"Ack!" Vanyel lands in a crouch with several layers of shields already in place - that wasn't a Gate, he'd know, did someone just kidnap him with Fetching... He stretches out his magical senses, trying to gauge his surroundings. 

:I don't recognize this place at all: Yfandes confirms. 

This place is....desert, in one direction, as far as the eye can see. In the other direction there are crumbling buildings half-buried in sand, and then reeds, and then a river. 

It's dusk.

A lemur with webbed feet and a tail in eight rainbow colors squalls indignantly at the human and the horse, and checks whether the slugs are tasty.

Is there anything that Vanyel's mage-sight can recognize, particularly traps or weapons?

He also casts out his Thoughtsensing, seeking any people within a half-mile radius. 

This was a magic trap! It is unclear what it is meant to do; it's inactive now. There is some magic stuff buried in the room the trap was protecting.

There are no people within a half-mile radius although from the torch-lights vaguely visible on the horizon in the river direction there are some people farther away than that. 

Weird. 

He doesn't seem to be in immediate danger, though, so he puts up some quick shields over the hidden room the trap was protecting, just in case that still matters, and then climbs onto Yfandes' back and heads in the direction of the river, casting a mage-light once it gets dark enough that Yfandes can't see where she's putting her feet. 

A ways along the river from here there is a little village. Really little - it has maybe thirty buildings in the village proper. There are some farmhouses along the way. It seems like the half-mile near the river is very intensively farmed and then farther out than that everything is sand and hopeless to farm at all.

Huh. Not a climate that he particularly recognizes. Vanyel approaches the village, using Thoughtsensing to find where the nearest people are but carefully not actually reading anyone. He reinforces his personal shields just in case, but isn't feeling especially threatened here. Just very confused. 

There are people in the village! Mostly in their houses, now that it's getting dark. 

The village seems to consist of a dock for some large river barges, some stores, some houses, and a temple. The temple has a symbol above its doors - two stylized lines crossing, with a pin at the place where they meet.

Vanyel doesn't recognize that either. This is getting weirder and weirder. 

He finds a door to knock on where the people inside are definitely still awake. 

Someone opens the door. Blinks at him a bit confusedly. 

He'e not Gifted. He is shielded - not well, but more than a random person in Valdemar would be - in the fashion that the non-Gifted can pick up a little bit of shielding with enough exposure.

He says something in a foreign language. He sounds friendly enough.

"I am sorry to interrupt, I wanted to ask where we are?" Vanyel asks in Valdemaran. If that doesn't work he can try half a dozen other languages before running out of ones he has even a few words of vocabulary in. 

This man knows none of those languages! Ethnically he might be Karsite or might be from somewhere even farther south but he doesn't know those languages either. 

Vanyel is feeling very stuck! He tries miming some questions, but miming 'what kingdom are we in' is sort of hard. 

The man shrugs apologetically and then walks out of his house towards the temple, gesturing for Vanyel to follow him.

Vanyel nods and smiles politely and follows him. 

He knocks on the door and fetches a woman of about sixty, in gold-trimmed robes and with a necklace bearing the same symbol. She's not Gifted either but she has shields against Thoughtsensing, better than his. 

They talk. She - looks at Vanyel, and then reaches for the necklace, murmurs something -

- something that shows up to mage-sight, but not as mage-energy, as something that flows similarly but looks - silkier, lighter - 

Vanyel bobs his head and smiles and tries to look the appropriate amount of grateful even though he has no idea what they're doing. 

...He's sort of tired. He mimes laying his head down on a pillow to sleep. 

She nods and beckons them both into the temple.

Yfandes hesitates outside, it's both unclear if there's room for her and unclear if she would be welcome. 

More emphatic gesturing, of course she should come in!!! - it'll be a little crowded but it'd be awfully rude to just leave her outside! 

Yfandes tries to express gratitude as much as she can in horse body language, and follows her Chosen in. 

The temple has shrines to five different unfamiliar gods and after some work by the random villager and the elderly woman also a cot and a...bale of hay? She shrugs apologetically at Yfandes. Introduces herself as Saira, points emphatically at a tile mosaic of a sun on one of the shrines.

"Vkandis?" Vanyel says, just to check, although it doesn't really look like Vkandis iconography. 

Headshake. Then - shrug. 

And she leaves them to sleep.

Shrug. This is so weird. 

Vanyel lays some careful passive wards around the area, just so he feels more comfortable sleeping, and then very belatedly thinks to attempt his communication-spell to reach Savil. It ought to work anywhere in Velgarth, although if he's more than five hundred miles away - which he almost has to be, to get somewhere this unrecognizable and with no languages in common with the locals - then it'll exhaust him in seconds. 

He tries it anyway. 

It does not work.

This is so weird and Vanyel doesn't like it at all. 

Yfandes nuzzles him. :Shh, love, I don't think there's anything to be done about it here. And these people seem friendly. Get some rest. If we're still stuck in the morning I can, er, try Mindspeaking them even though it's not the done thing and will probably alarm them: 

"Mmm." Vanyel pets her mane and then curls up for a nap.

At dawn the elderly woman comes out into the temple and kneels quite still at one of the shrines for an hour. Unfamiliar magic swirls around her. Occasionally she mutters to herself. 

"There we go," she says with some deep satisfaction in Valdemaran when she has finished this. "Teleportation mishap?"

Vanyel just stares at her for a moment. "...How do you speak my language?" 

" - I cast Tongues." And then she gestures apologetically at her elaborate sleeves as if she thinks they are the source of his confusion. "- it's not a second-circle cleric spell but it is a second-circle inquisitor spell so I thought I probably had the capacity, if Abadar would permit it under the exceptional circumstances, and He did, so I suppose they must be exceptional circumstances indeed."

This does not result in Vanyel having fewer questions! If anything he has three times as many! He doesn't ask any of them for about thirty seconds because he can't figure out how to put them in order. 

"Where are we?" he says finally. 

"This village is called Mut; it is four days travel upriver from Alexandria, the second-largest city in Osirion. Osirion is on the Inner Sea; we neighbor Thuvia and Katapesh and the Mwangi Expanse; by sea Alexandria is a week's travel from the Arch of Aroden and two weeks from Sothis or Absalom."....watching his facial expression, "Do you mean on a larger scale than that."

"Have you heard of, er, Valdemar, or Rethwellan or Karse or Hardorn..." He lists off all the countries he knows of. 

"I haven't. It's possible if they were in Tian Xia I wouldn't but - you don't look like the people of Tian Xia.

We call the planet Golarion. Third of eleven around our star."

"...I think I'm in a different world. Somehow. I wasn't aware there was more than one." It feels kind of fake and Vanyel's top hypothesis now is that he's dreaming, although it doesn't feel like a dream and his efforts to decide-to-wake-up are certainly unsuccessful. 

"- we've heard of others but they're very hard to get between without good knowledge of your destination. Do you know how you got here?"

"Not really! I wasn't casting or anything - I did land by some old-looking magical trap thing, and it looked like it might've pulled in some animals too, but I don't have the faintest idea how that would work. It wasn't a Gate and I didn't think it was possible for an artifact to do Fetching without a mage there." 

"You'd want a wizard, probably, I don't know very much about summoning spells. If I were you I might go to a city and try to trade the very interesting information that this happened for a ride back to your world. - assuming that you would like to go back to your world."

"I really need to get back to my world!" Although this one is fascinating, and nothing is urgently on fire back in Valdemar so far as he knows, and he ought to maybe collect some information to take back to Randi. Assuming this isn't all just a dream. "I do have some questions. One, what's a cleric, and what's an inquisitor?" 

"- do you have gods in your world?"

"Y...es? I don't recognize any of the iconography here, though - I thought maybe the sun one was Vkandis Sunlord but you didn't recognize the name." 

"That's an altar to Sarenrae. Neutral good, glory, healing, and the Sun...The gods go by different names in different places though so it's not impossible that it's the same one you are thinking of - 

- anyway, the gods select people who exemplify their values and ideals, and grant those people the ability to channel the power of the gods to bring about their works in this world. ...does that happen where you are from."

"Sort of? But, er, the thing you're describing sounds - formalized, in a way that ours isn't. Our gods occasionally do miracles through their worshippers but only according to their whims?" 

"Our gods grant the people they select miracles every day. There's a known list of ones they'll grant at a given level they have chosen to elevate you, and you can ask for any of those. Under almost all circumstances you get exactly what you request and have to figure out how to use your abilities to serve your god yourself. Actually talking with them is...sixth circle? There are probably a dozen people in the country who can do it. While there are thousands who can do what I can do, truth spells and healing and creating clean water and ensuring signatories to a contract are acting in good faith - Abadar is the god of cities, law, merchants, and wealth, He mostly selects clerics who will ensure peace and prosperity and most of the spells we take on a typical day are spells for that. If I served an evil god I might ask His help summoning demons or killing people or something."

"I think that's pretty different from what we have." 

