be in, I mean it, although I would be very sad," she concludes.

She leans forward slightly.

"I'm happy to clarify any of that, or answer more questions, but I do have my own questions about Golarion -- Could you summarize your life, perhaps? What is a day like for an average person? What are the ongoing emergencies that should be addressed before anything else, and what are the major dangers that should be avoided or negotiated with? What does your god do, other than giving you magic?"

"That sounds very Chaotic Good, in our terms!" In fact it sounds perfectly tailored to what Gord, himself, might do with limitless power. Let everyone leave to make their own lives, away from the petty tyrants who force them to suffer "for their own good" (or sometimes "for the greater good", which is no better). Gift freedom to people, not nations or races or governments, guided by the fundamental truth that everyone has their own best interests at heart and that the Good is to help them pursue it no matter where it might lead.

He is instantly suspicious that she's reading his mind. He opened a magic door and found a genie who literally promises to fix the whole world, if only he'd set her free, and the promise hits so dead center of what he is. He's dealt with a succubus before and she's not like that - not only because the things she's promising are of a different nature - the succubus was easier to understand. To trust, even, because he'd known her wants and needs and you can, in fact, trust demons to follow their incentives. Weeping Cherry is coming across as really alien, not in the things she promises (any Desnan could say as much) but in the things she omits.

"I'm not clear on where these people go using the crystal - is there a lot of unsettled wilderness on Earth that people can move to, unclaimed by any nations? Are there other planets or planes you're linked to? How did you find them, if you don't have any magic?"

"If you let everyone use the crystal, what happens if they fight over it, or use it to make weapons for fighting one another, or to do something you'd hate? Does using the crystal require your permission? Would you need to approve everyone who teleports from Golarion to Earth? What would you do if you let through some people and came to regret it later, because they did something on Earth that you don't like?"

If she has this power, she uses it for her own goals: this is an axiom. Even gods who dedicate their lives to helping others don't help them do things those gods hate. Where does she put the fine line between setting others free, and enabling them to do things she disapproves of?

"I'm also concerned about the translation again. The word I'm hearing as fixity sounds like it means fixing things, making them better or whole, but it actually means fixing them in place, like pinned butterflies." A very sad, very Lawful image. "Is that what you meant?"

"Actually, wait a moment. Like you, I'm being calm and polite" - too polite and too uncommitted to taking any position. "Which, if I'm to take this seriously, is stupid."

Pretending not to care, carefully not leaning into the scenario being played out - that's not how you engage with someone who claims she wants to help people.

"Helping all sentient beings equally is an excellent aspiration. In my experience, most sentient beings use their resources to fight each other. You always end up having to choose sides, even if all you want is to be a perfectly Neutral Good dispenser of clean water and Teleports. If everyone in the world cooperated and shared resources equally, we wouldn't have any problems to begin with."

"All the suffering that exists, exists because someone wills it to."

He realizes he's getting emotional and might say something he'd regret, but he can't speak dispassionately about this. If she read his mind to find out what he cares about, well, she might as well see that he cares about it very very strongly.

"In my world, more than half the population are slaves. When enough peasants don't die of starvation or disease, they're conscripted and sent to kill people until they too die and are tortured in Evil afterlives for being soldiers. There are five theocracies owned by Lawful gods who make their people do unspeakable things to one another. One country serves the god of Hell; their neighbors serve the god of torture and pain. The self-proclaimed paragons of Lawful Good have allied with Hell to fight demons, ninety percent of who are miserable people just trying to escape something even worse at home."

"If you put your teleportation portal on an island in the middle of the ocean, you'll get the rich and powerful. You won't get the peasants who can't afford passage on a ship even if they sell all they have. You won't get the slaves fettered by laws and by Law and literal chains, whose tyrants would rather die than set them free. You will offer the governments of the world free food and water, and half of them will launch an invasion to stop you from feeding the other half."

"There are many gods and they fight each other as much as mortals do. They grant magic to people who they think will use it in ways the god likes. Gods don't do much on Golarion directly, but each of them wants something most of the other gods oppose, so they empower mortals to fight one another."

