That will definitely get Merrin to make a face? “…Maybe? If you’re not counting me reading reference material, I do need that. I feel like there’s got to be an easier way to test it, though, it’s going to be massively more inconvenient to do metallurgy without using my gear at any stage of the process.” 

"I would, at this point, be interested in seeing any set of steps that you can supposedly sit down and do without possibly-Dark-Tapestry materials, to arrive at a result no one from Golarion would know to predict.  I don't know everything an alchemist from Golarion knows, but I do know that if they knew how to refine spellsilver more easily they would already be doing it the easier way.  For that matter, I know that we source the strongest acids used in making spellsilver from the City of Brass in Elemental Fire, so if it's easy for you to show me how I myself could make strong acids adequate to the process, then it proves you have real knowledge and not just eldritch equipment or specialabilities."

…This is a weirdly difficult prompt, actually. That’s not Merrin’s thing! She’s not into Cool Science Tricks, really, her thing is whatever works to keep people alive in weird emergencies. Some of her trainings involved less and lower-tech gear than what she had for this one, but she can’t think of anything that came up in her actual Exception Handling work that could be done with only basic local materials and would look impressive. Like, sure, she can light a fire without any fire lighting tech - that wasn’t even Exception Handling stuff, that was Kalorm showing off - and, like, alternate-Estha's planet clearly has basic nonmagical tech, they use metal, they have textiles, they can presumably nonmagically light fires. 

If she were more of a protagonist she would know how to make strong acid or something from, what, rocks? even if she arrived on a planet with nothing but her clothes? - as it is, she's pretty sure she can make hydrochloric acid by seawater electrolysis but that takes, you know, electricity, and titanium for an inert electrode - really it's impressive that she remembered that off the top of her head, she's never that she can recall done that, she's a medtech– 

Nope. Over it. 

Merrin needs to stop thinking of it in terms of cool stuff that she can do, and start trying to think of - what - science experiments done by eight-year-olds? Any anecdotes she can remember from anyone she knows who is the sort of person who does Cool Trick Science for fun? 

Hmmmm. 

.....Which of the following Baseline concepts have translations in any of her Shared languages: optics, magnetism, static electricity, air pressure, cells (in the biology sense), ummmm, acid-base reactions? batteries? thermometers? pendulum clocks? 

Kalorm built a radio for fun once. No industrially-manufactured parts. Since he hates Civilization and all that. 

....Uh, yeah, she does remember that story, but notice how Merrin doesn't have the real actual Kalorm hanging out with her? Just the imaginary one in her head? Who by definition cannot possibly know things that Merrin herself doesn't?

(Also didn't he build it out of, like, scrap metal? Which is something you can find in the trash in dath ilan, but the metal was previously refined with industrial processes, and one of the things Merrin would rather not have to do on this planet just as a demonstration is metallurgy from scratch.)

Yeah but she's a protagonist now. She can definitely figure it out from first principles. 

Laeirthe is mulling on the fact that Merrin has perhaps not deeply considered the operational-security concerns here. If Aspexia Rugatonn does show up with magic to return alternate-Estha to Cheliax, and he at that point already knows some potentially-replicable dath ilani industrial science, that could destabilize the current equilibrium on his planet in the opposite direction from what Merrin would prefer.  

Mrrrrrrghh okay yeah it would be bad if the doomworld doomgod doomcountry became significantly more powerful as a result of Merrin's attempts to convince alternate-Estha that dath ilan science is a real thing. 

.....Anything on her previous list of science vocab that does not seem to have any even vaguely related terms in her Shared languages? 


- supersaturated solutions? exothermic or endothermic reactions? hot air balloons?

- optics

You hold a #spyglass# up to your eye and use to survey an enemy army.  #Eyeglasses# sound like things that quite old people need in order to read.  #Lens# is the name of a magic item slot and they're often made to look like eyeglasses, since active adventurers usually do not need prescription lenses yet.

- magnetism

#Lodestones# sound like a material component for some spell.

- static electricity

Esta does not personally know special names for different kinds of lightning damage?

- air pressure

Comes out as 'pressure from air', doesn't have a special name.

- cells (in the biology sense)

Esta personally doesn't seem to have heard of those, though you'd think microscopes would go with spyglasses and cells would go with microscopes.

- acid-base reactions

Esta thinks of acids as generic corrosive stuff, and would probably consider strong bases to be 'acids'.