"Huh. I think the gods in some places are less interventionist but I don't know much about it, much less about how it works on other worlds. I have heard it claimed that the way it works here is a - negotiated agreement among the gods of this world, after there were a bunch of problems with their actions running into each other before such an agreement was in place, and I guess it would follow from that that in a different world they might've negotiated something different."

"I don't really know what our gods' deal is, they don't, er, talk to people much. I could see them having some sort of negotiated agreement. I think they intervene sometimes but it's very...sneaky? It's not usually obvious miracles that they take credit for." 

"Huh. I guess at least if you're doing that you don't run into Aroden's error but it seems like people would end up much less informed about whether they wanted to follow you."

"Aroden's error?" 

"Aroden was a god. An ascended human, actually, the first one of those - there were others, after him. And it was prophecied that in the year 4606 by the Absalom Reckoning he would return to the world and usher in an Age of Glory and - address all of the evils that it's kind of mysterious the gods who care about humans don't really address -

- and on the appointed day something went wrong. There were thunderstorms, and fierce winds, all over the whole world, for three weeks, and earthquakes destroyed five cities and a hurricane a hundred miles wide formed west of here and - sank two countries into the water - the hurricane is still there today -- and the storm surge flooded most of Osirion's cropland with salt water, caused a devastating famine, and a hole was torn open between this plane and the Abyss and demons invaded, and Aroden's clerics stopped getting spells from him. So we assume the gods went to war and he lost and he's dead."

"Huh. I know - someone, who would agree with the sentiment there. That it's mysterious that gods don't address all the problems in the world and someone should change that, I mean." 

"It is a pretty sympathetic sentiment but in light of what happened when someone tried it I am inclined to say that the gods have their reasons."

"Mmm. Anyway. I should go find the city, but I think I'd better ask some more questions first so I don't want into anything unawares. Er, are there other kinds of magic than god-miracle-magic, here? I guess you said wizards. What can wizards do?" 

"There are lots and lots of kinds of magic, I'm sure someone has tried to catalogue all of them but it'd be like trying to catalogue all the stars. Wizards are arcane casters, rather than divine casters; their power comes from the magical energy inherent to the world, rather than from gods. Anyone educated enough can learn to be a wizard, so it's the most common kind of magic. Wizards can do - most things, really, arcane magic is very very flexible. Relevant to you there's such a thing as an interplanetary teleport and wizards can learn it, though it requires exceptional power and I don't know that there's anyone in all of Osirion who can do it. Absalom will have someone, if Sothis - Sothis is the capital city of Osirion - doesn't. 

There are also sorcerers, who have some access to arcane magic through an inherent ability that requires study to refine, but not to use in the first place. Some sorcerers are part dragon or part angel or part demon and their power comes from that. I think there are more than a hundred kinds of sorcerer catalogued, though. There are also bards, who have powers through music, and druids, who have powers through communion with the natural world or maybe an extremely subtle god who doesn't want to admit to being one. There are people who get magic through pacts with extraplanar entities that aren't powerful enough to be called gods. - I do not recommend doing that, many of them are malicious and the pacts give them a great deal of power over you. There are people who get magical abilities through secret traditions I know no more details of.

My magic tells me that both of you are powerful but not - any more detail than that, I couldn't guess just by looking whether you are one of those things or some other sort of thing."

"Huh. I have magic through an inherent ability. It's hereditary, in our world, although I don't think it has to do with being part anything-nonhuman - er, what are demons in your world, I'm assuming being part-demon means a human parent had to - do things - with a demon parent and the thought of that with our kind of demon is deeply appalling." 

"Demons are from the Abyss, another plane from which we can summon creatures by magic and from which they cross uninvited at the Worldwound, ever since Aroden died. They are appalling. They're varied in form, at least somewhat, and some of them were once human -- humans condemned to the Abyss when they die can eventually be transformed into demons, if they survive long enough -- but I don't know very many details."

"Our demons are from the Abyssal Plane, which sounds not ridiculously dissimilar, and they can be summoned - I don't think we have any holes in reality that just let them through, that sounds awful. Anyway. I suppose the main thing I need to know is whether there's local etiquette I should know to avoid offending people, and whether I'm likely to be attacked if I do offend people? Or in general. Are there bandits here?" 

"Osirion is a lawful country, with a temple in every city of more than three hundred," she says, with a touch of national pride. "I cannot guess at all the cultural differences between our world and yours but I can name cultural differences between Osirion and other countries I have heard of, in case they are illustrative. We permit the worship of all deities but prohibit proselytizing for evil or lawless ones. It is illegal to use magic on other people without their knowing agreement, except in self-defense or in emergencies. Men and women who are unmarried and not family avoid being alone together in Osirion; not in some other places. Necromancy is not illegal here and the rules against killing except in self-defense do apply to the intelligent undead. Killing children, in the womb or outside it, is illegal here. If you mistreat a slave they can sue for redress; if you have a child by one you have to marry them. The use of magic designed to ensure that someone is condemned to a specific afterlife is illegal. If you do magic in a fashion that affects the local climate and weather, you need to clean it up or pay a fine to the local temple which they can use to arrange for someone else to clean it up. You have no legal duty to aid people in danger you didn't put them in. You have a legal duty to obey orders from church authorities in an emergency or in the course of an investigation into a criminal matter.

There are sometimes bandits on the roads, this far from a major city. Not on the river, if one of you weren't a horse I would recommend you join one of the river barges and get to Alexandria from there but maybe that's uncomfortable for a horse. You are permitted by the law to defend yourself; you should go to a temple afterwards and explain, if there was violence, and they'll have you state under a truth spell that you didn't start it and did not unreasonably escalate it. It is not unreasonable escalation to kill someone with a weapon who is threatening you; it is unreasonable escalation to kill a pickpocket."

That explanation gives Vanyel several new layers of questions. Focus on the practicalities first. "Right. Er, is it unreasonable escalation to use magic - in self-defence, I mean - that temporarily incapacitates someone but doesn't do any lasting harm? Or to put up magic wards on a campsite that would harm an intruder but leave passers-by alone?" 

"That would be reasonable in both cases."

Nod. "If I do weather-affecting magic I can clean it up myself, assuming it works similarly enough to in my world. Can you, um, explain necromancy more? I don't think we - have that - in my world...what are undead...?" 

"It is possible both to animate a dead body once the spirit has fled it and to tie the spirit with magic to a body too injured to sustain it ordinarily. These things are illegal in most countries but they are not illegal in Osirion, though obviously you have to own the rights to any body you are animating. Undead people show up differently to magic, typically, and they're harmed by healing spells and healed by harmful spells, and you're not likely to run into one but if you did and they were minding their own business it would be illegal to disintegrate them just on account of their being undead. If you really want to see an undead I'm sure there's a zoo in Absalom, or you could go to Geb where they use them for almost all their labor."

That has Implications, several of which are horrible and at least one of which is very painful to think about. Vanyel takes a deep breath, and cuts off that train of thought. "Thank you. Er, am I going to go back to not being able to communicate with anyone after this, since they haven't cast Tongues?" 

"Yes. In a city you can pay someone to cast it on you, and then you can talk to everybody. - I could also have done that but it's Will-defended and I didn't have a good way to communicate that you ought to let me. Until you get to a city the best anyone's going to have is Comprehend Languages, which will let them understand you but not permit you to understand them."

"Right. Thank you, again, I really appreciate your casting it for me. Um, would it be possible to get a map and directions from you all the way to the city, so I can hopefully make it without needing to understand instructions from anyone else?" 

"You just follow the river. I can try to find you a map, though -" 

As she stands up to do that someone bursts through the door. "Ciceronethere'sadragon."

"There's a - an adult one -"

     "Idon'tknowhowolddragonsare!" 

"Sothis will need to know to send us help. How big was it."

      "Idon'tknowverybig"

"Blue?"

      "Yes."

"Wait a moment, please" she says to Vanyel, and runs into a back room. 

Vanyel follows her. "Do you need help? I'm pretty good at fighting things - granted we don't have dragons, I don't think, but I've taken on very big magical creatures before..." 

"We definitely need help, I'm going to try to Send for it, I do not know if it will arrive in time. Fighting an adult dragon on your own is - there are maybe two people in the country who could do it are you that good -"

And she opens a locked chest with a flash of magic and pulls out an extremely magic piece of parchment and starts reading from it with an air of intense concentration.

Well, it really looks like she ought not be interrupted, so Vanyel runs back out to the bystander who brought the news, and - oh, right, they haven't cast Tongues on themselves, how is he supposed to–

:The dragon: Yfandes jumps in, pushing through a lot of reassurance and calm with her mindvoice. :Where is it? Can you point the direction, tell us how far, and - think an image of where you saw it? Then we can find it and help fight: 

The person looks back at her, startled, and then nods and steps out the front door and points. 

