He appears to be in some sort of outdoor garden. The air is quite cool, especially compared to Sothis. There are flowerbeds in a lot of colors, the paths are are smooth stone. There's a lot of trees and grass, and a little pond, and bushes manicured into attractive shapes. The water spills out over the grass. It looks like it's late afternoon or early morning, the sun low. There's a metal sign with pictures of plants and a lot of words he can't read a little bit away, and a low rumbling sound somewhere off to his left.

There are a couple of people visible in the distance, across the pond looking curiously towards him. One is jogging in his direction.

Plane Shift can land hundreds of miles off target, but this is clearly civilization! He made it back safely, and is one step closer to perfecting his spell!

He's tempted to quickly make another portal to escape attention, but it would be impolite to spill a lot of salt water on someone's garden and probably ruin the grass and then run away. Also, he's probably trespassing, and running away would leave the crime unaddressed. He'll wait for the person to approach him, apologize, try to pass it off as a weird Teleport accident, and offer to pay for the grass. ...He hopes he can afford it.

It transpires that this person is: 

1. A foreign-looking woman

2. Wearing too few articles of clothing for proper Osiriani modesty, and what she is wearing is made of strange, colorful and shiny tight fabrics*

3. Speaking a language he does not recognize

She seems concerned more than angry, at least? Though she's definitely making faces at the flooded grounds. She motions with one arm, offering to help him up from the ground.

*Hot pink sweatpants, a blue sports bra that's visible through a sweaty white cami, a bright green bolero jacket, an arm-strap holding a smartphone, running shoes, and AirPods.

It's a... woman... in a bright gauzy half-dress? Did he land in the pharaoh's harem? How do those earrings work, they look like earplugs - forget that, is she's trying to touch him?

"Eeek!" He gets up and backs away rapidly. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to come here! Should I go away, who should I talk to -"

She backs off when he looks alarmed, looking more confused by the moment. She pulls her rectangle from its arm-holster and looks at it while trying a few more languages, haltingly. She yells at her friend across the pond, who starts jogging over himself. The pair then start arguing with each other, giving him and the salt water wary glances.

A few more people are approaching. One of them- A guy in jeans and with a leather jacket- Steps a bit closer and furtively mimes spellcasting at him questioningly- With hand signs and words that are obviously wrong, but are recognizable as an attempt.

He can try... accented Taldane? A few words in Kelish? "Hello I am lost" in broken Vudrani?

Ahmose has no idea what words and gestures are or aren't valid spellcasting! He's only ever seen a few dozen spells, and there are probably thousands out there! And it might make sense to use wrong words when you're not actually trying to cast the spell, so you don't do it by accident. Also, he's not sure magical theory knows what spells are valid at all - never mind that, focus.

If the man is offering to cast a translation spell on him, he'll accept! (He's not agreeing to pay for it, though, it's a minor expense to a real Teleporting wizard but would cripple him.) He smiles, and offers the man his hand.

Okay, so he'll take his hand and tug Ahmose down the path and away from the growing crowd. Jogger girl yells at leather-jacket-guy. Leather-jacket-guy yells back and waves his own rectangle.

Then he presses buttons on it- It lights up and the patterns change- And then holds it to his ear. He can hear a tinny voice coming from it as they have a conversation. Apparently a communication item.

And then... It seems like it's time to wait, here, slightly out of sight of the Incident Site? That's what jacket guy seems to be miming, anyway. He pulls a white towel out of his backpack and offers it to Ahmose, too, shrugging.

"Thank you," he says, even though the other man can't understand him. He wipes his face and head, but his robe is dripping everywhere and won't stop until he has a chance to undress and wring it out. It's not too cold, so he ignores it and hopes he doesn't have to go indoors soon.

...he will wait for at least a few minutes. He's not in any real hurry and he can use the time to think.

What went wrong with his first portal? There was an explosive wind, like that one time he opened a portal chain far far up where there's no air, but there was air in the river he ended up in, and no more wind once he closed the portal... Yeah, he has no idea.

Where is he? A few hundred miles around his village could mean Osirion - he's not sure if Sothis is in range - or it could be north Katapesh, or maybe over the border in the Mwangi? They have more water there, a water-garden wouldn't necessarily belong to an incredibly rich person, just a very wealthy one. 

The sun is higher than he expected, which could mean he went east but more likely means he's really bad at keeping track of time when he's working.

Jacket Guy looks tense and nervous, but also resigns to waiting for at least a few minutes.

Then a small, weird and obviously magical creature shows up, bounding nearly effortlessly and silently across the ground.

[Hi! I have telepathy!] It announces cheerfully.

Puchuu telepathy is both a voice babbling nonsense like 'puru purururu puruchu puchu puchuchu', and inexplicable understanding of what, actually, Puchuu is saying.

Oh wow did they summon an outsider to talk to him? That must be so expensive he will be very polite and cooperative with the probably-very-rich people whose garden he intruded on.

[Greetings! I am very sorry for having accidentally intruded on your garden, it was something like a Teleport accident.] 

[The garden belongs to the university, actually! I don't think it'll be a problem. It was an accident, right? We have to allow for this sort of thing happening sometimes. More importantly, as defenders of light and justice, we Puchuu and the Magical Girls we support are responsible for fighting the forces of evil and darkness, and helping all magical beings stay on the right path!]

That sounds like... a Lawful Good outsider, probably? He's never heard of "puchuu" or "magical girls" but the rest fits.

[It was definitely an accident], he assures it (him?), [I was trying to go home in a - stressful situation and I ended up here instead. Where am I, please?]

[This is Urbana-Champaign. The University of Illinois has a big campus here! The agricultural and engineering programs are ranked very highly! It's in Illinois, which is in the United States of America.]

Jacket Guy says something. The Puchuu tilts its head and looks at him for a bit. Then Jacket Guy nods stiffly.

[As Cute Guardians, Puchuu are primarily concerned with preventing the misuse of magic, so I have to warn you: Don't be evil, please!]

Of course it's illegal to be evil in Heaven, and also this is very very scary!! Ahmose doesn't want to risk being evil by accident!!!

[I don't know what my alignment is, I'm not strong enough to detect. I... don't think I'm doing anything Evil right now... but I could be wrong about that. If you notice me doing or risking doing anything evil please tell me so I can stop!] There, that contained no actual lies.

[I didn't mean to come here and I would like to go back home. Which is in Osirion, on Golarion. That's a planet on the Material plane,] he adds, and oh wow that is not a sentence he expected to ever have to say.

[I intend to try going back using the same method I used to arrive here, but it didn't do what I expected last time, so this is... maybe risky. I don't want to be disruptive. Do you have advice for me? Is there somewhere I can go to try it without bothering anyone?]

[That's very responsible of you! We'll be sure to let you know if you're being bad, but you haven't done anything evil so far. It was an accident, after all. My partner, Shining Black Lily, is on the way here. We can go out into the fields a little bit, or to a house we have juuuust in case, depending on what you think will happen. I don't think I recognize your magic, and I'm not familiar with Golarion.]

Yeah, fair, Ahmose doesn't really recognize his own magic either.

[I'm not sure what will happen. I can open portals to places I can see and that works reliably. I was trying to do something new, open one to a different plane, and it got me to some river somewhere, and when I tried to go back I landed here instead. I don't know what will happen if I try to go home again, if it sent me here last time and I'm here already. If it fails I can try going somewhere new again but I'm not sure where would be better than here. Somewhere that can help me get home, but I don't know how I'd pay for a regular plane shift.] Or well, he does know - by mortgaging his future - and revealing his abilities to this outsider isn't *not* a hint that he's open to offers. If he's going to trade, he might as well trade with Heaven, probably?

[Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't introduce myself! I'm called Ahmose.]

Another young woman comes running through the garden, having debarked from a bus that's barely visible through the shrubberies. The bus rumbles as it moves on. This one has pale skin, black hair, and is at least wearing more, if in a clearly unfamiliar style.

[May my partner perform a little ritual to help you talk to people? I think it should last a day or two, long enough to look for more permanent fixes!]

[Yes please!! - that is, I would be very grateful!] 

Also very reluctant to promise payment he can't afford, and he does want to pay people who help him back when he can, but he's not going to turn down help offered freely, just agonize about it for a little bit.

He's curious to see what ritual magic looks like! Is it not a spell?

It looks like-

Well, first Shining Black Lily hugs jacket guy and kisses him once and they talk for a bit.

Then it looks like her digging a bunch of things out of her backpack and starting to arrange them around Ahmose. Scissors, needles, an empty cup, a candle holder and candle, a book. And then, a long dark wooden staff with a silver orb and sapphires decorating the top that can't have fit in that little bag.

She stands over the scissors and starts chanting in a slow, melodic voice.

Ah, some things never change! Ahmose is obscurely comforted to know even ritual wizards use staves and bags of holding, just like spell-wizards like him. (Not that he could ever afford a bag of holding or a magical staff, but it's something he can aspire to, unlike the ritual use of scissors.)

She moves from item to item as the chant continues, and then after a few minutes there's a ringing sound sort of like a bell. 

"There we go. Finally. Jasper, you do know I have a test to study for, right?" She gripes.

[This was important!]

Oh wow sourceless language knowledge magic is so so cool!! And so obviously useful and valuable, unlike cutting holes in people opening a portal to the wrong place!

"Thank you!" He introduces himself again to the non-telepathic people.

"Yeah, no problem. Well, small problem. Freaking ME 310... Sigh." She actually pronounces 'sigh' instead of just sighing. "But hey, you're caught up in some kind of something- Accidental portal Jasper said? So that does need addressing. I guess. Even though I'm supposed to be retired from active Puchuu work."

