She's a young woman, in apparent good health except for being unconscious, crumpled on the ground. One hand is clutching a glowing shield, there's a sheathed sword at her side, and she's wearing a steel cuirass. In general, she looks about a thousand years out of date and eight to ten drinks out of normal.

A flashlight spot flickers across her face. From someplace behind the glow, a voice says, "Hey! You can't sleep here, air and spin's not free."

She shifts in her sleep--and then snaps the rest of the way to awake and is on her feet in an instant and taking a mental inventory. "Where am I? Who are you? Have you seen a guy in full armor and a really tall guy with a bunch of bottles?" Her accent is unfamiliar but perfectly understandable.

Unfamiliar accents are a way of life in a transit port in the Protectorate. At least it's not French. The flashlight flicks to point at the floor, revealing a man in a leather jacket over a "Bottles? Lady, I don't think you need more of what got you here. This is Diego's ring, and that means you're not welcome if you're not paying to stay. You have a room someplace?"

"No, I was on the Isle of Kortos a minute ago and would quite like to get back there. Can you point me at somewhere I can buy a teleport?" Not that she should take one until she's had a chance to Sending Phrenk and Marshall and confirm whether whatever trap that was got them too or they're still back where they were.

The voice sounds slightly more sympathetic. "Jumpships dock on the towers. Never head of Kortos, but if that's your ship, they should still be up there if they haven't marooned you. If that's where you're going...maybe you can find another ship there?"

A port with no teleport wizards? Must be a small one. Or wherever she is is short on fifth-circle wizards. She's got to have gone a long distance; they make their walls out of metal and they've never heard of Kortos.

"Can you tell me how to get to the towers from here? Also, what's the difference between a jumpship and a regular ship?"

The voice pauses, evaluating "drunk or drugged?" for a moment then continues with studied incredulity.  "System ships tool around the planets here, jumpships leave the star system by teleport, like you said. The port towers are on the north end of the main habitat. Do you need to be walked there?"

Star . . . system? Tool around the planets? "Hang on, am I even on the planet Golarion?"

"Never heard of it," the man says, apparently coming down on the answer of "drugged" and not liking the odds on the question of "by choice or not?".  "This is Junkertown, in orbit of Junkrat, Snap system. Do you need medical?"

Oh dear. "I seem to be uninjured, but my party members may not be, and a place of healing is as good a guess as any for where they'll guess to look for me. I can follow directions if you'd rather not walk me there; I don't want to take up too much more of your time."

The security thug appears to decide not to trust the drugged woman on her odds of navigating to directions, and points up the sloping curved corridor from the side passage Samora was passed out in. "I'll walk you off the ring, at least. Hub access this way. Is your com on the local network?" The corridor's slope, what 40 yards or so is visible, is relatively gentle...but as the security guard points Samora along it, it doesn't feel like it's rising, even though the corridor just keeps curving steeper ahead as they walk.

"I do not have a com or know what that is. Also I think I might have been injured after all, I'm perceiving the hallway as sloping up in front of me but it doesn't feel like I'm walking uphill." She looks back over her shoulder. "It also looks like it's sloping up behind me." Blasted Evil ghost sorcerers and their weird kinds of damage she's never heard of.

The security thug stops talking to process that, even while leading her briskly past what look, despite mostly metal construction and illegible signage like gambling parlors, bars, small food stands, and side corridors lined with doors. "...Landrats. Where the hell is Golarion and what kind of strange religious cult does it have, lady? It's a spin hab, the floor does that. It's a whole circle, and it spins for that luxurious fake gravity you're feeling."

She's not sure why the floor spinning would produce that sensation but if it's not some kind of dexterity damage or something it's not urgent. "Fascinating. And I'm not a cultist, I'm Iomedaean," she says in a reassuring tone. "Though I suppose you might not have heard of the ascended gods here. She's Lawful Good." 

"....Uh huh," the guard says. "I'm sure you're good or fine or whatever." Another couple minutes, and the passage opens up double-wide, to a couple yards across, and there starts being more traffic of people walking other directions, even given the low level of the overhead lights, and then they come out to a multistory lobby, with four floors of balconies with stairs up and down. They're on the second floor up from the bottom. He leads her to a set of doors set into a wall, and pushes a button that lights up with an arrow pointing up. After a moment, the doors open to a smaller room, a few yards square. He points inside.

Samora is giving this planet an embarrassing impression of Iomedaeans but that's not likely to be important unless she's stuck here for longer than it takes to prep spells tomorrow, Sending her party, meet back up if they're all here, and Plane Shift out.

That room is either a jail cell or a platform that goes up and down and the man's body language and the arrow and the way the floor isn't quite connected to itself makes her guess it's the latter. In she goes.