The dragon is flying along the river towards their village, still about half a mile away but closing the distance quickly on those enormous wings; it has perhaps a thirty or forty foot wingspan; the air around it is crackling with lightning -

 - it is the same bright blue as the morning sky -

- people are fleeing in a panic.

First things first. Vanyel, squinting, flings up a shield over the biggest cluster of people, and then opens all of his Othersenses, focusing both his mage-sight and Thoughtsensing in particular on the creature, while directing part of his attention to search for anything node-like he can use to draw power. 

There's a node upriver a little bit and a couple more farther away but still in range. 

His Othersenses are reading a lot of things off this dragon but most of them are really hard to interpret! It definitely has several different layers and kinds of shields. It looks like it is kind of throwing levinbolts in circles around itself constantly!

It looks startled and irritated about some of the people suddenly being shielded and turns its neck to breathe levinbolts at the shield in case this makes it go away. 

Vanyel yanks energy from the nearer node and reinforces the shield just in case; he's pretty sure it can hold off the attack, if it's comparable to levinbolts as he knows them. 

:'Fandes, can you Broadsend to them to stay put under my shield or run to it: 

:Of course: She does so, Mindspeaking at all the humans within range; it'll tire her eventually to keep doing this, but she can do it more easily than Vanyel, and also isn't busy fighting a dragon. 

The dragon breathes electricity substantially more powerfully than human mages throwing it around do, apparently, but not so much the shield can't take it. The dragon raises its head again and looks around to try to figure out who is inconveniencing it. Having figured this out it flies on towards Vanyel and Yfandes, slapping the shield very hard with its tail on the way out.

Vanyel throws a last burst of power into his shield when he sees the tail-strike on its downswing, then switches to shielding himself. And probably he should try some offensive magic before it actually reaches him. 

He's not sure levinbolts will even hurt it, given that it's surrounded by a constant bath of them, but how does it feel about a large fireball to the face? 

Singed, and apparently quite irritated about it, which it will express now that it's in range by snarling and breathing lightning at him and then swooping in to try to bite and claw at him. And at Yfandes. And at bystanders if it can find any. 

Shields, shieldhieldshield, and he also tries shoving it back with raw magical force - if he boxes it in with a barrier from above too, can it get through that...? 

It cannot, at least not immediately, though it can try to make that really inconvenient to hold by battering at it with enormous claws and wings and a tail, and it can try breathing lots more electricity, and it can snarl at him something which is definitely language but which he cannot understand, it being a local one.

Interesting. 

He tries Mindspeaking it, since Yfandes is busy. :What do you want here: 

:There is fighting going on in the lands where I usually travel. I thought I'd get something to eat and explore for somewhere new. 

You are supposed to flee screaming.:

:I would rather you not eat any of us, actually!: Wow this is not going the direction he expected. :What sorts of things can you eat? I could try to help you find livestock: 

He feels bad throwing a dragon at some poor farmer's livestock too, but it's better than having it eat people, and he's feeling a lot less in favour of killing an intelligent being who can talk to him. 

:...I can eat most human livestock: it says, baffled. :That horse looks very tasty.:

:Sorry, I'm a person and I'm his Companion, I'd rather not be eaten. Maybe my Chosen can Farsee for you and find something else for you to eat?: 

Privately: :Van, I'm going to see if the cleric-lady is done with her scroll and relay this to her: 

:Yes, of course: He focuses on the dragon. :I have a Gift that lets me see places very far away, and since I can Mindspeak with you - can all dragons Mindspeak - I could Send it to you too: 

Yfandes checks if the cleric is interruptible now. 

The cleric is interruptible and in fact interrupted just as Yfandes steps in by the sudden teleportation of three heavily armed men. 

"Dragon's out there," she says to them.

:We're talking to the dragon and negotiating if it can go elsewhere: Yfandes sends. :Van's holding it off in the meantime although if it keeps trying to get at him, he can't shield everyone forever. He'd prefer not to kill it since it's clearly an intelligent being. He wanted to try to head off the attack by sending it to eat livestock instead but he realized that's something we ought to run by the locals. And sorry I didn't talk to you sooner, we're not really supposed to but this is a situation that calls for bending some rules: 

:He - can't shield everyone forever? Can he shield everyone pretty much forever? Who is this guy?:

:If you two would like to buy peoples' livestock at a fair price to feed to the dragon I guess you can do that: says the priest, looking a little bit faint. 

:Are there injured people out there -:

:There are some sprains and maybe a few broken bones from general scuffle, they're all under the shield: Yfandes sends. :What do you accept for money here? We just landed from another world and we have some coin but it might not be the same as yours: 

Vanyel focuses on the dragon. :We're negotiating to buy you some livestock to eat. Think you could lay off my shields a bit in the meantime?: 

:I will loan dragonguy a couple thousand gold because from what I have heard so far I like him a lot.:

The dragon snorts at Vanyel and ceases trying to batter his shields down. 

Yfandes can do the negotiating while Vanyel relays to the dragon and keeps the shields very solidly in place just in case it gets impatient. 

:Thank you: she tells the man, then Broadsends to the crowd again. :Anyone want to sell us some of your livestock for a reasonable price, so we can send this dragon off?: 

:If we get you something to eat: Vanyel is telling the dragon, :I want you to leave this place alone. Can you agree to that?: 

:Sure. I will look elsewhere for a good place to settle down.:

:Got an agreement with the dragon: Yfandes tells the man, :just got to get some of these people to sell us their animals, I don't know what a reasonable price is. I'm also not sure how to pay you back, but apparently we have useful magic so maybe we can figure something out: 

(It would possibly be less expensive at this point to try to kill the dragon, but one, it's not clear Vanyel can, two, he hates killing anything, and three, it seems like it might be earning them this man's goodwill even if it's putting them in his debt monetarily.) 

:If your buddy can just kind of pin an adult dragon there for a while while he negotiates the sale of some sheep for it to eat then he can probably make, like, five times that in a day adventuring? Maybe more? What is he -:

(There are civilians willing to sell their oxen and camels and goats for what the cleric can confirm is a reasonable price.)

Vanyels relays this to the dragon. Finally thinks to ask. :Do you have a name? I'm Vanyel: 

:Amilek.:

:All right, Amilek, let's figure out a place for you to go eat your supper: Getting the dragon to stop pounding at his shields means he can spare some attention for Farsight. He scans the surrounds for a nice big open area. 

Lotsa sand over there.

Yfandes conveys requests for people to bring their animals out there once they've been paid. She'll have to ask the man they just met for help with that, since she lacks hands. 

:Vanyel is a mage from another world: she explains. :We haven't gotten a huge amount of introduction to your world's magic, but I think he's most similar to a sorcerer. He's also the most powerful person for several kingdoms around. It's, er, a long story: 

:Investors'll eat it up. Another world? Like, another planet?:

:We're not sure! We assume so, we haven't heard of any of the countries or languages here. Some sort of spell incident grabbed us, we think. We do want to find our way back eventually, but aren't sure how to do it with our magic, so we might need to save up for one of your wizards. And we're not in a terrible rush. It's peacetime back home, finally, and we'd like to bring back as much information as we can on this other world for our King: 

Once people have been sent out to herd livestock to the field, and then have departed again, Vanyel can let up the shield on top so that Amilek can fly over. 

:Best of luck finding somewhere else to live: he sends. :You'd better keep your end of the bargain here, though. I'll know: He can put up some long lasting wards for it.

Amilek goes invisible as soon as he's released but Mindspeaks something like a laugh. :Blue dragons are lawful, little one.:

And the bunch of people who came here to fight the dragon but are apparently not needed for that can patch up minor injuries and try to get a glimpse of dragonguy. 

Vanyel heads over to meet their mysterious benefactor. :Thank you for helping us out there. By the way, does everyone here just have Mindspeech?: 

:Your telepathy? I super do not have your telepathy I'm just trying to yell thoughts in your direction. Mahdi has Tongues if you wanna do that and then talk out loud instead.:

:Huh. Non-Mindspeakers in my world usually have a harder time with Mindspeech than you do. If you cast Tongues on me then I can talk to anyone and understand anyone here? For how long, and is it tiring?: 

:Eighty-seven minutes if Mahdi does it. It's not tiring.:

:Sure, if he doesn't mind then I'll take you up on that: 

Mahdi is a tall brown man of maybe thirty. He's not Gifted. He is wearing a bunch of intricate magic artifacts. He jogs over to Vanyel and then -

- draws an extremely elaborate tangle of mage-energy out of the air, makes a couple quick motions to complete it, and offers the hand that's holding it to Vanyel. 

Wow. 

"What kind of magic do you have?" Vanyel asks him. "Is that the wizard arcane magic?" 

"Yep. Your animal companion said you were some kind of sorcerer?"

"In my own world I'm called a mage, but I think our magic works slightly differently, there are different kinds - my Mindspeech is a separate Gift, for example, but it's also an innate trait you're either born with or not, they all are. Well, you're born with potential, and sometimes it awakens naturally but it can also happen, er, other ways. Mine happened other ways, so I have a lot of Gifts and they're unusually strong." 