- batteries

Why would there be a special name for energy storage that stores lightning energy specifically?

- thermometers

...temperature-measurers?  It's hard to tell whether this is a standard phrase or just an obvious phrase.  Esta does know about quantitative temperatures; he has a notion of a degree-something.  Hard to see how you'd get those if no kind of thermometer had ever been invented ever.

- pendulum clocks

He knows what a pendulum is, though it doesn't sound intrinsically clocklike.  Esta definitely knows what a clock is, that's standard caster equipment.

- supersaturated solutions

??

- exothermic or endothermic reactions

Esta has many different standard words and phrases for different kinds of fire.  There's fire that behaves like a solid and fire that behaves like a liquid and fire that can burn enemies around corners and fire that only burns what's in its line-of-effect.  There's fire that spreads and fire that doesn't spread.  There's fire that behaves like it has a choice of preferred target and spreads only along that dimension, eg, X-eating fire where X is often 'flesh' but occasionally something like 'armor'.  There's hot fire and cold fire and invisible fire.  In an ultimate sense, if you're starting to wonder about definitions at this point, fire is that which is hindered by [fire resistance].

If there's alchemist rather than caster terminology around heat, though, Esta hasn't specialized in that.

- hot air balloons

Not particularly?  Would it scale to hold up a city?  Esta knows a word for a flying city.

Wow it's actually...surprisingly hard???...to figure out from that prompt either of, one, what the actual state of scientific knowledge is in Golarion, and two, what sorts of demonstrations alternate-Estha would actually find impressive. 

....The thing is, for Merrin it's sort of obviously and intrinsically all connected? She's using the same underlying models of the world whether she thinking about metallurgy or cellular respiration, about spark radios or the electrical conduction of the heart. Biology built out of chemistry and physics built out of math, and sure, she’s generally using approximate models of not memorized heuristics, but it all holds together.

(It would be so soothing right now to go look at some cells under her miniaturized optical microscope. No uncomfortable narrative-trope reasoning or social deception or slippery-quicksand decision theory, just chemical reactions in the elegant intricate dance of life staying alive.)

Merrin…kind of feels like alternate-Estha’s worldmodel gestured at by his vocabulary is not obviously one where he would update on her ability to nonmagically refine cerium metal based on her advancepredicting and demonstrating the behavior of a supersaturated solution precipitating onto a seed crystal. 

And demos will probably be impressive and convincing him to the exact extent that they would give Infernal Cheliax a strategic advantage if the information made it that far.

That does, unfortunately, seem like it follows.

…Which leaves Merrin kind of stuck, because it makes perfect sense for alternate-Estha to want Merrin to actually concretely demonstrate capabilities that would make a lot more sense for her to have in the world where dath ilan is real, and not the world where her memories were cobbled together by an Outer God. 

(Also, Merrin on an emotional level just really wishes she could approach this whole thing with straightforward cooperativeness and helpfulness. It just feels stressful and uncomfortable to be framing every single interaction as "I don't want to offer you anything of value because I don't trust you not to use it against my interests", even though that is JUST A TRUE FACT about the situation right now.) 

Merrin's strategy here depends, among other things, on impressing alternate-Estha with her competence. He will not be impressed with her competence if she carelessly gives him information for free that will benefit Cheliax because she's being conflict averse. 

Also, what's the rush? Is there actually a strong reason Merrin that needs to offer him a science demo he'll find convincing today? The Outer God playing this game with them doesn't seem to be in that much of a rush about it, that's for sure. 

Hmm. 

"On further consideration," Merrin says levelly, "I don't think it advances my interests at all to teach you a technique for refining spellsilver that you could actually take back to Cheliax. Also, pragmatically, it would be enormously more laborious and inconvenient. If we come up with a plan that can use a lot of spellsilver, and you can convince me that that plan is in my interests, I'll do it for you, with my equipment." 

Shrug. "I've thought of a few - alchemy? - demonstrations I can make {advancepredictions} about that would be fast and easy but may not be convincing. Another demonstration that would be inconvenient and time-consuming would be to make a {radio} – it's the same principle as the tech we were using to stay in communication while separated, just a lot less advanced. I would need metal, but metal from your world should work fine." 

"I doubt that entities in some ways above gods would be terribly interested in whether or not Cheliax ends up with dath-ilan-based methods of spellsilver refinement, and so I doubt that is what we are meant to do here.  To be sure, anything else we could try doing encounters the same question, but it seems especially unlikely to be that one, somehow."

