Just touching it shouldn't do anything but both the orb and her memories have been tampered with so who the fuck knows! Tanya's just glad to finally be away from the blasted thing. She does not intend to spend her life running and hiding from mind controllers and the first step towards that is to deal with the devil she knows.

In a way, she's almost glad that the additional risk makes it no longer justified for her to rely on it as an emergency backup. Goodbye, Elenium Type-95, goodbye Elysium Labs and insane Dr Schugel, you will not be missed.

There is a phantom sensation of relief in her chest as she leaves it behind in the antimagic field!

…or maybe not so phantom, as she is lead away from the room the lack of something becomes apparent.

As she gets all the way back up the stairs, it becomes clearly non-phantom, as another pain in her chest, pulling in a different direction than the existing tug, very clearly pulling her back to where she left the orb!

Sigh. (She reports this to Jon, of course.)

Does it help if she goes back into the other antimagic field?

The pain actually becomes too crippling if she goes all the way up the stairs, they can use one of the other antimagic cells in that hallway.  The inquisitor fills out more paperwork, some of which he explains. “This indicates you are not a prisoner but an ally voluntarily using one of our antimagic cells and you do not require anyone’s permission to leave.”

Once inside the cell the sensation of separation (it dropped back down from pain and her wound actually slowed in bleeding as she got closer to the orb) stops again.

Blast it. But at least now she has a clear target for her anger. The enemy had better work quick to convince her she should break the damned thing Tanya will be cool and rational about this, as always.

"Still better than nothing, hopefully. Maybe Terendelev would get somewhere analyzing how the orb is affecting me while one or both of us are in antimagic fields. Should we have the conversation here?"

“We can whisper non-magically, and Lastwall is trustworthy not to try listen in.”

He addresses the inquisitor.

“We need privacy for a sensitive conversation.”

The other cells are empty, and it is a long hallway with a station for guards at the end they came through and a dead end in the other direction.

The inquisitor nods and goes back to the station to give them space.

"I'll start with a very brief summary."

"I was born on Earth in the year 1980. It had a war in its history which started in 1914 and matched the description you gave earlier. There was no evidence of either magic, miracles, or the existence of gods or any extraterrestrial intelligence. Many people still believed in different and wildly contradictory religions, but the educated opinion was that it was all superstition born of a pre-scientific lack of understanding. At the age of thirty-three, I died in a... surprise accident. I next remember experiencing meeting an old man."

"It was as if I could only do some things. I could move but I did not experience moving, I was suddenly standing in a different place or position, and so was he. I could not talk but he read my thoughts and replied to them. I heard him but I also received some messages telepathically."

"He claimed to be the creator - implicitly, of the world - and that he had given the 'ten commandments', a concept from several popular religions. He also claimed humans are reborn until they attain enlightenment, which comes from a very different and explicitly contradictory religion. He then lost his temper and complained about the state of the world and, specifically, humans like me not believing in god or worshipping him anymore. He said he was overworked because souls were not leaving the cycle of rebirth... I can give more details later. He proclaimed he'd have me reborn in a world with evident magic, with war and suffering, and as a woman, as the opposite of the conditions I said made me disbelieve in gods. I decided to call him Being X."

"The next thing I remember is childhood - really, infanthood, I have memories from age two. On a different Earth, where I was born as a girl in the year 1914. As I described earlier, magic was known although there was no direct proof of gods and miracles were not universally accepted. The state and history of the world was significantly different from my first one but it was recognizably Earth, to the point that even my knowledge of foreign languages served me well. I never told anyone about my first life, because I had no evidence and it would have been a heresy to the area's dominant religion."

"A population-wide test at age nine showed I had magical ability. This meant I would be conscripted into the army at eighteen. I was an orphan with poor prospects and no need of primary school so I volunteered right away, it was peacetime. I became an aerial mage and excelled at it."

"At one point I was assigned to test new orb models. The chief engineer has made an orb of revolutionary power and complexity but it was too difficult to use. He used my feedback to iterate, but couldn't make it work. Eventually the order came to cancel the project. On the last day, he claimed to have had a revelation from god. He said the orb would work if we prayed for it together. I thought he was mad, but when I tried activating it like I had every day, I was - transported to a different space again."