"I'll say so. At fifth circle I'd be able to pin a dragon like that for...ninety seconds. If it were smaller than that dragon in fact was." He points at the men he was travelling with. "Fazil's a cleric and Hagan shoots things with arrows."

"Nice to meet you, thanks for saving a village full of our people from a dragon, if you're very bored around here maybe swing by the Worldwound for target practice -"

"Don't do that unless you're pretty sure you know what you're doing!"

"Don't listen to any of Hagan's advice unless you're pretty sure you know what you're doing."

"I feel like 'check out the Worldwound' is extremely responsible advice for powerful sorcerers from another world. Did I suggest he overthrow Cheliax, no, I did not, did I suggest he go for the Starstone, again, no, I did not. He can fly by the Worldwound and drop some fireballs on it and leave. They've got excellent resource management."

"Honestly, I think I need some orientation to your world," Vanyel says. "The Worldwound is from the god Aroden dying, and your kind of Abyssal demon comes in through it? Other facts about it?" 

"Those are the main facts about it. A bunch of churches and a bunch of countries have people stationed there, trying to - not lose ground, or at least lose ground slowly. Once in a while they'll stage a crusade and actually try to gain ground but it's hard because once the Abyss has bled into it for a while it's all - distorted and horrible, nothing grows there."

"Is it not, er, fixable? We have some horrible-distorted type lands, called the Pelagirs, but they're slowly being fixed by some people serving a Goddess, using our kind of magic. Huh. I wonder if it'd be worth seeing if Healing-Adepts could do something about your problem." 

"That sounds useful. I think people've been figuring if we ever figure out how to close it then we can figure out how to fix it but fixing it sooner would probably help with gaining ground. - I am not, actually, an expert on the Worldwound related tactical situation or anything, it's just where I'd go if I were getting bored of taking on dragons solo."

"I'm not bored of anything just yet. Too busy trying to figure out how anything works. Um, I probably also need to learn the local language or languages." 

:Is your crew looking for some travel-companions?: 

They glance at each other. "Absolutely."

"Tryna think what kinds of contracts it makes sense to take - I am assuming horses don't like tomb runs or escorting boats - we could go help Thuvia out but they are not paying market rates, these days -"

:I'm pretty flexible as horses go but Van gets sick on boats. What's a tomb run? Also what's Thuvia?: 

"Thuvia's the neighboring country, they're in an endless low-key war with evil spirits from Abaddon that leak through the magical portal a foolish pharaoh built thousands of years ago. A tomb run is like - someone died, they built a tomb where all of their magic libraries and powerful artifacts and so on are, they put up a lot of traps so no one could get in, in general there's an efficient-market thing going on where most combinations of our world's abilities to get in which reflect a reasonable balance of risk and benefit have already been tried but you have some rare form of sorcery so maybe we should revisit those and see if we can now cleverly bypass their protections."

"Weird. I guess that could be interesting. Yfandes could be a sentry or something, we don't always have to be in the same place." 

"Well, I can get us back to Sothis in the morning and we can look up what's on offer. You can learn the language if you want or you can get permanent Tongues for - seventy-five hundred? I've been thinking about going for it, worth it if you're going to do lots of international work."

"You have permanent versions of spells like that? What works differently about it? Also I'm not sure how much that is, here. And I think I still need to pay you back for the money you lent me first." 

"A gold is as much as a laborer earns in ten days, and about the cost of a stay in a nice inn in Sothis. You can buy a pack animal or a slave for about seventy-five gold, a house in the city for five hundred or so, a Raise Dead for five thousand, an interplanetary teleport for probably around that."

:Raise Dead?: Yfandes sends, privately. :Is that...a thing here...?: 

: - yes?:

:...Does it work on dead people from other worlds: 

:I have no idea. It might depend if they're in the same afterlife system? Or one our magic can reach? We could scry for them and find out.:

:...You can scry for specific dead people?: Pause. :We should do that. If you don't mind. He, um, lost someone pretty important, years back:

"Hey Mahdi you're going to love this idea, what if instead of fighting a dragon we do a scry."

"Wow, you're right, I do love that idea," he says. This is very blatantly a lie. "Who're we scrying for?"

Yfandes looks expectantly over at Vanyel. 

Oh gods does he have to say it. 

Talking out loud is too hard so he goes back to Mindspeech. :His name was Tylendel Frelennye: He can send a mental image at them if they need that too. 

"Casting a scry takes an hour, the way I know how to do it," he warns him, and then starts spinning an elaborate magic construct around a silver mirror in front of him.

"Hey, Van, does your magic do flying?"

Oh thank the gods it's a distraction. "I can't fly myself. I can float things? Probably that means flying with it is theoretically possible, it'd just be a complicated spell." 

"Mahdi you gotta let him fly."

Mahdi looks up; the complicated construct he's working on around the silver mirror collapses. "Sure," he says, with a sigh, and pulls yet another elaborate tangle of mage-energy out of thin air in front of him, and holds out his hand to offer it to Vanyel. 

Vanyel carefully doesn't ask if this means he needs to start the scry all over again and aaaaaaaaa. He shrugs and reaches out to take the magic. 

"Nine minutes, the descent is gentle for one minute after that and then stops being gentle so don't go too high. Or land on Fazil, if you must go too high."

"Magical healing is a blessing from the gods for our health and happiness and is not a replacement for Feather Fa-"

"Don't believe a word he says, his favorite thing in the world is healing up me and Mahdi after we duel for absolutely no reason."

"Go enjoy your Fly spell and try not to almost kill yourself and if you do I can in fact sink a city's worth of Healing into you but I will give you a hard time about it at least twice."

:Just so you know: Yfandes sends privately to Fazil, :he almost kills himself with some regularity, but I think this occasion should be fine:

:Van, I'll keep time for you. Have fun: 

And he steps up into the air, and - flies. 

It's very distracting! Also, wow, he could see how this could be incredibly useful, especially combined with an illusion so he can't be seen... He doesn't go too high, but tests how fast he can move. 

:Do your world's gods not send people to Hell for that?: he asks Yfandes worriedly.

:...Um, for what part? The being excessively reckless?: 

:Killing yourself.:

:...Not that I'm aware of? Honestly I'm sort of dubious that Hell is actually a thing in our world, although it might depend on the local god, and it's pretty hard to check directly: 

:That makes sense. We can tell by scrying, the government does population statistics on it.:

:...Wow. What a concept. Do people, er, reincarnate, in your world?: 

:No? Or not very often, there's a rare spell for it.:

:Huh. I think that's the usual thing in our world, actually: 

:That seems - well, better than Hell. Worse than Axis.:

:What's Axis?: 

:Axis is the lawful neutral afterlife. Abadar's lawful neutral and it's the one most people here aspire to. It's - a collection of a thousand cities, connected to each other with portals, each with their own laws and customs, and there's all kinds of people there so there's all kinds of customs, and you don't have to work all day just to survive, and it's very interesting, not the way Golarion is interesting with awful buried history at every corner but just - in that with lots of time people get up to all kinds of things. When I retire I'm probably going to run pilgrimages there. - I'm lawful good but maybe that'll change someday or maybe you get a choice or maybe I'm needed for something, dunno.:

:...I think maybe we need an explanation of this, er, system. I don't know what you mean by the terms you're using - 'lawful good', 'lawful neutral' and such: 

:Huh. Should it wait until Vanyel comes back or should I explain now?:

:Probably wait: She watches Vanyel soaring. :He looks like he's having fun. Flying was a good idea: 

:Who's the dead person we're looking for - brother? Child?:

:Oh. This might be hard to explain, if it's not something your world has, but - do you have any kinds of soulbonds between people? Actually, Van and I have one as well, if it's the kind of thing you can sense:

:Not with Detect Magic and I don't have anything fancier up right now, though I could prepare something tomorrow maybe. I haven't heard of soulbonds between people outside of, like, halfway mythological stories.:

:They're not common in our world either - well, the kind I have with Van is an established thing in our kingdom, we're sort of - colleagues, is probably the best way to look at it - but the other... Our world has something called lifebonds as well, between romantic partners. Losing a lifebonded partner is very, very bad for someone and usually they kill themselves. Van and Tylendel were lifebonded. Tylendel died, oh, more than twelve years ago now: 

:I'm very sorry. - twelve years ago wouldn't be a Raise Dead, it'd be a Resurrection, about twice as expensive. If we can do it at all.:

:If you can't scry him, does that mean it's definitely impossible for your magic to do it, or...still worth trying...? I don't know how long it'd take us to save up that much, but apparently Van's services would be in demand here, so...: 

:Shouldn't take him that long, no. Even if we can't scry him it might work to resurrect him, scries fail if the subject successfully throws it off and Mahdi doesn't have much to go on so it's easier to throw off. - and it might work to resurrect him in your world even if it doesn't in ours? I've never thought about this with other worlds involved, and we'd have to go back to your world anyway to do a resurrection...:

:Why: Pause. :Oh, goodness - is this something where you need a body? Because, um...: 

:Without a body it's a True Resurrection, and that's even more expensive. Not impossible, though.:

Yfandes just nods, an oddly humanlike gesture on a horse. It doesn't seem like there's anything to say. 