"I should nonetheless like Asmodeus, looking at my soul the next time I pray, to perceive within me some hope of progress on something, now that the Bag of Holding's contents are lost, and there will be no tuning fork for a Plane Shift back to our... back to my own Material plane.  You convincing me that dath ilan is real, or convincing yourself that it is unreal, at least might be progress toward satisfying our purpose here; and then, somehow, being allowed to depart."

"Do you have a better idea than {radio} for what we are to do with our time, here, besides waiting for Asmodeus to drop me as a cleric so we can eat snails?  What supposed principles would you be testing and proving, by creating such a thing?"

It would be kind of hilarious if IN FACT the Outer God's purpose here the whole time was to make them have a romance arc– 

IT REALLY WOULDN'T BE and that sounds so enormously ill-advised! Not helping! 

"I don't have a better idea yet," Merrin says, perhaps a bit more snappishly than she would have if not for the inane commentary from the imaginary people sharing her brain. "I was looking for the intersection of things you might actually find sort of impressive and useful and things that wouldn't take six months. ...If you mean what aspect of physics am I demonstrating an understanding of, I can try to cover what I know about {electromagnetic radiation} before your Baseline spell wears off..." 

Which has to be pretty soon at this point, though she's not sure exactly when he cast it, he already had it up by the time he marched in to announce they needed to talk. It feels like that must be longer than two hours ago but clearly it wasn't, it's just been very densely-packed with - things. 

"Briefly, perhaps.  Enough that I can understand for myself that knowledge beyond my own, and probably beyond Golarion, is being tested, here.  If all goes well, I will have Tongues again tomorrow.  It does not especially feel like the correct move and also I do not know a better one."

"What is {electromagnetic radiation}, then...?  It sounds related to lightning, and light; and come to think I have never before known why those two words would be similar in Utopian and Draconic, if not Taldane..."

It wouldn't do to appear too eager about instantaneous communicators, faster than Sending and perhaps much less expensive than Telepathic Bonds; whose principles also at least feel like they would run deep and be present in many technologies.  If Merrin considers the matter a lighter one than spellsilver, well, perhaps she is correct and perhaps she is not; his Law does not oblige him to volunteer his thoughts on the matter.

(Marian isn't sure, but suspects, that the concepts of electromagnetism – the, uh, extremely basic concepts, she is not a physicist and she is not especially going to try to dredge any of the actual underlying math out of her brain at this juncture, she did learn it in school but ugh – aren't that much of a step toward having an actual functional radio network? There's a lot of necessary infrastructure base, and she's not sure if any of it already exists but if it does then the planet probably wasn't that far from having radio in the first place? The scary thing about the "spellsilver" refinement is that it sounds like they must already have some sort of infrastructure setup for whatever costly and inefficient process they're using for what sounds like an extremely critical supply chain, and Cheliax could import a couple of new processes and very quickly destabilize the planet's current equilibrium even further in favor of Asmodeus. Or, like, that's Merrin's current theory, she could be wrong. The principles do run deep, but that would be true of anything that made an effective demonstration, that's the point, the scientific worldmodel is all connected and so Merrin would have noticed if her gear didn't make sense and could only have been created by an Outer God out of nothingness and dreams. 

...Admittedly she's not sure it's in her interests for alternate-Estha to be too hopeful too soon, if it might result in Asmodeus sending Aspexia Rugatonn with a Gate, and so she's not especially disappointed when Tongues wears off.) 

Vicar Esta prays.

He doesn't deliberately try to steer his thoughts away from the shattered Bag and lost contents, for that would be heresy; it is not forbidden to try to get the better of Asmodeus by concealing information from Him when you trade, but it is heresy to think that you can.  There is also the fact that he hasn't used Locate Object or Extended Locate Object today, as would usually result in those spells being dropped.  For Esta to deliberately expend those spells, hoping to lead Asmodeus to believe he was still searching -- it does not on the whole seem wise.

There is enough desperation in him that he prays for two Conditional Curses, to take the place of two Extended Locate Objects.  If Esta can only get one new species of spell, he needs a curse and curse-removal combined.  It may be that treating with Merrin on a completely Lawful Neutral basis is affecting his standing with Asmodeus, which now concerns Esta unusually sharply; and maybe one subtle curse, cast on Merrin in her sleep when she will get no Will save about it, would be a good start at beginning to act like a real Asmodean again.  (Though he may perhaps first offer Merrin the sort of curse that can serve as light entertainment, given by him and accepted by her openly, to see if anything unexpected happens there.)