"This time I met a different being. He looked visually like one from yet a third major religion, but he claimed to be acting for Being X, and that he had approved me to do miracles in his name. - the miracle being the ability to use the orb without exploding myself and the city I was in. When I came to, nothing had seemed to happen, but the scientist insisted I go through with the test, and when I tried to activate the orb again I - became someone else. I didn't know how to describe it at the time, but mind control is a good name. A few minutes later I remembered myself doing and saying things that made no sense. Namely, I had loudly prayed and praised god - the one from the locally dominant religion - and the scientist and others present had joined me. And I had managed to safely use the orb, which the chief scientist and the other truly religious among them took for a miracle."

"Nobody else ever managed to use it. The army wrote it down to me being exceptionally skilled. The lab eventually produced the other type of orb I have, only dual-core but still a vast improvement over the previous state of the art. When we scraped together the best mages in the army to drill in using it we only got a battalion's worth, so in the end it was only issued to our elite unit. The only quad-core orb, the Elinium Type-95, was given to me, and classified."

"I used it rather freely at first. It made me much more powerful at the cost of praying and saying inane things, which tended to inspire the men anyway, and so I thought it was worth it. Until one day I realized I only half remembered the last few months, and then I swore off using it. Of course I couldn't stop carrying it or explain this to the army."

"There was one other person I believe received extra powers as a miracle. An enemy mage we repeatedly encountered. She wasn't skilled and as far as I know didn't have a special orb, but she repeatedly used insanely overpowered magic that I could only match with the Type-95, even her allies fled when she started going. I don't know much more about her."

"The rest is as I described. My memories cut off abruptly, at a point where I wasn't in particular danger, and the next thing I remember is being healed by Terendelev in Kenabres."

He tries to put some sympathy into his voice.

"That contextualizes a lot of your other preferences and suspicions."

He thinks carefully...

"Shifting souls between alternate realities is not something most Golarion Gods can do.  Maybe none of them can.  Nethys is notable for being able to see across alternate realities, but it isn't a capability he can use in a very organized or useful way.  Some dark tapestry entities have capabilities suggestive of interacting with alternate realities.  Demanding worship is something Evil Gods often do, and Good Gods often have overzealous followers incorrectly assume they should demand others worship their God."

He needs to focus on the most actionable pieces, Tanya does not like him going off on tangents.

"On Golarion, if this 'Being X' tries acting, it is likely to run into intervention rules and limits if it is divine in a similar way to Golarion Gods.  Empowering people outside of the standard cleric, paladin, inquisitor, or witch spellcasting style is very expensive under the intervention rules.  Other methods of empowerment build on existing adventurer abilities and known classes of spellcasting, going even further outside of them gets absurdly expensive.  Empowering someone under false pretenses is very expensive.  Empowering someone directly against their will is absurdly expensive.  An unknown or foreign God would have very little intervention allowance if it introduced itself to Golarion.  And if 'Being X' tries entirely ignoring the intervention rules, it will have a lot of Gods across many alignments working to outright attack it.  However, it is possible it isn't properly a god as the Golarion divine treaties count them and would have more leeway.  And there are possible intermediate cases, lesser Gods and Demigods in some ways have more leeway but not as much as something that is not divine at all.  From your description 'Being X' sounds at least semi-divine, a very skilled expert examining the orb it interacted with might have a better guess as to the status of it's divinity."

He has more to say, but he should check if she is understanding.

"Are you following so far?  Is your wound still manageable, such that we have plenty of time to talk?  I have a lot more detail I can go into and I have some additional actionable points I should mention even if we are in a rush, but I am trying to keep my explanations more organized."

Tanya's wound hasn't gotten worse at all.  It is basically just a persistent paper cut that won't clot or close.

Whew. He didn't seem to react badly and - it set her mind at ease, more than she expected.