Inside another button press closes the doors, and Samora's guess is proven right as there's a feeling of movement for a moment, and the glowing number "2" on the wall changes to "3", "then "4", "5"...."6" and "7" flash past, and then it changes to blank. The guard suddenly jerks with a thought. "Uh, you never been in a spin hab, have you ever been in zero-g?" He doesn't wait for an answer, and points at one of the many rails lining the walls. "Grab on, and try not to lose your lunch, OK?" Beneath Samora's feet, the feeling has gone from moving to...lighter and lighter, like she's about to float away.

Oh, that's very weird. Less nausea-inducing than monsters exploding their innards at her, though, and anyway she didn't have a lunch to lose. "Thank you for the warning."

The floating sensation fades, until it feels like what Samora has heard featherfall sometimes does. The slightest push off the floor or pull on the handrail is enough to start her drifting off the floor entirely, but it's also warning to instead press on the rail and brace her feet on the floor just in time. The display flicks to "H" and then the floor actively drops away from her for a moment, which her bracing avoids, then everything settles into floating. Another moment, and the doors open with a soft chime and a voice saying, "Hub". The guard gestures out into another lobby, this one lit brighter by lights and the glow coming in from a padded circular entryway. Though it's yards across, more metal grab-handles are everywhere, freestanding rails in front of the lifts and a small kiosk near the entrance, plus ones located all around the padded entrance area. "You want to try pushing off for one of those rails, or do you want me to drag you along with me? I'd prefer not to leave you floating in the middle of the lobby."

"I think I can manage." She goes for it, none too gracefully but with plenty of leg strength to make up for it, and lands with an amateurish bump on the indicated rail.

The guard lands smoothly on one of the rails nearer her, and points for one of the rails recessed into the padded entryway. "Over there, then hand over hand to the edge. I'll point you to the docks medstation."

She boings thataway. "Thank you for your help! So I know for next time, is there more to operating the box that goes up and down than pressing the button for the place you want?"

The guard gives her a look as they crawl towards the edge. Clearly, he's reevaluating his definition of 'the furthest place in the galaxy from the Protectorate's laws as marked by educational requirements'. "Public lifts, no...secure lifts can require an access card of a verification key by com." And then they reach the edge, and....the world before her is steel and lighting and open to the sky. The cavern it opens to is a cylinder that must be a miles across, and several times that long. It must be in "zero-gravity" like this hub, though, judging from the people, market stalls, and...is it a cart when its floating around? It's lit by massive glowing bars across the sky, lighting up the interior like daylight. Much of the interior of the cylinder is taken up by various castle-sized constructions of metal and...could those be entirely glass? Some are blocky, some are drums of various sizes, some open and visibly spinning, others closed off. Everywhere, metal and glass and fabrics, and almost nowhere wood. And also everywhere....crowds of people. Even as they stand at the edge, a few people are leaving or arriving or leaving the hub they're holding onto, and there must be hundreds, if not thousands going about their business in the floating marketplaces between the buildings.

The guard points at the near end of the cylinder, where the blocky constructions almost close in entirely. "Docks are that way. Central medical's down there too, look for the red cross or read the signs. It's a couple [half mile or so]s."

Wow! Samora has been to Absalom multiple times but she's going to gawk like a tourist anyway, because this place is almost as big and way weirder. Flying buildings made of glass! 

She can't read this language but she can look for the red cross and if she gets to the docks she's presumably gone too far. "Alright. Goodbye and thanks again!"

"Thanks for visiting Diego's Ring," the guard says somewhat rotely. "Don't come back without a reservation."

"I won't!" Off she scoots. Wheeee flying out of combat! Keeping her eyes out for red crosses and also anything and everything else, because alien planet! She pauses a few rungs along and does a Detect Magic out of curiosity.

Nothing within 60 ft of her is magic, it's all mundane. As she looks around with the spell, she can see where she was, a nearly half-mile across cylindrical building, lying on its side in...what looks like it was once a lakebed on the...floor...wall? Does she remember which way was up when she came out of the hub?

Not having a down is pretty weird! Also it's so impressive that all of that stuff is working without magic! She remembers which way she had been thinking of as up but that's maybe less important than she's used to. She keeps going the way she had been going.

Some of the larger empty zero-g streets have moving cables with grab handles on them, others are paralleled by pairs tube shafts, or there's always just bouncing along from handrail to handrail along kilometers of streetscape like Spiderman.

