Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but he can't do specific enough conditionals to get his grander ideas off the ground yet. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
Still, they're taking a chance on Lucien by approving his application to join the expedition, so he definitely really shouldn't be late for his first day of work. He also probably shouldn't be running along a poorly maintained trail in Bolivia, but between that and the possibility of being late he knows which he prefers.
Well, which he prefers right up until he's tripped on a branch and sent tumbling towards the portal.
This portal was not supposed to be one that let people through, what the heck?!
He drops about ten feet and hits solid rock. The sound of the impact echoes a bit; if he were a bat he might know anything about the shape and size of his present location but as it is there is no light at all.
Lucien lots out a short scream upon landing, which would also help if he were a bat.
He didn't hear anything crack, so that's good??? He sits u-nope not time for sitting up yet, it's time for curling up on the ground itself.
The cave does not object to this behavior.
The echoes die down. ...not all of the sounds are gone but that might be his imagination. Squelchy rustling? Distant footsteps?
It's pretty firm in this position. So to speak.
Then there are footsteps - muffled by the face-thing, so they must be pretty close - and a shout, and then Lucien's left ear is really really cold even with the thing on it, and it loosens for a moment, enough that he could gasp -
Not for long! It clamps down again. Then there's another flash of cold - and then it relaxes, and something yanks it away from his head.
He is going to be gasping for air for a good ten to twenty seconds this time.
"...gria." Sigh. "Uli." And then there's light, not much of it but enough to be blinding for a moment in the blackness.
When he's blinked the spots away, there's a purple woman with white hair wearing loose pale clothes cinched up around her arms and legs. The light is emanating from a cinch near her left elbow.
Wave wave.
"Dasar jiam." A complicated wave of the hand. She cups a hand over her ear and makes an encouraging gesture at him.
... well, the portal was in Bolivia.
"Hablo ingles?" he asks, putting his elementary school Spanish to use.
"Oh..." In retrospect it didn't make much sense for a purple portal person to know Spanish, even if the other end of the portal was in Bolivia.
"I um.... where is this?"
She points straight up to the ceiling. There is presumably a ceiling; there certainly isn't a sky. (The light doesn't really reach that far.) "Taldor?"
That is apparently a concerning thing to say. She cups her hand to her ear again.
He also finds this concerning.
"I'm from New York - uh, Earth. I think this is probably a different planet."
Shrug. ...she reaches into her backpack, and pulls out a big cloak, and makes to put it around his shoulders.
She then collects the corpse of the thing that was on his face, rips a little hooky appendage from it, and uses that to clip the cloak more closed at about waist height on him.
"-I um. Fell out of a portal that might let me get back home. If I can reach it."
She looks around. Waves her light-bearing arm a bit, then finds a pebble, says "uli" again while waving her hand, and winds up with the pebble glowing instead of the sleeve cinch; she offers him the rock.
"I-do you want me to throw the pebble at the portal?"
It has been a very long day. Except for how it's something like 9:10am and he woke up half an hour ago.
"Okay."
"Do you know if it would be possible for me to come back here later if I leave with you now."
Nod. Beckon beckon, this way. (She casts another spell occasionally as they go.)
Lucien follows, continuing to succeed at putting one front in front of the other, and not crying, and that's it, that's all he's really up to doing right now.
Eventually they start passing through caves that have people in them. His escort exchanges words with them. Sometimes they laugh.
The people who talk are all purple but they pass a group that includes a bulky blue guy with tusks, hauling a big sack of mushrooms, and one that includes some tiny people who'd come up to about Lucien's waist, bent over their own glowing objects and sewing. Some of the purple people are playing a dice game; some of them are performing mushroom-related actions of some kind that they don't linger long enough for Lucien to get a great sense of.
Lucien is confused about their being different types of suspiciously-human looking aliens, though probably this shouldn't be any more surprising than seeing one suspiciously human looking alien.
The sewing looks lower tech, which isn't great.
They come to a long tunnel and pass people going the other way, some of whom his escort doesn't actually need to talk to at all!
