That is actually one of the very first things he thought about! And it didn't work but it led to other things which did! He's so excited to talk to a fellow portal enthusiast he almost forgets to finish his cake.

"I can't make a portal where you fall down through one side and up from the other, you always keep the direction you were going. The two parts - the two places the portal links are always parallel. But if you make one far enough, around the planet, the direction you were going becomes sideways or upside down, locally." (He tested this with rocks, not by jumping through himself.) "But! To fly you need wings, right, or something - to control your flight and not just fall and die - and if you have that, you can turn falling into flying yourself, like a diving falcon." (He has definitely not tested this but it's very cool to imagine! Flying wizards can't move nearly as fast as a dragon someone falling.) 

"Or you can go a quarter-way around the planet and start falling there, and come back here horizontally, I guess."

"Ooh. Idea! Put you in front of a railgun and launch sats into orbit really cheap."

[That requires infrastructure and marketing to be practical.] The green Puchuu comments. It has a clearly distinct psychic voice. [While this portal ability is unprecedented and has high potential, the Cute Guardians would like to consider for a while before doing things that have a long lead time like that.]

"Well, maybe we can get you a partnership with a skydiving company. They tie you to an instructor so you fall safely, even if you panic and don't open your chute."

"I can open portals to space, it's as easy as any others." Even accidental sometimes. "What's a railgun?"

It makes sense that they'd have people teaching others to fly safely! Golarion wizards probably have something like that too, for newly third-circles. 

"Railguns use electricity to fling metal objects at insane speeds! Though thinking about it I bet a railgun would destroy any satellite we want to put in space... Maybe a spin launch thing?"

"If you just need to accelerate something a lot you can let it fall until it's fast enough," Ahmose points out reasonably. "Through the same pair of portals, even."

"Yeah. Make a semi-vacuum and let it fall for a while, then use the quarter around the world trick to set it into orbit. Now I really want to try this with a cubesat just to see if it's workable."

[If you really want to, please allow us to organize some permits and registrations!] Jasper comments. [Artificial satellites are typically registered and tracked so that they don't accidentally collide with anything.]

"Oh yeah, I don't mean like right now. I'd have to research some stuff."

He's so glad to see people who are introduced to portals and immediately think of useful applications that are not that other thing! Even if he doesn't know what satellites are for.

Actually - "what are satellites for?"

"Science and communications! They look down on the world- Uh, are you familiar with modern tech? Maybe not. So, short version, light comes in lots of wavelengths and we can only see a little bit of it. Radio waves are light, technically, and you can transmit and receive them. Satellites can see lots of the planet, and if you have a ring of them around the planet, they can beam radio light at each other until one can see where the message is supposed to go. So if you set it up right devices can talk to each other from around the world. They also look at the weather and warn us of storms and make maps and things like that."

Ahmose understood almost one word in ten out of those!

He's also coming to realize yet another way in which this world is just plainly better run than his, or at least than Osirion, which is that even (supposed) sorcerers can still be wizards in spirit, because that was the most wizardly thing he ever heard that (probably) wasn't about actual magic.

"Satellites can see a lot because they're high up, like storms, and help draw maps," he confirms. So could people whose job was to sit and look through portals, but he can't keep enough portals open for that. He likes ideas that scale and don't rely on him! 

"They can talk to each other using light, because they can see each other too, and transmit messages all around the planet. And to and from the planet." Or you could open a portal to talk to them, but that has the same problem. "So you can pass messages around, cheaper than sending, if all the wizards can't learn to make portals" - which is doubtful - "but you can still make lots of satellites. That sounds great!"

"Yeah, it's great! The internet is great. We've gotten this far with rockets, which basically spit out giant columns of fire behind themselves to get up there, but it's really incredibly difficult and expensive compared to a portal."

"What else do you think you'd use portals for, if you could make them yourself?" Ahmose is very curious; it's the first time he's been able to discuss portals openly. Any ideas she has might be very valuable, even if they're meant for a world very different from his own. And if she reinvents ideas he already thought of he'll feel very validated, so really he wins either way!

She opens her mouth. Then she closes it and blushes brightly.

Then she shakes her head and opens it again and says, "Well! Aside from cutting travel time, I'd grab snacks without having to get up, or get good views at sports, or maybe to generate electricity- You could take water from the bottom of a hydroelectric plant and pour it right back into the reservoir! That might hurt the fish, though. Uh, electricity is lightning in small controlled amounts. Most of our tech uses it."

...

Connecting the two cases where he has observed local sorcerer women blushing inexplicably, Ahmose concludes that she wants to use portals for some kind of grand magic ritual, or maybe to charge an arcane reservoir. Which is probably a very reasonable idea but he is really mystified about the blushing!