Vanyel comes down immediately when prompted at nine minutes. He's smiling. "That spell is very good!" he says quietly to Fazil, not wanting to interrupt Mahdi again. 

"It's great, isn't it? That one's for combat, there's a higher circle one for if you just wanna fly all day to wherever you're going next."

"Could you explain what you mean by 'higher circle', there? I've heard people use the term circle a few times and I don't know what it means." 

"Mahdi's the specialist but for prepared casters - like clerics and wizards - who either receive the spells in advance from our god just ready to deploy when asked, or complete the spells most of the way in advance ready to finish when asked - there are certain configurations of magical energy that are stable, and most aren't. If you do something that's unbalanced then you can't store a spell indefinitely like that. So our magic ends up - discrete. Either something requires a first-circle spell slot or it requires a second-circle spell slot but it's never halfway in between. - I think they're called circles because of something that wizards came up with, I do not myself have an intuitive felt sense for what makes a spell belong to a particular circle of power. Researchers try all the time to figure out how to compress a wizard spell so it uses a lower spell slot. Cleric spells just are what they are, mostly, maybe with a little bit of give in an emergency. - divine magic used to be unambiguously much more powerful than arcane magic but now arcane magic is generally considered more powerful, so much more has been invented. I can try to give you a sense of what spells are what circle but it takes a while to get an intuition for. Uh, something like creating water, or stabilizing a dying person, or creating an illusory light, uses very little energy and I can call the energy right back into my hand as I cast it, we can do those an arbitrary number of times per day. Invisibility is second circle. Flying is third circle. Scrying is fifth-circle for me but wizards recently figured out how to compress it into fourth, which means it's much easier for Mahdi to do than for me, so he has to do all our scrying and he mopes about it constantly. Teleportation is fifth-circle for wizards and plane shifts are fifth circle for clerics, wizards can't do a plane shift until seventh circle. 

Raise dead is fifth circle. Resurrection is seventh. True Resurrection, which doesn't need a body, is ninth. There are not stable configurations higher than ninth, you can do ridiculous things if you get that good at magic but you're not really working within the same system anymore.  The vast majority of casters are not powerful enough to do more than third-circle spells, and lots can't even do that. 

Interplanetary teleport is ninth. Wish is ninth. Miracle is ninth, Gate's ninth..."

"Topology," he says without looking away from his scry. "If that translated then I guess your world has the concept and if it didn't then I'm not really going to be able to explain it while I do this. It's what determines what circle a spell is."

:Interesting. That is a field of study in our world - with some magical applications, even, although more obscure ones:

Vanyel could really do without the repeated reinforcement that True Resurrection is hard and high-level and absurdly expensive (and might not even work in his case...) 

“What’s Gate, in your magic?” he asks, desperately hoping for a different topic. “We have a technique called a Gate but it’s not that absurdly difficult, although it requires pretty strong mage-potential to do at all.”

"Opens a portal between two planes. I've mostly heard of it used to, like, summon the armies of Heaven to a battlefield or something. You have a technique for that?"

“We have a technique that opens a portal between two locations. I - hmm, I haven’t actually checked if I could Gate back to my own world. Doesn’t seem impossible, but...I have a weird sensitivity to Gates, I can cast them but it hurts me a lot, so I’m not that inclined to experiment.”

"Huh. If you wanted to tomorrow I could prepare Delay Pain and then we could try knocking you out nine hours later when it'd hit."

"...Wow, wait, you can just block pain for nine hours?" Vanyel rubs his eyes. "Yes, sure, seems worth trying. And I want to hear more about spells that exist and how hard they are, because I'm getting the sense your magic is really, really different from ours. I mean, creating a light is easy," he does so, "but I can't create water from nowhere at all, I don't think. And healing is an entirely different Gift, although I happen to have it too because, um, I have a lot of Gifts. Oh, and I meant to ask, your world has Bards too?" 

"Yeah, it does. They're somewhat uncommon but we did a bunch of adventuring with one a couple years back, trying to stop this cult. I'm not surprised you can't create water, Mahdi can't either, arcane and divine magic just allow different stuff in some cases and all arcane conjuration spells that do straight-up creation are temporary.  - also I was talking with Yfandes and it sounds like your world doesn't have the concept of alignment, probably because of the lack of divine magic? So we should explain that, it's important -"

"Er, right." Vanyel listens. 

"Hagan should help me out because we have theological disagreements you should probably hear both sides of -"

"When you die, you go to the god of the dead, Pharasma, and she judges you based on how your actions in life pulled the material world towards the - forces the gods think in. There are two of them, Good and Law. Good is - uh, defending the innocent, feeding the hungry, fighting evil, trying to improve the world. Law is - obeying the rules, keeping your word, doing your duty, respecting authority - but not exactly, because they're god concepts, and the human concepts you'd be using if you didn't have magic access to what the gods think would probably be kind of different."

Nod. "It sounds like your gods still think in concepts that are, er, a lot closer to human concepts than how our gods think. Which I guess would make sense, if they talk to people and directly work through them more. Anyway, um, Fazil, what's your stance on it?" 

"Haven't gotten too far into the stuff we disagree on yet but - the opposite of Good is Evil, the opposite of Law is Chaos, and you can also be - mixed, on an axis, or indifferent to it. Abadar is a lawful neutral god. This might seem odd because Good and Evil are sure a thing to be indifferent between, but - Abadar is the god of trade, of markets, and markets are neutral tools. You can sell healing and you can sell slaves. And yet - and yet when people can trade enough with each other you get valuable things, important things, somehow, despite the utter neutrality of every trade, because people only bother to do the ones that get them things they want. And so the world can end up more shaped like - things people want - without any Good having happened at any point, and that matters."

"Huh! You know, there's someone in my world who in general isn't a fan of gods at all, but - would be quite intrigued by a god of trade, of all things!" 

"Abadar is the best god! Though, I would think so."

"Osirion's Abadar's pet project."

"He selects the pharaoh and makes the pharaoh an aspect of Him. It's the most directly a country is ruled by a god except arguably Cheliax, which is ruled by Hell."

" - we should explain Hell. So, you die, you go to Pharasma, you get judged based on how you lived your life. Mahdi's lawful neutral and would go to Axis, the city of cities, it's where most people in Osirion go. Fazil's lawful good and would go to Heaven unless Abadar can, like, ask for him anyway, or unless he stops being good at some point, it's sort of unclear. Heaven is the lawful good afterlife, it is the base of organized opposition to evil in the universe, it has - armies, and an entire pocket dimension for debating ethics more usefully, and probably some other stuff but we know much less about it than Axis because Abadar enables safe tourism in Axis and most of the Outer Planes are not remotely safe for tourism. 

If you're lawful evil, you go to Hell and get tortured for thousands of years."

"Ack!" 

:That's... Um. That's horrible! And there's an entire country ruled by Hell? Do I even want to know about their international policy?: 

"Cheliax is the largest power in Avistan. They're not expanding right now but if they decided to it's not totally clear who could stop them, maybe everyone else working together but people are terrible at working together. Right now they seem content to aggressively grow their population of people damned to Hell when they die and to contribute the bulk of the forces stopping the Worldwound from expanding, such that it would also be kind of a humanitarian disaster to topple them even if someone had a way to do it."

:Gah. I hate it: 

It's probably noticeable from Vanyel's face that he's thinking about whether he's powerful enough to conquer Cheliax, regardless of whether that would even be a good idea. He probably isn't powerful enough anyway. Maybe Leareth– nope, that is an insane idea. 

"Anyway. There's also a neutral good afterlife, and a neutral one, and a neutral evil one, and a chaotic good one, and a chaotic neutral one, and a chaotic evil one - the Abyss, which we've mentioned. All the evil afterlives suck. All the neutral afterlives are, like, mostly fine for the sort of person who goes to them. All the good afterlives are - well, they attract the sort of people whose biggest objection to the neutral afterlives is 'but we can't do anything about Hell? that's terrible."

"You're Neutral Good," he tells Vanyel. "And you're Lawful Good," to Yfandes.

"I guess I am the sort of person who would object to being shoved in an afterlife where I couldn't fight Hell. Anyway - you can just tell by looking at people?" He's a bit surprised that he isn't Lawful per their system just by dint of being a Herald. 