And eventually they are going up and down the stairs and ramps in a bunch of twisty passages and come to a cave, with a tiny person cooking in the dim firelight. His escort makes a rag hanging from the wall glow and says something to the tiny person, who replies with a deferential head-bob.
And then down the hall to this terminal cave here, just a room, not very big, with a hammock and a bookshelf and some folded up furniture made of bones.
She sits on her hammock. It looks big enough to sleep on but it's also low enough that she can sit there. She cups her ear again hopefully.
"-I'm surprised that you nod, it seems like it would be cultural and this isn't even my planet, I'm pretty sure. I'm also surprised that your planet has people who look similar to my species, and mushrooms. Probably those are good signs for whether you will have food I can eat."
She points at the ceiling. "Taldor. Qadira, Cheliax, Absalom, Kelesh... debna. Human."
"I'm really surprised that you have place names that sound like the sort of place names that would exist on Earth, and also that you have humans.... I guess this could make sense if humans came here from Earth.... it can't have been the other way around because we have a fossil record of human evolution."
"-are you able to understand me because there are other people who can speak English nearby?"
"Are you able to understand me because you have the ability to understand every language?"
"Uh, in an amount of time less than the amount of time it took for us to get here from where you found me?"
"Will you be able to talk to me again before um, I have to sleep t-actually why am I not just using normal units. How many hours will it be until you can understand me again?"
Siiiiiigh. She cups her ear and says "Dasar jiam!" Then she puts her hand flat over her ear. "Pon po dasar jiam." Then she collects some silver coins from her storage trunk, lines them all up on the floor, and dubs each one individually "dasar jiam". She picks one up; she cups her ear; she puts it back in the trunk and then flattens her hand. Then she picks up a new one, and cups her ear again.
Oh no he is being exasperating. And also he keeps having to do things and he's terrible at that it turns out.
"Sorry. Um."
"Can you only understand what I say for a brief period of time a certain numbers of times per day?"
He did a good job and she is smiling at him about this and this is very good.
"Oh uh, that's not how omniglotism works on my world.... does yours work on writing?"
"-I have a notebook and pen in my backpack, would it help if I wrote out a bunch of words so you can point to ones you want to say instead of playing twenty questions with me?"
Lucien isn't sure what the shrug is about and starts writing down every word he knows.
Useful ones! Prepositions, conjunctions, common nouns like person, cave, danger, food, dom, sub, etc.
Huh. She will try to indicate with her slate and chalk that he should write small but otherwise she'll let him get on with it.
He can do so, organizing words as he goes, to make it easy to sort through. He's sort of deciding this system on the fly and probably he can do a much better job if he'd planned ahead of time how to sort words, oh well.
She puts her coins away and pulls out her folding chair and desk that are made of bones and unfolds them while he's at it. He is welcome to sit in the chair at the desk if he would like, it'd make writing easier.
If she gestures for him to use the chair he'll do it, otherwise he's fine where he is and will let her have the desk.
So long as she's not using it he'll sit at the desk, figure out a better organizational system, and write.
His list of words is now color coded, and neatly laid out on multiple pages.
She skims through it. Can she compose "stay here while I am gone for several hours"?
Yep! She doesn't even need to leave the first page for that.
"Is there food here that is safe for me to eat while you are gone?"
Yep, "bring" is on the second page.
"Okay, um. Thank you for being so helpful."
Lucien can clean his own bowl...but not in this circumstance so sure, the small person can have the bowl.
There are now five more pages of densely packed words, a pronunciation guide, a table of contents, and - mostly but not entirely redundant with the table of contents - an instructional flow chart to tell you what page and section various things are in.
...sigh.
She ushers him out of the desk chair; she has stuff to do with this scroll and this book.
She is not going to tell him right now! Instead she is going to do her inscrutable book thing.
A couple more hours later, the scroll shrivels up dramatically, she sweeps the scraps into the chamber pot, she does a few more minutes of book things, and then, she turns in her chair and hold out her hand to him.
She says more words he doesn't understand and -
- then if he replays his audio loop, he understands them after all, they meant "Share Language".
"Bit of a waste of paper but I didn't realize you were going to carry on with it," she says, gesturing at his notebook.
