She's in a graveyard, rows of tombstones interrupted here and there by trees and ornamental shrubs and the occasional crypt, all illuminated by the silver light of a slightly unfamiliar moon.

There's a human, or something resembling a human, leaning against a nearby crypt sipping steaming liquid from a ceramic mug.

"Don't see that every day," he remarks. "Hello."

"...Tongues. Come again?"

"Hello. Welcome to Sunnydale. You appeared mysteriously out of thin air, which is at least mildly unusual. D'you have business here or is it just one of those days?"

"...one of those days. This translation spell will last only about an hour. Where is Sunnydale?"

"In California which is among the United States of America which together take up much of the continent of North America which is on the planet Earth. You might like to look for a better translation spell, if as implied yours isn't freely repeatable."

"I can't cast it again today but I'll be able to tomorrow. I'm from a planet called Golarion."

"Never heard of it. What manner of creature are you?"

"Drow. We're a kind of elf. You look like a human."

"Used to be one. Currently a vampire. Elves, that's interesting, I'm not sure I've run across anyone calling themselves an elf before."

She was already pretty tense; it doesn't get that much worse when he says he's a vampire. "We're not from Golarion originally but the place we are from isn't called Earth, so. What do I need to know to find a place to sleep, food to eat - what humans eat is fine for me - that sorta thing?"

"That depends. As far as accommodations, I believe it's traditional for newcomers in your genre to kill a few locals and move into their crypt or mansion or abandoned factory or corner of sewer, but if you're not thrilled about that option there are others. You'd have an easier time of it if you weren't so very obviously not human; for murky historical reasons, mainstream human society on Earth is completely unaware of the existence of demons, vampires, magic, other worlds, or anything else of the sort, and people will wonder why you're so very dedicated to your purple elf costume."

"I can do a magic disguise tomorrow. What is there to kill that lives in mansions, I'm slightly picky. About the killing more than the mansion, I'll take other accommodations if necessary."

"Vampires, mostly. Sometimes demons of other varieties. And I couldn't swear to the availability of mansions in particular—no, excuse me, that's a lie, I know exactly where to find a mansion that definitely isn't inhabited by humans but I have no idea what if anything is living there instead. And it's a bit out of the way. Very pretty, though. What are your criteria for acceptable prey?"

"It's complicated. As a quick and dirty pass something likelier than it to be friendly to me has to be better off with it dead."

"In that case you will likely be delighted to slaughter every vampire in your path," says the vampire, with mild ironic amusement. "Most of the demons, too. Unless you anticipate developing a seething enmity with every human you meet, but there's seven billion of the buggers so you'd have to be the most deeply off-putting person imaginable and I've found you tolerable so far."

"You're a vampire, you said."

"I am! And there are certainly some humans who would have been better off if I'd died before I met them. Can't say I recommend trying to kill me over it, but luckily for you, as vampires go I'm unusually responsive to nonviolent persuasion."

"I'm not into killing people just because they're chaotic evil if they'll, like, have normal conversations, yeah."

"Because they're what?"

"Chaotic evil. Like, most drow ping that way, so killing people just for being chaotic evil is the sort of thing that gets adventuring parties going caving and decimating civilizations carelessly."

"You may have to explain a few underlying assumptions here. Assume for expediency's sake that I have never heard someone described as chaotic evil before and don't know what the classification means or how it is traditionally measured."

"...huh. Uh, there are two axes of what is called alignment, 'good' versus 'evil' and 'lawful' versus 'chaotic', which are related but not identical to the independently interesting concepts of the same names. Alignnment in the technical sense determines afterlife for most people on Golarion most of the time. It can be detected with magic, when the person you're checking is powerful enough to have an aura, but I'm the wrong kinda magic."

"Fascinating! I do very much suspect I'm neither good nor lawful but I don't know how much of a middle ground the system provides for and I'm not sure where exactly it draws its lines."

"Neutral's an option for both and neutral on both is what most random people who aren't accomplishing much of anything read to magic, but afterlife sorting's more sensititve than that. Anyway, even if you're chaotic evil I do not plan to attack you right now. I would however take it amiss if you went and ate somebody."