If she wasn't so worried about what had become of her party she would be having an amazing time right now. Even with the worry, she's having a pretty great one; either they're here or they're back in Otari or they're somewhere else, and if she can get to either them or their corpses they'll all be alright in a week or two tops. The only scenarios that would be really bad would be if Phrenk was dead somewhere it took her more than nine days to get to, or if Marshall had finally discovered something he could die of, or if they took so long to get back to Golarion that Belcorra attacked Absalom first. But there's no sense borrowing trouble when she knows what her plan is for the rest of the day. Whooooosh. She keeps her speed to something reasonable based on the speeds she can see other people going; if she ran into a wall at a hundred feet per round she'd be fine, but if she ran into someone else at a hundred feet per round that would be bad.

One thing that stands out, after adapting to the floating and the metal and glass used like wood or stone, is there's writing everywhere. Practically everything is labeled, whether a fixed sign on a shop or building or spinning-gravity factory or simply where two floatway streets meet or some kind of (apparently non-magical?) glowing panels displaying words or video. Unfortunately, none of any of the text is anything Samora can read at the moment. Still, the circular end of the cylinder is a defined enough direction if she makes a wrong turn even as the floatway streets wind around buildings and markets. As she's about to turn one corner, she has to stop to push off from the frame around a stall where chefs are cooking noodles and stir fries on a floor covered in runes. As one of them flips the stir-fry in a giant pan, it flips out into space...and then comes back down.

Huh. Is anything in that area magic?

There's a magical aura surrounding the kitchen area of the stirfry stall, just inside the float-up counter and inside the outer grab-bar-cage wall Samora was about to push off of. It rises like a heat shimmer in waves about ten feet tall from the runes on what the stall's runes are apparently working very hard to define for the whole kitchen is the "floor". No one in the stall seems to be magic themselves, though.

Oooh, foreign magic. It's not quite like any school of magic she's seen before, but if she had to pick one she'd say evocation. How busy does the stall look? She doesn't have local money to buy anything from them, but maybe the caster is there and will talk shop for free--or, if wizards here are like the ones back home, maybe they'll need to be paid to stop.

The stall has a few customers, but it doesn't seem swamped at the moment.

Then she'll bounce over there and loiter appreciatively until everyone who's actually doing business is out of the way.

"Hello! I'm not in line, I'm from somewhere unreasonably foreign and I was admiring your gravity magic. Are those runes [lanthanides]* or do you use something else?"

*Often translated "spellsilver"

"Radioactives?" The older man behind the counter, standing on the floor while Samora floats on her side of the counter grimaces. "No, just normal silver inlays. That's trouble enough in an Unarcana system. My son, he is a Mage by Right, and he serves on a jumpship that visits regularly. He's a good boy, he recharges them when he visits." The man grins. "You a Mage? You recharge my runes, you eat for free!"

People, she thinks approvingly, are the same everywhere. "I'm afraid not; just a curious traveller. What's an Unarcana system?"

"Ahhh, you must be from far off," the man says. "Unarcana systems like Snap here forbid Mages in some way. Mars comes and finds the Mages by Right on Flytrap like anywhere else and takes them elsewhere to train. But Flytrap's government doesn't care as much what happens here on Junkertown as long as nothing comes in system. More likely to have trouble from Legatans than Trappers!"

"Yeah, I'm from Golarion, I doubt you've even heard of it. I'm glad you can legally have the gravity thing, it's neat."

The man smiles. "It's Junkertown, legal is what you get away with, eh? The patrol for this area likes my noodles."

Ah, bother, she'd been hoping it wasn't that. "Are there kinds of magic here that aren't done by mages? Are those allowed?"

"Ah, you find a way to make magic without Mages, next you'll be making thrust without rockets, right?" The man nudges his line cook, who chuckles and deftly recovers to avoid spilling the contents of the wok he was tossing. "Runic artifacts, but those mostly need charging, and they come from Mages."

"I see; thank you. I shouldn't take up more of your time; am I still on the right course for Medical if I keep going that way?"

Finding Medical takes stopping for directions a few times as the buildings close in on the floatways as Samora heads towards the docks. Finally, she finds it in another cylindrical building, the entrance lobby in the center marked by several signs in more writing and a large red cross. There's several different sets of double-doors like the lift earlier at four different orientations on the back wall, each labeled with big illegible signs in one of four different colors each, but in the center there's an area with a few zero-gravity cubicles next to a passage deeper into the hub. One of the cubicles is occupied by somebody watching people as they come through the entrance. Somebody in some kind of armor with a sword and shield definitely trips the scale for "somebody looking lost and in need of directions" and so the person calls out to Samora as she enters.

"Are you trying to find an appointment, or are you looking for the emergency room?"

"Not exactly either--I got stranded here by accident and separated from my friends, and I'm hoping they'll think to look for me here. If they don't arrive by tomorrow morning I'll go looking for them. Also, I have some magic that isn't the usual kind and it's useful for healing injuries, but apparently that's a legal gray area so I'm not sure if I should offer."

