Tanya sets her orb to replay everything he said (appropriately sped up) and squeezes it for meaning.

So I suspect your ‘working understanding’ is badly wrong… I intend to try to explain properly in more detail.

What does he think her understanding of the gods and their treaties is? What is 'gods and their treaties' even referring to here?

She assumed the local religions were as disconnected from reality as those on Earth, but she does know of one being who styles himself a 'god' and who sometimes empower people's magic and pretends it's a 'miracle'. And where there's one, there could be others. There are all kinds of philosophical treatises about the properties a singular God must have if He existed, which proves He doesn't since Being X clearly doesn't qualify.

This planet's locals seem to be religious the way people are on Earth. They talk about 'gods' and 'angels', but when they call 'heaven' like Tanya might call up Regional Command they get a normal person and not a Being at all. Someone who takes the time to remind them of the long list of allied and enemy gods in the pre-battle briefing. Someone who emphasizes there are conflicts and treaties between the gods, that he serves one god but others have their own servants. The same gods who magically empower people on this very planet. And then he underlines that information about other planets including the ones the gods live on is not given out lightly to the people living here, and that he can only talk to her about the things that she already knows.

Maybe her earlier idea of colonialism was right. Maybe these 'gods' are metonyms for powerful planets and nations, playing pretend with the credulous natives and warning her not to ruin the charade. And maybe, just maybe...

Maybe Being X is one of them.

They mentioned resurrecting the dead and she dismissed it, but didn't Being X reincarnate her at his whim after she died?

What else did he say?

“It is completely reasonable to not know anything at all about this, especially considering your background!”

Does he mean her background as in - her actual background? Is he referring to the fact that the first world she lived on had no magic? ...Is he implying a claim that all magic comes from the 'gods' and is bestowed at their whim, and her first world was a low-intervention one?

Too much speculation. She could spin in circles like this forever. Set it aside for now.

But anyway, let’s discuss your planet first.  So… I may have actually heard of your planet ‘Earth’, it’s not one I’ve specialized in knowledge in…

'May have'? 

the most recent thing I read about it was a major industrialized war between the colonial empires centered on the continent of ‘Europe’.  This war started… 8… no 9 Earth years ago...

It's not fair to describe Germania as a colonial empire, they're practically the only Empire on Earth that doesn't have significant colonies, but he could be generalizing or - referring to the god-nations' nature again? Assuming 'empires' are naturally made up of 'colonies'? Never mind, it's probably not important.

The war started with the Legadonian border violation in June 1923 but it wasn't a war between major powers until the Republican invasion a few months later. Five years before then was... the Third Balkan War? What does that have to do with anything?

In any case he's implying she is missing between four and six years of memory and - it seems frankly improbable that her body wouldn't changed noticeably, unless she arrived here by near-lightspeed travel which... for all she knows is how interstellar teleports work... Wasn't Alpha Centauri about that far away?

I recall specifically the comment that with a better knowledge of writing treaties, the European powers could have avoided the war,

Anything is possible, she supposes, but when nation after nation unprovokedly attacks you without even a casus belli it's rather hard to keep faith that they wouldn't have just torn up a treaty that didn't suit them! Treaties can make it not in your interest to attack but that requires rational judgement; the kinds of people who start wars tend to be insane warmongers who enjoy war or who think it can redeem a nation's soul or some such claptrap.

an assassination in one minor country triggered smaller countries to go to war which drew in bigger countries via treaties until the entire continent was at war.  Does that sound like your planet?

...no? No, it really doesn't? 

But it does sound like a certain other war, though, on a certain other Earth... 

Have these people been spying on her original Earth? And their last reports are a century old? ...and they didn't notice that World War One had no aerial mages and that Earth had no magic - no, surely that makes no sense. Not unless the report on 'Earth and its recent war' was all of three pages long and Jon only read the executive summary. Which is a worrying possibility she can't quite dismiss, but -

If her arrival here causes them to take another look at that Earth, what might the unholy marriage of actually-modern military technology from the year, uh, 2027 (or is it 2032 by now?) and teleportation and mind control magic produce? On the other hand, Being X already knows about it, so it's presumably a lost cause to try to keep it a secret even if she had a stake in doing so.

If she claims to be from her first Earth she can admit to recognizing his story, but sooner or later he'll realize (or reveal he knew all along) that that Earth has no magic and she'd be exposed as a liar.

If she says the story doesn't match and describes her (second) Earth accurately, it may enable him to find it if he hasn't yet. Part of her is tempted to say that they already have Being X messing around so surely other 'gods' have to be better than that, but of course that's nonsense; there's plenty of ways for 'gods' to actively harm people if they wanted to. Introducing this interstellar civilization to Earth while Earth is behind on magical development is likely to end with Earth as another colony kept poor and ignorant.

Inventing a completely different world... no, there's no way she can do it on the spur of the moment.

Refusing to answer will presumably fail her this 'interview', even if they don't outright turn hostile, and there's a good chance Jon or his superiors can find her Earth anyway with some magic or technology she knows nothing about.

It is extremely unfair to be removed from your social and legal context and support networks and then to be asked to choose between your personal wellbeing and that of your entire planet.