"I didn't have anything else to do."
"Did you read something about how to give someone else your language?"
"I'm a psion who mostly does divination - which means I can find out the answers to the right sort of sufficiently general questions. But I get hungry if I do it too much."
"Whoa, I didn't think psions were real and never heard that they got unusually hungry."
"Well, this spell is new to me so it might have some kind of translation drawback but it could also just be that things are super different on your planet," she shrugs. "Uh, what are your most urgent practical questions?"
"How can I get a ladder and how can I make it safe for me to go back and look around for a portal? How long can I stay here?" Asking if they have vaccines, electricity, or trains isn't urgent or very practical even if it's probably more important than his comfort.
"I did not see anything that looked like a portal where you came from. Are you expecting it to be midair or along a wall? A ladder that can freestand is going to be more than twice as expensive as one that just leans on a wall."
"Midair I think, I fell out of it. They don't always look obvious from the outside. Do you know if I call sell things from my world for money?"
In his backpack he has: a notebook, a planner, a water bottle, a granola bar, a wallet, his phone and charger, five ballpoint point pens in different colors, a flashlight, and an umbrella.
"I also think my clothes might be unusually nice for Golarion."
"I don't recognize most of this stuff and I'm not an experienced fence. - and you definitely should not try to directly sell any of it yourself."
"I can show you what the things do if that helps? Why shouldn't I try to sell them myself?"
"'Cause you're a human. This is drow country. The place has drow, and slaves."
"I can escort you places, and I will do this if you have a plan that might work for getting you somewhere worth being, which 'haul a ladder to the cave where I found you' might qualify as. I am not trying to personally keep you as a slave because I do not suck and also separately am not stupid enough."
"Okay... thank you?"
Suddenly it is way more salient how cute she is, which really isn't the correct reaction to any of this.
"You're welcome. The notebook is definitely saleable, though I'm not sure I can get it to go for enough of a markup that it's not worth me just buying it off you, I go through lots of paper. Bottle will probably sell. The wrapper on the - food thing - is definitely suspicious, someone might get curious..."
"...yes, it's bad? I mean, if you want to skip out of here and tell random Chaotic Evil strangers that you're from another planet that's your lookout but I would expect the results to qualify as bad."
"-I am um. Not used to operating in societies were many people can be described as chaotic or evil."
"I was hoping once I was through the portal to return with science textbooks to advance this world's medicine and transporation and things. Are people chaotic and evil in a way that would make this difficult."
"There's probably a fine place for it up on the surface, you'd just have a time getting there."
"No. Some monsters are people but not all of them, it means the general category of wandering hazards that might attack if you went up to Taldor from down here."
Wow this place isn't very good.
"I... can probably avoid needing to go much of anywhere by figuring out telepathy, I guess."
"Probably not initially but it shouldn't take too long to get that working."
"Well, if you make it home bring more food with you when you come back, you're going to be dreadfully expensive to feed."
"Oh. I can um. Pay you back. In paper or other things from my world - we're a lot richer than here."
"I meant that once I get to my world I can get more paper and pay you back for the food."
"Paper's good. Spellsilver'll go farther at the same weight and less bulk."
"Weird. Well, if you don't have it you don't have it. Paper is good, surfacer food is good if you wanna trade it for mushrooms."
"Huh. I am still interested in them but less. I'm also tempted by the food thing but I try to avoid overspending on luxury snacks so I would not really want to pay you what it's worth and can probably flip it for more, unwrapped."
Nod. She can have all the aforementioned items.
"Is this going to be enough for you to buy me a ladder. And uh, for you to escort me with the ladder to the portal."
"I'm not going to be much help at carrying the ladder. How strong are you?"
"Not very. I think I could carry a ladder from my world that far by myself but possibly your ladders are much heavier."
"... I don't think of bones as very heavy but I've never actually held any."
It's not impossible to lift the chair but it is heavier than a comparable chair made of solid wood, let alone particleboard.
"I cannot really do that either." Sigh. "And I have just spent my scroll budget for, like, a while, but if your stuff sells really well I can maybe spring for a Fly and you can get up there that way?"