But most of all, Esta prays about radio, instant communication potentially across great distances without the cost and limitations of Sending, as would provide an advantage to Cheliax in war and a far greater advantage in administrating the Empire.  How many counties could gain real control of their baronies for the first time, if their ears and tongues were not limited to twenty-five words exchanged every other week?  If Taldor had possessed such an art, it would never have disintegrated.

Esta is making progress on whatever inscrutable purpose has brought him here, he does think; and perhaps once that purpose is discharged, he will be able to find a way home, to Cheliax's grand advantage; or perhaps then Asmodeus will see fit to instruct Aspexia Rugatonn about a Gate...

Esta is very certain that his knowledge will have great value to Cheliax.  By the time he prays, there is no uncertainty left in him; it would not be to Esta's advantage to be uncertain about that.

This about Esta:  Although he is ambitious, he has no ambition.

He has been told that as a 6th-circle he is one of the people who makes Cheliax, and this is not wholly wrong.  But Vicar Esta has always made Cheliax to someone else's vision and instruction.

Rugatonn is the one who has a vision for the Church.

Abrogail Thrune is the one who has a vision for Cheliax and a vision for Golarion.

And what this all amounts to, in the end, is that Vicar Esta has never once in all his life been told by anyone to think ahead to the equilibrium, you fool.  That level of thinking has always been the job of his superiors.

When Esta imagines the value of radio, he imagines Crown and Church knowing about radios, building some radios, distributing those radios to useful recipients, and those recipients then using those radios as directed and as Esta imagines it useful to Cheliax for those radios to be used.

And this about Golarion:  As many as several aspects of technology and civilization have progressed, in the richest countries here and there, since Aroden died.

This is not really what you would expect to see as the result of there being a planetwide apocalypse, many countries and trade routes disintegrating, and also, just saying, the god of civilizational progress dying.

In today's Golarion the printing presses in Taldor and Galt and Tian Xia are crude things, used more for single news-broadsheets printed once a day than for bookbinding.  The previous price-competition point was Scrivener's Chant, not monasteries; and most people rich enough to afford books in the first place, would like nice Scrivened books rather than messy inkstained printed books.  But those printing presses exist, and as books move into new genres like 'romance novel' the people who read those new genres are willing to tolerate some inkstains.  Only in the last century has it become so.

This isn't normally what you'd expect about a planet in which it has been eight thousand years since the Age of Darkness ended, where literacy existed and also mathematics advanced enough for topology, through those eight thousand years.

Why then?

Obviously, because the net weight of gods was against it, before -- while prophecy was unshattered.  But now, prophecy is lost; and whatever weight of divine action was holding back the technological tide, it is no longer considered sustainable at a worthwhile cost.

The incredibly lost squirrel, who is now trying to suppress terror and thinking of doing deliberately terrible things out of only the hopes of conforming to tyranny better, has indeed become a little more legible to Asmodeus.  Such things were not always a part of His domain, that began as a simpler and purer shape of nonstandard decision theory; but after millennia of mortals perceiving Him a way and praying to Him about that way, it has crept into Asmodeus a little.  He is now God of Tyranny and not only God of Coercive Multiagent Equilibria.

Asmodeus can tell that the incredibly lost squirrel has run across knowledge of radios.

Asmodeus knows about radios.

Not just as physics.  Asmodeus knows how radios end up being used.

Asmodeus doesn't have the ability to pay attention to everything at once, and very often He is often not paying enough attention to really count as a general intelligence.  But insofar as He can figure out what is going on at all, His cached thoughts are not the thoughts of a tiny ambitious squirrel.

Asmodeus knows that once any significant number of people know about radios, the knowledge will leak outside Cheliax.

Asmodeus does not think in terms of Cheliax getting radios and having radios and using radios for a few years, like a greedy squirrel imagining itself getting a shiny thing that it can sell or use for itself.

Asmodeus thinks in terms of how radios would affect the equilibrium of Golarion, once diffused and with further predictable advancements being made to the technology.

Obviously if a majority of divine power were not against radio or something correlated with the technology tree containing radio, they would have already been invented, back when prophecy still held.