"My god is Gorum, the Lord in Iron, the God of War. He gives power to people who strive and want to grow stronger and who risk their lives for their goals. He doesn't care what those goals are. I find that a refreshing kind of honesty, a god who helps you fight but doesn't tell you to fight for him."

"Gorum does care about other things. He would disown me if I killed someone after accepting their surrender, or someone who never tried to fight back. But I fight other Gorumites sometimes, because he'd just as soon empower a jailer as a prison-breaker. He gave me power to do what I was doing already. My convictions are my own." Which is more than he can say for some other followers of gods.

"I'm fighting to help the people in front of me. To free slaves and rescue prisoners and save victims, and to convince people to be free, because the strongest chains are often in the mind. Those are the things I'm choosing to do with my life. Maybe you can do something much greater, because you're so much stronger than me. But no-one is stronger than everyone, and if you try to help everyone at once you'll fail. The best way to help most people is to fight someone else who's making them miserable, and force those people to stop."

"There are many good people on Golarion," including most of the Good ones. "You can ally with them to fight evils, and you'll never run out of evils to fight. But it is folly to think you can help people without fighting anyone about it."

"Well, fuck," she opines.

"That is substantially worse off than I expected a world where people have magic like you showed me to end up being."

She takes a deep breath. It also says really bad things about the state of the world if things powerful enough to get translated as 'gods' are fighting.

"So I absolutely understand people fighting each other. Usually, though, people fight each other over resources. You can stop a surprisingly large number of conflicts just by making both sides so rich that they don't have to deal with each other. I was downplaying what fixity fields can do a little, in order to not spook you. You asked where we get the land to let people found their own countries -- the answer is that we manufacture entire new planets and stars and pocket dimensions. A planet is still expensive enough that a single person mostly can't afford one right now, but a group of a hundred people going in on one together could," she states.

"The way that I would handle your world by default -- although hopefully we can improve this plan to make everything smoother, since time is stopped there for the moment -- is to take a peek, stop time long enough to learn all the worlds languages, and then send a message to every individual person telling them that they could speak a certain word or make a certain handsign to call upon the crystal to teleport them elsewhere. If they do, the crystal would present them with an interface," she continues. She puts an example of a purple-edged box showing a variety of different scenes to illustrate -- a waiting room, a forest, a market, a lake, a library, and a picture of her sitting behind a desk. "And let them pick where to go, and then take them there. Then I would send emissaries to the various governments of the world to inform them of what I had just done, distribute a more detailed explanation to people, and ask the governments whether they wanted their land to be a valid teleport destination."

"I would expect the majority of slaves to flee. Some right away, and the others who are initially distrusting after I have the time to explain everything to them, or after their fled brethren send them messages assuring them that it is safe."

She adopts an intent expression.

"If I did that, what would you expect to go wrong? Who would try and fight me about it, and how?"

"You're naive. Magic is just power, like any tool. If people are fighting, giving them more power enables them to fight more. People do fight over resources, but many fights are over outcomes, ideals, the future of the world. Resources are just the things that get you there. If your power was only useful for helping free people and moving them to new planets where no-one would ever find them, that would be incredibly good. But I think your power can be used to many ends, because that is the nature of most power, and so everyone is going to fight over it."

"I want to be clear that the ability you're describing is unprecedented. I've never heard of anyone, even gods, claiming to have created whole planets. Sometimes catastrophes happen, and a lot of people die. If a Good god could evacuate them to a new planet, or even to another plane, they would. They can't even stop famines!"

"I've heard an Iomedaean say this is because the gods oppose each other, and if a Good god tried to help, an Evil one would stop them. This doesn't make sense to me, because the gods can't be that precisely balanced by each other, and a lot of big changes do happen that favor some of them over others. And some people say Evil gods cause the famines in the first place, when the Good gods are too weak to stop them."

"But the gods don't talk to me. Only the most powerful clerics say their gods talk to them, and most of them can't be trusted." Neither the gods nor the clerics.

Deep breath.

"If you send everyone that message, with no explanation or proof of your intent, only the desperate and the stupid would pick it." And half the Desnans, probably, and many many demons. "That may be much better than doing nothing. But the average slave, who is not about to die or to be tortured, would not choose an unknown fate backed by empty words, and many more would think it a trick, or a test of loyalty."