...her missing years (?) still have to be accounted for and if she spent some of them on this planet then she may have told already told someone about Earth. They will certainly investigate her past; in fact it would be suspicious for her not to ask them to do so as part of her payment, she already told Terendelev she wanted to find out how she came to be wounded and unconscious outside her city - or was she only planning to tell her that...

Ugh. Tanya really doesn't want to break off relations and she wants to be caught in a lie even less, so that leaves telling the truth. Cooperating with the local authorities is surely a good thing, and she is not at all betraying her comrades' trust and her officer's commission by making a decision that just happens to preserve her own life? Isn't the argument for keeping mum essentially a conspiracy theory at this point, and not anything that she could prove? She can imagine herself making this argument before some future hypothetical court. (She can also imagine the court ordering her summary execution, but she must save her life today before she can save it tomorrow -)

Clutching that flimsy justification, Tanya slows down from her frantic mental acceleration, which was in fact starting to exceed the so-called safe limits and has already caused her heartbeat and breathing to speed up rapidly.

"That description matches only partially. The war started with an unprovoked border violation and later grew into a major conflict when a different nation invaded us. I never heard of an assassination being pointed to as a cause for the war. The war has lasted less than five years even counting from the earlier conflict; it is possible that I am missing memories of a long period, since I do not know how I arrived on this planet and am definitely missing some memories for an unknown reason - I assumed it was months at most because I would have grown noticeably over the course of a year but if interstellar teleportation obeys the speed of light then maybe I spent those months being transported?"

"...do you happen to know the current date on Earth?" She really should have thought of that question earlier.

He can tell she is using some sort of subtle haste effect on herself, and it still takes her a bit of time to respond.  Among the innocuous explanations: she is considering several perspectives on her war to see if any matched his brief description, she was disoriented by the apparent lost time, she is processing some feelings.  Among the less innocuous explanations: she is worried about how a being claiming to be from 'Heaven' might take the fact that she was involved in a war ('Some of his word associations for 'Heaven' in her native language are a bit worrying), she was crafting a nuanced lie, she was struggling with memory modifications from demons/Fey/Geryon.

He wants to help her and work together effectively with her... but maybe it would be best if his caller lets this calling expire in the hour duration and calls a different specialist tomorrow.  For his calling, Iomedae would have had to juggle multiple priorities picking out a good spotter and someone that could help someone from an unknown planet orient effectively.  A follow-up calling could take advantage of what he has learned and the lack of extremely pressing need for a spotter to get someone more suited.  In which case... he should get as much context as he can so Heaven and Iomedae can figure out which specialist to send and position Tanya to have reason to trust whoever that specialist ends up being.

"Some methods of interplanetary travel would have a travel time-" if her planet knows about the speed of light it might only be a matter a time before they figure out mass energy conversion, which is really alarming but he needs to focus, he needs just the right level of vagueness that avoid expenses. "-Earth is too far away for a speed-of-light travel time to account for such a small discrepancy.  I will note that on this planet there are many spells that could effectively achieve stasis, including spells as low as 6th circle spells, such as the combination of Stone to Flesh and Flesh to Stone to petrify and un-petrify someone.  As for your other question... a moment...." 

He reviews this question carefully.  If she isn't from the Earth that he knows of... he actually hasn't said anything expensive yet, vague facts and descriptions are cheap.  The things that would cost dramatically more would be anything enabling interplanetary travel.  Names are a notable liability, among this planet's known spells, a modified, improved Discern Location that doesn't require having met the person would provide enough information for a Wish or Interplanetary Teleport.   The exact year... maybe has some slight liability with divination spells, like helping to direct a legend lore, but shouldn't be expensive either.  He takes another moment to check his reasoning, then shifts through some advanced mnemonics to convert the Celestial date methods he knows to Earth calendars.

"Sorry for the delay, I was mentally double checking for any subtler implications or consequences of sharing that information as well as actually doing the mental math on date conversion.  The date, on the European calendar, is 1923."

He'll hold off on more specificity until she gives him a good reason.  Thinking of the European Calendar, has got him thinking about European language.  …doing comparisons on her language versus European languages... her language is definitely a European language, it's almost exactly like one language in particular, but has some very slight differences from that language... he's pretty sure it's not just regional dialects... word associations to try to bring proper nouns to mind (his Truespeech can't do this on it's own, but with his eidetic memory he can recall the names of Earth's nations and the general geographic areas of them, and if Tanya's Earth is the same it should associate names to them)… okay now he's confused!

"I noticed something else that I need to think through."

A pause.

"Can you give me some small samples of other languages from your planet besides your native one?"

Truespeech is so much better than telepathy if you know the tricks to really bend it and stretch it.

She could have been in stasis, which is at least an understandable concept, but he's saying some methods of travel (even interplanetary, not just interstellar) have no travel time - does that means information is transmitted at the speed of light and experiences no time in transit, or...? But he said she can't ask him questions about technology, and she certainly doesn't know about any technology that disproves relativity. How frustrating.

"The last date I remember experiencing on Earth was in 1927. Do you have an explanation for this that you can share with me?" She knows the right answer but she's curious if he'll admit to it first.

Here are some example sentences in the other languages she knows! Germanian and English she knows well, ditto Akinese - wait, no, she knows that from her first life, skip that entirely - and she can manage some sentences in Lebadonian, Ildonian, Ispagnan and Russy, with decreasing grammatical correctness as she goes.