"I'm following. ...I had very little to go on but I've always assumed there must be many more Earths than Earth-1 and Earth-2. Being X picked one to reincarnate me on, one that matched his specifications precisely and I don't believe he can create worlds on a whim, so there must be a very wide selection. But that also implies he and his fellows can mess with all those worlds, while your gods are local? How is the Earth you know related? Is there a way I could be from its future? ...that's not immediately actionable, sorry."

"The wound doesn't seem to be getting worse but the blood hasn't stopped flowing, so there's something abnormal about it. It might be a mundane, curable abnormality, though. I don't know how dangerous it might be, if the blood flow continues internally despite the pressure I'm putting on it or if something else is wrong, but I don't think it can get so bad that I won't notice in time to get magical healing." 

"Another theory I had earlier, before I knew about local abilities to alter memories, was that I might have used the cursed orb again - for some reason - it's not impossible that I would have chosen it over certain death, or to save my men - and then Being X made me cast an interstellar teleport. For some reason. It would at least explain how I ended up on Golarion, and I could be missing memories just due to overusing the orb and being - mentally corrupted by Being X. My best guess of how that works is that if I'm a sufficiently different person, I can't recall being that person later when I recover myself. This suggests that I - or something wearing my body - arrived in Golarion under my own power before doing something to end up here. I wouldn't have known to avoid mind control magic, unless Being X controlled me into doing all the right things..."

Tanya hadn't originally planned on saying this part but it's not that hard to think of once you know the rest, and this is her best chance while she can still decide to ask Jon to forget it all.

“It seems from Nethys some alternate realities are out of sync temporally, but as you say that’s not - actually it is potentially actionable, maybe not for you, but if you allow me to retain my memories and act on this conversation - for allied non-Evil Gods monitoring the Earth of our reality.”

Depending on how well Tanya knows her history and how similar the Earths are… but it’s not immediately actionable.

“Uh sorry for the tangent, we can discuss that later.  For good news… if Being X directly caused you to arrive in Golarion it might be retroactively liable for all its interventions relating to you.  If it indirectly caused your arrival, it might be partially liable.”

“As for your memory… a limited wish to restore your memory could probably get the memories lost to the orb, depending on how much of a God being X actually is and how deliberately it was inferring with your memories.  A full wish or a miracle should succeed even if Being X is equivalent to a full God, unless it is very specialized at mind manipulation. Also, depending on the limited wish wording Terendelev is thinking of using it could be relevant for her to know about this.”

Tanya would greatly enjoy seeing Being X get his comeuppance! She will even allow the relevant memories to be thought-read if that's the court's standard of proof! Not that the local gods seem any better, ethically, but if they're defensive of their little cartel she will happily report rogue agents. Of course she's not a vindictive person, but personal safety and basic game theory both demand Being X's head be stopped.

It is also an excellent reason not to ask Jon to forget this conversation. (Which he of course knows; she never asked him not to convince her to let him remember it.)

"That is very good news, if it might lead to being free of his interference," she comments rather more neutrally than she feels. "Is this contingent on successfully recovering my memories and them showing Being X was to blame, or would the local gods be interested in looking into this on their own behalf?"

"In terms of the practicalities of investigating... well one of 'Being X's' most direct and expensive interventions is with you already: the orb itself.  None of your memories would be required about the orb, Abadar probably already has a good sense of it, material wealth is something he can see very clearly.  So he might have sufficient evidence about the orb's arrival on Golarion. And although looking at an alternate reality from scratch might be impossible for almost all Golarion Gods, some form of retrocognitive magic on your past should be a lot more achievable.  Well actually... if Terendelev's theory is right and Areelu Vorlesh had a hold of you for some time she might have rendered that approach unworkable.  Hmm... I'm unsure."

"In terms of motivation of the Gods, Abadar and many Lawful Gods are usually interested in upholding existing divine treaties almost as an end unto themselves.  Iomedae and most Good Gods would be interested in this as a means of stopping an Evil God-like being."