"Oh, then, let's suppose for expediency's sake that I'm not going to do that. Would you like to see the abandoned mansion of unknown occupancy, or shop around for a nice crypt? This one's mine," he nods over his shoulder, "and you would not have to kill me to stay there a night or two but you might find the decor a bit on the spare side."

"Let's hack together a phrasebook for when the spell runs out - this spell doesn't do writing, so we can agree on sentences and then each write 'em down, then you can give me phonetics while pointing at the words after - then at least case the mansion, why not."

"Suits me," he says agreeably. "Got anything to write with?"

She does. "Last time I did this I had, what was it - yes, no, this way, wait, rest here, numbers one to ten, seconds and minutes..."

He can provide English translations of all of these.

Eventually they have a phrasebook, if a limited one, and can go case the mansion!

The mansion is a couple of miles outside town, tucked away behind a small hill, its grassy grounds somewhat overgrown. Her vampire guide inspects the front door, produces tools, picks the lock, hauls it open, and pokes at the threshold as though he is expecting it to repel him. It doesn't. "Well, no human squatters," he concludes, and steps inside.

Tongues has worn off so she isn't sure what that means but she follows him.

The furniture is all draped with sheets, which in turn are covered in a thick layer of dust. There's lots of it, though, and plenty of rooms. The place could certainly be very comfortable once she got it all cleaned up.

The vampire proceeds cautiously for the first couple of minutes as they examine the ground floor, but then he turns to her and makes an expansive all-that-you-see-here-is-yours sort of gesture. "It's empty," he says, which does appear in their phrasebook.

"Lucky me." This doesn't but he can probably get the picture. "Thanks." That does.

He grins and shrugs. "You're welcome."

She starts looking for something bed-shaped.

Numerous rectangles are available! Some of them even have mattresses.

She picks one in a well-curtained room. Is the vampire still hanging around?

Seems so!

"Are you planning to watch me sleep?" Which he will not understand but perhaps the tone will get it across.

He laughs and shakes his head.

"Going home. Come see me tomorrow if you like." And then he departs from the phrasebook's vocabulary to add, "Assuming you remember the way."

"See me tomorrow." Wave.

He waves, and off he goes.

She waits for him to be gone a while before going to sleep.

Eight hours later she preps new spells,

casts one, and heads back into the town.

It's a town! At this lateish morning hour it has some people in it, out and about doing peopleish activities. They are all dressed in local fashions and she gets a couple of curious second glances that may have to do with her outfit, but no one outright accosts her.

Yeah, she doesn't have much choice about the clothes. She does have her hair over her ears.

This place is weird. She can kill a while just gawking.

Sky fireball heading up or down? She has no clue what time of night she landed.

The sky fireball is on the rise! Pretty close to the top of its arc, though. It looks to be maybe a couple hours before noon.

The money is unfamiliar and very weird. She's not sure they'll take silver. She goes cryptward.

She will find the crypt unlocked, and to all appearances empty and uninteresting, populated by nothing but boxes of bones—

—except for the glint of light shining out from under the lid of that sarcophagus in the back, there.

...she knocks on it.

A few seconds pass, and then the lid lifts and swings aside and out pops her new friend, up the narrow stairs which someone has for some reason installed in this sarcophagus.

"Hello again!"

"Tongues. Hi! This place is very different from Golarion. In particular there is paper money, which I have none of."

"Yes, that is true," he agrees. "I've got a little, which I might be convinced to part with in exchange for, oh, I don't know, interesting tales of your homeland perhaps."

"Drow live underground, murder half their children, maintain a population of fifty percent surfacer slaves, eat a lot of mushrooms, and are a matriarchy, what's interesting?"

—he cracks up. "Half their children? What on earth for?"

"Keep the best ones. Usually they make the call on boys in the first year and give girls a more extended chance."

"Seems a depressing sort of society to live in if you give a shit about your children, but then I suppose by the same token it very strongly encourages you not to."

"Well, I don't have any." Shrug.

"Yes, that's one way to handle it. Anyway, I don't mean to depress you. —What's your name? I've neglected to ask. I'm Sherlock."

"Belmarniss."

"Mildly interesting to meet you. What did land you in my graveyard, anyway?"