Nod. That one is pretty self-explanatory.
"Is it possible to sell my divination abilities for things."
"...risky because it is not exactly a done thing to let magic non-drow live around here but maybe, what do they do?"
"I can tell where people are, and learn aggregate statistical information about the past."
"I uh-"
"-there are circumstances where I would be inclined to help find runaway children."
"I am going to wildly guess that those circumstances are hard to filter for in this environment." Sigh. "Statistical aggregate information about the past? What's that good for?"
"I use it mostly for things like detecting the efficacy of various medical treatments."
"...if that's all it does it's pretty much worthless, all our medical treatments just, like, work, if someone in fact gets to the point of casting the spell."
"I can use it for a lot of things such that it's difficult to narrow down a good description... I can answer quite a lot of yes/no question of the form 'when this things occurs, does this other thing usually follow'. I can also figure out numbers from this, such as for how long something lasts most of the time."
"I do not immediately know how to sell that. I guess I might be able to use it gambling but that's not a scene I know how to navigate safely."
"It can probably be used for gambling.... I can get other abilities for you given time, though it might take months."
"Months of food for a medium sized person is cheaper than a scroll but not by, like, an order of magnitude."
"I'll sell some of your stuff and then I will go to my grandmother and tell her I just really really want Fly. If that is all you are going to want. If you're about to materialize another expensive need I need to do something else."
"I can't think of anything."
"If there is anything I can to help you.... I'll of course pay you back once I can get back to my world, but before then..."
"I assume you are very useful in your own context but here you kind of sound like a sorcerer who drew really badly from the spell list."
"You don't have to apologize for it, it's just, you know, inconvenient. How long will this food thing keep?"
There's a label on it somewhere...
"Two months, or uh, a maybe a day or two once the wrapper has been taken off."
She goes through each other item. "Selling these things and picking up enough other work to convince my grandmother that I've done my fair share of the work on saving up for Fly - which, like, I did, I just spent it on Share Language - will have me out of the cave a lot. You will need to wait here - you can read my books, the ones that are written in Drow, but a Light will only last so long and it will mostly be too dark for you - and not make yourself inconvenient to my mother or my little sister or any guests they might have for a slave definition of inconvenient. Do you understand?"
"I think so. Is not being inconveneint covered by me not asking for anything or making any work for anyone and doing anything I'm asked?"
"And being very deferential when you talk to any drow even if they're being flagrantly unreasonable, yes. The story I'm giving my family is that I won you in a bet. It's a little out of character for me to be betting so I was very confident and the odds were great and the girl who lost you in the bet was probably looking for a face-saving reason to not have another mouth to feed, okay? - also to be particularly clear here the only reason to have a human in particular, instead of an orc who's stronger and sees in the dark or a halfling who eats less, is basically for sex reasons."
"Do you understand. You don't have to bring it up but you cannot act like you have no idea, if it comes up."
"Yes-yes I understand." He is nodding! He would probably feel entirely differently if she weren't pretty and interesting, but as it stands he is feeling warm and nervous and this really shouldn't be the salient part of anything that's occuring.
"My mom and sister are not particularly awful but -" She shakes her head. "I'll go sell the simplest-to-move stuff and see if I can think of anyone who'll take the rest." Scoop. "Here's a light." She casts on a random pebble. Gestures at the bookshelf.
She's got a selection of novels and a book with woodcut pictures about various kinds of monster that exist and a book about topology and an atlas and some stuff that must not be in Drow.
Topology sure is a strange subject matter for her to have a book on.
He will glance through the atlas, and than check to see if any of the novels might be informative.
Depends what kind of information he's looking for. If he wants the information that drow are a matriarchal murder-happy mushroom-eating subterranean culture with a lot of slaves, the novels include this, and some background tidbits on what wizards and clerics and advanced swordspeople can do.
Honestly, he's now more confused than when he started. How exactly do wizards or clerics develop there powers - is there any information about this.
Wizards have spellbooks. The ink for them is expensive. They need to read through their spellbooks every day to prepare spells in advance to go off when called for. He's out of light now.