The hospital's information desk clerk blinks at her for a moment, then looks Samora over for a moment. Whatever she's looking for she doesn't seem to find...but armor and a glowing shield d stand out. "OK. Umm...this is a no loitering area for anyone who's not a patient or seeing patients," she says, pointing at one of a dozen gibberish signs on the wall around the area. "Do you...want directions to the Protectorate Liaison office?"

"That would be good; I can speak this language but not read it." Temples nearly always let you loiter but she doesn't know how healing here works.

"Are you having vision problems impairing your reading?" the clerk asks.

"No, I'm just using my magic for translation and it doesn't do text. . . . I hope that isn't illegal, I can't turn it off."

The clerk has to process that for a moment, weighing "Mages are strange sometimes" against "psychiatric admission". Finally, she turns to where a pad of paper is stuck to the wall of her desk area, and grabs the pen floating at the end of a chain. She writes a glyph that looks like a right angle "L" on it, then rips the sheet off the pad. She hands it to Samora. "Can you see this letter on that sign?" She points back at the sign that apparently says, "No Loitering"?

"Yes, it's the first one after the little gap."  What a ridiculous situation she's putting this poor clerk in.

"OK, then," the clerk says. "Go through the door through the hub behind me to the next set of elevators, look for the red spoke set, and when you get in, you want the level labeled with that."

"Alright, thank you. Sorry for bothering you. If my friends come looking for me please tell them where I went." Off she scoots as directed.

Once to the next set of elevators down the hub, it takes a moment to find the red elevator bank and catch a handrail near it as it loops over her head and to her left with the spin of the building carousel's rotation, about a quarter rotation per round. She can't help but notice that this elevator lobby has a couple sculpted features which would make good cover for archers or the like against anyone coming down the narrower hub hallway from the hospital, and unlike the hospital and Diego's ring where she started, several banks of elevators here don't have ladders paralleling them openly, instead securing them behind doors.

Huh. Apparently the "protectorate liaison office" is the sort of place someone might want to attack. But the elevator is biddable in a similar way to the previous one and there is a button with the L symbol in it. Poke. 

The lift starts moving down. After a few seconds, her feet start dropping to the deck and then firmly taking hold. After a moment, the door opens into a chime into a small lobby, with a few chairs and couches. A clerk sits at a desk, while an armored (and helmeted) figure radiating "soldier" stands wary attention in a corner. Hanging on the wall is a black flag with a red circle, and a crowned white triangle, surrounded by stars. The clerk looks up expectantly as Samora approaches. "Good evening," they say, then shrugs. "Or good morning, I suppose. What can we do for you?"

"I have magic that isn't the kind commonly known around here and I'm not sure of the legal situation around it, and the last person I said that to told me to go to the Protectorate Liaison Office."

The clerk is suddenly even more alert and businesslike. "What's you name, Mage? Different how?" Their eyes flick to her throat but don't seem to find what they're looking for.

Her throat has: a medallion with a sunburst-and-sword symbol on a sturdy chain.

"My name is Samora. I don't know enough about the local magic to draw the best comparisons, but I get magic from my goddess in the form of a number of spell slots I can prepare spells for off a large list every morning. I also have area-of-effect healing and the ability to convert prepared spells into additional healing. And some very convenient other miscellany. If you'd like to see a demonstration, the easiest option is probably conjuring water, because I can do that as many times as I want. Do you have a container handy?"

"How big a bucket do you need?" the clerk says.

"Oh, whatever size is convenient and will make a convincing demonstration. I can do any amount up to twenty gallons at once, but I can't quickly get rid of it afterwards."

"Corporal?" the clerk says. The armored Marine nods, but Samora doesn't here the com call inside his helmet. The clerk continues, "That's impossible to the best of my knowledge, so I'd be very interested to see it. Where're you from?"

"The nation of Lastwall on the planet Golarion. I don't think it's in touch with this set of planets by any reliable means; the last thing I remember before waking up here was setting off a magic trap."

"Golarian. Fascinating, I've never heard of it," the clerk says. "You asked about the legal situation for Magic here, Mage Samora. The answer is that it is...complicated. The Flytrap government is heavily insular, they don't just disallow magic and refuse to let Mages visit the planet outside of the bare minimum under the Compact and Charter, they don't allow almost any outsiders. The other side of that, though, is that they haven't even policed these outer parts of their own star system in decades, and so law here on Junkertown is...situational. There's enough locals or other anti-Mage prejudice on station that flagrant use of magic draws attention, both positive and negative. On the other hand, there's no de jure station authority with laws against it. The position of His Majesty's government is that, in the absence of specific local laws, we don't recognize or enforce any legal restrictions on either non-violent or self-defense uses of magic in line with the Compact. Which is a long way of saying it's not illegal in this office, and arguably not on this station at all, but I wouldn't recommend trying it too hard unless you really want to make a point of people seeing you do it or you don't have another choice."