"Some kind of trap in the abandoned town I was exploring. Was not expecting anything that pricey."

"Who goes around entrapping abandoned towns with dimensional portals?"

"I don't know! Even if there were at one time a good reason for it it'd cost thousands upon thousands of gold."

"Well. Got any plans while you're here? For that matter, got a way back?"

"Don't have a way back yet but when I level a few times I'll be able to try to contact my insurance salesman, and if that doesn't work a few more levels past that will have me able to get home if I can independently reconstruct spells a few levels ahead of what I have written down on spec now. Insurance salesman will probably work though, I think fetching me should be cheaper than resurrecting me. Leveling that much could easily take years, though, "

"Explain 'leveling'."

"Spellcasters start out able to cast few, simple spells and gain access to more, more more complicated spells with study or with what's summed up as 'adventuring' - high stakes applications for our skills, often killing things but sometimes other stuff works. The spells come in natural categories of complexity at least within a given kind of spellcaster like 'wizard', and you get access to a new 'level' of spell all at once, and there are some intermediate milestones between those where you can cast more spells in a day or they last longer or hit harder. So one would say I'm a sixth level wizard who can cast third level spells and next time I level up I'll be able to cast fourth level spells, but only the ones I've already found opportunities to write down and accordingly have along."

"—hang on, then, where the hell do new spells come from? Do people invent them? And somehow they still conform to the—natural categories, you said, it's not done by convention—I suppose there's no good reason why you would know any of this."

"Oh, I assume gods make up new cleric spells but particularly clever wizards invent what we can't copy from clerics. And they have levels once invented like an object has weight once assembled."

"Are there any contrary fuckers like me out there who'll deliberately try to invent spells that nudge the boundaries between levels, just to see what happens?"

"Sure, probably. You'd wind up with an unusually good, say, second-level spell or an unusually bad third-level one, not a level two and a half spell."

"What a delightfully tidy system! Magic around here is a total clusterfuck in comparison."

"Oh?"

"So far as I can tell, when a contrary fucker on Earth tries to invent a spell to test the boundaries of what they believe to be possible, the result is decided by some sort of cosmic coin flip. There are dozens of competing theories of how magic is supposed to function, most but not all of them can get you spells that genuinely work, most of them contradict most of the rest about something fundamental, but nobody can agree on exactly which spells belong to which paradigms!"

"Huh. Weird. Maybe I should do spell research here and see if I can get stuff early."

"Best of luck with that! I know where to find you some decent reference material but we'll have to go after dark on account of I catch fire in sunlight."

"I've heard that sunlight destroys vampires but not that it did it with pyrotechnics. Dunno if my spell for that would help you."

"Oh? What's your spell for that?"

She reaches for his shoulder. "Penumbra."

"Huh. Well, only one way to test it, I suppose."

He climbs the rest of the way out of his secret stairwell, heads for the door of the crypt, and sticks his hand out into the light.

"You are not on fire."

"I am not!"

He grins.

"Oh, that's lovely. Well, then, if you don't mind a spot of trespassing, there remain some complications but I could show you the school library in daylight if you liked."

"Sure. That spell also lasts an hour, I should remember to recast it in time but do warn me if you think it's about to wear off, I can cast that one as often as I like."

"Useful! Let's go see how easily I can pass as a local student. I'm in the right apparent age bracket but I have for obvious reasons never entered the building in daytime before."

"Am I? I'm not sure how old I look to humans."

"You look a little older than I do but it's hard to say precisely how much. The clothes might get a second glance or two—I'd offer to lend you something a little less distinctive if I had any such thing to spare—but I don't think you'll be too suspicious. Might be best to let me do the lying if we run into anyone who bothers to pay attention to us, though. On the other hand, there's a two in seven chance that it'll be the wrong day of the week for students—I haven't been tracking the date that closely—in which case we'll definitely look suspicious if anyone is there to notice us but they almost certainly won't be."

"You can do the talking. I can cast Tongues one more time today, but I have way more uses of Comprehend Languages, which only works one way but does let me read. I have a cloak which'd cover up my getup some, but it seems warm for one and I didn't see anyone wearing cloaks..."

"Yeah, the cloak would be a mostly lateral move." He shrugs. "We'll see."