"Also, if you were to grant consent for Iomedae to look at your memories of 'Being X' and you prayed to her about it, she might be able to make some additional inference you missed that I won't catch simply through conversation.  I'm aware you feel very strongly about this but I want to note the option.  Iomedae would in fact be competent to look at just the memories you intended to show her.  Alternatively, there is extensive magic for looking through one's own memories, and you have illusions, you could leverage these together to give me as thorough a picture as possible and then Iomedae could learn it from me."

"I feel very strongly about anyone reading my mind without my knowledge or consent. This doesn't apply to sharing specific thoughts or memories, as long as I understand and control what exactly gets shared. That's no different from telepathy, which I had no problem with. I'm repeating this because I'm surprised you didn't understand this already. ...unless you meant Iomedae could look at my memories of Being X even if I couldn't currently recall them? Or notice details of the memories I told you about which I don't consciously remember or pay attention to?" Tanya hasn't forgiven Iomedae but that doesn't mean she isn't willing to use her strategically. Although she'd be showing Iomedae her memory of calling Being X a devil, which might be strategically unwise... "If we're going to try to restore my memories, I don't have to decide about this until afterwards."

"As for Abadar, if he already knows about the orb and is interested in acting, does that mean he's already done all he's going to do?"

"About recovering my memories, the ones I lost on the Rhine - er, during those months when I used the orb too much on Earth-2, they're not really important to me. I know roughly what happened from records and other people, and it wasn't really me doing it. Only the recently missing ones are important." 

"The exact bounds and details of mental privacy preferences can vary a lot!  And some Gods lack the skill at interfacing with mortals such that they could restrict how much they read from the mortal when sending a vision or communicating directly with that mortal.  Iomedae is more skilled at communicating with mortals and would not have this problem.  Iomedae could get a more accurate look at memories you don't recall precisely, but not substantially better than you could with memory augmenting magic like trying on the maximum strength of intelligence headband.  Iomedae would likely be able to notice and make use of details you haven't paid attention to that you may have difficultly verbally articulating, such as the exact mental sensations you felt while you were meeting 'Being X'.  Yes, if Abadar noticed anything actionable about Being X's interventions he would have already begun acting on them."

"If you specifically want to avoid recovering the memories from orb use and just recover your more recent memories, Terendelev might need to research a more obscure and specialized limited wish wording."

"I don't have to avoid them, they're not a priority but if it's all or nothing then restoring them is fine."

Tanya is wondering how 'alternate realities' work. Is there an alternate Golarion next to each alternate Earth? Are there alternate gods and do they cooperate? None of that seems useful or urgent, though; the cursed wound takes priority.

She needs to judge Jon's reaction. He's not obliged to tell her if the information would make him or his faction hostile to her, or anything else they might do because of it. She can ask, but asking directly is probably silly; if there was something obviously relevant he was willing to tell her, he would have brought it up himself. Although he is an alien, so Tanya shouldn't put too much stock in things that seem obvious...

"What else?"

“I’ve been considering how mortals of Golarion will react to this information, should you choose to share it.  The uneducated might be wary of you, but I believe most educated people will expect ‘Being X’ to be at least partially limited by the rules of Golarion and thus you are not a threat if you plan to avoid praying to it or willingly agreeing to anything it asks for.  The standard advice about obscure Evil Gods, which isn’t exactly relevant to ‘Being X’ but I don’t think will hurt as a precaution, is to avoid spreading information people could use to pray to them, such as their name, area of concern, iconography, or holy symbol.  You are already using a pseudonym you invented, you don’t know of any ‘area of concern’ besides inane demands for worship, …if the orb’s shape itself counts as ‘Being X’s holy symbol, we might want to keep it secret?  I’m unsure, the exact rules of how Gods pick their holy symbols for purposes of inquisitor and cleric magic are somewhat flexible.  I don’t think Being X could simply claim a mishmash of Earth religious symbols… sorry I digress.”

"It's not irrational to avoid associating with someone who is being harassed by an evil - being. That is one reason I didn't share the information right away. All I can say is that he never to my knowledge acted directly against my past associates. ...except for brainwashing Dr Schugel, even he didn't deserve that. That's - not nothing, I admit. If we can restore my memories, we might be in a better position to judge whether he is an ongoing threat."