The door behind the clerk opens, and a second armored marine walks in, holding an incongruously yellow wheeled bucket with a large warning logo showing a human figure slipping off their feet.

"Thank you, Private," The clerk acknowledges. They stand up from the desk and roll the bucket to a stop a few feet between them and Samora while the second marine takes up a position next to the door. "If you don't mind that demonstration, Mage Samora, can you please fill this?"

"Thank you for the explanation." Sounds like she's in the clear to use magic from the perspective of her own Law, and it's not like she's planning to stay here long.

"Create Water." There is now water in the bucket, appearing on the bottom and rapidly rising to fill it to a level where it can still be pushed without slopping out. It's very normal-looking water.

The clerk looks down as the mop bucket fills and begins grinning broadly. After it stops, they kneel down and gently poke and stir the water in the bucket with a finger in delight. "Impossible. Absolutely impossible." They stand up, shaking their hand dry. "I think I have more questions than I can think of off-hand, Mage Samora, but I suppose I come back to the question I asked at the start: what can I do for you this morning? Mage-Liaison Montoya will almost certainly be interested in having some time to talk to you today once he's awake. Do you need someplace to sleep or wash? Coffee or a meal?" They gesture at Samora's glowing shield. "Is that also your magic?"

"I need someplace to wait for dawn, mostly. I got separated from my party, and--I mentioned choosing spells every morning? I don't have the ones I need to locate them and get back home today. The shield is Golarion magic but I didn't enchant it."

"Well, we have plenty of room in the visiting quarters," the clerk says. "How does dawn work for you in orbit? It's currently oh-three-forty-seven Olympus Mons time* and station time works off that, but if you need 'dawn' I'm not really sure how that would work, I'd need to even see when Junkertown is in Junkrat's shadow."

*Olympus Mons time works from local time on Olympus Mons' 24-hour rotation. Yes, you read that correctly. The first Mage-King thought it was untidy to have to do conversions or something and fixed it. Scary amounts of OCD and power.

"I'm not sure how dawn works for me here, I've never been--not on a planet--before. It's got to work somehow, priests have gone to the crown of the world where it's dark for months at a stretch and they still gets spells every day, and I can feel when it happens, so I guess I'll find out when I find out."

"Hmmm," the clerk says. "Seems an untidy way to run a universe, but they didn't make me a god, nor did the Mage-King ask my personal opinion recently. Umm...if you'd like to wait until I can get you on Mage-Liaison Montoya's schedule in the morning, we can find something you can do some reading on, or watch the feeds, or I'd be happy to answer any questions myself if you're willing to answer some of mine?"

"I can't read this language--I'm using magic to speak it--but I'd love to trade questions with you! Can I start with 'what sort of things can the Mages here do'?"

"I'd say 'the usual stuff' but that's probably not helpful without an idea of pre-Martian and modern Protectorate fiction. Um...telekinetic force and shields, energy transfer like fireballs and lightning, gravity manipulation though that's kind of under force it's just specially useful. Creating antimatter from matter, of course. Runic matrices for making some of those more sustainable, making them more efficient in use of a Mage's energy before they need to rest or storing an effect for later, or amplifying their effects like the Jump spell for ships or the Runic Transceiver Arrays for faster-than-light communications. Certain chemical and industrial processes, and some limited biochemical applications, though those are very tricky." They shrug, "Not like turning water into wine or people into newts from religion or myth."

"Huh. We can do some of that stuff, though not much with gravity and I don't know what antimatter is or what faster than light means. Biochemical is--to do with living things? We have a lot of magic that affects living things. The healing mostly, but also turning water into wine and people into newts--I couldn't turn someone into a newt even if I wanted to for some reason, but wizards can."

"Why not? What makes a wizard different from you? Do they worship a different god or something? Our Mages' magic just kind of comes from the universe spontaneously through flowing power."

"Priests like me get power from any of various gods, wizards study the fundamental nature of magic and assemble their own spellforms, sorcerers have innate magic from their bloodline, druids get power from nature or the universe or something. Do people here worship the gods and just not have empowered priests, or do they not worship the gods at all?"

"That's a lot of types of mage. I'm..not sure I'm the right person to ask about gods, I'm an atheist. A few people worship various gods, or the same god different ways and have a lot of opinions on what's right or wrong about it, and it seems to bring a lot of people peace? But I'm not sure I've ever heard of it bringing powers, at least not in any time where it's well-attested."