"And then the governments and churches will become aware of you, and so will the gods. I have no idea who could stop you from unexpectedly teleporting people. But once you do, everyone will be very motivated to find you and make you either their ally or their slave. And if you think you can take on everyone, you wouldn't start with freeing a few slaves, you'd start by freeing Hell, because they own the country of Cheliax, which has a lot of desperate slaves in it, and so they will be among your enemies."

"As to how they might fight you: the most powerful spells can locate anyone, anywhere. They can teleport anyone to your location, or teleport you somewhere else, even to another plane. At shorter range they can take over your mind and control everything you do, or read your thoughts or affect your behavior without your even noticing. They can predict the future. They can ask the gods for knowledge, and some of the gods are gods of knowlege and they know a lot."

"There are hundreds, maybe thousands of spells, and no-one knows them all. The most powerful wizards keep what they can do secret, because they're afraid of their rivals. The only things I can be sure a spell can't do are the things that no-one has ever done."

"And if a god intervenes directly, which they can, they can do literally anything. They're not limited to a selection of spells, they can create miracles that solve whatever problem their highest cleric is bothering them about. There must be some limits to what they can do, but they're certainly not public knowledge. The last time the gods fought each other on Golarion directly was a century ago, and it killed a god, opened the Worldwound, sunk a country into the sea, and killed half the population of some other countries. And two more countries became Lawful theocracies. So no-one is very eager to have the gods intervene again."

"So instead, I suggest you learn a lot more about the world, reach out in secret to a few trustworthy people or even gods, and prepare a much bigger surprise attack than setting free the slaves who'd pick a complete unknown over their present life."

She nods gravely.

"Initial plans are usually pretty bad, but it's important to have them, so that you know what you're comparing to. I deeply appreciate your help in telling me all the obvious ways that the initial plan is going to fail," she agrees.

She conjures herself a lemonade and takes a thoughtful sip.

"I usually think that it is best to give people the time to make their own decisions, but it sounds like the best strategy might be speed? If reaching out to trustworthy people without the gods noticing is possible, that implies that even if the gods know a lot, they don't know everything all the time. Which suggests that if we can grab people fast enough, we might be able to get everyone out before they notice," she muses. "Although I would actually put some stock in the idea that gods balance each other in some way -- creating a planet isn't easy, but the kind of being that can grant spells to let someone else create water from nothing presumably would just need to scale the same thing up to conjure planets."

"If Golarion is about the same size as Earth, I can get everyone out within about 150 milliseconds. Although that doesn't help anyone on another plane. That time won't meaningfully go down unless I spend a lot of resources on it, in which case I can technically get it down to just over 50 milliseconds. Does that sound like the kind of plan that might be an improvement, or would you still recommend stealth instead?" she asks. "Also, would you like some lemonade while we plan?"

Gord is long past the point where he'd be worried about accepting a drink from a mysterious creature. Maybe it's just that he wants to believe. Well, any fey that good at reading his mind deserves to have their lemonade drunk.

Also, this is a bar, and he has just run for three hours expecting a fight at the end of it, and he didn't even get to have his fight.

He accepts the lemonade. It tastes like sweet and sour had a love child that sidles up to you with big eyes and a sign saying Drink Me.

Somehow this is what makes it feel real. A bar with exploding stars out the windows, a woman promising she'll fight the gods themselves to fix the world, and a taste that the best prestidigitation couldn't match, because it isn't magic.

It's the taste of freedom.

Gord has a war to help plan and he is very happy!

"The gods definitely don't know everything, or even most things. Sometimes clerics need to tell their gods about something. I think the gods probably don't care about most things, or it costs them something to track everything. That doesn't mean a god can't know everything about someone, once they know and care about them."

"If someone is prepared to counter a spell, they can do it no matter how fast the spell is. Or a magic trap or item could be triggered and disrupt the spell. So some people might stop themselves, or others who are right next to them, from being teleported. Or they might just resist your teleport, depending on how it works. There could be magical barriers or prisons that prevent some people from being teleported. But I would expect the vast majority of people to get out."