And off to Sunnydale High they go.

It transpires that this is one of the off days! Sherlock cheerfully and with minimal damage breaks in. The place is very quiet.

"Oh," he adds casually as he leads her through the deserted front hall, "there's also a dormant portal to some hell dimension or other in this library, I forgot to mention. Shouldn't give us any trouble, but it occurred to me you might like to be informed."

"Well, I'm not prepped for combat today, but I could handle a low-grade devil if I had to?"

"—the catchall term in local parlance for 'nonhuman and probably hostile' is 'demon', what's the scope of 'devil'?"

"Demons are chaotic evil, devils are lawful evil. Devils live in a place called Hell and demons in the Abyss. Neutral evil is daemons in Abbadon, for completeness. I can also handle low-grade demons for my usual value of low-grade, though."

"'Demon' and 'hell' are both locally generic. I'm not sure what your value of low-grade is but with any luck it won't come up."

He leads her around a couple of corners, and: "Here we are!"

It's a pleasant little place, with a couple of pleasant little tables lit by pleasant little lamps, and some pleasant little stairs leading up to a sort of gallery lined with bookshelves. Also for some reason some of the books are in a locked cage off to the side. Sherlock ignores all of that and vaults over the counter to dig around behind it in the place where the librarian presumably sits.

"Comprehend Languages." She starts skimming titles.

Most of the nearest books don't seem especially relevant, but then she runs across a shelf with titles like Magic Mirrors: A Comprehensive History and Blackest Artes and 1001 Common Demons and Simple Potions for the Discerning Witch.

Meanwhile, Sherlock is excavating the librarian's desk, and his stack contains such delicacies as On Sorcery, Curses Made and Unmade, and VAMPYR.

"Tongues'll wear off soon, if you have any questions for me or want to add anything to the phrasebook before it does. I'll still be able to understand you with the lesser spell though."

"I expect we'll get along all right with one-way comprehension, but I'd be fascinated to hear your preliminary thoughts on local magic if you come up with any before you lose your translation."

She flips through On Sorcery. "...at a glance this looks like a blend of divine magic and some terrifically uncommon specialist magic that four people in the world might have."

"Well that's an interesting diagnosis. How so? What are the relevant attributes of divine magic, and what about the rest looks so uncommonly special?"

"Divine magic on Golarion consists of stuff you ask other entities for. Gods, usually, but also nature abstractly, sometimes non-god outsiders such as demons. I see lots of calling on other entities in here. And it's got a lot of elaborate ritual components - some spells have a little rigmarole or equipment to them, lots require one or two or even three things, but not, uh, six rocks and six candles and rosemary oil. Uh, telekinesis is also any of several spells, not just a thing people have all the time."

"I suppose that holds together, then, yes. Actually, come to think of it, you implied earlier that your spells have limited uses per day? How's that manage to work?"

"I can prepare new ones once a day. For my wizard spells, that is. I also have sorcerer spells, which don't need prep and just come back when I sleep."

"But... why do they have limited uses in this fashion? How? As far as I'm aware, no local magical tradition has ever managed to invent itself a daily usage limit."

"Divine magic is probably like that for some godly balance of power reasons. Arcane it's a mystery."

"Hell of a mystery. Well, good luck finding anything useful in the garbage dump that is the local magic system, and at least if you do pick something up you won't have to ration it out like that."

"I'd like to pick up healing if I can, the divine casters keep shlern krawan imers ipa."

"I will have to wait until later to find out what the divine casters keep doing unless you feel like pointing at relevant passages in books or perhaps attempting mime."

Snort. She flips through books more and commandeers a legal pad from the librarian's desk to take notes on.

Sherlock cheerfully pulls out a few more likely-looking titles and then wanders the shelves retrieving anything that catches his eye as being potentially interesting or informative. After a few minutes, he even comes up with a book that claims to contain information on magical healing, although when he hands it over he warns, "I skimmed the relevant chapter and it looks well shy of being concrete enough to teach you any spells."

"Lyrnoriz," she comments, as she takes the book.

"I'll see if I can dig up something slightly more useful." Back to the stacks he goes.