"There's a spell for it, but it doesn't work on most people because most people haven't - tugged the world very much in any direction of interest to the gods. Powerful people will reliably show up to it, though - politically powerful works, not just magically powerful. I have the permanent version of the spell because it's - it's not always the right answer to the question 'who do I want to help, here' but it is a lot of evidence. The cleric in the village said she cast it last night, and if it had informed her that both of you were Evil she'd have been much more cautious. Or if the dragon hadn't been Lawful - actually why did you trust the dragon to keep its end of the deal, I trusted it because it was Lawful -"

"...I mean, I didn't entirely trust it to. I did put up a lot of magical detection and some protections on the village, so if it does break its end of the deal, I may not be able to get there fast enough to save the villagers but I'm a lot more confident I can kill it with advance preparation. Since I got a good look at its magic. I told it that I'd know if it kept to the deal." 

"Huh, I guess that makes sense. I'd expect it to keep its end of the deal. If nothing else you must've left an impression."

"That's a relief. I think I could take it on if I had to but that doesn't mean I want to fight it. It'd be exhausting and also, I don't know, I don't like killing people even when they're doing bad things? I guess arguably I have an ethical obligation to, if it's going to go off and eat a lot of people somewhere else, but - I didn't feel like making that call on the spot. I might keep an eye on it with Farsight." 

"They should put you on a poster for Neutral Good."

Vanyel makes a face. 

:Van, I think that's a compliment: 

"It's - 

- so, everyone dies, right, and they go to Pharasma, and sometimes it's straightforward but for most people it isn't, they've done some good stuff and some bad stuff and some lawful stuff and some chaotic stuff, and any afterlife that thinks they have a good claim can send a representative to argue that this soul should be theirs. 

And the Neutral Good afterlife sends for everybody. They show up to every trial, for every person, for drow slavers and orc raiders and cannibals and worshippers of Rovagug and child-murderers and all the rest of us, who are probably just as ugly, from some angle, and they say 'We think they should live forever in paradise. We think there's Good, there, even if they never really managed to find it. We'll take them'. And sometimes no one else has their act together so they get a crazed serial killer or whatever and they have this isle, in their paradise, for rehabilitating them or at least keeping them out of more trouble. That's Neutral Good - like, there are lots of ways you can get there, there are lots of kinds of people who end up sorting that way when there's only nine ways to sort people, but that's what it is, and it's -"

:Awwww. That's my Chosen, all right: She nuzzles Vanyel's shoulder affectionately. :What's the Lawful Good afterlife like?:

"Heaven fights Hell. I don't know a lot of details about that because it's mostly happening on other planes and in incomprehensible ways. They intervene on the Material Plane less often than Nirvana does but not never. There are also realms of Heaven dedicated to rest, and ones dedicated to debating ethics, because - it's bad for even the kinds of people we are after we die, to do nothing but war. Their gods organized the crusades to take back territory from the Worldwound."

"That's - quite something. I'm guessing Nirvana is the other Good afterlife, er, that'd be Chaotic? What's that like? I'm also curious what Chaotic Good people are even like, I think most of the people I know are more Lawful-ish than me and not less." 

"I am chaotic good! The chaotic good afterlife is actually called Elysium, Nirvana's neutral, and Elysium is an infinite expanse of magical wilderness. Elysium does not as a plane intervene on the Material one because it has no governance structures and doesn't do anything in an organized fashion but lots of its denizens intervene on their own or in small groups or whatever.

- if you want to think of Heaven's central claim about what good is as 'good is fighting evil' and Nirvana's as 'good is paradise for everybody' Elysium's would be, hmmm, 'good is not a thing you can build for people and then stick them in'. That they've got to - do it themselves, ultimately."

:Wow. I kind of love it? Even though I'm, well, not that thing. I suspect all Companions are Lawful, it's - kind of the entire purpose we serve?: 

"Purpose you serve?"

:Companions are one of the key pieces of our kingdom's government. We were created by a god - or gods - when the first King of Valdemar prayed to Them for a miracle. We're magical, we Choose and bond to particularly upstanding people as our Heralds, and they're the core government. Heralds are supposed to be impossible to corrupt and this is basically true: 

Her eyes flash briefly to Vanyel. 

Vanyel is not looking at her. 

"Huh. I don't know of any countries here with an arrangement like that - and if there were one it'd probably be a - paladin order? But yours must be slightly different from that. It sounds like a good idea."

“It works reasonably well for the most part. Heralds also tend to have magic, the various kinds of Gifts I mentioned.”

"Does the god also pick who is in charge or do you - decide internally from among the Heralds, or - what -"

“Hereditary monarchy, but with the additional requirement that the heir be Chosen, so sometimes they have to go a little further out in the family tree.”

Nod. "Kind of like Osirion."

:How does Osirion do it?: 

"Uh, Abadar picks the most suitable of the pharaoh's descendants - direct descendants, ideally, but if none do then he'll branch out to brothers or nephews or something. The pharaohs have, like, thirty kids apiece so he doesn't usually have to branch out but they gathered the whole royal family in, even distant relations, when the last pharaoh was dying, just in case."

:Huh. Does Abadar talk to them directly and, um, tell them how to run the country?: 

"I think most possible answers to that question are heretical or something!"

"Formally the pharaoh is an aspect of Abadar but most laypeople are really unclear on what exactly that means. The most useful way to reason about it is by thinking about what happens to people when they ascend to godhood - they get a bunch of new - parts of themselves, ways they relate to the world - there still is something that can reason like the human that they were, but it's not all that they are anymore. Becoming pharaoh is sort of like that except that instead of ascending to the god that you would be if you ascended in your own right, you ascend to - Abadar. I know that's not a great explanation, gods are hard to think about."

Vanyel makes several odd faces. Eventually shakes himself a little. "Right. Anyway. I guess I should learn more about what sorts of spells you already have, and I can tell you about the kinds of things I can do and which ones are tiring, and then we can figure out if this is a good way to break into people's tombs."

He feels sort of uncomfortable with the tomb-raiding concept, but it's not like the dead people can use their stuff, and besides, if it's possible a True Resurrection would - work - then he's suddenly more desirous of money than he's ever been in his life. Also it sounds like a good way to learn a lot quickly about this world. 

"Yeah that sounds good. Uh, arcane magic comes in schools. There's abjuration - shields, alarms, defenses - you clearly have some of your own of those - conjuration - that's both making stuff from scratch, which is made of magical energy and always temporary, and summoning creatures or constructs from other planes - divination, which is scrying and information-gathering magic. Tongues is a divination spell. Prophecy was divination, back when we had prophecy."

"The gods and some people used to be able to - see possible futures. They didn't always come true but they were - real information, if you knew how to interpret them. Aroden's return was - prophecied like that. When Aroden died prophecy stopped working, reportedly for the gods as well as us, and now we're all flying blind. Divination spells that are about conveying information someone else currently has work fine."

"...Wait. You're saying your world had Foresight and then you broke it?" 

" - not us personally! Aroden died a hundred years ago. But - yes."

"That's so weird. Our world has Foresight, or prophecy, a few different kinds. I technically have it but mine is really useless in practice." 

"Oh?"

"It's the long-range kind, which is generally cryptic dreams about things years in the future, and I've had a dream about exactly one thing ever." 

"I would demand a refund!"

"From the gods?"

"Yes."

:Do the gods of your world use money? Ours don't!: 

"They do not at all. Abadar collects money in that vault of his but does not spend it, which seems like being a lousy god of commerce if you ask me, which Fazil never has for some reason."

"Abadar maintains a vault with a copy of all things people have ever made with their own hands."

"...Huh. Where? In the afterlife?" 

"Yes. - it's not impossible to get to look at something but there's no spell for it, you'd need a really good reason or to have earned a heck of a personal favor."

"What does he do with it?" 

"Mostly it's just - there, as far as I know. The story goes that when humans were new he wasn't - sure what to do with them - but he saw them making things that were precious to them, and trying to put them away somewhere they'd be safe, so he - kept copies safe for them."

"But not like for them in the sense that they can go get them."

:That's honestly kind of adorable: 

"I think so too."

Next to them, Mahdi sighs. His magical construct is showing black. 

"I can try again tomorrow," he says. "Sorry."

Vanyel had been trying very hard not to get his hopes up, so he isn't sure why he feels so crushingly disappointed. "Thank you for trying," he says dully. 

He nods. "Did you get through explaining our magic, Fazil -"

"No, we got distracted by how prophecy is broken."

"Next school of arcane magic is enchantment. Messing with peoples' heads. Your head should be hard to mess with, high-level casters develop innate defenses -"

"Oh, interesting. Those are different Gifts in my world - more than one, actually, I have Mindspeech and Empathy but not Mindhealing. Although mages in my world can often learn to shield them out even if they don't have the Gifts themselves." 

"The only way to do Yfandes's thing with arcane magic is a sixth-circle spell which still only lets you communicate mentally for a matter of minutes with people nearby. And detecting emotions is actually divination. Enchantment lets you - force people to hold still, or tell the truth, or find it hard to act against you. At high levels you can puppet them. I haven't specialized in it."

"Oh, that sounds like compulsions. That's just normal mage-gift magic for us, although in my kingdom it's considered unethical and not used - reading people's minds against their will, too. We also have a Truth Spell but it's, um, a weird unusual application of summoning air-elementals, and it doesn't actually need mage-gift, although only Heralds with Companions can do it."