"I would be grateful for any help but I'm not sure how you could help me." He repeats what he told Jasper. "Unless you can send me home yourself. I don't know what else to try, other than opening a portal again. And trying to figure out where it leads, if it's not home, and why."

"But, uh, you don't have to help me! If you're doing something important. Helping me probably isn't urgent. Um." He trails off.

"Oh, it's not like this test is thaaat important either. If I really had to, Jasper would get them to let me reschedule." She picks up the puchuu and hugs it tightly. The puchuu accepts this in good grace.

"So we just need me around to smack face if needed and keep anyone from interfering?"

[Yes! I think we can use the house for this.]

"And maybe to clean up the garden?" Jacket guy interjects. "I don't think salt's good for flowers. By the way, glad you're okay, man. But I might scoot. Kinda stings to be around magic stuff when I can't have any."

[I've spoken to another Puchuu about that, and they're going to fix the salt!]

"I'm sorry about the salty water!", Ahmose apologizes again. "I didn't know how to clean it up, I don't think the laundry spell can remove salt from the ground..."

He's sad about the man not having magic. Everyone should have magic in Heaven! He'd offer to teach him, but he's - probably not actually a good teacher of magic? It would be impolite to ask the man why he can't have magic. There's probably a good reason, not everyone is smart enough to learn and maybe that's still true even if you have an eternity in the afterlife.

"That's nothing on the time I was fighting this werewolf guy and we tore through half a supermarket. Nobody got hurt, it's eminently fixable, let's keep it that way for next time. Jasper, how are we getting to the house? I took the bus here."

[We can just walk?] Suggests the Puchuu.

"...Nah, I'm gonna fly us. It's already four o'clock. Ahmose, any objection to flying?"

They are so free and casual with magic! The afterlives are really amazingly rich, aren't they, he really hopes they're putting it to good use.

"Yes please - I mean no!! No objection."

"Hold on a sec so I can transform - see you tonight, babe!" She calls to the retreating jacket-guy, who smiles and waves.

She takes a deep breath. Then... Blushes, and sort of squirms a little, shifting her legs and hips side to side. Then she slams her hands on her hips and holds her head high, chest out. "By the will of my soul and the power of my blood."

She is doing a little dance, and is glowing extremely brightly. It looks like all her clothes are falling away, though you can't actually see anything because of the light. "In deepest darkness and brightest light, in driving snow and terrible blight! I will not give in where there is evil to be fought!"

By now, a new set of clothes have started appearing in outline, ribbons and the hem of a skirt becoming visible. Illusory sweet-smelling wind and swirls of black petals swirl around her. "This flower blooms with passion and might. Shining Black Lily, the flower of death guards the font of life!"

The light finishes with a final gust of wind, and now the same girl is dressed in a very fancy bright red dress that shows a good amount of skin, ruffled sleeves, with a frilly many-layered skirt dominated by black, that goes to mid-thigh. She's also wearing a shiny black cape that flutters in an unseen wind, fishnet leggings and black heeled boots, a silver brooch decorated like a skull surrounded by flowers at the lapel of the dress, and a silver-and-sapphire jeweled hood and veil covering her face.

It all looks very fancy, though the style is somewhere in between all three of wizardly and court-noble and harem-outfit. Only then does she draw some sort of large square plate (also skull-and-flower decorated) out of her backpack of holding, set it on the ground, and incant 'Lily Wind, Expand!'. The platform expands. She smiles (she now has black lipstick on, faintly discernable through the veil), and gestures towards the platform. "Our ride."

Is that. Was that. Another magic ritual?? Or maybe - no, Ahmose clearly Does Not Understand what is going on, probably because he is Officialy Not Splendid Enough to be a sorcerer and that looked more like a sorcerer thing than a wizard thing. Or maybe a bard thing, or -

- wait, maybe that's just what happens if you let women be wizards, they do it like that? Just as Osirian wizards insist on wearing robes and pointy hats, maybe when women are wizards they wear fancy dresses with skulls and flowers. And short skirts because Osirian men want women to wear long dresses, and attack women who dress immodestly, and so in Heaven where the women are wizards and the men are their magic-less husbands they dress the way they always wanted to in life?

He saw a flight being boarded in Sothis once. Money changed hands, the fat old wizard pulled out a carpet from his bag of holding and they were off with no more ceremony. Ahmose much prefers the version with a song and dance routine, and is having a little revelation about this fact.

...also oh no he drifted off thinking and people are waiting for him again!! He hurries onto the platform. 

"Uh, thank you very much!" Is there something he should hold on to?

(Haaah. Even weird teleported wizards think the transformation and outfit are over the top! Oh well. She's accepted it long ago. And it's still nice to be looked at... Just a bit embarassing, sometimes.)

There isn't anything to hold on to, but as soon as he steps on the platform he gets a sense of -surefootedness. As if he'd have to actually try to fall over.

The Puchuu jumps aboard too, and then they climb into the sky at a rapid pace.

They fly north, still east of the college. To the left are a lot of mixed brownstone and more modern buildings and a few green areas, then more standard glass and steel construction. Apartment towers, in the distance. To the right are suburbs and farmland.

Cars and busses are present, less so on campus. Lots of young people walking around, too. They have a fairly muted reaction to seeing her flying around. Interested and some gawking, but not awed.

"So, you must be pretty confused." Shining Black Lily comments. "Hopefully we can get you home- But if not, there's a lot of stuff you have to learn about here."

"That makes sense, I never expected to go to Heaven! Um. I never expected to go to any afterlife while alive. I guess that's what opening a portal to another plane means, but I thought I'd go to - the visitors' area of Aktun, probably, somewhere people actually go to. But I clearly don't know how to aim, so for a random other plane Heaven is actually pretty good!" Wait no that sounds ridiculously disparaging - "very good, I mean, it's really - incredible. The city, and everything." He feels like he could spend hours just looking at the view. The soaring towers glinting in the sunlight, the farm-plots laid out in geometric perfection.

Wait, they're still Interacting with him. "It's - possible I can't go home? I mean, I don't know if I can do it, but I just need to repeat what I did to get here. In reverse. A boat or raft for the river might help."

"And I'm very grateful for your help and your understanding, and I want to repay you if I can, I just don't know what I can do that you'd find valuable." There, he said it. He hasn't agreed to anything specific yet, it has to be safe, this is Heaven.

She looks completely confused.

"Wait, wait, wait. Back up. Heaven? This isn't heaven. What the ffffudge gave you that impression?"

He - gestures to the puchuu. "You said you... support good, and fight evil, and enforce justice, and prevent misuse of magic. And this is another plane, and I assumed you're an outsider. So I thought..." By process of elimination, if this isn't Heaven, and presumably it isn't Hell either, is this... Nirvana? He's not really clear on what goes on in Nirvana. It's probably not Elysium, though? Elysium has fewer cities in it, and more beer.

"No, none of those. This is the planet Earth. Of the, uh, material plane, I guess. I don't know much about portals or other worlds or anything."

Oh. Oh.

The second portal was meant to take him back to the Material Plane. And it did! But where plane shift has an error range of several hundred miles, his had one that reached another planet. How far is that, anyway?

Ahmose had read a book with a list of spells which said plane shift can take you anywhere on the other plane. And he'd laughed and thought, pull the other one, surely people can't just go anywhere without any limits. The world doesn't look the way it would look if people could go anywhere on any plane.

Well, it turns out Ahmose was right, but for a different reason. Going anywhere isn't a good thing, really, it's going somewhere that's the problem. Plane shift probably deserves its high circle, lots of smart wizards must have worked hard on it to make it not go to other planets. And here silly Ahmose thought he could compete with it, just by opening portals without knowing where they'd go. Better to stick to the ones he can see where to put.

He has to figure out targeting, though, or he can't go back home. Well, if he can go to Actual Heaven, or probably Axis, maybe someone there can help him for a price, and maybe he can find someone helpful even in a random place in Heaven. He can keep the portal back open this time while he searches.

...If these nice people let him, that is. Because. Um. He thought he landed in a rich afterlife where people can afford to casually help strangers. And it turns out he landed in - presumably still a rich place, because look at those towers, but more specifically in a university's garden, and there were unsurprisingly wizards at the university, and he's very grateful that they're helping him! But he's not, after all, in a place where random people help strangers with powerful magic for no recompense.

"The planet I'm from is called Golarion. I can draw you the shape of the continents, and maybe you can tell which one it is? If it's - anywhere near here, and you can point me to it, then maybe I can portal there directly. It would take a long time" (how much is a million seconds again?) "but at least I know how to do it."

"Or I can open a portal to the river-place again. Which might land somewhere else on that plane, I guess, and I don't know what plane that was. And I can look for people there who might be able to help me."

"If none of that works, then I guess I can - go to Abadar's, and tell them my story and offer to pay for normal plane shifts back home. Which I don't actually have money for, but I can sell them my portals." He hates that it's come to this and it's all his fault and if he has to sell now he'd get much less than he could have gotten at home, probably, since he values getting home and they'd be holding that over him...

"Another planet? Inhabited alien planets? Gosh! I think I'll wanna visit, if I can... Though it's kind of weird that you're recognizably human, if you're from another planet... We only know Earth, as far as inhabited planets go. Portals, huh. Do you have to obey the speed of light? Jasper, what about you, what do you think of the portals? And 'Golarion'?"

[Unfortunately I don't know of any other inhabited planets in this plane! There are other planes accessible from Earth under certain conditions, but I've never heard of Abadar or Golarion. As for the portals, I need to see it in action to tell more!] Declares Jasper the Puchuu.

