"Um." Now he's blushing, and also he has to look at her which is terrible for his self-confidence. "Mage women don't need chaperones. In Osirion, where I'm from. Also you're not in Osirion. Um. I thought women outside of Osirion didn't... do... all that?" He never actually thought anything about what women in other worlds did or didn't do but it would be... weird... if they were more like Osirion and Katapesh than the rest of Golarion, according to all the third-hand rumors he heard about the rest of Golarion. 

"Uh, no. Not- It's a thing in some places, historically. Mostly for, like, princesses who had to stay, uh, verifiably virgins, or something like that. Hardly anyone does it these days. Or, well, not strictly. Hanging out in a game room would be fine, going on an overnight trip maybe not... But... The robes and the hat... Ugh. Fuckit, does it make things better or worse if I tell you that I used to be a guy?"

This isn't terribly surprising! Gender-changing is a known (use of a) spell. And being a woman (if one is a mage) has some obvious advantages like - being pretty. 

"I'm... not sure what it's supposed to make better or worse?" he ventures.

"Your whole..." She waves vaguely. "...Me neither, I guess."

Hrmmm.

Pause, navigate menu, save.

"...Yeah, the succubi did it permanent for me. Made me pretty, too. It was... A whole thing. Few weeks of incremental progress. I guess people don't say that's evil and people who do it deserve to go to Hell, in, uh, Osirion? A man becoming a woman, or vice versa, I mean. The Christians do."

"I've never heard anyone say it. But I don't know if I ever met people who did it permanently before, so I suppose it's possible I just never had the chance to hear about it. And I'm not nearly a good enough wizard to do it myself yet."

He's abstractly glad she brought up Hell again, because it's important, but it feels terrible and - aversive to actually talk about it when she's so unhappy to hear what he has to say. "We don't say anyone deserves to go to Hell," he ventures. "Or well, I guess maybe some people do, but almost everyone agrees it's terrible that anyone goes to Hell, it's also just - true. So we have to know about it, to avoid it."

He probably shouldn't ask how the Christians know that men-who-become-women (or anyone else) go to Hell. He can ask Jasper later. Change of subject?

"I haven't heard of succubi changing men into women, either. I thought they changed themselves, not others. But I've never met one, so I guess I don't really know that, either." He had never been in any danger of meeting a succubus, which meant he had had his share of safe guilty fantasies about it. Ahmose isn't sure what a society looks like that has succubi freely available for anyone who want to talks to one, and is a little scared to find out.

"...If Hell were real, it'd be incredibly terrible. Nobody deserves that. If your supposed afterlives are real... That'll be important. Very. But I just can't believe it sight unseen."

Sigh.

"Succubi do shapeshift themselves, but also others. A lot of magical people don't actually resemble the stories most people believe about them at all. And a lot of magical things exist in varieties I think. Maybe they changed over time, maybe it's just a similar-enough thing that the same word got reused. The kind of vampires I know about, for example, can only drink blood from people who love them- Blood from people who don't care doesn't sustain them, and if someone they drank from recently has negative emotions about them, that's toxic to them."

"I would think almost everyone whose blood vampires ever drank had negative emotions!! On Golarion, I mean. ...wait, no, vampires can enchant people! That explains it, they probably use magic to make people like them before drinking their blood." That makes a lot of sense, really. "It's true that there are lots of varieties of everything, though. On Golarion too, I mean."

"And - I wouldn't ask you to believe anything without proof! It's probably not a Lawful thing to ask anyway."

"I don't know a lot about the vampires. I think the Puchuu would have us take 'em down if they were mind-controlling tons of people, that's kind of evil."

"I've always heard vampires are evil. But I've never met one." He shrugs helplessly. "A lot of this is - adventuring tales. Stories of far away places. Maybe some of the things everyone thinks they know are just - literary conventions? Because stories with non-evil vampires who don't bother anyone aren't interesting."

"Yeah, that makes a lot of sense! Popular media too- They'll spin the story whichever way makes it sound most - infuriating, or scandalous, or exciting, and damn the truth. Don't trust much of what you read, especially on the internet, 'till you know how to check."

"How can you check if what you read is true? Divination, or truth spells? You can't ask the gods..."