He's disappointed at the prosaic suggestions, though. Maybe she's trying to steer the conversation away? He's terrible at picking up on clues like that.

"Is that like a watermill?" he guesses. "We have problems with rivers that are too wide and slow sometimes. I guess making the water go up would solve that. I don't think fish like going through waterwheels anyway. You can put nets on the intake channels, and then recycle the water directly onto the wheel, without a reservoir at all."

"What I thought about was bringing water and food to places that don't have enough, when there's drought or famine. You probably don't want to rely on portals if only a few people can make them, but in an emergency any help is good. Or I guess you could just help people evacuate to where there's water and food, if they can afford to buy it and there just isn't enough of it where they live." But then they'd be relying on him to go home again...

"It sort of is, yeah. Turbines. Oh yeah, they would be great for emergency aid, wouldn't they?"

"The most obvious use is shipping and travel. People pay a lot for it, so they'd pay for the portals. And I could use the money to do things I want. I just - would rather find a way to use the portals to do things I want, if it works out and money isn't just much better for it." This goes completely against Abadaran teachings, which is another reason he could never have discussed it at home. "Like helping people," and the other thing he's never going to be the first to mention. "I'm trying to make planar portals work because it would be so good if I could let people go to Axis or Heaven or Nirvana, you know?"

"No shame in getting rich, but also no shame in not caring... Heaven? Axis?"

"The Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral afterlives."

"Yeah uh, I don't know what religion you follow but I'm not sure those are a thing."

"You're not sure that... what is a thing, exactly? You don't think Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral have their own afterlives?" This is deeply weird but it's the closest he can come to making sense of what she said.

"I don't believe in Heaven or Hell anymore because every source that talked about them turned out to be bullshit. Which is a lot of peoples' reaction when you get into the magical world, it seems like. As for Axis, isn't that a math thing? And Nirvana is supposed to be a state of perfect detachment and contentment or something. I mean, if you showed me Heaven and it had compelling evidence, I'd believe it, but..."

"I think there are spells that can show you the afterlives? But also you can, like, go visit them!" Well, not Hell, probably, or at least he won't be trying that anytime soon. "It's expensive but you can talk to people who did it, and to summoned outsiders, and even people who've been resurrected. I guess if you don't believe any of them or any priests, you'll have to save for a couple of plane shifts yourself, and that's a lot of money" (even for most wizards) "but it's might be important to get it right? I suppose if you're sure of your alignment it doesn't matter that much what you think about the afterlives." This is a novel and bizarre worldview to Ahmose but he isn't going to judge her for it.

"Maybe where you're from, but not on this planet. Visiting the afterlife isn't a thing here. Unless you count dubious visions on drug trips."

Wait, didn't Shining Black Lily also say something about not knowing if there was divine magic around? 

"Who are the major gods who grant their clerics powerful magic in this world?" he asks both her and Jasper. Huh, English doesn't have a god-pronoun?

"There... Aren't any."

[There are some people who believe their sorcery comes from gods such as Yahweh, also called Allah, or Amaterasu, or Shiva, or Thor, or a number of others, but it is unclear if that is actually the case, or if their powers come from another source. A being called Amaterasu does seem to exist, for example, but its capabilities and nature are also unclear.]

If you were a cleric, maybe not of a very high circle, and your god granted you spells but no visions, how could you prove, or even know yourself, what you were? This is a fascinating question Ahmose is wholly unequipped to answer!!

Of more immediate concern: if no clerics here have plane shift - or raise dead? - or if they don't advertise it publicly, what does that imply? That no clerics are strong enough? Less adventuring, without life insurance? Less banking and governance, without Abadar? More terrible sickness and disease, less food, less everything that only clerics can do back home - but their cities are clearly rich - maybe they have other magic that can do those things without clerics? Maybe that's related somehow to why the gods don't choose any?

Most importantly, it means if he can't get his planar portals to work, he can never go home again. Unless he becomes super wealthy and finds a way to still own it after he dies despite having no access to Abadar's - never mind that for now.

He... supposes he could try praying? But surely any gods Who wanted to choose clerics here would have already found someone better suited than him, and people in greater need too if that's what They were looking for.

Boat plan it is, unless he can get the portals to do something better in a few days' time. He can't open a planar portal home because he's already on the Material, so his only remaining hope is to figure out how to open two planar portals at once after all, or else to make a portal somewhere he likes better than that river.

Something else is bothering him about this, but he can't quite put his finger on it and he's frankly too worried about his personal situation to pay it much mind.