He has many questions for when his... captor... returns. He can't afford the calories to work on his powers so he will just... lay back. And fail at napping.
His captor is gone for about eight hours. She comes back without the stuff. She refreshes the Light for him.
"You're welcome." She stashes some coins in her trunk. "I need to sleep. I do not have any secret additional place for you to sleep, so it's the floor, sorry."
"Convenient." She gets into her hammock, apparently unbothered by the light.
She talks in her sleep, only about half in words Share Languages gives him.
He wonders how much of him liking her is a result of her personality and how much of it is because she's an attractive magic alien keeping him captive as a pretend sex slave. Probably it's a combination of the two - part of her being attractive is how she's trying to be ethical about treating him well in a society that doesn't support that, so far as he can tell.
He reads a bit more of the novel, and then falls asleep as well.
By the time he's up she's at her desk studying her spellbook, not that he can tell because it's dark. She is at any rate no longer talking in her sleep, and if he listens for breathing it's there instead of hammockward.
He has some questions but will sit and wait for her to finish before asking them.
Eventually she shuts the book and casts a fresh Light. "You sleep all right?"
"I'm pulling the shape of the spell from the magic ink and shaping it from there into a configuration that'll sit nicely on my spell scaffold and then it waits there till I cast it."
"Yeah." She flips hers open to a page and holds it up so he can see. It's a weird blobby thing with a lot of notes pointing at various bits of it.
"It's possible to transcribe a scroll into a spellbook - that's what I did yesterday - but the scroll contains more magic, you can cast the spell from the scroll directly without having it on your scaffold if you want."
"You just have to be smart enough and have hands and a voice. There are hands-and-a-voice workarounds but they're bad. - oh, also you can't be an insomniac, your scaffold degrades without really solid sleep."
"...if you want to learn my notation, you can maybe prep cantrips out of my book, when I'm not otherwise occupied. It'll take dozens if not hundreds of tries to get anywhere, though."
"Oh I don't want to inconvenience you. I am just uh, lacking for things to do right now."
"I do not have a lot you can do when I'm not around because when I'm not around your light will wear off. We haven't had a Continual Flame torch around since Sovi needed a nursemaid, the halflings just have the layout memorized and see by the cookfire in the kitchen. Messing with my spellbook is not a thing you can do when I'm not around. Do you sew?"
"I think I can sell what you're wearing for more than replacing it will cost, though you'll probably get pretty cold if I do it in that order, and then you can sit in the kitchen with the halflings and hem it or embroider it, that's cheap enough and won't look weird."
"If you don't like this idea I don't actually expect anyone to look that closely at your outfit, it could happen but you're not planning to be here long."
"No it's an okay idea and makes sense. Though I uh, assume I won't actually be helping you by doing it. Which is okay."
"Well, if you do a great job I guess I could flip the outfit again before you leave, but I do not especially need embroidery done, no."
"Well, I can attempt it if you don't have a better idea. You could probably read in the kitchen too."
"I'd be happy to do anything that would be helpful but can't think of anything that seems like an obvious option. I'd prefer reading to sewing if they are both options."
"Hanging out in the kitchen increases your exposure enough that I want you in normal clothes. Lemme take some measurements?" She produces a length of string from her trunk.
She is brisk and efficient about getting it around various parts of his person and marking the lengths with knots. And then she casts a fresh Light for him and runs off to go clothes shopping.
Lucien is discovering new things he's into at a really bewildering pace.
He looks through the atlas in more detail while Belmarniss is gone.
Golarion's continents are all on there though some of them are not in much detail and don't have any zoomed-in pages; Avistan has the most detail and there's moderate amounts of northern Garund and western Casmaron too.
She's only gone for about four times as long as it takes his Light to run out this time. She hands him some silk. "There you go."
Belmarniss is back about fifteen minutes later. "- your cinches are done up funny, you want them like I have mine," she says, holding her sleeve near the light.
"No problem." She pulls out a little stone case from her trunk and hands it to him. "Sewing kit."
"No ma'am." Wait...