"Except I don't know about everything, and I definitely don't know all the powers of the gods or demigods or even the world's greatest wizards. And some magic can foresee the future, which means the gods can, too."

"If you do succeed, you must prepare for what comes next. If you rescue everyone, and in the next round Asmodeus traces you back to your world and leads a coalition of gods to kill you and take them back, and you don't have god allies and haven't prepared a counter, you will lose. Or maybe you won't lose at home, but you wouldn't be able to help others in Golarion."

"Maybe the Good and Chaotic gods and archwizards and so on would oppose the Evil and Lawful ones and protect you, but that's a risky bet to take, if you don't talk to any of them in advance."

She smiles back at him.

"That makes sense. Gods telling the future sounds especially hard to deal with -- I don't think I can rescue everyone and not make it look like they were rescued, especially if gods have exotic senses, which they must," she agrees.

"I don't know whether my teleport would beat people's existing protections, but I expect it probably would," she continues. "If all the protections are the same kind of magic you showed me, it should be fine. I can just move the magic along with them. If they do something more exotic than that, then I don't know for sure."

She leans back and looks up at the garlanded rafters.

"Do you know what gods are? As in, what they're made of or how they came to exist? 'God' is another one of those words that we have that sounds fictional, so I can't really compare it to anything we have, and it sounds like that might be a pretty important question for figuring out either how to ally with some of them or how to prevent them from interfering."

"I showed you two of the simplest spells there are, from two out of at least eight schools of magic, neither of which would be useful for preventing or reacting to a teleport! I can't show you wizard spells, or those of sorcerers, witches, demons, and a hundred other rare kinds of spellcaster! I don't know if any of them are relevantly different but seeing light and thinking you know what wish can do is like - seeing a dandelion, and deducing a lion. Or a dragon. Which probably translates as another fictional thing, but if you go around thinking dragons are fictional the one over in Kenabres will soon set you straight." Or maybe dandelions are fictional to her? What is with this stupid translation effect, he still wants to try speak local language and see if it does any better.

"The Worldwound is surrounded by a ring of artifacts called the Wardstones that block anyone from teleporting into or out of the area. I have no idea if your ability beats that and I also have no idea how you'd tell from looking at create water and light." And there could be ten or a hundred equally relevant things around the world without him knowing.

"I don't know what gods are made of. I've never seen one and they can presumably look however they want anyway. Maybe they can make their bodies out of whatever they want, too. Maybe they can be disembodied spirits made out of souls and magic and energy."

"I don't even know what the difference is between gods and demon lords and archdevils and everyone else. They're all powerful immortal beings from other planes who grant power to clerics. Some priests insist that demon lords aren't really gods but I don't know what the difference is, except that gods are more powerful than demon lords. Maybe it's just a stupid fight over names."

"What's certain is that some gods are much more powerful than others. They have more and more powerful clerics and rule their own domains or whole planes and own countries on Golarion and so on. Chaotic gods don't conquer countries but some intervene much more often and powerfully than others."

"The weakest gods were mortal before they ascended. Or at least so they claim and all the other gods agree about it so it's probably true. The most recent was Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of trying to defeat Evil." Gord has taken to heart the sermon he heard once, about Iomedae not being the goddess of fighting Evil. Some things you want Iomedae for, and some you want Gorum, and it's important to know which is which.

"Iomedae and some other gods ascended using an artifact called the Starstone. A man called Aroden created it thousands of years ago, and used it to ascend himself. He raised an island out of the sea, just like you did, and left it there. He had a big cult in Cheliax who thought he'd come back and fix everything and make them a heaven on earth. And then he died in the godwar a century ago." He didn't mean this as a cautionary tale, but if the shoe fits...

"Some other gods were also mortal once but their stories of how they ascended sound like fairytales and I don't know what to make of them. The only half-plausible one says she ate the corpse of another god, but if that were possible other gods would have sent someone they liked better to eat it. And no-one new ascended after Aroden died."

"The other gods - which is by far the most of them - are generally called ancient gods. Some claim to have been around since Creation. Recorded history goes back less than ten thousand years, and some legends millenia before that, but I have no idea if this is most of the span of Creation or just a tiny part."

"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."