"I don't understand about the speed of light? It takes me a few seconds to open a portal... I'll show you when you ask me to." Aaaand here it comes, the actually smart people and formally taught wizards are going to look at his spell and figure out how to use it better and he won't be special anymore.

"The gods might have different names here? Abadar is the Lawful Neutral god of commerce, cities and travel. He likes people to trade freely and fairly to mutual profit. His holy symbol is the golden key, or the Golden Arches" - he makes a bent-cross sign with his hands. "And he lives in the city of Aktun in Axis, the Lawful Neutral afterlife."

"Huh."

Well, it's incredibly rude to say that someone's religion is fake.

"Light has a maximum speed... At least, when magic's not involved. It's insanely fast on human scales. Something like two hundred thousand miles per second. Actually I think magic might obey the speed of light too? I'm not sure. House is down there-"

She points towards part of the suburb and starts gently descending.

It makes sense that light has a speed - how could it not have a speed? - but Ahmose still doesn't see how that's relevant to his portals. Probably they have a good reason for asking about it that real wizards get taught in university.

"What gods are worshipped here?"

"I'm agnostic, man. There's magic all over the place, and any or all or none of it could be divine in origin, who knows? Even if someone named Jesus did do miracles and die on a cross to absolve people of evil, who's to say the guy was actually a god? Puchuu won't say anything substantive about it either."

"But - divine magic looks clearly different from arcane magic? At least, everyone says so back home." Everyone who can cast detect magic, that is. "And - if people get spells when they pray, those are divine, if they read them from a book that anyone can read" except him shut up, brain, "that's arcane wizard magic... probably? And then there are sorcerers but most mages are either wizards or clerics. Um. On Golarion, that is. Also, only clerics can heal or resurrect people."

"I don't do magic with books or by praying. I mean... You can write down information about techniques, but that doesn't sound like what you mean?" The panel comes in for a landing in the fenced backyard of one of the houses.

"We're here. Basement's reasonably warded, so any dangerous but not very dangerous tests can go there. So, when I do magic, I have this - well of energy inside me, and- Actually, it's a bit embarrassing. Let me think about how to explain. How do you do magic?"

"But then... what does the university do? How is magic taught without books?" Is she a sorcerer?

Then the rest of her questions hits him and Ahmose is mortified. He has no idea how he does magic and it's the most embarrassing fact about him. But he really can't see how to avoid this, and he kind of promised them an explanation of his portal spell, because just showing it without explaining anything isn't really fair. 

"I... don't know exactly how," he confesses. "I wasn't formally taught. I have just a little bit of magic, other than the portals. I asked the wizards at the temple of Nethys, god of magic, and they said I was probably a sorcerer, but that I couldn't ever become a better one because I wasn't splendid enough." Actually what they said was 'there are as many kinds of mage as there are mages' but he's pretty sure that was just exaggeration. "But they also said a cantrip couldn't make portals, so maybe they got the other part wrong, too. I didn't show them the portal spell, because I was trying to improve it so I could get more when I sold it. And one of the things I tried was to make portals to other planes, and that's how I ended up here."

"When I do magic it feels like - I have a sense for it? Like knowing I have an arm, and where it is, and how to move it somewhere else. I just know I can do some things, and how to do them, with the gestures and the words. So I can cast light, and mending, and the laundry spell." Only true wizards can pronounce the name for the laundry spell without stumbling, everyone else just calls it the laundry spell. "And the portals. They all feel the same to me."

"Wizards learn magic from books. In general, and specific spells. They charge a lot of money for letting other wizards copy their spells into their own spellbook. And every time they want to cast a spell, they need to read it in their book again. Or, well, they read their book in the morning, and then they can cast those spells later, but only a few times and only the ones they read. It's like they can only remember a few spells at a time, and when they cast them they forget again."

"Anyone can learn to be a wizard if they're smart enough, you don't have to be born with it or anything. Sorcerers are said to be born that way, but they only develop powers as adults and most sorcerers don't have sorcerer parents, so I don't know if it's actually true. And of course clerics are given magic by gods, who can choose anyone to be a cleric. I think." He feels extremely unqualified to be explaining magic, but he has actually practiced this with some of his neighbors who asked him about his time in the big city, so he delivers this without stopping or cringing.

"...No, the university doesn't teach magic. It teaches lots of things, especially engineering, which is like- Machines, computers, factories. That doesn't sound like what 'wizards' I know of do either, but there's a bunch of different traditions anyway. So who knows, really."

She hops off the platform as it settles down, the skirt bouncing higher for a moment with the motion. She motions him off of it, so she can shrink and backpack it again, then heads inside, unlocking the sliding glass back door with a key from a key ring. The house is pristine and moderately fancy, looking completely unused.

"That sounds similar to me actually? Jasper found me when I first started feeling magic and started teaching me. Apparently there's only a few spells that are pretty 'standard', and a lot of it, you have to kind of... Feel out? For my magic, at least. No books involved. So I bet we're both sorcerers, actually. It's like learning to ride a bike. You just kind of... Do it. But Jasper helps a lot." 

She bends at the knee, down to pet the Puchuu. It purrs under her hand. "They can make enchanted items that help shape magic! My scepter and outfit and brooch are like wearing training wheels. Or... Not quite. It's more... Intense? They're a little... Restricting? Like wearing a corset. And also make it easier to, uh... Churn emotions, to get more magic out. It's hard to describe. I can't do rituals transformed like this, but I'm a lot more powerful in other ways."

"I think some engineers are wizards. The greatest buildings and bridges and so on often have magic in them, to protect them or to help them stand up. There used to be a bridge across the sea that was made by a legendary wizard. Wizards are - the people who study magic and figure out how to do new things. Sorcerers can't really control what spells they have, and clerics only get new spells if the gods decide to give them."

"Using magic items makes sense! Every mage who can afford to wears magic items in Golarion, to get more power and for protection and sometimes just to cast spells from." Ahmose wonders what kind of animal a 'bike' is, and what 'training wheels' are and how you'd wear a wheel. He has a mental image of Shining Black Lily standing on horseback, holding two big wheels to the sides that she has to balance, and shuts it down hurriedly. 

He's heard before that sorcerers sometimes use emotion to cast magic. Or was it song-sorcerers? He has no idea how to do it, but maybe he should try - getting very emotional about his portals? Not where Lily can see him though!! - an idea for another day. 

"I don't think we really have wizards then. There's some people who try to scientifically study magic... Or magic related topics. But..." She glances at the Puchuu. "Anyway. The basement is right down there." She opens a door to a wooden stairwell, and flips a light switch on the wall as she goes. The basement is unfinished concrete with carved and painted runes and circles all around. "Once the protective wards are on, it's a pretty good containment area. There's a lot of safeties and support spells too, to keep us safe from any side effects or environmental stuff. The Puchuu have a bunch of places like this, for figuring out just how dangerous or useful things are."

(Jasper, too, follows her down, if he's worried about chaperoning.)

Chaperoning doesn't apply to wizard women!! That's, like, at least half the reason Osirian girls dream of growing up to be wizards before they tragically but inevitably grow out of it. 

Lily might not call herself a wizard but this laboratory would do any wizard's tower proud! (He assumes.)

"Would you like me to show you a normal portal first? One that goes somewhere else in the room. I've made lots of those and they never did anything unexpected."

[Yes, please! Let's start with the simplest things and work up in complexity. Shining Black Lily, please take a place on the siphon rune and channel.]

Shining Black Lily blushes but nods, and stands on one particular circle, closing her eyes and focusing. Puchuu darts around the room and prods different sections of the arcane runework. Bits of it start glowing.

[We are ready!]

"I don't have more complex portals. Other than the interplanar one. The rest go to different distances and have different sizes but they feel the same. I can make a portal anywhere I can see within a mile, and the other side opens next to me."

Ahmose concentrates for a few seconds, and two man-sized, round portals open on two sides of the room. Then he yelps, and runs towards Puchuu gesturing frantically. "Don't touch them, please! The sides are very sharp and will cut anything that touches them. I forgot to tell you, I'm so sorry!!" This is so embarrassing and there's a hot feeling in his stomach at the terrible accident he nearly caused. "Just, um. Never touch the sides, that's all. Sorry. There's nothing else."

[Thank you for warning us before anyone got hurt! I would like to test that by hitting the side with a stick or something. Does that sound reasonably safe?]

"Ooh, nice..." Shining Black Lily mutters.

"Yes. The stick will be cut, that's all."

Puchuu valiantly tests this, with a stick that is fetched from... Somewhere. And then a metal rod, just for comparison. It investigates the cut points carefully. It also tries hopping through, being very careful about the edges.

Do the portals have 'fronts' and 'backs'? Does it look like something could pass through portals multiple times if it were long enough and pushed through in the right way.

Each portal has two sides, and each side is connected to a side of other portal. The two sides pointing towards each other are connected, and so are the 'outer' sides. You can push a long stick through the portals' inner sides several times, if it's angled so it doesn't touch itself.

[These could be incredibly useful! Is it tiring at all to maintain them? Could you maintain one without your attention?]

"I don't have to do anything to maintain it, I can even forget it's there." This is something he's pretty scared of, because if he forgets an open portal someone could find it and get hurt and find out he can make portals - that cat's out of the bag now. Ahmose never goes out of view of his portals if he can help it. "But I can only have a few open at once - more of them the smaller they are."

[I can think of two big ways to use your portals to make a lot of money for you. One of them is kind of dangerous. But we can talk about that later. Do you want to try going home now?]

Ahmose can also see the obvious and obviously dangerous way to use his portals for money!!! He hates that it's the first thing that comes to mind but it's indeed very obvious and he really really hates it and hopes he doesn't have to do it, but it might be a moral duty in which case he'll give his spell to the paladins in exchange for changing his memory so he can never know he invented it.