"Mostly you check if it came from a reputable source, and check for common rhetorical shenanigans like, uh, implying that just because two things happened at the same time, one of them cause the other. Like, a certain man owns a gun- A sword- And there was a murder with a sword. If a piece of news just tells people 'that guy owns a sword' and 'that guy was murdered with a sword', and make it sound suspicious, people assume who the murder is even though the news never actually said he was. So you can't ever be totally sure, I guess. You can just make sure things are consistent with everything that's come before, and make internal sense. It's hard sometimes."

"Those are just - the ordinary ways to check things. It must be so hard without magic and the gods!" How do you even run Lawful courts without Abadar's truth spell? "Wizards can read someone's thoughts, but truth spells are - probably better for a society..."

"Don't you have authorities? People you trust on some subjects, or who you'd ask to check something if you're not sure? That's how we do it, but we rely a lot on those people being clerics. Or at least being Lawful, and not wanting to lie because that might lose them Axis."

"Well... Not universally. There's domains of authority and trustworthiness... An announcement about crime from the FBI is a lot more trustworthy than some newscaster's ranting, for example. And scientific journals more than random internet posts. Even the Puchuu hide things from us sometimes. Though I don't think they directly lie. If they do, I've never caught it."

"To work as a cleric or banker or judge, or other important jobs, you need to be swear never to lie about your job. If anyone is caught in a lie, they're punished, and can't work in that job anymore, and if they're clerics then Abadar renounces them and they lose their powers. And of course it would break their Law, so they probably wouldn't make Axis or Heaven." Or Hell, and the other Evil afterlives are probably better so Evil people ought not be Lawful - no, focus. "And then you can trust them much more, though of course they can still be wrong about things. Or even incompetent, but they work together and - check each other." 

"Your authorities may be competent, but how do you know whether to trust them?" Ahmose doesn't think you can't trust non-Lawful people - unless they're Evil, presumably - but he's also noticing the concept of non-Lawful, possibly non-truthful authorities is very scary.

"Uh... We kind of don't. The way it's supposed to work is that people vote for who should be in charge, and if they're unreliable you vote for something else. But... That's how it's supposed to work. Not how it actually does. I'm not sure I can actually comprehensibly explain American politics..."

Ahmose is baffled. "What does it mean to be unreliable? If someone lies in Osirion they're automatically out, do you - vote to decide who to replace them with? That sounds... separate from the part where you need to notice they're lying and remove them! Or did you mean you vote to decide if someone is lying?" That sounds like it cannot possibly work, for so many reasons!

"No, no, once every few years the positions come up for vote. You vote on who you want to fill them. And if one of them is notoriously unreliable, you don't vote for them. They can be thrown out other ways... Maybe I should just find my old civics textbook instead of trying to remember this..."

"If a judge is unreliable, you shouldn't wait a few years to replace him," Ahmose points out reasonably. "And if you replace judges when they turn out to be unreliable, why do you also need to replace all of them every few years? That sounds very inconvenient, really, if people can't make plans or build careers and others can't expect to work with them long-term, because they can't know when they might be appointed or replaced!"

"No, judges are different. It's complicated. I have reached my patience limit for this topic," Sporty Lime says dryly. "Politics sucks."

"I don't think justice and banking and clerics who teach people about Law and Good and Evil are politics. Maybe I don't understand what 'politics' means exactly." Ahmose much prefers the system where he can trust people and so leave them to do their jobs without actually having to check on them, that sounds very hard and exhausting.

"Should I go back to Shining Black Lily's house, to keep trying interplanar portals?" He has a lot of questions but Sporty Lime doesn't seem excited to explain her world to him, and the portals are more important anyway.

"Almost everything is politics in the end." Sigh. "That sounds like your decision? And it's a guest house, not Lily's. This ground floor apartment is too, technically, but I'm here most of the time."

Pause.

"Wait, interplanar? Right, Jasper explained... You probably want the warded basement for that, yeah."

"I - think it's the right thing for me to be doing. If I can open a portal to Axis or Heaven, and get them to help or at least to send me home, nothing else I do will matter. So I guess I - shouldn't spend so much time learning about your world, even though it's very interesting."

"Sure. You've only been here for a few hours, right? I think that priority makes sense for- At least the first week. After that, I'd start trying to settle in, personally."

"If I succeed I won't need to settle in. Are you saying you expect me to fail and to give up after a week?" This is not very diplomatic of him but Ahmose discovers he is quite angry about the prospect of being stuck here, having squandered his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and accomplished nothing of value and rendered himself just another useless laundry wizard. Sporty Lime predicting it so nonchalantly, as if it doesn't matter, is really upsetting!