"I don't know what would cause the gods to ignore a planet, or a dozen of them. How did humans come to be on so many planets, anyway? I thought we started on Golarion and had pretty much stayed there, with maybe a few people on the other planets around the same star."

"I...wouldn't have thought you'd even have gotten that far, by your armor, actually, that's impressive. But for us, it was the Compact and the Charter," the clerk says. "The first Mage-King of Mars overthrew the Eugenicists, who had force-bred magic back into humanity, and signed the Compact and Charter with the rest of humanity on Earth where we're from. The Compact says Mages dealt with Mage law and Mage crimes, as free from persecution by mundanes ever again as possible, and all Mages would be under his Majesty's Compact's protection. That's both the Mages by Blood directly known to descend from the victims of the Eugenicists His Majesty and the first Hands freed, and the Mages by Right the Testers spread out to help find from the children of mundanes. In exchange, His Majesty gave humanity the stars: mages using the jump matrix can jump far enough to cross between stars, and together with other works like the runic transceiver that let us communicate across the stars they tie the worlds of the Protectorate together. The Charter says that what a planetary or system government like Snap and Flytrap here get up to is their own business as long as they meet the minimum needs of their people for education, healthcare, and civil rights like speech, assembly, and exit." They pause. "Sorry to give you the speech version. I'm used to having to defend why we're here to slightly annoyed locals who don't get why the Protectorate is here at all."

The Corporal of the Marines chuckles. "Or Marines. It's like I say, after a couple years here you'll wonder why we're here if we're not going to clean it up a bit. Isn't that the whole thing about 'what use is His Protectorate if we don't protect his people'?"

"This is how they want to live, Corporal, and we have to respect those who make that decision. If we can prove crimes major enough to come down on people, we will," the clerk says. "In the meantime, that protection is being here to cover the bases for individuals and not wade into the local mess."

Samora knows a fellow patriot when she sees one, even if the system the clerk is patriotic about is foreign to her. 

"That makes sense, I think. As a way for magic to work and a way for society to work. Only our most powerful wizards can get to other planets, and Golarion has no overarching government, just kings of different places. My country, Lastwall, is run by paladins--people chosen by the Inheritor as especially righteous and honourable, and if they ever do anything Evil they lose their powers."

The clerk sighs. "I'd say it must be nice if it's that easy, but I'm sure its just as much more complex in practice as my little speech about the Protectorate?" They look back down at the bucket. "So, will that stick around, or can you....vanish it or something, or should I ask the private to go empty it?"

"It works better than any other system I've heard of, but empowering people is costly so there's never as many paladins as there's a use for. The water will disappear after a day if you don't need the bucket sooner."

"Oh, right you said that," the clerk says. "I...kind of want to see that, and we have other mop buckets."

They look at the second marine that had joined the group. "Private. Please take that and set it up someplace with a security recorder and some sensors looking at it and label it not to be touched? Then you can go about your duties. I think we'll be all right out here for a while longer." The Marine nods, and opens the door, sliding the bucket through with their boot before closing the door behind them.

"How large is the population of Golarian, or Lastwall? Would you be able to draw me a map?"

"Lastwall is about three million, give or take. Golarion as a whole . . . I have no idea. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds. And it depends on whether you're just counting the civilized races, humans and elves and dwarves and halflings and suchlike, or everything that speaks a language."

"...There are some people that speak languages and don't count in society? Why not?" the clerk asks carefully. Charter Commission senses tingling.

"Well they live in the wilderness and don't have writing or build buildings or trade with anyone and if someone tried to count them they'd just kill that person, so nobody really knows how many there are."

"Mmmm," the clerk muses noncommitally, in a way that says a lot. "Why do they try and kill people?"

Shrug. "Sometimes to eat, sometimes to steal from them, sometimes territoriality. Depends whether you're talking about morlocks or orcs or dragons or fae or what."

"So like...different races meaning like, different types of beings? Like...uh...giant flying lizard dragons, that's not a translation convention of your magic?" the clerk asks.

"Yes, that's right. Do you have those here as well?" It wouldn't be that surprising; old enough dragons can do gods know what.

"Not that I can think of," the clerk says. "Maybe some big flying lizards, but nothing intelligent. We've never found another civilization of beings that wasn't sadly extinct, or so early in their development there's been a lot of debate about the ethics of contacting them and influencing their development."

"What's wrong with influencing people's development? Don't societies influence each other's development all the time?"