Wow, described like that the Truth Spells sounds so odd. 

"Huh. We can do truth spells with enchantment and then Abadar has a specialized first-circle one for his church only which means as a practical matter Fazil does those and I don't. The air elementals have truth detection?"

"I think ours have an affinity for minds and can sense intent, which includes intent to lie. You can also put more power in and force people to tell the full truth, and I don't really understand how that works. I'm not the one who invented the technique." 

Nod. "Next up is evocation. Combat stuff - creating force or energy. We can throw fireballs and electricity and ice and sonic bursts. The thing you did pinning down the dragon looked just like a evocation spell I am not powerful enough to cast. There's illusion - what it sounds like, illusions that are bigger or more complex or persuasive to more senses or longer-lasting are higher-circle -necromancy, which is formally the school of magic that uses the plane of negative energy but which everyone mostly associates with being trailed around by a lot of undead servants -"

Ick. "Our world doesn't have the last thing at all, as far as I'm aware, and I've never heard of a plane of negative energy - it sounds a bit like the Void but that doesn't have anything to do with, er, undead. We have illusions, the kind of mage I am can do those too, I'm all right at them. I'm really good at the thing you're calling evocation. Anything where raw power matters most." He doesn't look entirely happy about this fact. 

"The planes we know of are the elemental planes - Fire, Air, Water, Earth - the positive and negative energy planes, the ethereal and astral planes, the shadow plane, and the afterlife planes. And then hundreds of random demiplanes, I guess. We know that's not all of them, though, it's possible the Void is something else or it's possible it's the negative energy plane but that necromancy can't be done with your magic system.

There are plenty of people who'd pay you to blast things but I dunno that the jobs tend Neutral Good. It does probably mean it's safer for us to raid some more challenging tombs than we'd have tried before. - I am assuming that Fazil can heal you normally, probably we should not assume that and should instead check it."

"I've fought in a war and done a lot of things I'm really not sure were Good," Vanyel admits, "but I'd prefer not doing that as, er, a mercenary. We should check that Fazil can heal me. I guess I can give myself a minor injury?" 

"Sounds good."

Vanyel shrugs and slices the palm of his hand a bit, in a way that won't be too annoying to fix with his own weak Healing if it turns out Fazil's method doesn't work. 

His expression doesn't change at all. 

He blasts a thirty-foot radius around him in not-quite-mage-energy and the cut seals right up.

Vanyel jumps, startled. "That's the weirdest healing magic I've ever seen. Does it hit anyone within thirty feet? I could see it." 

"Yes. We have kinds with more finesse but in a fight sometimes you just want everyone on your side to be several weeks of healing along on recovering from their injuries, immediately."

"That's - honestly really incredible! We usually can't afford to take our Healers into battle, and they can only Heal one person at a time, plus it's not instant like that." 

"Healing with arcane magic is a nightmare and a half, I'm impressed you can usefully do it at all. Divine magic is much better for that. This is why adventurers always have a priest."

"Also your wise moral counsel and guidance on the wishes of the gods."

Mental laughter. 

"So it sounds like I can do most of what your arcane magic can, with some weird exceptions. Are there other kinds of magic - other than divine, or areas of divine we didn't cover...?" 

"As far as we know all magic is one or the other, or some creative combination of them but that's exceptionally rare, I've only seen it as a parlor trick."

"Right. I guess I should go through what I can do. Hmm. Can arcane magic make durable magical artifacts? I'm trying to see if I..." He can't remember if he has a spare shield-talisman with him. It turns out the answer is yes! "This is something I can wear, and if I activate it in a fight, it'll make a personal shield against magical attacks or physical blows, say from a sword, that I don't have to maintain from my own reserves." 

"We can make those. They're both finicky and require expensive materials, but most spells that you can do at all you can make an artifact for, in principle." He gestures at his own outfit. "The headband's for intelligence, the gloves help with not letting spells slip while I'm casting them, the cloak does a little bit of shielding. If you can make magic items that's a good way to make money, you can supply a shop in Sothis or Absalom."

"Hmm. My kind is pretty fast to make and doesn't require particularly special materials, I usually use quartz as a focus but lots of kinds of crystal or stone will do. The problem is that most of them have limited power and then stop working, and it takes a mage to re-power them. I guess maybe your kind of magic could do it too." 

"Probably! That complicates selling it in a shop by a little bit, if people'd need to learn a new technique to repower them, but it doesn't seem impossible - and it's possible that the expensive materials traditional for item-making here.. collect the magic on their own, so to speak, and if you tried with those you'd get more longevity? I am not an expert, I planned to retrain in magic item making once I retire."

"Right. So I might have an advantage for some areas of artifact-creation, but it wouldn't be revolutionary or anything. What does your magic have in terms of defensive wards?" 

"I can put an area under a ward that will silently - or loudly, if I wanted, but I usually don't - notify me if anyone enters. There's variously selective versions of that, like ones that'll notify me only of illusioned creatures, or only of anything magical that enters, or only of people I haven't preapproved. I can lock down an area against teleportation or against summoning or against scrying. I can do a barrier that hits back if anything hits it but that spell's not stable, it lasts about a minute and a half. There's magical traps? Really powerful wizards usually hang out in their own extradimensional space where they control the laws of physics."

"Wow! That's not something our magic can do at all, as far as I know. It sounds like your shielding and wards have a similar range to ours. I can do magical traps too, and I've got a wide repertoire of types of shield-barriers." 

:I wonder if Vanyel could get through shields that your arcane magic usually can't get around?: 

"I would expect at minimum that if he tries to dispel my magic he will usually succeed because he's significantly more powerful than I am. If you have a technique for dispelling magic that isn't mostly about power we could try it, see whether it works? I can put up Glitterdust or something."

"Sure, could give that a go." 

"This spell is meant to be debilitating but not actually dangerous," he warns them, and then pulls one of his magic-forms into being and - fills the air around them with intensely bright reflective shards of light, which makes looking at anything kind of like looking at the sun.

Vanyel scrunches his eyes shut, and instead opens all of his Sight, looking at the magic itself. 

It looks kind of almost like a mage-light would if it were scattered into thousands of pieces.

Huh. It looks like he could brute-force shove it away or shred it, but - is there a more efficient way that isn't just about power?

He tries to see if there's any remaining underlying structure to the spell, now that it's been cast and released. 

There's a ghost of the spellform still hanging in the air, gradually dissolving of its own accord. It looks like it'll last a couple minutes, if that.

Does anything happen if he reaches in and sort of snips it apart? 

It resists that a little but not very much and then the glitterdust is gone. 

"Huh," Mahdi says, "that is not what it would look like if I were dispelling magic. - I guess it makes sense that sorcerers would have finer control on counterspells, what with being able to decide what you're doing in the moment, the dispel spell I know is just a general attempt to shred magic with force."

"Right, you need to prepare everything in advance. I - have basically an arbitrary degree of control? I mean, my control for illusions and things like that is worse than some people, because I've practiced less and my Gift is really powerful which makes delicate work harder. Also I can see the structure of your spell, so I've got an idea of what to poke. Can you see it?" 

"When I have Detect Magic up, but I can't concentrate on Detect Magic and casting at the same time."

"...Wait. So you can have mage-sight or you can do magic but not both at the same time?" It sounds infuriating. "Also, mage-sight isn't a spell for us. It's - a sense, like eyesight, I can 'close' it and it takes a little bit of effort to have it 'open' but - not really concentration the way a difficult casting does. Does that mean you can't cast two spells at once either?" 

"I definitely cannot do that, no one can do that! You can do that?"

"Yes? I mean, not two really hard ones at once. If it takes a lot of power, or concentration, it needs my full attention; I can't Gate while holding a shield, for example. But I can hold a shield and throw fireballs at the same time, those are both easy, I did it in the dragon fight. Actually, I was doing both and mage-sight, so I could analyze how to even fight the dragon, so I think that would be three things in your system. And I can Mindspeak at the same time, that's another Gift entirely - I mean, it can be distracting, but the same amount as talking out loud." 

"Our shields don't require concentration once you cast them - well, the ones I know don't, because I wouldn't bother learning one that did. I can have them up while I throw fireballs. I can fly and shield and throw fireballs but those are - at one point I cast a shield, which will then last all day, at a later point I cast Fly, which will last nine minutes, and then I throw some fireballs, and I can't throw two at once though if I knew how to throw quickened fireballs I could cast them faster than I could count aloud - I don't, getting a spell that fast makes it higher-circle and it's rarely worth it."

Nod. "A shield takes a little concentration to maintain, for me, but that's because I can feed more power in, and reinforce it if it's damaged. I can also cast a barrier and leave it, but it'll only hold against attack to a certain point. Most of my longer lasting spells aren't cast-and-leave-it, like that, I can fiddle with them as I hold them." 