...Oh well it's fine, this culture is more traditional anyways.
Lucien attempts to embroider because Belmarniss mentioned it. He pokes himself with the needle once or twice. Not on purpose but he doesn't exactly mind it.
The halflings are hard at work carrying water in and cleaning mushrooms and a handful of other ingredients and processing them into various mushroom products. They look at him and titter between themselves but don't really talk to him.
Eventually he will probably stop liking mushrooms but he'll enjoy them while his convenient preference lasts.
Belmarniss is home in time for dinner (it's mushrooms). She lights up a rock and tosses it to Lucien and beckons him back to her room.
He was beckoned!
...wow, doing nothing all day is really setting his bar for enjoying interactions very low.
"Oh good." She deposits some coins in the trunk. A halfling comes in with stewbowls for both of them.
"It's going to be at least a few days before I can hope to get the rest of the money out of my grandma."
"I have more questions about your world, if you are interested in answer more questions now. Or I can answer questions about mine, if you have any."
"Ask away. I don't have enough information about yours to even know where to start, really, if you do wind up coming back with an escort sufficient to fight your way upstairs maybe I'll come along then."
"Mostly they aren't. I don't actually know a lot about the process for the rare wizard who can finesse it. I know a little about how you get a spell to stabilize at a lower circle but still not very much."
"What do you mean by 'where'? I think they can pray for them wherever they happen to be."
"I meant do they get them from books or uh, one of your novels implied it was from some people called the Lords of the Abyss?"
"Oh, clerics don't use books. They can use scrolls but they have to be cleric scrolls, they can't use ours. They prepare spells like wizards do but they do it by praying, no spellbook, and can get whatever their god or demon lord gives out. I think surfacers mostly do gods but demon lords are more popular down here."
"Gods are... above some particular power tier, I'm not actually sure how theologians define it because I'm not a particularly religious sort, and able to empower clerics, but obviously some things that aren't gods, such as very powerful demons, can also empower clerics. Demons are Chaotic Evil outsiders from the Abyss, which is the Chaotic Evil Outer Plane."
"Sometimes, but some of it's pretty debatable, like, Cyth-V'sug could be giving some farm a bumper crop but it could be luck."
"Huh.... on my planet there's some debatable evidence for a god - or gods in general - existing, but it's not very compelling and diviners who have checked almost universally report negative results."
"...okay, well, that is not the consensus here but even if you really wanted to go to church once a week I couldn't bring you."
Nod.
"Um, this isn't related to your world but I've picked back up embroidery more easily than I expected so if there's something you want embroidered with a particular design I can probably do a half decent job at that."
"Also you're a human so you can't possibly have had very much practice, though I guess if that made you slower instead of sloppier it might work out all right since mostly this is to give you something to do."
"It is definitely making me slower, yeah. Why can't humans have much practice?"
"Yeah. Halflings can sometimes get really good at embroidery and they don't live a whole lot longer than I understand humans to do, but that's 'cause they're little, they can make teeny stitches easier, and also they aren't trying to also have a life while employed as enslaved embroiderers."
"We... probably have machines that are better than any human at embroidery on my planet, at least along some axes... and magic for people to be de-aged, but that's really expensive and the machines are much cheaper."
"Presumably, but I have never personally aspired to join the legions of the undead so I don't even know what circle you have to be off the top of my head."
"You don't have those? Zombies, skeletons, ghouls, ghosts, most relevantly liches? Stuff that runs on negative energy?"
"If somebody gets hurt and they go to a cleric about it the cleric can boop them with a healing spell, fixes that right up, and those use positive energy, whereas if a cleric is pissed off at you and wants you to shrivel up and die they'll emit negative energy, which harms, but for undead it's the opposite. Most of them are not good at, like, thinking, or anything, but some kinds can be."
"Wow that uh... started off sounding great and became horrifying very fast."
"Yeah they're not super appealing as a species transition. There's probably other ways to be immortal I haven't heard of specifically."
"Mages can reverse aging. There are also some that can do healing but non-magical healing is so much cheaper."
"But of such opaquely varying efficacy that you need to check up on it with magic?"