"Well, that's the debate, right? If they're suffering from disease, or lack knowledge of agriculture so they can't raise enough food for their populations, then isn't it good to introduce those tools? And if the issue is that they lack some kind of intelligence or mental capability to do it, not just the knowledge, do we have a right or a duty to try and apply any capability to alter them and uplift them? Except also what right do we have to define 'improving' their society for them and especially in a way which is more like us or more convenient to us? Xenoanthropologists call it a 'prime directive' question, after this centuries-old science fiction story. I had a roommate at Curiosity City University who wrote his thesis about the whole thing."

"Huh. I wouldn't object to someone showing up and curing diseases and making the crops grow better and making everyone smarter, if it wasn't a plot to conquer us. I guess the goblins would object to that if it came with an attempt to get them to stop killing and stealing." Shrug. "At least it seems like a nicer problem to have than not being able to get through the forest without being eaten by something."

"Well, you can do both trade protection and attempting to fix social and developmental issues, that's why we have the Navy and the Marines as well as people like me, because we get more accomplished together from different approaches. But there is a challenge when those developments change cultures. What if the people you want to help have their own crops that are different than the ones you know and you think yours grow better? It can become a little like an invasion to try and cause somebody to switch over their entire food culture, diet and farming traditions, maybe even their whole agricultural calendar or ways of inheriting and dividing land socially? Or new technologies that can make farming or travel and trade or printing books or making metal and tools more efficient can completely upend traditional social structures...sometimes in ways that are in aggregate good, but in specific disruptive. What if you teach reading and writing to a small culture that previously had their own spoken language and oral traditions, and they they get swamped by exposure and loose all their traditional culture? There's good to be done...carefully."

"Like Legatus is careful?" the corporal says sarcastically. "They're licking their damn chops."

Samora nods along. "Very little worth doing is simple or best done carelessly. Who are Legatus?"

"Legatus is the first, oldest, and most developed of the Unarcana worlds," the clerk says.

"And whenever there's an ugly situation, you can count on them putting their oar in to steer people into thinking Unarcana rules are the solution," the Marine adds.

"Roughly how many inhabited planets are there again, and how many are Unarcana?"

"One hundred and eleven inhabited Protectorate worlds," the clerk says. "Fourteen are legally Unaracana worlds, but there's others where Mages aren't much liked but not legally prohibited."

"I'd say bad luck that I landed here, then, but honestly I'm glad to be somewhere with people and that isn't on fire."

Samora and the clerk keep on trading cultural and technological information in a similar vein; by 8AM Olympus Mons time they feel like they have a rough grasp of each other's magic systems and Samora knows enough about what electricity is to be very impressed with it.

In places where there's no well-defined dawn, the gods must work out different agreements for when clerics get their spells. In the absence of any other gods with opinions on this civilization's space stations, the tiny fragment of a fragment of Iomedae that tracks Samora's spell prep timer defaults to a census of nearby clocks.

"Oh, apparently dawn is now! Time to go do my prayer hour." Samora gets stashed in a little nondenominational chapel attached to a block of unoccupied quarters and kneels in a corner with her sword across her knees and contemplates the lessons she's learned from this strange planet and also the various options for getting her party collected up and pointed at the Belcorra situation again. Sending Sending and another Sending in case of complications, two Plane Shifts and one Breath of Life instead of the reverse, handful of combat spells for the optimistic case where they're back in the dungeon by mid-afternoon and for the pessimistic case where there's some other unexpected combat, two Comprehend Languages because this place has a lot of signage and it would be nice to be able to read it, and several open slots because this is a weird situation and she expects to want flexibility more than maximum combat effectiveness.

And now it's finally time to answer the question: Where is Marshall!

Trap sent me off Golarion to Junkrat Station, safe, Phrenk's status unknown. In Protectorate Liaison Office. Where are you? I have two Plane Shifts prepped.

No sale.

She's heard that happens sometimes with interplanar Sendings. Botheration. Well, that's why she prepped three. Same thing to Phrenk, maybe he's on the Material. (Or not on the Material in the same way Samora isn't, if she isn't, though if she had to guess she'd guess it was Marshall who wasn't.)

Phrenk answers! He and Marshall both made their saves against whatever it was and will make what progress they can against Belcorra until she gets back. (Implied: they are aware that this may take a while and will try to acquire a new third party member at least temporarily.)

Well, that could definitely be worse! If they do end up acquiring another healer then they'll all work out something sensible when she gets back based on who's circled up how much and what kind of specialty overlaps everyone has.

She should say goodbye to the clerk properly instead of just disappearing; she heads back to the lobby looking visibly relieved.

