That's very reasonable of them! It still hurts that they're considering the value he can provide their world if he stays in it, instead of the much greater value he can provide by connecting them to Golarion, or with Axis.

"I would like that, please. So that when I go back home I will know how much I owe you, and can repay that, and - be sure you're glad you encountered me, and didn't host me only for the duty of hospitality. Hospitality is really great but it shouldn't have to stand alone."

"What we call honor in Osirion is - mostly following the Law, and the laws, and honoring deals. And a few things like hospitality, but most people won't think you dishonorable for not providing more than token hospitality, just - bad and rude. Clerics of Abadar don't ever help people unless they're paid, and they're not honorless. I guess we don't use the word as a separate thing. And trust is - I want to say obvious but maybe it isn't? It's how much you expect you someone to do a thing, even though they wouldn't be wrong not to do it. I think." It really is a bit hard to define!

"And, yes, I'd like this buff. I'm not sure what it's like but if it's not hard for you - or expensive - it seems worth trying?"

"It takes a single drop of my blood. I wouldn't want to do it all day but once is just a distraction from learning the math for characterizing turbulent flow, particulate settling, and mass and energy balance and whatever else. Honestly, Maybe I should do it to myself... No, no. Anyway, no charge if you let me through to Chicago and back tomorrow afternoon!"

[I am tabulating costs now!] Jasper declares. 

"A drop of your blood sounds like a scary evil sacrificial ritual! You'll, uh, get the blood... back... right? It's not like - you will forever have a drop less of blood?" That sounds horrifying and she didn't actually say the word sacrifice and he's almost certainly worrying pointlessly, but, what kind of magic is fueled by a drop of your blood?

"Oh, definitely! It's just, a symbol. Spells are intuitive but sticky once you practice 'em long enough, and I was an edgy Goth in high school. That's witchcraft for you- As opposed to Magical Girl stuff, I do both. Most Em Gees don't keep up the witchiness, when moving and flying and working with what the Puchuus design for you is so much easier and faster." 

'Intuitive and sticky once practiced' is indeed Ahmose's experience! (This is a problem because it's not supposed to be very intuitive for wizards, apparently.)

"Oh, I hadn't realized you had two kinds of magic! That's really cool! How do people become witches, and what is witch magic good at?" 

"So, I don't think anyone really understands it, but there's two basic kinds of magic? There's the Spark, which seems to be random. And there's inborn magic, and people with that need to consume stuff. Witches and magical girls and a bunch of other traditions are, people with the Spark, who have trained to use it in certain ways. Witchcraft is about symbols and rituals and sacrifices. Making a doll with someone's hair and cursing them through it. Or, uh, ideally, healing them through it. Some witch spells... Your cleaning thing, but you have to sing a poem. Make people sleep. Change someone's hair color. Mess with emotions or read thoughts. Help plants grow... Improve luck or try to nudge the weather, protection from disease..."

So they have several magical traditions, but they're still all for sorcerers (maybe of different lineages?). The witch spells all sound like reasonable magic that probably exists back home, except maybe arcane healing.

"The laundry spell does have a verbal component," he offers. "Wizards have been working on improving spells for many thousands of years. Maybe it used to be a whole poem before they got it down to six syllables."

"And the 'sacrifice' - sorry, that translates poorly for some reason, but it sounds like a material component that the spell requires and destroys? We have those too. Not for the simplest and weakest spells, like my laundry spell or Light, but for most of the higher-circle ones." A drop of blood isn't even as weird as some components he'd heard of.

"So, witches and magical girls are both traditions for using the Spark. What about inborn magic?" This is a bit confusing, because if he understands correctly this Spark is also inborn.

"Huh. Witches don't share spells in a way that makes 'making them better' make sense? Even if you try to take an apprentice, they end up putting their own swing on it to make things work, half the time. Maybe inborn magic is the wrong word. Heritable magic? Like the puchuus, or succubi, or alarunes, or catpeople, or werewolves, or vampires... Or, what was the polite word for them, I can't remember, the leprechauns... All the kinds of magic people who depend on something for their magic. So, the translation spell is going to try and fit my interpretation of all those into your terms. I'm sorta curious what they come across as. I think you mentioned puchuus are 'outsiders' and succubi are 'demons'?"

"If puchuus are from this world and not from any other plane then they might not be outsiders? I assumed that, but they're - probably just a different race. Outsiders are the people who live on the other planes, and I guess some people whose ancestors originally came from there."