"I don't know which information about Being X counts as letting someone pray to him but I am very invested in not enabling anyone in doing that. I can summarize the story I told you even further, avoid sharing his exact words and images of his appearance and so on, but the story itself still implies that he is concerned with reincarnation and with himself being worshipped. Terendelev already saw the orb and we might need to show it to other experts..."

"The way Golarion Gods work is that multiple factors can make it easier or harder to pay attention to a human.  Prayer makes it easier to pay attention.  Detail and accuracy in the mortal's conceptualization of the God during the prayer helps.  An established name of the God being spoken or thought about helps. Surrounding associated iconography or holy symbols of the God helps.  Being within one alignment step of the God helps.  Actions and intentions in sync with the God's own intentions and nature helps.  Being on ground consecrated to the God (or desecrated, in the case of Evil Gods) helps.  Being around other followers of the God helps.  The information you have mentioned so far would be pretty sparse for a Golarion God to use to accept prayers.  Reincarnation and desire to be worshipped just isn't much to go on.  And also if you only share the information with experts that can be trusted to be opposed to an Evil God, I think the risk is very minimal.  Of course that is all assuming 'Being X' is at least somewhat similar to Golarion Gods in the first place."

Hmm. Well, Tanya has now officially handed her case over to the experts (assuming she doesn't ask Jon to forget about it), and 'the expert highly-paid consultant says the risk is very minimal' is a quote she can rely on!

"Understood. I would appreciate your help in checking the story we tell Terendelev and any other locals. Conversely, there are other details I omitted for brevity and might not know to bring up. ...you are certain that Being X isn't a locally known god who is working within the local system?"

"I would be willing to provide such help.  I am not certain Being X doesn't have a locally known name... there are numerous semi-divine beings such as Fey Eldest and Protean Lords and Demon Lords and stranger beings such as Dark Tapestry Entities that might engage in odd activities and are less bound by divine treaties than full Gods and are willing to flout such treaties anyway.  There might be some clue if we go through your story in enough detail.  I have an encyclopedic knowledge of such beings, but that's not the same thing as expertise, and there could be some obscure clue I fail to connect."

"It could take me a long time to explain everything about my birth world in order to explain my thoughts and assumptions at the time, which is relevant because Being X was reading and reacting to my thoughts. And Terendelev is waiting. Is there something in particular I should tell you about right away?"

"I... I'll admit it's not relevant to your actions, and I'm professional enough I can ignore my own curiosities and worries... but I will admit I am both curious and worried.  Your original Earth, did it have any close calls with weapons of mass destruction?"

His voice shows some embarrassment about going off topic and some worry about the subject matter.

"It's hard to say how close the calls were, because we survived them. Many people were very worried about nuclear weapons, and certainly there were claims that we were often on the brink of self-annihilation. But in the end, of all the people killed in war over the past hundred years, only a very small fraction died to weapons of mass destruction. Now that I've served in the military I can appreciate that most of the relevant material must have been classified, so that we - the public - probably didn't have a clear understanding of the matter..."

"Nuclear weapons are terrifying but for that same reason it's irrational to give them up. They were only used once in war - at a small scale, before the truly powerful ones were developed, but still enough to wipe out a city with a single bomb. After that demonstration, everyone naturally wanted one. But once the two great powers of the time both had them, with retaliatory second-strike capabilities, they restricted themselves to proxy wars, so some people argue they helped prevent a third total war between the superpowers, which could have been catastrophic even without nuclear weapons."

"I grew up in the only country that had been targeted with atomic weapons. Sixty years after the fact, we thought it was uniquely horrific. But now that I've fought in a total war, I can't really get emotional about it. Dead is dead, no matter how cheaply or efficiently. Industrialized murder, a criminal waste of resource and potential. If we can't stop fighting wars, then the only thing that's special about nuclear weapons is that some idiot might miscalculate and end life on Earth with a nuclear winter. Of course that argument wasn't enough for mutual disarmament, since you can't prove you're not keeping some weapons in reserve... All we got was a self-interested treaty between the five or so nuclear nations to prevent anyone else from acquiring them."