From those small samples he can deliberately try for "this language from Tanya's planet".  The languages mostly match Earth languages, with small differences that could just be regional dialects, except he is normally able to navigate around dialect variations!  And some of the place names and polity names almost match in the most bizarre names, and his Truespeech can associate that they are talking about the same place!

"A moment, I am going to temporarily limit my memory to just obscurely known information from this planet and what I am sure you have told me or very clearly indicated knowing, to make sure the case I didn't introduce any secret or unknown knowledge is very strong."

He loves having eidetic memory that can temporarily isolate information!

"So, the languages you have given me samples of are almost exact matches for the languages of the Earth I know of, but there are distinct differences that I don't believe are the result of me failing to navigate regional dialects or anything mundane like that.  For example, the names of the polities associated with each language and associated with each general geographic area almost match.  'the German Empire' and 'Germania', 'United States' and 'Unified States', 'Akinese' and 'Japanese', the list goes on.  My current three guesses are..."  

One, some entity took you from the Earth I know of and heavily altered your memory, possibly up to the point of playing your mind through elaborate scenarios.  Some flaw in their translations or a deliberate calling card left artifacts in otherwise perfect reconstruction of language.  And this can only partially account for your magic and computation orb.  Of the entities that might be responsible... demons or fey might somehow waste the potential of your magic by using it as evidence in an elaborate constructed scenario, but I still wouldn't bet on it.  Other entities would be even less likely to waste the potential your magic presents this way, so I would all but rule them out entirely.  This hypothesis could be ruled out by using the 7th circle spell limited wish to attempt to restore your memories.  It has a moderately expensive material component, but it should be easily affordable with the sum that my caller promised you."  

"Two, you've somehow crossed over from a parallel or alternate reality.  I must emphasize accounts suggesting this sort of thing are not well verified.  There are some speculative theories of alternate universes, some with some decent theoretical framework about how they are magically possible, but wizards write lots of speculative theories!  This hypothesis is hard to address... a few divination spells might be able to get at alternate realities, among the speculation I've seen a legend lore might be able to give the caster knowledge of the stories and histories of your planet... although it might subtly fail and get those of the Earth I know of.  You could try talking to Nethy's High Priest... but his high priests tend to be mentally altered by the vast scope of knowledge they've seen in a way that makes them impossible to usefully understand.  I'm not sure about the current one...  Other sources of knowledge... this continent has one 9th circle Archmage that isn't Evil or inaccessible, Felandriel Morgethai, you could consult with her on the off chance she is ahead of even the obscure knowledge of this planet.  You could figure out a payment or service you can make to outsider like myself that would be sufficient compensation for the intervention budget costs of more knowledge about this area.  My memory is currently locked so I can't yet suggest more along this direction, I can reconsider once I unlock it."

Alternate realities are less insanely impossible than he is implying given the Yog-Sothoth is active on Earth.

"Three, you're from somewhere even more metaphysically distant or bizarre than alternate realities, and the method you've been transported with also translated other aspects of your existence... this would make more sense if you were transported to Earth, at the very least as an intermediary point.  Under this theory, you wouldn't have even been human to start with and your languages would have all been vastly different from Earth's to start with.  This theory sounds really bizarre, but there are actually a few obscure but relatively well documented (by the standards of this planet at least) cases of this and a handful more of possible cases!  Of the known cases... the Dark Tapestry Entity Yog-Sothoth is thought to be involved.  I would be careful to check on the legal status of knowledge of Dark Tapestry Entities before investigating this many polities ban knowledge of them entirely, and in some that don't specifically ban the knowledge, it still falls under bans of Chaotic or Evil Gods, although I would quibble about how well Dark Tapestry entities fit under the label 'Gods'.  I think a limited wish to restore your memory in an effort to address my first hypothesis might be a bit hazardous in this case, as it may make your current body and existence feel dysphoric... if you got a second limited wish on retainer you could use that to restore your form to it's original.  I will note, although I know of actual examples of reasonable veracity, this is still a very very rare phenomena, much rarer than interplanetary or interstellar travelers."

It's annoying he can mention Yog-Sothoth in relations to this theory but not his second.  He consider a moment.

"Sorry for my long windedness, I wanted to be thorough.  If you need me to recall or recount any of this later I will be able to.  Do you have any questions about these theories I should try to answer from this planet's knowledge before I undo the lock on my memory?"

He can manipulate his own beliefs to produce plausible behavior for any set of assumptions? What an incredibly useful skill for a diplomat or a spy! This tracks with the mind control - of course the benign application would be to self-modify, they can probably use it to produce perfect obedience to laws and organizations and infinite willpower and any number of other hacks. What a terrifying skill! With eidetic memory and some preparation, you can choose to remember and believe in the most useful thing in every situation.

Of course, he could be manipulating her by saying that. But supposing for the moment he's being truthful (if obscure and misleading), he's clearly familiar with her original Earth - she's going to think of them as Earth-1 and Earth-2. 

He believes, and implies that people on this planet believe - wait, did he self-modify to believe things commonly accepted here that he actually knows are false? ...Of course she can't ask him, both because he currently doesn't know and because he told her not to ask about the technology he knows about. (What a ridiculous constraint on a conversation!)

...he believes that actors technologically on-par with his own civilization (whom he's temporarily calling 'demons' in the local style due to the memory restriction) can use the same techniques offensively, not only mind-control but memory selection, to mold someone's mind into an almost-arbitrary desired shape.

This is possibly the most repugnant thing Tanya has ever heard. (Not counting false things, of course, like 'demons' eternally torturing people in 'hell' for the edification of the righteous in 'heaven'.) And he's saying it might have been done to her. That it's unlikely, because most people are rational actors and there are much better uses for a Tanya (or at least a Tanya placed on this planet) than to mess with her memory. 

Except that's a false logical implication. If Tanya is heavily modified, if she was (to entertain the argument) customized or even created from whole cloth, then who can say that there are better uses for such power? If Tanya isn't a single-use resource, if you can clone or create Tanyas, then you can do pretty much anything and everything, all at the same time! If you can kidnap Tanya from Earth-2 then you're not limited to her orb, you can collect dozens of orbs of that model alone and the industrial process that produces them along with everyone working on the project! You can copy the orb once you have a working example - people on either Earth could do it - you can kidnap more mages from anywhere in the world...

Tanya has a well-justified opinion of her own skills but, unique personal memories and unusual age aside, she is not a unique and irreplaceable specimen of either a mage or a military officer. She is a cog in the great machine of society; an important and valuable cog perhaps, one worth maintaining and replacing, but what truly matters is the machine, for the system to work she must be replaceable and if she wasn't the system could never have been built.

...she really isn't sure whether she should point this out, either now or after he 'unlocks' his memories - which were presumably already edited before he came here, so, after he restores them to their previous arbitrarily-modified-slash-chosen state.... ugh. Tanya has always believed in cooperation given a reasonable presumption of good faith and rational choice theory, but she's experiencing an inchoate sense of uncertainty and dread that she doesn't have enough time to reflect on. Can you really negotiate with people who mentally modify both themselves and others? Don't you need to understand the collective, the system behind them, because the person is transient?

"It will take me some time to think through the implications of what you've said."

"Regarding the... metaphysical possibilities, I don't understand the practical implications they imply. Whether I'm from a planet distant in space or one in an 'alternate reality' or some other possibility, if all of those places really exist and are reachable through different means, is there a difference beyond the practical difficulties or costs of accessing each one?"

"Regarding the possibility that my memories were altered or chosen, and indeed that I as a person was deliberately created. It is, tautologically, not something I can prove or disprove by introspecting. But supposing that were the case, then restoring some previous person who lived in this body would mean, in effect, killing me."

"If I can restore memories that are guaranteed to be true, that were only erased or blocked, or if I can otherwise learn about my past, I want to do that. If there were a only few false memories planted, I would want to remove or repair them. But if it's a matter of realizing many and perhaps all of my present memories are false, to the extent I could start feeling bodily dysphoria, then obviously I would resist that as a matter of self-preservation." And that is not a matter on which she will negotiate.

"Regarding the rest, knowledge of opposed gods and such, it seems prudent to wait for you to reconsider the matter with more knowledge available." As opposed to different knowledge available, augh.

"Sorry I wasn't clear with the bottom line.  For the first and third possibility, there are well known, well used Limited Wish wordings for restoring memories, including variant wordings that would only restore memories below a certain level of trauma or avoid memories that would drive you to insanity or psychological discontinuity.  The limited wish wording can guarantee that it does nothing if it would otherwise completely overwrite your current mind.  The limited wish can restrict any memories gained to just erased or blocked.  Given that you have a gap in your memory, you would probably want to consider this option anyway." 

"For the second possibility, if it genuinely is an alternate reality... the difference between alternate realities and interplanetary travel matters for if you wish to return home.  If it is 'merely' interplanetary travel required, you might need enough money to either pay for an Archmage like Morgethai to reinvent or rediscover Interplanetary Teleport or pay for the expensive material component of a Wish, but it is achievable, there are many well documented cases of interplanetary travel within this system.  There are much rarer, but still well attested to, cases of interstellar travel.  There are no known consistent ways of travel between alternate realities.  Wish... sorry I don't know if anyone has explained Wish or Limited Wish to you yet.  Basically, these spells can do nearly anything, as specified in a brief sentence, within some limit of power, but there are only a narrow subset of things they can do consistently and safely.  Limited Wish can do anything in the range of power of a 5th or 6th circle spell, with duplication of existing spells being consistently derivable, and it has a few other known reliable effects, such as undoing otherwise irreversible harmful spells.  Wish can do a lot more.  But a Wish to return to an alternate reality would likely require a novel wording different than the one for transporting vast interstellar distances to any known plane.  I'm not sure, you would have to consult a 9th circle Archmage.  And they couldn't really guarantee any safety trying to transport you with a novel wording, it would be very risky."

"Is there anything else I should clarify before I restore my memories?"  Hurry up he should not have said to research Dark Tapestry Entities and he needs to correct that.

"Or if you have other questions you want to ask while you're sure it won't cause any treaty-budget problems for me?"

Of course they have well-tested spells for common needs like restoring memories while avoiding trauma and not accidentally overwriting her complete mind. Those minor difficulties were long ago ironed out by generations of memory-crafted spell engineers and the modern variants are guaranteed perfectly safe!

She will... not think about it for a while. Like a whole few hours, how about that. She is theoretically in the middle of a combat mission and even more theoretically in the middle of interviewing for a job she is not at all certain she wants anymore and she can afford to have her existential crises later.

Paying someone to "rediscover or reinvent" a technology that is known to exist is - not insane, reverse engineering is obviously easier than inventing novel things, but if the locals can do it then why are they not doing it without someone paying them??? Do they not want to be able to travel to other planets? Is that not the kind of thing they could charge a lot of money for? It's not as if she's even injecting money into the economy, it's all coming from Terendelev! Anyway, that apparently doesn't cover interstellar teleport.

Does she want to go home? ...she does not know enough to say, obviously, she doesn't understand this planet let alone the one Jon is from and keeps being shocked by new information. She doesn't know how long it's been (and how long it would be before she can go home) and what state her home would be in. She doesn't know what she did during the missing period of time, some of which she presumably spent on Earth. She doesn't know if her new - associations would follow her, or whether they would go to Earth anyway regardless of if she comes along, and whether she'd want to be there with them and possibly be known as the one who brought them there.

She doesn't know almost anything, really. She shouldn't be making big decisions or declaring what she wants. She should be learning things, and finding safety and local backing and steady income without committing to anything long-term if at all possible.

A spell for "doing anything that can be expressed in a single sentence" is - presumably a way to transmit the wish to someone from Jon's civilization who decides what to do about it? She can't really conceive of another way it could work. That makes sense; Jon is still limited to what the locals know.

"I think that is all. ...if I ask a question later that you'd have trouble answering, couldn't you self-modify again to answer it as the locals would, and tell me which answers are which?" She is going to have such a terrible time keeping track of this dual personality thing. No wonder Jon cared so much about having eidetic memory!

"I could do this again yes...  it isn't standard practice to use the memory techniques I'm using in this way.  Normally I will just carefully qualify when my answers are with reference to this planet's knowledge and explicitly say that, but the question of alternate realities was esoteric enough I wanted to be extra sure.  Now if you give me a moment I will restore my memories..."

Okay that is extremely urgent, and a clear example of why those techniques are not standard!

"Urgent correction on something I said, Dark Tapestry Entities are not safe to research.  Key pieces of information about some of them can attract their attention and/or drive people insane.  In the most extreme cases, merely thinking too hard about a name can have that affect.  Yog-Sothoth is not one of those entities, but some related entities are!"  His voice, which has been calm and level throughout almost all of their conversation is showing some worry.

Any other critical misunderstandings... none at first review, but maybe Tanya will reveal she understood something different.

"Sorry... this fact is inconsistently known on this planet, but with just access to this planet's knowledge I misgauged the risk as overzealous superstition.  I suppose that is one reason why mid-discussion temporary memory locks are not the standard practice for management of information-based divine intervention treaty limits!"  His voice shows some embarrassment. 

Seriously? After all his talk about eidetic memory and safe memory spells, he went and did something outside standard practice which he immediately regretted?

...maybe 'Jon' isn't such a senior and experienced manager after all. He is that to Terendelev, because to her he's an emissary from her literal gods. In his own organization he might be some low-rung employee assigned to the dead-end job of handling calls from low-tech reservation planets. Tanya is beginning to recontextualize his obsessive repetition of god-lists and divine laws and treaties.

It seems the so-called 'divine' people can still make mistakes, they don't have themselves modified (or modify themselves) to never do so. They still have flaws after going through training or require training on-the-job instead of all being clones of the best employee of the century. This makes Tanya oddly cheerful. 

Rational management of human resources is the key to civilization, but the essence of humanity is building machines out of people, not becoming machines themselves. The elegance of a well-run organization lies in the way individual incentives align, not the way they are suppressed or overwritten. Specialization, division of labour, freedom are all the same thing in the end: they are meaningful only because people are different from each other. A manager who demands utter perfection rather than adapting the system to his resources ends up demanding uniformity, otherwise known on a societal level as Communism. Besides, with identical perfection nobody would need a manager in the first place, which is how Communism disproves itself in practice.

The idea of knowledge dangerous to possess because some entities or factions want it to remain secret and have a way of finding leaks sounds like standard disinformation slash foreign intelligence work. Tanya is already well over her head in foreign interests and isn't going to touch anything that isn't obviously relevant to her and is known to aggressively police its interests. For all she knows, Jon's own organization (polity? faction?) is behind some of the ones he mentioned.

"Thank you for the warning. I see no pressing reason to investigate any such entities even absent a risk." Hopefully that will be reassuring.

So... he's been thinking about what topic to raise next.  He isn't well practiced on comforting mortals dealing with the existential problem of being stranded in an alternate reality or having their entire memory erased!  A lot of the standard lines for being stranded far far away ('let us say a prayer for your loved ones, wherever they are') won't work in this case.

How about he moves on to some mostly positive news!

"Moving on to some good news... divine treaty limits on information sharing definitely don't cover your actions and things you do with your own knowledge, and my faction, that is Heaven as a whole and Iomedae in particular, are overall in favor of a technological, scientific, and industrial revolution on this planet!  An allied God, Abadar is even more strongly in favor!  Iomedae and Abadar did not and do not have the intervention budget to directly cause such a revolution ourselves, but enabling a mortal is something we can afford.  From the way you talk and the things you've mentioned I'm sure you remember at least a few major points of science and technology (and don't forgot this planet has lots of mind and memory augmentation magic to help you recall everything)!"

And to get to the part that should really appeal to her...

"The divine treaties will make it harder for Iomedae or Abadar to directly pay you themselves (on this planet), but Abadar's Church on this planet has the financial means and motive to compensate you fairly for enabling such a revolution.  If you only remember a few general principles of science or examples of technology, payment might be, well still quite a lot actually.  If you remember any specifically valuable pieces of technology or science, they could make you the single wealthiest person on this continent!  If you remember a lot, well, you could be the wealthiest person on this planet.  Iomedae's Church would also pay you, up to whatever Abadar's Church would (depending on what you negotiate for), but I must admit they would be a lot less financially capable of paying you in advance.  But if you have any altruistic goals you would like to achieve with such resources, for example: universal public education, more equitable standards across genders and races, or more democratic governing institutions, Iomedae's Church would be well positioned to help you achieve them.  Not that you couldn't also work with Abadar's Church!  The trade off is mostly you wanted to forgo some payment or share of profits upfront to start on progress on those altruistic goals in the process of achieving an industrial revolution or if you wanted to make lots of money first and then donate as you see fit.  I'm strongly in favor of either of these options over the status quo on this planet!  And of course you can work with both of their Churches at the same time in whatever combination is compatible with the intellectual property and compensation agreements you come to with them!"

He isn't charismatic, but he is clearly very enthusiastic!  His voice is filled with happy excitement, it is the most emotions he has shown so far.

"There are some caveats and some downsides, but I'll give you a moment to process the good news first."

At first Tanya speculated this planet was a low-tech backwater too expensive to trade with for it to be profitable to uplift it, because of limits on material transport in teleports. But that wouldn't limit information and technology transfer. If a small city can call in an offplanet consultant on ten minutes' notice (unless he was already posted on this planet?) then the only thing stopping him from telling the locals about science and democracy and so forth was company policy, as part of a status quo between an unknown number of parties enforced by treaties.

Her next thought was that this place was something like a reservation deliberately kept low-tech. But if Jon is openly (well, in private, but still) encouraging her to try her hand at technology transfer, and even offering to pay her indirectly, wouldn't it still be blamed on his faction?

"It seems that I indeed don't understand what the non-intervention treaties are intended to accomplish," she admits. "I assumed the goal was to maintain some status quo. If it's in your interests for me to enable this technology transfer, why didn't your faction bring in someone else from Earth or another planet to do that? If the treaty prohibits you from bringing in someone who will share their knowledge, why did you speculate that other gods' factions could be the ones who brought me here, since it would fairly predictably have that outcome? What is the treaty supposed to accomplish, and is it successful at that?"

Well, so much for the fun distraction of all the extreme sums of money 

"The goal is not to maintain status quo, the Gods have contrasting interests, often directly opposed.  Unlimited interventions and counter-interventions would be very outright destructive to the material plane.  When the God Aroden died a century ago and a lot of existing treaties broke down, the resulting conflicts between Gods caused widespread famine and destruction.  The Worldwound was opened during this time when a Demon Lord, a kind of Chaotic Evil Demigod that doesn't obey many of the treaties, took advantage of the chaos to carry out his plan.  A constant never ending hurricane started during that time in a continent to the south, and it is still going to this day.  The treaties have since been reestablished.  So, even many Evil and Chaotic Gods are willing to negotiate to avoid such outcomes where everyone that isn't in favor of total nihilistic destruction loses.  You can't have disease without living creatures that can catch them, for example.  This treaty balance includes knowledge.  We would love to go explain, drawing from an example in your language 'vaccination and inoculation', but the Evil God of disease directly opposes that.  Conversely, the Evil God of disease, given the chance, would love to grant her followers knowledge of how to magically engineer even more deadly plagues.  So we were at a mostly status quo equilibrium, where the Gods would nudge mortals or provide a bit of extra help, but couldn't change things too dramatically because other Gods will counteract it and they were all in a delicately balanced treaty.  The equilibrium is a lot less status quo now, prophecy and foresight broke with the death of Aroden, so the treaties are less delicately balanced, and Gods are a lot less able to anticipate mortal's actions in advance."

"Uh... I realized a threw around a lot of terminology that may not be translating informatively.  Let me know of any terms I should provide more details on.  Like 'Demigod' or clearer explanations of alignments such as 'Chaotic' or 'Evil' or 'Lawful'.  Or 'foresight', the connotations I'm getting seem a bit wrong and mostly fictional."

"As for your questions...  We couldn't afford to directly pluck someone from Earth.  We could maybe afford to direct someone that is already capable of traveling interstellar distances by some other means, I'm not sure, it depends on the circumstances?  Demon Lords often ignore the treaties when they can.  Fey Eldest sometimes ignore them.  The treaties allow for cheap counteractions against treaty violators, but even so Demon Lords and Fey Eldest can get away with some.  The treaties are overall successful at preventing total destruction, but, well, you're at the Worldwound where demons have crossed over to the material plane and seek to overrun it, so the treaties aren't totally successful."

"Many of the words you're using translate to - preexisting concepts in the languages I know, except that most of those concepts don't refer to anything real and they carry cultural baggage that may bias my understanding no matter how much I try to ignore it. I find it easier to use neutral terms like 'factions' and 'entities', or names that don't translate, like Iomedae, but I don't know how much intended nuance is lost that way."

The infantry flushes out another demon from a house and she shoots without pausing. It looks like they've finally learned how to bait the enemy into the open without engaging in melee.

"I would greatly appreciate a more - structured explanation of all these factions and alliances and terms. I think I should have a study plan, with resources like books or classes or tutors, and I expect it will take me some time to gain a broad understanding. I suspect our time now is best spent on things which are more urgent or which the locals don't know or can't teach me as effectively. Are there any more such subjects before we return to this one?"

"Regarding your suggestions about sharing technology and about the causes I might promote, I am very much in favor of all those things." They might not the most important things to her from a starting point of 'swords, longbows and teleportation', but she is definitely in favor of equal rights and universal public schooling! 

As for being the wealthiest person on the continent, she'd really rather not, it sounds like a terrible headache that would make her a target besides. She wants to be safe, comfortable, able to retire early if she has to, able to buy things or go places on a whim. Wealth she can't expect to use herself might as well go to charity. ...unless she needs to be that wealthy to purchase transport offplanet, she supposes, in which cases after she does she won't be wealthy anymore.

...that's assuming this place has invented finance, which might be a tad optimistic. She hopes Terendelev doesn't intend to give her a huge pile of literal coins in a vault.

"I will lean towards using more abstract terms and direct names."

"Among the urgent things, I'm not sure if I communicated the implication just now so I will state it explicitly.  Evil Gods and Gods opposed to mortal technological advancement will want to to assassinate you and soul trap you beyond the possibility of resurrection.  -which reminds, me I think I noticed you politely indirectly indicating some skepticism about that class of divine magic earlier?  The spell Raise Dead, at least, is common enough you should be able to arrange to directly witness it.  For the immediate term, information about your existence and origin from a technologically advanced planet should be handled carefully.  The Demon Lords are likely already paying attention but other Evil Gods may not yet be, and the easiest way for them to learn of you will be through mortal cultists.  Over the longer term you'll want precautions against assassination such as protective magic items and bodyguards.  Probably also an insurance policy covering resurrection and soul recovery- the Church of Abadar sells insurance, including for that."

"For your broader education, books and tutors and a study plan all sound good.  It make take some care to adequately cross the cultural differences..."

That's at least eighty percent less judgemental translations! Tanya is grateful for the effort and will overlook the remaining 'evils' sprinkled throughout. The existence of insurance as a concept is also welcome news.

Tanya knows from personal experience that souls exist and can be reincarnated; it is not an enormous leap to imagine that they can be reattached to a repaired body. She dismissed resurrection earlier as standard religious pablum, but if it's really available on demand and there's enough of a free market that people can buy insurance then it's much less likely to be a con. 'Divine magic' means it's provided by one of the superior civilizations and the technology isn't shared with the locals - presumably this is not one of those cases where she can just pay someone to reinvent it, there are levels of ridiculousness she will not accept no matter who says it. 

If true, this would be the strongest evidence by far that the treaties limiting the spread of technologies are very well enforced, presumably by murdering anyone who steals or reverse-engineers the raise dead spell. 

"How common is this? Are rich and powerful people always revived? What percentage of the population can afford this, out of pocket or via insurance? Is the insurance subsidized by the government or legally mandated or regulated? Which 'divine' factions provide these services and how much do they discriminate who to sell to or at what price? How is the insurance against soul, uh, trapping implemented, do the Abadarans just pay the divine faction that trapped the relevant soul?"

"Raise Dead is 5th circle and standard to all clerics, that means basically all factions with clerics of the necessary power have access to it.  It requires an intact corpse that did not die more than two days ago per caster circle, 9 to 10 days ago for typical casters.  The duration it can work for can be increased by a 2nd circle spell Gentle Repose.  It fails against targets that have hit an age limit for their species - this is partially an external imposition by one of the more powerful entity 'Pharasma' and her faction, she opposes mortal material plane species obtaining immortality.  It leaves lingering weakness in the subject brought back, but this can be fixed by a 4th circle spell.  Usage of this spell is limited by the fact it requires expenditure of expensive material, a 'diamond'..."

He is careful to use the Hallit word, he hopes Tanya's translation can determine what it means.  (And make her incredibly wealthy by sharing synthesis techniques or at least basic knowledge of the chemistry!)

"With the material cost, it can be a bit pricey for the lower end of the wealthy, but the extremely rich almost always use it.  And... I realize I haven't explained afterlives yet, which I suppose might sound extremely fake to someone from a world with no divine intervention and the wrong types of magic for testing their existence?  I will delay explaining that to answer your other questions."

He isn't going to apologize for being wordy.  She asked like 5 questions all at once, so evidently she wants the detailed answer.

"I don't think anyone is subsidizing or mandating insurance... the Abadarans favor free market operations and would be opposed to it on general principle, but I'm not certain there isn't anywhere that doesn't have the right conditions.  The Abadarans have a theocracy in Osirion... it is a recent development in the past century, but I think purchasing reasonable levels of insurance is more strongly socially expected than legally mandated... sorry this is a tangent.  There are two stronger resurrections magics that are publicly known about, they require even bigger 'diamonds' and can resurrect someone that died decades ago, Resurrection is 7th circle and needs only a tiny part of the original part, True Resurrection is 9th circle and needs no body part at all.   Oh... and I guess for completeness I should mention undead creating spells, which can create an entity using the dead body and the original soul, except heavily psychologically warped and damaged, almost always in monstrous directions, such as having a hunger for living flesh.  Overall... insurance prices are set by risk, so costs vary based on lifestyle.  Adventurer's make a lot of money, but face a lot of risk, but can generally afford insurance for it at around 3rd circle.  Wealthy merchants with low risk lifestyles can afford insurance.  Most cleric will take money for raising the dead if the person isn't outright an executed criminal or member of an enemy polity.  The Abadarans generally avoid policies vulnerable to blackmail or incentivizing undesired actions, so I think the soul-trapping insurance usually pays for a bounty on recovering the soul?  As for overall commonness... surviving up to 9th circle and getting into enough high stakes battles is hard, most Gods have to simply pay the raw budget costs to raise a 7th or 8th circle to 9th circle, so they only have one 9th circle cleric each.  I'll note you said something earlier that made me suspect you had a confusion about this process of growing stronger."

"That is a lot of details, feel free to ask about which pieces are most confusing or feel the most urgent to you, otherwise I will keep trying to explain, there are a lot of things to explain."

So there's a complex multipolar balance between factions, with at least one powerful faction opposing revival beyond certain limits and the balance falling somewhere around "very few but not none", but the quota is then allocated by local markets. This is presumably a compromise: they wanted a low-tech reservation but then competing factions inevitably wanted to revive their favorite people, so the rules were loosened a little - you can revive people but only a few and they come back weaker and it costs you valuable resources, and also your enemies can revive you under mind control as a form of torture or something.

Tanya supposes that's one reason to want to be the richest person on the continent, except that it's a zero-sum game deliberately instigated by the outside civilization. Keep the locals scrabbling and jostling for 'divine' favor, tell them that there are factions and they should pick the right one, but make it clear that if they go against the rules of the game and try to obtain the technology for themselves then all of the factions will promptly unite to eliminate them.

Is this the equilibrium when more than one of Being X play their sick games with a planet? They lean on people's rational self-preservation instinct to keep them at odds? Well, they can presumably deal with all the people of the planet uniting against the 'gods', and ruining their petty little game is not rationally worth everyone dying or being mind-controlled.

Tanya... presumably can't get anywhere by defecting against this system. But she really, really doesn't want to cooperate with it. 

(Requiring payment to be specifically in diamonds is weird but not weird enough to draw her attention. In any case, if the supply increases the price will presumably increase to offset it; the purpose of the system is to produce artificial scarcity.)

...she should say something. Ideally something which doesn't make it clear she really dislikes Jon and his employers. What else did he mention? 

"If souls exist and can be revived, even when the original body is completely destroyed, then it is obviously possible to revive them somewhere else."

"Yes, the oldest God 'Pharasma', who has a strong first mover advantage and a plurality of total power across all God-factions, draws souls into her court, where she sorts them into one of 9 afterlives... 3 are absurdly insanely horrible, preferences vary about the others.  This can be verified with scrying on dead people, with is 5th circle for clerics and wizards have optimized a variant down to 4th circle.  Recent developments of scrying techniques allow two way communication across scries.  Planeshift, which is 5th circle for clerics and 7th for wizards can enable direct travel to these afterlife planes.  Pharasma accounts herself as True Neutral, but my faction believes sending people to torture dimensions is incredibly Evil and should not be done to anyone, ever, even if those people were themselves 'Evil' or 'deserved it' by some accounting."

He is trying to keep his explanation concise, but he wants to get ahead of the obvious doubts and heresies and start working towards addressing the thing were Tanya reads as 'Lawful Evil'.

People who are raised religious and then become atheists through rational reflection often experience emotional distress. It's not merely learning you were wrong as a matter of fact; it's the tearing away of a cherished, desperately desired belief that the universe is moral and righteous and fundamentally just, that death is not the end, that good deeds are rewarded and so are rationally indicated.

Tanya is experiencing a somewhat similar distress, except that in her case she is having to let go of her cherished belief that the enormous atrocities commonly ascribed to the gods are as fake as the gods themselves.

Certainly, Being X exists and handles some of the dead, but Tanya's case was clearly exceptional: other people don't remember their past lives, let alone on other planets. Oh, he claimed that souls that achieve enlightenment are rewarded somehow, but if the price for that is worshipping him then Tanya would rather stay mortal, at least if he didn't keep interfering with her life or reincarnating her in progressively worse places out of spite. (Honestly, he said a lot of nonsensical and contradictory-sounding things during that meeting and some of them are probably just wrong or something.)

Sending people to hells is a common feature of Earthly religions. Giving people spells to view the suffering of those consigned to them is an obvious and rational tool for managing a subservient population. The local religions presumably instruct people on what to do to avoid the hells, or maybe they just make them compete for the gods' favor. A simple and efficient way to align incentives: Tanya will have to fall in line.

Unless they all demand honest worship like Being X does. In that case they might as well mind-control her and be done with it.