"In Golarion succubi are a kind of demon. Demons are" - he winces internally, this is what drove Sporty Lime away - "very... bad, we should probably not talk about them. Maybe your succubi are different. And we have werewolves and vampires, who I think are evil, and I haven't heard of the others. Maybe all these translations are wrong because the spell is translating everything that I recognize as some sort of evil creature. I'm - really very much not an expert on any of them anyway."

"I mean. Language is kind of a bitch, and a lot of the names have... Negative connotations... Because they tend to cause trouble... I wouldn't say that a species is evil. That's kind of... Racist? Just individuals of it, maybe. Nobody knows where Puchuus came from, not even Puchuus. What about... Kitsune, unicorns, golems, trolls, goblins, jackalopes, fairies, lamia, harpy, liches, mermaids, slimes, tentacle monsters, uh, kappas, angels, hyrdas, mimics, gargoyles, dragonids, object-spirits..."

"Some of those I've heard about and - I guess I can't rule out that all of those are names for races that exist somewhere on Golarion? Angels definitely exist and are good, so the spell isn't just translating things as evil, but I think all of the other names that I actually recognize are evil. Trolls, goblins, liches, gargoyles..."

"And - probably most races aren't evil but for some races people say they're, like, almost always evil? I don't know if all liches are evil, but I very much don't want to ever meet one."

"And of course some races are evil by definition. Like devils, and our kind of demons. And angels are good by definition. I think only some of the outsiders are like that? They're sort of - tied to their planes' alignment." Ahmose is so ashamed right now about not being a proper wizard who knows all about races and planes and alignments and incidentally has the spells to prove himself right about them all.

"...I guess I should probably stop reflexively dropping the idea of planes. We don't have... Ontologically basic good and evil. Or like, it's a philosophical thing. Okay, enough of my questions, sorry for blasting them at you."

"It's all right, really! Questions are good!" Except questions about himself, which are mostly flustering.

"So, um... I'll let you go to Chicago and back if you use your ritual on me." Ahmose is a little uncomfortable with this because he was already going to let her go to Chicago whenever she wanted - he thought that's what the portal in the cupboard was for - but insisting on paying her more will probably derail the conversation again, and at some point isn't their time and patience worth more than making a small-enough trade perfectly fair?

She has long since dropped the transformation, by now.

She rummages in a purse for a small, white token. Like an oversized guitar pick with a sharp point.

"So, you should already be doing what you want to be focused on when I do it."

Oh! Ahmose hadn't realized this would only let him concentrate on one thing for the duration, not on whatever he wanted to. Although, once he really concentrates on something he probably won't switch; that's sort of the point of really concentrating.

What does he want to do for the next few hours, better than he would have otherwise? ...He wants to fix his interplanar portal spell so it can target something. If he could choose to succeed at any one thing, this is the thing he wants. It wouldn't just solve all his problems, it would solve a whole planet's problems, problems they don't even know they have. And he would stop being responsible for them.

He brings the spellform to mind. He invented (discovered?) the modification that made it interplanar; he needs another one to make it targetable. Without seeing his destination, but having seen it before, like a proper Gate or Teleport spell does. This is clearly theoretically possible and he just needs to accomplish in a few hours what legendary archwizards did through millenia of study.

He tries to tune out the room and focuses as hard as he can on the spell, and then he tells Shining Black Lily to go ahead, trying not to look at her as he does.

Jasper, rather alarmed, nudges them both down into the ward room first!!!

Also: You need to close the emergency portal to Chicago in order to try transplanar portals, right? That's alright this time, as long as you make sure to re-establish it right away once you're done! We'll just deduct the hourly rate for emergency-shortcut-availability from what we owe you.

Then, once he's all set again, Black Lily is saying something in a deep and solemn voice in the background, and the whole world narrows to his conception of his portals.

Ahmose is, generously speaking, a half-trained zeroth-circle wizard without a spellbook. The half he isn't trained in includes spellcraft. He knows how to read and visualize spells, and see if they stabilize and at which circle; he has no idea what they do, or why, or how to make them do something else instead. He's also unfamiliar with most of the standard spells, so it's not as if he could crib the targeting off Teleport even if he wanted to.

With enough focus on the only thing that matters, he can admit to what he doesn't know: he won't get anywhere by thinking about the spellform itself.