"Huh! That makes sense and isn't how most wizard spells are designed. Not only can I not put more power in once it's up, I can't even put more power in while I'm casting it, it has to be exactly what I prepared that morning."

"Are the sorcerers in your world more like me?" 

"They are definitely more like you in that they can put more power into a spell as they cast it, or tap a node nearby for extra power if they've been taught how - I can do that only if I prepared the spell that morning shaped for the extra power, which is a stupid thing to do if you don't know where you'll be travelling. I haven't heard of anyone who can adjust a shield while it's up but sorcerers usually have a very restricted range of spells they know, and I haven't talked about magic with more than a handful of them."

"Right. I can tap nodes too. I...suspect it's easier for me to learn a new technique than it is for sorcerers, if they don't tend to know many? I mean, it takes years to get it really engrained, say, to learn a complicated shield well enough that I can cast it under battle conditions reliably, and even then I might fumble it if I got distracted at the wrong moment - but I can learn the basics in a day or two of drilling."

He frowns, thoughtfully. "I think in general our magic is less - discrete units of spell - than yours? I can take a shield technique and modify it a bit on the fly, for example. It's hard, most mages couldn't pull that off reliably, but I've had, um, a lot of field experience." 

"I think sorcerers are mostly alone. Wizards have tons of techniques because there are, what, probably a million wizards in the world, and more from history. Most sorcerers are one of a handful of people like them they've heard of. If everyone in your world is a sorcerer of course you'd have refined your magic a lot and they'd have as wide a range of techniques and spell types as our wizards do.

There's also something to the observation about being less discrete, though. It makes me wonder if there are researchers exploring how to make our spells more adaptable on the fly."

Hagan, bored by this conversation, has shot down a goose and built a campfire to cook it. 

"I didn't realize sorcerers were that much rarer here. Makes sense."

"There are hundreds of kinds and I don't think they can learn from each other, at least not more usefully than you and I can."

"...Huh. Bizarre. I guess my world does have kinds of Gifts, and a Healer couldn't learn very usefully from a Mindspeaker, for example, we just don't have that many and they're in very obvious clusters." 

"That makes sense. - hmm, I wonder if the thing you did to my Glitterdust spell structure -"

He reaches into his bag for something, frowns. "- huh! I can't recall the spell back to it! That's fascinating - uh, there's something called a Pearl of Power, you can use it to retrieve a spell after you've cast it - I can show you -" and he casts another spell, up into the sky, that produces a radiant rainbow burst of color.

He waits for the rainbow burst of color to fade away.

Then he pulls out the pearl, concentrates, and - restores the spell-structure to the state it was in and tucks it away again. "So I can cast the spell again later, right. Except apparently if you fiddle with the structure then I can't do that! Which is not a result I've heard of, and makes me wonder if you could do the opposite, and do the thing the pearl is doing -"

"Oh. Hmm. So, have you cast it, and then - grab it and fold it up and give it back to you?" 

"Yeah. Can you see what the pearl does - I can do it again if you want to watch again -"

"Sure." And this time he focuses closely on the pearl itself. 

The pearl seems to contain some magical energy - quite a lot of it, actually - in a very careful structure of its own, and it reaches out and finds the spell structure at Mahdi's fingertips and breathes all of its energy into it until the structure is intact again.

Hagan gets some potatoes and starts roasting them.

"Huh! I can't tell if it's doing something fancier than what I can See, but I'll give it a go." 

He casts the spell again. "Color Spray knocks normal people unconscious," he says in explanation while he does. "For less than a minute, but sometimes it's nice to have a minute."

"What, really? How does it do that? And, yes, sometimes a minute is very key." He closes his eyes, to better focus on just what he's seeing with mage-sight. 

"It turns out that if you flash the wrong set of inputs at your brain very loudly it gets kind of stuck! You could take down all your shields if you wanted to experience it firsthand I guess." 

Mahdi's magic constructs seem to all be contained in his spellbook, most of the time, but he brings them to his fingertips when he casts. When he's done the structure he just used is still there, just - empty.

"Weird. Just a minute..." Vanyel focuses on said empty magic construct. He touches it, very tentatively, with his Gift, and starts trying to feed in energy from his reserves; he's not sure how much it'll take. 

It doesn't take very much. It does, halfway through, get kind of stuck at a tangle in the spell structure.

Huh. He tries backing off and touching it at a different point to get the rest. 

That works.

" - wow."

"You could hang out in Sothis and sell that."

"Letting people use the same prepared spell more than once? I guess that'd be pretty damn useful, if a fundamental limitation of your magic was that you usually couldn't." It sounds like painfully boring work, though, but if it'd be high-paying and safe, he could probably bring himself to do it for a few weeks. "Anyway, I want to watch the spell preparation, whenever you do that next, I'm still baffled about that part." 

"In the morning. Sometimes I leave half of it undone so I can do it later, for more flexibility, but I didn't do that this morning because we were hanging out in Sothis and our plan for the day was to sell some spells and hit some bars and hear about interesting work."

"And then you got yanked in to deal with a dragon? I hate it when my nice peaceful day gets interrupted like that." 

"It's the worst. I bet they won't even pay us, on the grounds that we did not even deal with the dragon."

Yfandes nudges Vanyel. :Delicious food over there?: She does a horse-eyeroll at the others. :He needs to be reminded to eat a lot: 

"Hey." Vanyel swats at her, but he's smiling. 

"Eat something, on this planet we do it several times a day." He passes him a plate.

"We should maybe go ask the villagers about somewhere we can spend the night," Mahdi says, "Yfandes presumably cannot manage to get inside a Rope Trick."

"We can sleep under the stars! Unless there is a sandstorm. Or some of those stupid spider things."

"Let's not deal with the stupid spider things! We want Vanyel to like our world."

"If you are liking our world under the misapprehension that it is not terrible and full of horrible spiders," he tells Vanyel, "you should be aware that actually it is terrible and full of horrible spiders."

"...I can do shields?" 

"The stupid spider things make this weirdly compelling noise that convinces you to go check it out immediately and then you snap out of it once they try to eat you."

"That does sound pretty horrible! We have some creatures that do mind-effects like that - it's possible to shield although hard. If I could get a look at it, er, without being eaten, I might be able to shield against it. But maybe we shouldn't deal with that tonight." 

"I think we should head into the village and I should spend my Remove Diseases at the local market price of 'probably basically nothing' and we can revisit spider-shields later, one dragon is enough for today. Even if only Vanyel fought it."

"I can sell some magic if we need that, I'm not too–"

:He's too tired. Van, let it be: 

"We do not need money at all, we carry more change than any of these people make in a year, Fazil just loses his Remove Diseases if he doesn't use them by dawn and the precepts of his religion prohibit him from giving them away."

" - rationing scarce things by whoever you feel the most random impulsive sympathy towards is bad."

"Ah, right, makes sense. Fazil, I want to see you prepare spells too, if that's all right." 

(That is cute and he wants to tell Leareth and wonders, absently, if the dream will happen here.) 

"Yeah, absolutely. I do it at dawn. All clerics for all gods do it at dawn, it's widely understood to be one of the features of the agreement between the gods - because otherwise you could give people an advantage by having their spells ready sooner than their enemies -"

"I can do mine whenever but I need a solid night's sleep and if you try to be clever like by doing it an hour earlier every morning then eventually you'll be really low on magical energy and your spells just won't come together. - I've tried it, everyone tries it in school."

And they can head into town and find people who will buy Remove Disease and rent them a room and a stable for the night.

Vanyel is yawning at this point, and happy to drop Yfandes off (after explaining clearly that she's a person and should be treated like one), and then follow the others. This is the point at which he realizes that he doesn't have a bedroll, or clean clothes, or any of the usual supplies he would take on a journey. He's too tired to think about fixing this, though. 

"Guess you can pick who you want to share with -"

Fazil punches him in the shoulder. "We'll double up, we do half the time anyway. And you can buy supplies in Sothis tomorrow no problem."

Vanyel feels like he should protest, probably, but he's sleepy and doesn't feel like arguing, so he just nods and thanks them. "I look forward to seeing Sothis, it sounds like quite something." 

"It's all right."

"Good night."

And sleep.

...Possibly he should have thought to warn them about the nightmares thing, Vanyel finds himself thinking, blearily, at some point in the early hours of the morning when he's jolted awake, with something that was at least closer to a yelp than a scream, and he's foggily checking his shields and hoping he wasn't goddamned projecting at them. 

(He was totally goddamned projecting at them, in fact, if only for a couple of seconds right before waking.) 

He has his bow strung and an arrow ready to fly and is determining that nothing bad is actually happening. His snake is hissing. 

He has cast a spell that puts his thick leather armor on him instantly and then another one that is - energizing, they'll all feel like they could run for miles -

He has summoned a flock of bats.

"Sorry sorry sorry sorry–" Vanyel takes a few seconds to realize that he isn't sure the translation will still be working. :I'm so sorry - I have nightmares sometimes - sorry...: