Chris's goal is to think about the issue at hand.

It is not completely trivial to focus on the issue at hand.

The spell allegedly causes desertions. He is not about to stage a medical emergency to get an excuse to leave and it doesn't feel particularly tempting, but … oh, someone should talk to Blai about winter-over syndrome and T₃, maybe get him to hit himself with a Remove Disease if that helps. They have thyroxine but Blai does not seem the type to accept medications he doesn't critically need … okay, he should explain that the doctor is under oath to not harm the patients while he's under truth spell and he is really quite sure that the doctor would both knows what he's doing and would not intentionally harm a patient. And then mention winter-over syndrome.

He maybe doesn't want to focus on the issue at hand because he's not 100% sure that nobody is doing any shenanigans. Sometimes portions of the government do sketchy things and don't tell Congress, which means they might also not tell Ambassador Geary, and it would probably be reasonable for the president to refuse to let a magic alien cast spells on him. And "more aliens might show up with more truth magic" isn't the world's most credible threat. For all the government knows, they've just been transmitting false data and someone's conlang experiment and managed to do a good job putting costume makeup on a guy.

If Blai stays they can maybe swing it but if Blai doesn't even show up in DC he's not going to be able to say under truth spell that he's sure they can swing it.

He's just going to have to tell Blai to keep the page, though. He said that Blai should use it as leverage, and that was probably correct, and Blai listened, and now he's going to use it as leverage. God fucking damn it. Or, well, don't, the whole point is not having cults of evil gods, which is more important than magic, but if the only magic thing that ever happens is that an alien briefly shows up in an isolated Antarctic base and then leaves without leaving any cool alien tech behind for reasons which are arguably Chris's fault, he is going to regret it for the rest of his life, and it will probably drive people insane, and everyone will call him a liar.

It's probably not that likely to happen. For that to happen, Blai would have to disappear, and nobody from his world would ever make contact, even though they have a ton to get from contact. It just feels like there's a normal state of the world, and for a brief moment he might have gotten to be involved in discovering the sort of thing you dream about as a kid, FTL and aliens and such, and not minor details of the effects of Antarctic ice on neutrino behavior, but this is a fundamentally unstable state that will snap back to normal at the slightest provocation. This is a stupid mode of reasoning to use and he should not use it.

He should make sure Blai's loadout includes a guide for aliens who want to find Earth, though.

Also for some reason, even with the knowledge that someone has supernatural powers that are allegedly from a god, this doesn't seem to make him stop taking the Lord's name in vain. He doesn't even really feel bad about it. Which is strange, right, he should feel bad about it. Why doesn't he?

He's maybe just actually not religious. Not struggling with faith, he just doesn't have it at all. It kind of seems like this is a high-stakes scenario, of the sort that God might reasonably want to involve himself in if he existed, and he hasn't been involving himself at all. Not just with him, nobody on the base has been told anything or discerned anything through prayer, and if anyone in the government has they haven't mentioned it. And he isn't surprised by that, not in the least, it all seems perfectly as expected.

Blai's theories of what gods can and can't communicate don't explain it either, because there are plenty of people go around claiming that God helped them win sports games or that they were going to have a baby, which is not really what one would prioritize with a limited budget – people who are going to have babies tend to figure it out! Cheering for sports teams is fun but it doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things how good a season the Lakers have!

He's maybe still going to pray about this, because doing some kind of magic that makes you feel like you're thinking more clearly but also convinces you God doesn't exist is the kind of thing the devil might do, but he's going to feel really really silly doing it. And then he really ought to tell at the very least Blai that he deconverted.

It is probably possible to do better than "just never use the spell" regarding Owl's Wisdom distribution, though, people have a sense of who's more or less stable and it's probably better than nothing.

And then the spell wears off, leaving Chris a bit mentally fatigued.

He sighs and has Kevin translate to Blai.

"I don't think I'm 100% sure about the government deleting their un-redacted copies of the Acts. You can keep your page and save the spell capacity, though it might be nice to talk to you about medicine and you might want it for that."

Blai nods. It would be, not a vanishingly rare government but a striking one, that could just straightforwardly follow through on something like that. "Why might I want a truth spell for medicine?"

"Two things. One, there's a chance you're getting something we call 'winter-over' syndrome, where you can get a bit worse at thinking and sleeping and such. It's not contagious and it goes away when you leave. Part of the problem, if you have it, can sometimes be issues with an organ we call the 'thyroid', over here."

He indicates a spot on his neck. (Kevin pulls up a picture, in case Blai looks.)

"Its job is to release some stuff, but people here for the winter sometimes end up with the wrong amount of stuff, and you can use" he sighs "blood tests to check whether it's putting the wrong amount of stuff into your body. And then take medications for the stuff. Now, plenty of people have done winter terms without testing for this issue, and been fine, but you might want to be at your sharpest."

"I'm not going to tell you that there's no way anyone could harm you by having a sample of your blood. But the only way I know of to do that is by getting information from the blood that makes it easier to track you when you don't want to be tracked, not something that directly harms you. Also, a lot of doctors take oaths to not harm their patients, even if their patients are enemy soldiers or such, and ours is one of them. He's not going to analyze your blood like that, or give you things he thinks will poison you. Though sometimes people pretend to be doctors, or doctors break their oaths."

"The other one is vaccines. If you go home, I think the people who wrote your information package really want you to start a vaccination program, and honestly so do I. Unfortunately, the idea probably looks really suspicious. The basic principle is that you give people a dead or weakened form of a disease, or a weak disease that's similar to a lethal disease, or such, and then they get a little bit sick but their body learns how to fight the disease, so then when they get the real thing they're a lot less likely to get sick. It really works. We have had huge declines in how many children die and a significant part of it is due to vaccines. If you stay here, it would be nice if you got vaccines against our diseases. You don't legally have to, but it might save Iomedae some energy, or be a good backup if you end up more vulnerable for some reason, and it would set a good example for others."

"Would it be possible for me to maintain line of sight to my blood sample until such time as it can then be destroyed?"

"Probably? Someone can ask. There's also going to be a bit of blood residue on the needle, and whoever draws your blood will probably be reluctant to hand you a used needle, but you are a special case and can probably promise that if you stab yourself with a used needle you accept responsibility, I guess."

"...why would that rate as a thing I would need to accept responsibility for?

"Because once the needle's been used, it's blunter and dirtier and more likely to harm you? It's not, like, something weird and special about our needles."

"Actually the needles here retract into the tube after they're used."

And then something in English.

"Oh, in that case maybe it's fine. …and the habit people are trained on is to bandage the site the moment the needle is removed, and the bandage can get a few drops of blood on it, but you get to keep the bandage. Oh, and usually our disposal method is just packaging up garbage to be brought to the mainland and disposed of there but we can probably burn a bit of stuff or give it to you to dispose of, if there's a spell for it?"

"Burning it should be fine."

"Do you want any more technical detail on anything?"

"Would you expect anything the doctor might want to give me to show up to Detect Poison? Alcohol does though with experience it's possible to tell if it's just that or that and something else."

"I don't know how Detect Poison works. Here we have a saying that 'the dose makes the poison'. If someone puts a bit of wine in a stew, does that detect as poison to you?"

"No, because the alcohol cooks off."

"Okay. Uh, are you familiar with the spice nutmeg? Kevin can pull up a picture."

"No, that doesn't look familiar."

"Drat. Uh, the thing I was going for is that if you put a little bit in a food, it can taste nice and you're fine, but if you eat a lot of it, you get sick and hallucinate. A lot of medications are the kind of thing where if you take the prescribed amount, it does things which are on balance helpful, but if you took a handful you'd get sick."

"That would probably show up as not poison if I looked only at the amount I was intended to take and it would not in fact do me harm."