...

He really, really wants to go home.

"Yes, please." He closes the two portals. "I'm going to try to open a portal to the river-world again. A small one, that we can look through."

He concentrates and repeats what he did, as far as he can remember, and pours in all his power - the portal refuses to form for less, even though it's going to be smaller this time - until finally it opens.

It's dark and there's a wind blowing in, like the time he spent hours opening a portal-chain really far up to see all of the Middle Sea at once. Except there's nothing to see, this time, just a few points of light on a black background.

"That's outer space!" Black Lily declares with a gasp.

"Maybe it went off-target and ended up a few hundred miles above the river and looking away from the planet?"

They put a little mirror on a stick through it to look in the other direction. (The adventurer's friend!) Unfortunately, there is no planet anywhere nearby, and no obvious sun either.

"Um. I - don't know what's going on? I guess... I could be going to a new or different place every time, but..." He can't actually disprove that, except that it would be the worst portal spell ever. If his normal portals did that they would be completely useless.

"I can try again?" he offers. "I'll have to close this one, though, the planar portals take a lot more energy than the normal ones."

[Oh dear. I hope you will be able to go home. Go ahead! If you can't target a specific plane, that would be disappointing, but it's much better to know that in advance than have it be an unpleasant surprise.]

Ahmose also really hopes he'll be able to go home!!

The next planar portal also opens into space. He can't tell if it's the same space or not, because he doesn't have enough power to keep two planar portals open at once, and he's bad at mentally rotating the star-patterns.

Space a third time, and then just before he gives up in disgust - the portal opens on some kind of reddish... stuff... that fills it completely. It's moving, or maybe the faint light it shines with is moving, but the surface stays perfectly smooth and none of it comes through to this side of the portal.

"Oh no. I don't have a way to make the portals open only in clear space, do I." Please don't let him have cut anyone - THING, anything important, please please -

"Is that... Inside a star?"

[It would be much brighter if it was, so bright the environment ward would have to dim it! The pressure is very high though. According to the wards, the temperature is five hundred and seventy degrees Celsius, and the material is mostly Hydrogen.]

"A gas giant, then... Probably nothing alive to be harmed in a gas giant, right?"

[Almost certainly,] agrees Jasper. [Please mind your channeling!]

"Ah! Sorry, sorry, I was distracted by how cool this is-"

AAAAH A GIANT did he just murder an innocent giant!!! - no, wait, they're saying it's... some other thing and not alive?...

"But what if there was," Ahmose says, stuttering slightly with belated terror, "should I really be doing this? I want to go home but, but not if it kills someone!!" His imagination supplies a vivid image of his triumphant return home, stepping out of the bisected body of poor Mrs. Thekla. 

He's going to need a few minutes to calm down and... maybe keep trying... what do Lily and Jasper think?

[I understand your hesitation, Ahmose. It would be really bad to accidentally hurt or kill someone. If your portals really are appearing randomly distributed through possible space the chances of that are really really REALLY tiny, but they do exist!]

"Heeey Jasper, do I have to keep channeling the whole time?"

[You can stop now! The ward storage is close to full.]

Shining Black Lily huffs in relief and runs her hands across her skirt, nodding.

[I just wanted it topped up in case anything happened, like the gas planet. Ahmose, the risk of you hurting someone with a portal is not zero, but the risk of you hurting someone by walking around and tripping and falling on them is also not zero! Even if they appear on a planet, the chances of them appearing in the middle of a road or walkway in a way that people can't avoid it MUST be less than one in a thousand. Likely less than one in a MILLION. Even on a highly populated planet like Earth, densely inhabited areas cover about one percent of the land area, and most of that is empty most of the time. Just look at this house! If a portal appeared randomly inside this house, which is already vanishingly unlikely assuming it's random, it'd be really unlikely to unluckily hurt any of us three. I think it's best to look at risk in terms of probabilities and impacts! Your portals hurting someone is very high impact, but it's also very VERY unlikely! While learning and practicing with your portals carries a much higher likelihood, but lower impact, consequence: You learn more about what you can do and become more confident. It also carries a low likelihood, high impact benefit: If you find a world that needs help, or learn enough about your portals to do useful things with them, it would be amazing! It might not happen, but it might be worth trying on the off chance it DOES work!]

"And getting you home is important. And finding other worlds in need of help, might also be important. It's hard to look at and quantify long term benefits, especially if you won't be, uh, saving lives directly, but... There are some of those, if we learn more about your interworld portals and figure out a way to make them useful and safe?"

That makes sense and is exactly the sort of argument he's scared of and does NOT trust himself to make! It helps that it's someone else making it, but. A chance of one in a million of accidentally murdering someone every time he opens a portal actually sounds very bad!!

"I really hope I can learn to open them the same place as before," he agrees. "Only I can't see how, just now. It's like - the spell is the same every time, it doesn't have another component I could change, but I get a different place every time! Or a different plane, I suppose."

He somewhat reluctantly goes back to opening portals. The next one after the gas giant (which is not a gas-variant of giant, apparently, but a giant-variant of gas) is empty space again. The one after that -

Water, water as far as the eye can see, under a deep blue sky.

"Yes!! I did it!" He claps in triumph. 

[You don't have to use portals if you don't want to. I'm just trying to make the reasoning around it clearer.]

"You can argue yourself into knots with that kind of thinking, so maybe don't trust it blindly, though."

After the ocean appears:

[I'm recording all the protective enchantment's readings! Do you think we can take a sample of the water? Then you can try to come back to it again. And we can confirm it's the same place!]

Now he tells him he doesn't have to do it?

"Are you asking me? I... don't see why you couldn't take some of the water."

[Okay! I'm going to let a little bit in and collect it. Watch out for splashing!]

Puchuu prepares a glass vial on a stand from within a cabinet, then does things with the wall sigils, and the invisible wall of force flush with the portal, which previously had no water coming through- Blips, letting in a hearty splash.

[We can learn things about this world by analyzing the water!]

"What kind of things? And how long would it take? All I know is that it was really salty." Wouldn't it be easier to look for a fish or something?

"Maybe you can divine if the water I spilled in the garden" (he's still embarrassed about that) "is from the same place as this?"

"I can't do divination stuff," Black Lily comments. "But the labs and spectrometers and stuff are sort of like divination."

[That's a good idea. We should collect some of the water still soaking your robe, and more samples through the portal.]

"We can tell what kinds of materials are dissolved in it, with enough samples. How much salt, how much other stuff. Spectrometers use light absorption and emission to detect trace amounts of various things. Salt glows slightly differently from dissolved calcium or whatever."

Lily may claim she's a sorcerer but they're clearly being wizards right now! This is so cool.

SCIENCE!! By which we mean careful sample collection and labeling, proceeds apace.

Ahmose will wait until they're done with the portal, and try to ask questions whenever they seem distractable! Is there something unusual about this salt? (Beyond how much of it there is.)

[We won't know for sure until we can have my friend at the MSL check them. I think it might have more calcium salts than Earth's ocean.]

Black Lily bounces. "Imagine sailing over the seas of an alien planet! I wonder if there's life there."

"We could check for life!" Hopefully it won't be a sea-monster. "...but I don't actually know how to find fish or anything. I'll open a portal to show us more of the sea, can you do anything with that?" He opens a portal a few hundred feet above the water, looking down, and another half a mile up; there's nothing to be seen but calm water. 

He tries to open another planar portal, from the water-world targeting his own. It doesn't go through. His sense of the spell insists it needs so much power that he can't have two planar portals open at once. Maybe if he made both portals as small as he could... but then he couldn't go through them, could he.

"I don't think I can open a portal home without closing this one," he tells them, crestfallen. "I'll have to get a boat or something, go through, and then close this one. And hope that if I can't make it home I can at least go back here... obviously I can't ask anyone else can go with me. Um. I probably shouldn't do that right now. Do you want me to try some more portals?"

[We would want to prepare for something Iike that very carefully. I can't abandon my duties here on Earth!]

"We can get a boat, get supplies, prepare for it all... I don't think that's happening today. I also think there's somebody who would be happy to explore new worlds even if it's risky, but I don't know how to find them..."

[We can check the samples for microorganisms. That will tell us if there's life on that world. If there are, we can search for bigger creatures.]

Ahmose will wait until they're done with this portal, then.

He hasn't really processed, yet, that he might not make it back home anytime soon if ever. Should he try to build a new life for himself, or focus on trying to go back? At what cost, and when would it stop being worth it? He has no idea how to answer any of these questions.

Maybe he should try to get through the next few days without making any decisions, and see if that helps? He has a really sinking feeling about it all.

Soon, Puchuu declares them officially done.

[Feel free to use this house for the next few days, Ahmose. Nobody lives in it most of the time. People who suddenly need a place to stay, like you, are why we have it! I'll get you a key and a way to contact me.]

"That is very generous of you!" As would be helping him out with a boat. The idea of someone else deciding to go with him, when they might never come back, is - too much to contemplate, he'll ignore it until if this person actually shows up.

"I don't want to impose, is there anything I can do to repay you? And do you want to keep this portal for now, or should I keep opening more?"

[We don't need that portal anymore, right now. It will take a while to set up my idea for generating electricity, but if you would be willing to be on call for cross-country transport in case of an emergency, that would be a big relief. We wouldn't need you to fight, just to get Shining Black Lily and maybe some other girls across a few states so they're a little closer if something really bad is happening.]

"Emergencies like that almost never happen," Shining Black Lily comments. "The last time I had to rush out headlong like that was when I was back in junior high, something like... Eight years ago?"

He closes the portal. "I'm happy to help with transport, but it's slower than a normal teleport if I don't set it up in advance. I can open a portal a mile away every two or three seconds, so it takes me hours to get to the other side of the continent. If I knew in advance where you might need to go, or a few places, I could keep really small portals there that wouldn't cost me much and make a big one when you need it." 

He's considered selling transportation services, it's the obvious thing to do with portals, but the main problem is that the portals rely on him and he can't really ask someone to build their business, let alone an industry or a national trade route, by relying on his personal availability, and if he did he'd be committing not to use his portals for something better down the road. What would be really great is opening permanent portals, and he thinks (or hopes) it should be possible, it's less of a modification of what his spell does than planar ones, but he's nowhere near there yet.

A few on-demand trips, though, that much he can do.

[The most likely place we would need to go in a hurry is to Chicago, which is a hundred and thirty five miles away. Would it be much trouble to keep a small portal there, just in case?]

"It's no trouble to keep one anywhere, I just need to spend the time to get it there. That distance would take only six or seven minutes, but if you want to be able to get there even quicker I can prepare it. Can you point me in the right direction, and tell me where to put the far end of the portal when I'm done? Or just look through the portals through me, and tell me where to go."

"I'm gonna grab a snack from the kitchen if we're done testing now," Black Lily comments. "I do still have to study for that test, as awesome as all this is." She jogs over to the stairwell and thumps upstairs, leaving the door open behind her.

Puchuu points its ears and nose directly towards Chicago. [We Puchuu have places like this one in the city, so we'll look for one of those when we get close!]

Oh wow he'll never get used to beautiful women in uh, he's going to call it wizard-dresses, bouncing around the room! ...now he's blushing as much as she did when she channeled - that's probably an inappropriate thought or something, stop it brain, he has important work to concentrate on.

He opens a chain of portals, through the door that Shining Black Lily left open and out of the building and then, when he's gained some altitude, he'll keep going in the direction Jasper is pointing at around 1400 mph, until he's told to stop or, probably, sees some more incredible towers like those near the university.

At first he sees mostly farmland, and great black roads cris-crossing the countryside, cars and the occasional truck trundling along them, with the occasional town. Then he sees large fields of white towers with spinning blades on them, dotted amongst the fields, like enormous white windmills.

And then more fields. And then... Rows and rows and rows and rows of houses and other buildings, surrounding the towers on the lake in the hazy distance for miles and miles around.

Are those towers with swords?? - no, they must be windmills, he's just expecting weird things because everything is so foreign.

Probably they have a reason. Maybe the reason is simply that they can. Wizards always build themselves towers, these grand cities are half made up of towers, so maybe when people are rich and powerful enough even the millers build themselves windmill-towers.

...these people seem to have forbidden most of the city from building as high as its rulers, though. This is also a familiar sentiment: back in Sothis, the wizards and clerics all fussed about who was allowed to build a higher temple. Ahmose feels a brief pang of despair at the state of humanity.

Once he gets close to the inner city, Jasper asks him to slow down and make the pinhole portals lower down... Jasper has Ahmose lower down on an apartment block next to a park, not quite in the tallest part of the city yet.

Another Magical Girl(?) with a green-furred puchuu on her shoulder is leaning against an open door. Her outfit has some dress-like characteristics like Black Lily's, but the color is dominated by shades of green, and it looks more like the sportwear the jogger who first approached him was wearing. It's fundamentally a bit tight, for all the bangles and accessories hanging off it. She also has a sword. Her hair is doing something unnatural, too, holding itself up in a wide sweep of curls that looks more like a metal sculpture than something hair should be doing.

She perks up when the portal approaches. "Holy shit, portal! Is real! This is a triumph~" She singsongs. "Hey, portal wizard! I got you some cake! It's not a lie." She laughs as if this is a hilarious joke.

A wizard probably-sorcerer with a sword! Ahmose has every boy's belief that magic swords are cool, coupled with the teen's belated realization that wizards don't get to use swords and he's definitely destined for the wizard track (he thinks). Well, presumably wizards can make a wand or staff or something sword-shaped, but they don't hit people with it because they don't want people to hit them back (very relatable!). Clerics get to be sword-mages but they're not as cool as wizards, even though they can heal people. 

Except apparently you can be a woman and a wizard sorcerer and have a revealing pretty dress and - magic hair? - so why not a sword too? This place might not be Heaven but it seems to be so good. Ahmose really really hopes it's all like that.

Cake isn't really on the same scale, not unless it's a giant magic cake that needs to be ritually cut with a sword, but he's still very excited and happy! 

"Yes! Hello!" Also very tongue-tied, because he's still him and not someone from a fairytale of pretty sword-wielding woman mages.

Smirk. She can tell he's looking. If she makes sure to flaunt the sword and hair a little, surely that's a coincidence.

"Well, let's send it inside. To the kitchen. So you can get your cake."

He'll navigate the portal inside and away from the potentially flustering conversation and look for cake! ...he should probably actually go through, shouldn't he.

"Jasper, should we - do you want to go through?" He makes a bigger portal.

[It's up to you! It would be valid to be nervous about traveling. I'm going to stay here.]

"I can just hand you the cake," offers the unfamiliar magical girl, having followed the portal chain. "I kind of want to ask a million questions about how it works but, yeah, that'd be bothering you, right?"

"I don't mind! I have nothing to do" - that's not true, why did he say that, he needs to keep opening planar portals and figure out how to make them reproducible so he can get home - "right now, so I can answer a few questions."

Then he kicks himself when he realizes it would be impolite to eat cake while talking.

"Cool! I'll answer some too if you have 'em. Fair's fair. So it looks like it's not a portal gun situation, they don't need to be on walls..."

She fetches out a neat square of leftover strawberry cake, pink and red with frosting and sugared fruit layers. Onto a plastic plate it goes, with a plastic fork. She walks over to hand it through the small portal, carefully holding it steady in the center of the opening.

"I can open them anywhere I can see," Ahmose confirms. "Within range, and only a few at once."

He'll take the cake gratefully, and try it! Does it taste like it came from amazing rich free magic tower land?

"Nice. Kind of hazardous sounding though."

It tastes like 1/8 of a $40 cake from a nice bakery, left in a fridge for a day. So, yes. Very sweet, perfectly moist and with a bunch of subtle flavors underneath the sweetness.

Wow!!! That is so sweet and - of a quality he has no words for!!

Why does he have no words for having no words for a quality, that seems silly. It's not indescribable (except by him), it's not unnameable exactly, it's - not nameless or a wordless feeling, no, those are something else -

...focus, there's a pretty woman talking to you who might have more cake!

"It is! Hazardous, I mean. I have to be careful" - guilty glance at Jasper - "to look carefully before I open them, and tell people to be careful, and not leave them open where I can't see them if someone could run into one."

"Oh! And the cake is very... delicious, thank you!"

"Yeah! It really is. I go half an hour out of the way to get them from this one bakery that's really good. Of course, I have to get tuneups more often if I eat a lot of cake," She pokes her belly, "But I can afford it. Have you tried using portals as a catapult? Have something fall in one, and then come out above and keep falling so it goes really fast, and then pop the portals and have it go into one that was underneath and fly really fast?"

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.

"I... can't really imagine what life is like without any clerics," he offers with a weak smile.

[What do clerics do? Modern human society has replaced many tasks with machines. I think alternate solutions to the same problems people face might be seen in different societies.]

"What he said," agrees the green Magical Girl, who has failed to give a name so far. "Geez. That would be like... Falling into a hole and learning that lightning isn't a thing anymore, wouldn't it? I think clerics are really important in the stories I've heard that include them."

"Clerics - provide all the things divine magic does and arcane magic hasn't figured out yet. Healing, curing disease, raising the dead, making clean water, making crops grow. Probably a lot of rarer stuff I'm not thinking of. Plane shift, for visiting the afterlives. And spells that asks their gods questions. Those are the important ones."

"But most clerics don't just sell spells, they - promote the things their gods want. Abadar does banking, Erastil farming, Nethys magic - he's the god of wizards - Sarenrae fights evil... There are hundreds of others. Without their help, all those things probably wouldn't get done nearly as much. But, um, there are also evil gods, so if both were gone that might be fine actually, I don't know."

Ahmose has indeed noticed she hasn't given a name and has no idea how to ask for one politely! Being deep in conversation without someone whose name he doesn't know and is too late to ask is a horrible circumstance that happened to him bizarrely often in Sothis. He dreads the moment he has to refer to her when talking to someone else. Asking Jasper her name later will be mortifying but so will asking her name now so he's not doing that either, just dreading it inevitably happening.

"Well, some witches and magical girls are pretty good at healing. Succubi too, I guess. And modern medicine is no slouch, though it's not as convenient as magic. We... Don't raise the dead very much, unless they're very fresh and mostly intact. Clean water is a tech thing, crops too. I should show you a YouTube video on it... There are priests that talk about what they think their gods want, at least."

Wait, what?

"You have succubi for healing? The demons?" This is weird enough that it makes him completely ignore for the moment the other things one might want succubi for, if one could trust them with anything at all.

Oh look, return of the blush. It's lighter this time at least.

"Well, sure! Succubi are really good at biomancy, generally. I, uh, pay 'em to keep me thin and fit. Fighting shape. Lots of people do. Magical people anyway. They're... I don't know if demons is even the right word? Some are pretty evil, and some are basically fine, especially if you have a written contract."

This is extremely confusing and contrary to everything Ahmose has ever heard!

"Contracts are for devils, not demons! I mean - do they follow contracts? Demons are chaotic - no, not that, how do you say - what is wrong with this language - what do you call the... dead people are judged on two measures and sent to one of nine afterlives, one measure is good versus evil - what, not that either? What do you call them? The - axes on which the nine afterlives are arranged?"

"We don't believe in afterlives, remember?"

"You don't believe... that there are nine afterlives, one for each alignment?" Do they think everyone goes to the same place? That would be so weird.

"No. You said good and evil. And law and chaos? Are those 'alignments'?"

"Yes! Good and evil, chaos and law. Neutral between each two, a grid of nine. But - if you don't know about alignments, and you can't detect them or talk to the afterlives, how do you avoid Hell?"

"Hell's not... A thing. And the people who believe in Hell, who, who fucking use it as a threat to make people conform to their own ideas, deserve to go there if anyone does."

[I think you're getting a bit heated, Sporty Lime! Ahmose thinks Hell is bad.]

"I- Ugh. I have history with this shit, I'm not unbiased, okay?"

"Hell isn't, isn't something you deserve! It's something that's done to you! You need to avoid it, like you'd avoid the plague, or - it's categorically the worst thing there is!!!" She clearly doesn't get it. There are probably not enough exclamation marks in the universe to explain Hell if you haven't been raised in its shadow. And he's so, so tragically un-splendid.

"Prove to me Hell exists, then. Prove it. Because I don't believe it. I think- I think what happens when we die is oblivion, just, not existing, which, is worse than Hell for some people and not for others, and- I don't believe in Heaven either. I can't. Let alone a bunch of other extra ones. There's nothing I've ever seen on it but wishful thinking at best and manipulation at worst. Since I don't think Hell exists, or Heaven, all I can do is- Be, and try to help people where I can, and- Damn, I should be in the big ritual sink right now, Jesus Christ." She is holding back tears.

"I really really do!!! Want to prove it to you! Because it's so important! You can be a perfectly normal good person and then go somewhere bad because the Judge isn't good or lawful and she has rules you can't guess, that's why you need her priests to tell you about them!!" Ahmose is close to crying himself.

He looks at Jasper. "I, I have to go back. Back to my world, and then bring the priests here, bring the gods - we have to make the planar portal work. We have to."

[I'm afraid as Cute Guardians, we don't actually know if you're correct, or if the gods would be good for this planet. We will certainly help you investigate responsibly, especially if you trade your help to us a little bit. But the thing is that if any gods have operated on Earth before, we can't tell for sure. There are things that might match what you are describing, but they're rare and inconsistent. The prophets Jesus Christ and Mohammad did actually perform things that were declared miracles, like creating food and drink or rising from the dead or curing leprosy or using powers of prophecy, but it sounds like you think MANY priests can do them. Such things are very, very rare on Earth and we can't take it as definitive proof that a god, or multiple gods, exist. Have you considered that these gods may have had influence over your previous plane and world, but not this one?]

"Obviously they don't have any influence here! Clerics with spells and miracles is what their influence looks like! It's what happens after you die that's the problem!"

Ahmose is so, so deeply glad that Jasper is taking him seriously and the Really Serious People Running Things are smart and will do the right thing, because he really, really can't do this himself.

"Of course I'll cooperate and trade and - I, I'll do" - anything, he barely stops himself from saying, because that is not how you negotiate with non-Abadarans, but it's true, he'll do almost anything - he won't go to Hell himself, or - he'll do everything he actually can do, to save these beautiful free people from damnation.

"At home we have the whole government working on this, they track how many people go to Hell and they set policies to get better results and make sure everyone knows how to avoid it - it's the most important thing the government is for, probably - I can't do it myself. I'll tell you everything I know and, and I'll try to convince you it's true, but I really really need to - get people from Golarion here to help you."

[I've asked someone to increase the urgency of our arrangements to get a big boat and someone to keep you safe from the ocean so you can try going home. I still don't know how quickly they will arrange it. Are there other things we can do which might point at the existence of afterlives, other than scrying or visiting them?]

"...I think you've been fooled and lied to." Following this announcement, Sporty Lime stomps away from the kitchen, leaving the portal looking at a green-furred Puchuu who leaped off and shook itself as she left.

"You can summon outsiders from them. Wizards can do all those things. You - don't really have wizards either, do you. I'm... not enough of one, I can't reinvent all the spells myself..." Oh gods, has he failed to help a whole planet of people because he spent a year tinkering with his spell instead of buying a spellbook staying in Sothis to study?

- Oh no. "What - did she mean?" He looks helplessly at Jasper.

[...When Sporty Lime was growing up, the priests at the church she and her family visited every week said that some things mean you're going to go to Hell, no matter what. Things like not believing in the story of Jesus Christ, or not praying correctly, and some other things that I don't think she would want me to tell you right now. But this hurt her a lot, because she thought she was going to go to Hell, and everyone disapproved of her a lot of the time because she did things like wondering whether the Bible was translated correctly. Eventually, she decided that the priests were just lying in order to manipulate people, and she thinks the same thing happened to you.]

"Oh no. That sounds terrible." Making someone think they're going to Hell when it's not true is awful even though the priests presumably believed what they told her. "None of those things sounds Evil though? Or, well, it's most that they don't sound relevant to judgement, but maybe there are reasons I'm not seeing..." The opposite of correct prayer is - maybe praying to demon lords and granting them power? He's now even more concerned about what she's doing with those succubi! 

"Would it help if I told her I know praying correctly and believing in things aren't important? But I'd have to understand the details first, and I don't want to pry, and - anyway I'm not a priest! That's why I want to get some real ones! I really really can't just - teach you all the right things myself!!"

[I think you talking to each other about what you believe could be very good as long as you both try to be calm, respectful, and open-minded! Right now you have reminded her of a difficult time in her life, so she might want to calm down for a few minutes first. Remember that right now she has a strong prior that people who say things about the afterlife are probably wrong. She probably also thinks you are wrong.]

"I'm only repeating what all the mages back home say, they can't all be wrong about it. But I guess I can understand if she thinks it's - wrong to believe something very important if only one person she actually meets says so and he doesn't have any other proof. Could you please... tell her that she can talk to me if she wants to? And maybe the things I believe aren't the ones she'd be so upset about." It's sort of obvious that she can talk to him if she wants to, but saying it explicitly helps sometimes; people interactions are Hard.

"To be honest Hell is very very scary and it's - correct to be upset about it. About even a chance of it happening. I don't want to make her or anyone feel bad or, or think about horrible things, if it doesn't actually help anyone avoid Hell! And - I'm probably really bad at teaching people these things. I should just focus on trying to get home."

[Everyone CAN be wrong about things. Lots of people just believe what other people say. It depends on how many people are actually checking. I would predict that where you're from a lot of people cared a lot about the afterlives, and a lot of them checked, so you're pretty confident. But like I said, we can't check. All our checking on afterlives has been inconclusive and contradictory enough that it's hard to be sure. I'll tell her you're still willing to talk.]

"A lot of people definitely checked on the afterlives, the government does statistics! And it's not just for checking, people talk to the afterlife planes to learn things and get help and even if they're not asking about the afterlife aspect it would get out if they were wrong about it." He sighs.

"Where did you want me to put this portal? I'll make it very small so I have power to make other ones, so choose somewhere people won't accidentally miss seeing it and cut themselves. On both ends, I guess. And tell me if you want to prepare portals to some other places too."

The Puchuus settle on a disused kitchen cabinet on both ends, for semi-permanent portal locations. They are happy with just the chicago-portal-just-in-case for now.

Sporty Lime comes back and nods at him, looking a bit down, but doesn't say anything. She starts making a sandwich with cold cuts instead.

Oh gods, he's so bad at this. What's he supposed to say? 'I'm sorry what I said upset you' sounds patronizing. 'Do you want to figure out what we actually believe' sounds - dismissive of her reaction earlier.

Maybe he'll just let her be. She didn't say anything, so probably she doesn't want to talk to him? He's just in her kitchen. But then shouldn't he leave, since he's done here?

He looks at Jasper mutely, hoping for advice.

"Want a sandwich while I'm making one anyway...?" She asks tentatively. "We don't have to talk about upsetting stuff. Or at all. If you don't want to."

"Yes, thank you. And - I was the one upsetting you! I'm sorry I did, and I won't talk about - all that again if you don't want me to. I, um, I do think the things I know aren't the ones that - people used to hurt you with, so maybe it will help to clarify that..." He's blushing a little.

"Or we can talk about other things, what would you like to talk about?"

"It's a hard topic. I don't really want to get into it again right now. I leave that stuff mostly to the Puchuu. D'you have video games where you're from, portal wizard?"

"I don't recognize the name, what are they?"

A smile. "Hard to explain. Interactive games- Ones that can be a lot more complicated than a board and dice, for example. I'll show you Portal, where I got some of my ideas from, later."

He'll probably have trouble with the controls, though. New gamers often do, and some people just don't like games that much.

"There's a... game about portals? I'd like to see it, thank you!" That actually sounds like it might be a great idea, and not just a conversational diversion. 

"Jasper, is there anything else you'd like me to do for you, while we wait for the boat to be prepared?" If there isn't, he'll spend his time making planar portals, maybe he can work out something about the places he can get to even if he can't open a portal to a particular place on demand. He'd need the safety ward for that, though.

[We don't need anything else at the moment. If you want clean and dry clothes, or to use the washing machines at the Champaign house, or to use the toilet and baths, maybe we should show you now. We might suddenly be busy later.]

"All right. I do have the laundry spell, though, I don't need to impose on your washing machines."

Jasper shows Ahmose various modern amenities. 