Samora's return to the lobby is led by one of the Marines, and upon reaching it she finds a new arrival. The clerk from earlier and the Marine door guard have been joined by a man in a dark suit, standing at the desk with the clerk. It's clear a moment or so before Samora entered they had their heads together over the screen on the desk the clerk had used to bring up several things during their earlier explanations. Currently, part of the display is a roughly drawn map Samora had provided Golarian, digitized into a hologram with some additional mark-up. The rest is currently showing a security camera view of a bucket sitting on a scale in a security cell, with various sensor probes taped onto the edge feeding charts on the screen monitoring its weight, apparent fill level, density, salinity, acidity, trace contaminants, and more. The man turns to Samora and extends a hand, as he does so showing a golden medallion at his collar bearing signs of a quill and sword, per the clerk's earlier explanations indicating a Rune Scribe who can carve and inspect runic standard matrices, and an Enforcer, a person trained in combat needed to enforce magical law under the compact.

As they shake hands, he starts in a speech he's clearly given a little thought to. "Good morning, Mage Samora, I hope your prayers were productive. I'm Mage-Liaison Montoya, and I'm the head of the Protectorate Liaison office here in Snap." He gestures to the clerk. "Em Forrester has been bringing me up to date on your situation here, but if there's anything else we can add to our hospitality here, please let us know. Were you able to make contact with your party members on Golarion? Do you believe them to be here in the Protectorate?"

"I found my party, they're not in the Protectorate, and they're practically right where I left them! So all that's left for me to do here is Plane Shift out. I appreciate your hospitality. Is there anything I can do for you before I go?"

Montoya smiles. "That's good to hear! I don't have any specific instructions on the matter, this was...unanticipated,but if your 'Sending' works across the distance between our universe and ours, I believe His Majesty's government would be interested in establishing relations with Lastwall, if you would be willing to work with us to establish introductions?"

"I would love to! Without more capacity for interworld travel I'm not sure how useful it will be, but it's worth a try. I can Sending either of you, or if you give me a name and description and ideally a picture of someone else I can Sending them if that's more convenient. It's 25 words with room for a 25-word response, takes ten minutes per, and I can do . . . theoretically seven a day if I do nothing else, but past four it starts cutting into my slots for more powerful spells."

Montoya muses for a moment. "Can we send you an alternate contact later? I'll want to run this up the chain further, but I'm not immediately sure who I'll need to pass it on to. If I give you a name later, or a location, will that work? The only alternative I can think of would be to refer you to a Hand."

"Telling me someone else later works, if you don't mind fighting the word limit the whole way." Sendings: way better than nothing! Still kind of lousy!

"Mmm. Makes me wonder if an RTA could work across planes. That's still spoken word only, but at least it's multichannel with no word limit. Expensive as heck, but it might be worth it if the trade is there. Let me run this in with my dispatches, and then I'll get you a new contact."

The clerk, Em Forrester, chimes in. "Good luck, Mage Samora."

"Thank you." She can't say 'goddess guide you' when she's not trying to stick around long enough to see if Iomedae can choose more clerics here. "Good luck to you as well." 

She pulls out a forked metal rod with the word "Heaven" engraved on it in Celestial out of her bag. "Plane Shift."

Magic flares around her--and then crashes and falls apart in a rush of static.

Well, shit.

"Is there some kind of magic on this area that would prevent planar travel? Maybe something designed to stop teleportation? I've never heard of it failing that way."

She suspects the answer is going to be no. The Sending to Marshall failed even though he's on the Material with Phrenk, so it's not just Plane Shifts. There's no way she's currently in Heaven, these people are clearly mortals and that's not what trying to Plane Shift to your current plane is supposed to feel like at all. Could she have aimed for a part of Heaven too far away from this part of the Material? Maybe, but that's not what she would have expected that to feel like either, and she was deliberately aiming for Heaven as a whole rather than any specific part of it to avoid that.

"Nothing that I'm aware of," Montoya says. "Civilian freights don't usually Jump this far in, but the Navy can."

"This far into what?"

"The system or planetary gravity well," Montoya says.

Forrester rushes to clarify. "Amplified Jumps for ship teleportation require smoother space-time than personal teleportation, so ships have to travel some distance away from planets and the star before they can jump and there's a limit on how far in it's safe to emerge. Navy general amplifiers can do it closer than civilian Jump matrices, three million [about half a mile or so]s or less. Personal teleports can happen closer, even on planetary surfaces, of course. Do you think we might need to get you off station to some distance? It doesn't sound like you've had any issues doing this spell from planetary surfaces before, much less orbit?"

"Yeah, no, I've never heard of it failing from being on a planet--or of being cast while off one, though I wouldn't expect that to mess it up either. I'm starting to think you're so far away from my part of the Material that you're in some sense not adjacent to the Outer Planes at all. Which would explain why the gods aren't active here even though I can prepare spells normally, if they're too far away to see anything without someone familiar already there as an anchor."

". . . I have no idea what happens to you when you die."