But he does know what his spell does. He knows what it means for a portal to exist. He can see what other things could happen instead, and nudge his spell in random ways until he figures out which part does what, and keep going until he happens to nudge it in a way that does what he wants.

Ahmose doesn't know how he knows any of this. The knowledge just sits there, in his head, as intuitive and obvious as gravity pulling things down or light casting shadows.

Usually this is the point where he is distracted by worrying that he a sorcerer and not a wizard - denying that he is a sorcerer - hating himself for being a sorcerer - trying to understand his spell the way he imagines a wizard would, and failing, and hating himself even more, and just circling pointlessly round and round -

Ahmose can't be distracted anymore. It would be an effort even to remember what he usually worries about, and he isn't trying. He just focuses on the spell, methodically perturbs it in every way he can, and observes the results.

Another thing that (Ahmose imagines) wizards worry about when they engineer new spells is that trying out new spellforms is liable to be dangerous.

He is too focused to think of that, now.

It's a good thing Jasper made him go into the warded room, because he might not have thought of that himself once he started really concentrating.

A portal does not send people between two places, as a Teleport or a Gate does. A portal reshapes space to make two circles the same place.

A portal does not have two parts, or even one part that is in two places. There is no longer any fact of the matter about the former two places being distinct. Any effect that relies on the distance between two points will work through a portal as if through normal space, because it is.

A portal can be dispelled by targeting the area containing it. It cannot, itself, be targeted, because it is not an object, or even a thing. It is just - an area of space, which happens to have a complicated spatial metric around it.

To make an interplanar portal, Ahmose found the part of the spellform which targeted the effect, and - disabled it. At first this spell did nothing, but with enough prodding he made the spellform say, in effect, target any place which cannot be specified by the normal mechanism. Why this made an interplanar portal, and not e.g. one leading outside the one-mile range, is not something Ahmose can say; but he knows, now, that it did so.

He doesn't know how to make it target the place he's thinking of, instead of a place he's looking at. (He tried closing his eyes and thinking various thoughts; the spell failed.) But he can change the targeting component in every way that still stabilizes, and - see what happens.

Most changes to the targeting component fail harmlessly, or try to fail not so harmlessly and are caught by the wards. But some are - usable.

One change makes the two sides of the portal non-parallel. Not useful.

Another change identifies a circle of space with itself. This does nothing, as far as Ahmose can see, but the spell is still hanging there. Not useful, and he should be focusing on changes to the interplanar version anyway.

A change which... doesn't seem to do anything? The spell still opens an interplanar portal, to the same destinations as before and seemingly at random. It's a different spellform but Ahmose can't see what changed in the outcome.

A change that makes an interplanar portal go the same place as the last one he cast, without him having to specify where that was.

...success? No, because the portal back home that he wants to recreate was many portals ago.

AAAAAH, he doesn't think because he's very focused, and goes on methodically trying every change he can stabilize in what he hopes is an exhaustive ordering of the possible spellform variations.

Time flies quickly when you are incapable of focusing on the passage of time, or caring.

An hour and a half later, Ahmose abruptly notices his ankle hurting because he had been standing in an uncomfortable position. He was aware of this before, but didn't move, because it wasn't relevant to what he was focusing on.

Objectively, two new modifications are an excellent result for ninety minutes of focused study. Subjectively, Ahmose feels like he might have strained something. In his head, not just his ankle. The spellform is more present, more available in his thoughts now, even when he's thinking of something else. It's like an image of the sun that burned itself into his eyes after looking unblinking into the light. (Hopefully it will fade like one, too?)

He dully duly reports his findings to Jasper.

I think it might be a good idea for you to rest now. If you were a Magical Girl, I would say that was an extremely productive training session.

He probably should, shouldn't he. He certainly can't go on experimenting while he vividly remembers being like that and - not being like that, anymore. (Can he ever again?) He'd be far too distracted, not just by the usual things but by the fact he's distractible.

The local time seems to be early evening. It might be later than that for him, he hasn't been trying to keep track of time and it feels like days since he woke up, with everything that's happened.

"Yeah, I - should probably go sleep. And rest." 

(Another nice thing about the not being distracted was not worrying whether he was spending his time doing the right thing.)

As soon as you put the Chicago portal back, you can sleep. But it's alright to take a few minutes to recover first.