Not long after that, Sporty Lime is done with her sandwich and shouts for him through the pinhole cabinet portal. "Want to go to the game room and try Portal?" At some point, she untransformed, and now has more ordinary brunette hair in a messy pile, and is wearing baggy sweatpants and a long-sleeved hoodie. 

"Yes! I'm coming!" Ahmose is excited to see what kind of games people play with portals when they don't actually have portals.

"Yay! Hmm... Maybe you watch at first and learn to play later? I know it's hard at first."

The game room has a big TV and a bunch of couches and armchairs. She sets up an XBox 360, controller in hand, and the Portal 2 title screen is soon appearing on the TV.

"You control the game with these," she says, waving a controller. "The box is a computer, they do all sorts of things involving numbers and displays..."

There's an illusion in something like a picture frame, and an artifact with buttons that lets you manipulate it. Understanding that, intellectually, is the easy part; he's not going to ask about the numbers for now.

Getting to anywhere near Sporty Lime's level of fluency controlling the device is much, much harder, but he's used to magic devices taking a long time to master. This one seems to be a combined cunning / dexterity one, which makes it a purely dexterity-gated one as far as he's concerned.

What does the game-illusion show?

She has a Portal Gun that spits out blue and orange ends of a portal. They don't have to be on the same orientation, but they have to stick to walls, not free-float- And they're always the same size, and only white walls.

The challenges involve things like getting around beams of radiant damage, or redirecting them into targets in order to open a locked door, or moving spheres and cubes and beams around through creative portal use. They're not nearly as flexible as his portals, aside from the bits where they can be different orientations (leaving a cube bouncing up and down in two side by side portals, once), and how you can move one end independently of the other.

Also, there's a disembodied voice sarcastically threatening, joking, or insulting with the player as she progresses. The production value of the illusion is pretty good. The music, too.

"It's all a big puzzle, really. Do you want to try? There's a two-player mode, I never did much of it."

Sure, he'll try it. Does it reward being slow and careful, to negate his dexterity penalty?

"What is this - based on? My portals aren't like that at all. These seem more like a single permanent portal whose ends can be moved around."

Two player mode has a reddish and violet portal for the 2nd player. Right now as they're going through the intro scene, he has space to learn how to move around and look around on his half of the screen.

"It's basically completely made up?"

Huh. 

...this game is weird. Ahmose doesn't think he really gets it. He'll diligently keep trying, though.

To be fair, he's lacking a lot of context.

To get to the end of the two-player levels, they have to work together to chain portals around! Blue (her) goes here and opens the way for Red (him), and then they have to use four portals at once to move a cube, and so on. Sporty Lime is a little bossy about it.

"It's okay if you're not having fun though. Not all games are for everyone, and I have to admit this isn't necessarily the best first ever video game."

"It's mostly puzzling," he admits. "Every detail I see just raises more questions, because why - why everything? The cubes, the portal 'gun', that voice, the weird way the rooms are drawn, everything in them that you can't really interact with and I guess is all there to make you feel some way, but I don't know how to feel because it's from an alien culture to me." It doesn't look at all like the houses he's seen so far, either.

"Video games are weird as heck, yeah... That's part of the fun. They don't so much have stuff we see everyday. They have stories, the weird and strange. Science fiction, other peoples' lives... Magic. Weird to say that video game magic feels more magical than mine sometimes, but it's the novelty, really. We could try Super Mario Galaxy 2? Mario games are supposed to be really good for beginners. Just as absurd though, if not more."

Other people's lives and magic are weird and strange? Illusions of magic feel more real than the real thing? He is clearly missing her point. This feels like a conversation meant for someone more splendid than him, which is entirely unsurprising given the set-up.

Ahmose knows intellectually that Sporty Lime is a mage, and that her society might not have a prohibition on men and women being alone anyway. It's still his first time alone with a (beautiful) woman. Luckily he's supposed to look at the illusion and only listen to her; if he had to look at her his conversation might not stay very coherent. He focuses diligently on the game, because it is wonderfully distracting and also he doesn't want to deliberately be bad at it since she's bothering to show it to him (for unclear reasons).

"Um, whatever you think best?" he offers.

"...Ahuh. It's fine if you're not into my hobbies."

"I don't think I understand it enough to know if I would like it if I spent more time on it," he says truthfully and hopefully diplomatically. 

"...I can't spend a lot of time on it, I'll need to get back to working on my portals eventually. Sorry."

"No worries. Too much new stuff all at once is... A nightmare, so don't let me keep you? Uh..."

She shifts to look at him. Then says with surprise and a bit of embarrassment, "Oh. You- Lots of places have rules about chaperones, I didn't even think-"

"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!

"Oi. You said it, not me. At that point it becomes long term, at least, and you have to worry about staying functional for it."

...Oh, that's what she meant. Ahmose just went and put his foot in his mouth again, misunderstanding and assuming the worst. Why did he think he could parse nuance in a language he didn't even know yesterday? He knows why, though, it's because he's Ahmose. 

He feels a familiar burst of hot embarassement. He's learned to keep talking through it but he thinks it's obvious to others something's wrong; they don't question him out of kindness. 

"I - yes, you're right," he says stiffly. "If it takes more than a week I should spend some time to - adjust, make longer-term plans. I'm sorry I misunderstood." Don't ask about it don't ask about it -

"Nothing gets done if you drive yourself into a hole. But yeah. Good luck, I guess?" She sighs again.

"Thank you." He will try to extricate himself from this suddenly problematic situation!

Is Jasper still there?

Jasper is not in the game room. He's at the Champaign guest house, probably. The green-furred one isn't there either. 

"Thank you for inviting me," he says to Sporty Lime, with a shallow bow. "It was nice of you, and I saw some interesting things. I'll leave the portal in the kitchen cupboard." And with that probably terrible and nonenthusastic goodbye, he escapes back to Champaign. 

Who is there? He hopes they didn't just leave him alone for the few days they said he could use this guest-house!

Sporty Lime gives him a polite goodbye.

Jasper is still there! Actually, so is Shining Black Lily, but she's focused on a large textbook and some notebooks spread out on the kitchen island, and doesn't really acknowledge him.

[Hello again, Ahmose! Do you need anything?]

Oh wow she really is studying like a wizard! This continues to be so cool.

"I think I should keep trying interplanar portals. Unless you have a better idea for what I should be doing. Can I use the basement again?" Does he need them to supervise him with the magic wards? It would be very inconvenient and he hates to keep imposing (and increasing his not-quite-official obligation to them), but it's probably a good idea not to leave him alone the next time he opens a portal into a giant. He doesn't even fully understand yet why he was blown through his first interplanar portal.

[You may! Please don't try to operate the wards yourself. They only react to a Puchuu, for safety reasons, as they could explode if operated improperly. I'll also have to warn you if the energy is low and get Shining Black Lily or someone else to channel for them. We wouldn't want anything unfortunate to happen, and a little bit of prevention is worth a lot of cure!]

Oh, that makes things so much simpler! "Thank you. I'll be there if you need me." (Another apparently-pointless truism that people say sometimes and so he finds himself saying it too without thinking.)

He's had a very stressful day. Being alone is appreciated. Ahmose tries to sit and rest, but dwelling on his thoughts only makes him more anxious. Portals it is, then.

He still can't see any way to direct a interplanar portal, to revisit or avoid any specific destination. And the portals still take so much power that he can only have one open at a time (just barely, what with the portal he's also keeping open to Chicago). But he can make two more eye-sized pinholes, and that's enough to chain portals and explore the far side.

The pattern that emerges is:

- Most portals go to space. He can't tell if it's the same field of stars every time; it would take too long to draw the stars each time, and he doesn't have a great visual memory. There's no nearby sun large enough to show a disc, or anything else of interest.

- About one in twenty goes to the water-world. Portals a few hundred miles up show only a few bare islands poking above water; he reluctantly admits this is not, after all, a river. (Seas seem like such a waste, they take up valuable space and you can't even use them for irrigation.) There might be more land on the far side of the planet; it would take him a day to be sure. The portal seems to be opening in the same place every time, judging by the sun.

- Several times, the portal opens inside earth or stone or something else solid. It's hard to tell since he can't make more portals into it, and he doesn't want to try to get a sample without Jasper to tell him how to do it through the ward. 

This is presumably the Elemental Plane of Earth, since as Jasper correctly pointed out, in most planes with planets or at least an open sky, most space that the portal could randomly target would be empty. But then, how can he reach the sea-world planet? For that matter, why does the portal open just above the water, and not below or far above it? Ahmose is painfully aware he does not understand how this works, and is cautiously optimistic that with the help of wizards (or wizard-minded people, anyway) they can make some progress studying this.

He can't identify any of the other planes. They could be the Elemental Plane of Water (if it has water-planets and not just, like, water all through), or Air or Fire (for the gas giant), or any outer plane that has space with stars. The same moral luck that hopefully prevents him from blindly opening a portal that cuts someone's head off also seems to ensure he never opens one he can see someone's head through.

Ahmose keeps opening portals and cycling through various unpleasant emotions about not making any progress and not having any idea of what to do differently. He can't stop thinking about maybe being stuck in this world, and he also can't think anything useful about it. He's going to try the boat idea, even if it means he might die, because the alternative is giving up on everything and feels that he can't - think that thought yet. 

Eventually he can't ignore his hunger and tiredness any longer and goes in search of food and some distraction from his thoughts.

Jasper is still here, but Shining Black Lily is gone since it's been a couple of hours. He can show Ahmose the pre-packaged snacks in the pantry and fridge, or order a pizza or something. If he doesn't leave the guest house, he might not encounter anything more distracting, though.

He'll eat whatever he's given, he's a polite guest!!

What do the sorcerer/wizard women of an alien world stock in their pantries?

The contents of the pantry include but are not limited to: Gatorade, Diet Pepsi, sliced bread, peanut butter, Aspirin, Pop Tarts in three flavors, Quaker oatmeal packets, granola bars, gummy fruit snacks, bags of chips in a few varieties, a Tupperware of cookies, fancy crackers, Cheerios and Corn Flakes, a bag of trail mix, and cans of mushroom soup. The fridge has milk, cheese sticks, carrots, hummus and naan bread, ketchup, pladtic-packaged sushi, tortillas, shredded cheese, butter, apples, and grapes. The freezer has plastic bags with frozen veggies, prepackaged sausage egg and cheese rolls, ice cream (chocolate), a frozen pizza (supreme), and a bag of Orange Chicken Bites.

It just might be more variety than the average osirian laundry wizard gets.

Jasper will operate the stove and microwave for him, if he indicates interest in foods that need them.

They drink these alchemical potions?!

Jasper reassures him they're just "drinks" but Ahmose isn't fooled, they are RED and BLACK and BUBBLING and nothing does that without, like, a good reason. He'll have the milk, please, or just water. (The milk tastes rather unlike what he's used to, but that is fine; many different animals can be milked.) 

In the same spirit, he eats some of the bread and cheese and apples, familiar foods or at least familiar words to call them by. And then, once his hunger is quieter, he dares to experiment. If he likes something he can replicate the flavor back home (but won't share it unless he finds a way to fairly compensate them - which he already doesn't have for all their help - never mind, he'll eat this first and worry later.)

Pop tarts: it tastes like fairly inexperienced laundry-spell flavoring by a wizard who hasn't learned yet that there's such a thing as too sweet. (He's aware this is not a universal belief.) The cheapest tavern in Sothis that can afford a prestidigitator in the kitchen is better. But after he quietly fixes it up a little, the crunchy mouthfeel is quite nice! This world might not need laundry wizards but if he's stuck here he can at least work in a tavern - stop that, brain, please let him be distracted by the new food.

(Living with prestidigitation at your fingertips gives one a very good appreciation for mouthfeel unaffected by taste.)

Various 'chips': he likes the whimsical name! Unfortunately, that's all he likes about them. They seem to be salt-preserved trail rations, or something?

Granola and the trail mix: see, that's how you do trail rations! He is very appreciative.

Ketchup: oh, that's nice! A complex, hard-to-reproduce flavor that adds well to other food. Ahmose Approves (internally; he's polite enough to not deliberately tell his hosts he doesn't like some of their food, even if realistically everything Ahmose thinks can be picked with zero Sense Motive.)

Grapes: it's very nice of plants to grow fruit that's basically just water-sugar and he's very appreciative of Erastil about it but they're frankly not as good as watermelons back home, the mouthfeel is all wrong.

Gummy fruit: no sorry he takes that back the grapes are actually quite fine!

Sushi: ...look, he's not a food expert by any means (only an enthusiast), but Ahmose grew up next to a river, he can tell this isn't fresh fish!! Non-deliberately non-fresh fish: a big no-no in food circles!

Chocolate ice cream: oh my gods he takes it all back this is brilliant who INVENTED this thing? Golarion will trade for this!!!

Jasper agrees that a lot of modern foods are highly processed and artificially flavored. Most people don't have prestidigitation! There are different flavors of ice cream. Maybe he'd like chocolate in candy bar form, or ice cream in vanilla or mint flavor, or with nuts and things.

If he likes interesting food textures though, some things to try include Jello, funnel cake, pizza, croissants and other pastries, stir fry... Or for sauces, soy, mustard, mayo, marinara, and plenty more.

Ahmose appreciates the recommendations! He's not sure when he'll get the chance to eat food outside this house again, but he'll try to keep those names in mind.

The idea of more ice creams is intriguing. He experiments with prestidigitating the chocolate ice cream; the texture and temperature make some flavors taste new and exciting. It seems that being cold enough subdues sweetness, while bringing some other flavors into sharper relief, and then the taste changes over time as it melts in his mouth. (One of the laundry spell's biggest shortcomings is not working on food that is already in his mouth and preventing him from speaking.)

Jasper watches over him mostly silently. 

Shining Black Lily swings back around the guest house once the sun is setting, and mentions that they've sent off all the water samples to the various labs that Jasper had contacts in and could do anything useful with them. Results will probably be available tomorrow.

Ahmose regretfully (embarassedly) tears himself away from his ice cream research and back to his more important duties.

"I'm not sure opening more blind planar portals will help. They seem to repeat - I'm not sure if from a finite set or if there are just lookalikes, it would help if you have a quick way to check if the star-field in two portals is the same. And I guess there might still be less likely destinations that I could get if I keep trying." (And if he's smart enough to recognize them when he gets them, and not - mechanically close the valuable portal and go on to the next, which he is quite afraid of doing when he settles into a routine over several hours.) "Can you think of anything else I should try? I can spend the time to go all the way around the water-world..."

[We might be able to do a star-field comparison if we take photos with a camera! I don't know of any pre-built software to do a comparison like that quickly, though. Wishes are very rare and unreliable or I might suggest one of those. The other thing we could try is accumulating blessings of magical control and potency on you. Some magical girls and witches can cast spells that boost other people a little bit. With enough boosts, your control over the interplanar portals might improve.]

He wasn't suggesting using a Wish! ...they probably don't mean, like, a Wish Wish where you can wish for anything your true love brought to you from across the universe just. A wish.

And - mental enhancement spells!!! He always wanted those!

"Yes please!! I, uh, the mental enhancement, uh, blessings. Those sound - very good and I, um, I don't know if they're worth using on me but if they are I'd really appreciate that." He is visibly very excited about this prospect! Every wizard wants enhanced Cunning. As far as wizards are concerned, that's what item enchantment is for, and all the rest is just a convenient byproduct.

[A lot of the people who can do that sort of thing are in high demand, though. You might need to negotiate with them.]

"It takes a certain sort of personality to enjoy being a buff dispenser," Black Lily adds, nodding. "I can do one- Sort of a buff, at least. The Bone Pick of Determination. It makes you focus intensely on a single task, which makes you better at it at the cost of ignoring other things going on around you."

That sounds sort of like the opposite of what he has naturally. Maybe if he gets the buff, he'll average out to a normal person?

"I'm not sure if I'd want that? I mean, I don't know how costly it is for you, or what you'd want in exchange. I'd try it if it was cheap, but that's" - maybe not how to relate to Black Lily, because he doesn't seem to have a purely mercenary relationship with her, but he's not sure what it is he has instead - "I'm already presuming too much on your hospitality," he settles on lamely.

"If I sold spells I'd be bothered by all sorts of people at random hours. I just want to study engineering and have fun. You're odd, but interesting, so... Why not? It's not like I'm short on mana and I need a break from studying anyway."

[I suspect it's making you more uncomfortable than I anticipated to have things be informal and hospitality-based. Would it be helpful to switch to a currency-based accounting and denominate everything given to you and received from you in U.S. Dollars going forward?]

Oh no, they noticed of course they noticed, Ahmose cannot hide his thoughts from most people, let alone a telepathic outsider and a mage who seems to cast from Splendor.

"I - think I'm uncomfortable mostly because I don't understand what the local rules for hospitality are. They vary a lot even between countries on Golarion." Osirion has the objectively best system because it allows people to opt out and operate under explicit Abadaran rules without giving any offense.

"So I - didn't want to suggest using currency. Because some people see that as a rejection of hospitality, or a claim they can't be trusted to provide hospitality, and that offends their honor. Which is a big deal in some places!" (This is the kind of Wise Advice About Distant Foreign Lands that Ahmose is proud of himself for knowing even though he learned it from a book and not by, e.g., visiting those lands through a portal.)

"To be clear I am - very thankful for your hospitality. I appreciate it a lot, hospitality to strangers is a very Good thing, and I would reciprocate if I had the opportunity. But also, if you think I can provide you with a lot of value, and some of the things I'm asking for are cheaper than that, it would help me to make that clearer so that I know what I can ask for as a transaction instead of as a favor." And if it turns out he's not going to provide them with enough value, he'll be embarrassed and in their debt but - he doesn't think that can happen unless he fails to connect them with Golarion or the other planes, and he's Not Thinking About That right now.

[I think you can provide us with a lot of value. The value of a standing international portal network would be extremely high, especially if it were public, but even if it remained private to Magical Girls and Puchuu. I didn't want to press on that while you were adjusting, as not bothering your guest too much is also part of hospitality.]

"Some people can get pretty scuffed about hospitality and the like but I think we're going to try to be - diplomatic here? Try to understand that we're from different places that do things in different ways, and probably fail at that, but, you know, default to assuming good will and miscommunication even if one of us is offended."

[As far as cheap things go, the guest house is cheap enough to be hospitality. We're still working on getting you a boat and a place to send it through to the ocean world. That is expensive enough to be a minor favor, and why we asked for a standing emergency-use portal to Chicago for arranging it. Our organization going out of our way to specifically organize stacking large numbers of buffs on you would be outside the bounds of simple hospitality, I think, and require a more specific accounting. We won't stop you from dealing with individuals to get buffs cast, of course!]

Black Lily waves and smirks. 

"I'll bone pick you if you want. It's intense, I don't use it much myself anymore because I don't need to pass this test or anything, I just want to. I used to use it for stuff like keeping curses stable on things that needed containing... If you'd rather get paid and pay for shit on your own recognizance that would be totally fair. We do have the notion of honor, and trust... It's surprisingly hard to describe from a cold start, though?"

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.