The relevant chapter is indeed light on implementation details, but it does discuss (what the author understands to be) the principles behind magical healing in a fairly lucid and explanatory fashion, much more lucid and explanatory than seems to be the norm for these texts. Apparently, at least in the relevant magical tradition(s), proper healing magic is a subtle and delicate practice which requires long, careful rituals using numerous components customized to the exact ailment one is attempting to cure, and the success rate is imperfect but (and the author seems very proud of this) provided you don't make any truly egregious errors in selecting your candles and censes and crystals and chants, you can be very reliably sure you're not going to make the situation any worse than it already was. (There's a contemptuous aside about quick-and-dirty methods involving much less palatable procedures, such as human or animal sacrifice, which sometimes work just fine but sometimes cause the patient's eyes to melt out of their skull or some other similarly undesirable side effect.)

Gosh.

She skims the book looking for any particularly efficient-looking methods.

It's mostly a theoretical text, exploring a series of different branches of magic in order of increasing complexity.

The first chapter, on scrying, actually does start off with a complete description of what it claims is a viable scrying spell: you set a mirror flat on any stable surface in direct unfiltered moonlight, drip three drops of blood onto the glass (source of blood unspecified), take a deep breath and hold it as long as you possibly can, and then chant the name of the person you wish to spy on continuously as you exhale. The author uses this as an example of a spell that fails harmlessly, because while it only works about one time in ten, the rest of the time it does nothing; by contrast, another spell, which the author declines to describe in enough detail to allow a reader to try it, will work nine times out of ten but the tenth time makes you go blind for an hour.

The second chapter deals with curses, the third with "luck, love, and other follies", healing is fourth, the fifth is countercurses, sixth is wards, and the seventh is simply called "Bargains".

That scrying spell sounds a lot faster than the usual one even if you have to do it thirty times to get a result. She copies it over out of the book and flips to healing.

None of the healing spells mentioned are described in a usable amount of detail, although it's possible that if she carefully went over all the details the book does offer she could piece together enough of a system to derive some of the rest by experimentation; it's full of tidbits like "while of course the clearest quartzes are the most effective against infectious disease, it's possible to compensate for a cloudy specimen by increasing the purity of the silver in the rest of the array" and "most of the time, colour is more important in a candle than exact material, but for especially tricky operations like healing a severe physical injury, a solid unscented wax can make the difference between success and failure".

Sherlock comes back with a second book that mentions healing magic. This one is primarily focused on comparing and contrasting spells that call on gods or demons with spells that don't; he's bookmarked the three places where the spell in question is a healing spell and not, say, a curse for turning your enemy into a rat.

First case: speeding recovery from minor injuries such as bruises and small cuts. Here are three different spells Belmarniss would classify as divine, each calling on a specific entity using a specific formula, and four spells she would classify as weird niche bullshit, each using a different method from the rest. One involves a complex dance (not fully described) done while singing a song (only partially transcribed) in an ancient demonic tongue; one involves having the injured person write the location and nature of the injury down on seventeen identical slips of paper, folding each paper up in a different specific pattern (not fully described), and then dumping them all simultaneously into a fire; one involves an arrangement of crystals and candles that might or might not belong to the same system as the one described in the theory text, described in only somewhat more detail than the theory text tends to offer; and the last involves animal sacrifice, and makes no mention of side effects.

Second case: curing serious injury. Two divine spells, two non-divine. One of the latter is another animal sacrifice ritual, and not described well enough to replicate; the other requires a pre-enchanted artifact and does not describe how to make one, but does caution that the ritual will "use up" one of the amulet's seven rubies.

Third case: curing disease. Three divine spells, two non-divine. The description of the first non-divine spell admits that its primary use case is reversing magical plagues caused by the caster, and it's much worse at handling any other sort of problem, which is a pity because all you have to do is paint some runes on yourself and then chant a few things; the second is a cure for the common cold, accomplished by burning a dead bird in a fire ("any bird will do, including one that was dead when you found it, but it must not be plucked or cooked beforehand") until nothing remains but bones and then grinding the bones into a powder and sprinkling that powder over the patient's body while they are asleep.

She can kinda see what Sherlock meant about this magic system! Anything else in the weight class of the scry, efficiency-wise, not just healing?