"So, I wouldn't rule it out. However, while Taliar could make you younger if you're around whenever he comes back here, he couldn't persistently make you immortal. In theory I could cause you to end up with a second soul to go with your brainsoul, but that wouldn't keep your body alive, you'd need a separate healing source for that, and I have not, actually, figured out yet how to send someone home with the kind of generalist healing magic that would be necessary, and also that'd require me to trust you a lot. Bar doesn't sell immortality solutions, but if your world is full of immortality researchers there may be some brain preservation options that would let your brainsoul be intact by the time the researchers figure out a solution for you? Or if you can afford to stay here maybe someone who can help you will come in."

"It wouldn't be impossible to get preserved but I don't trust anyone enough to do it. I don't know, maybe I should plan to go home, I was optimistic about us figuring out immortality before I got too old."

"Trust can be an issue with preservation, yeah. I know someone who told her daughter that they were running a body-and-soul-preservation organization together, when in fact the mother was draining people's souls to de-age herself. I don't think that you can do that with brainsouls, but there is always the classic 'say you will provide a service that the customer can't verify at the time of purchase and then don't' scam. If you're going home soon and you're interested in immortality research I'd recommend you spend some of your time here copying out medical books that seem relevant to the project, probably? Also, if you can afford to buy meals here, you can get paid in a free room for cleaning tables, if you want to stay a little while."

"...I might be able to just do it myself if a book can explain what to do. Not sure. Anyway, it's not just that they'd lie, what if they died and then no one else could ever bring me back?"

"I think the idea would be that you'd do it when really close to dying anyway, so if it failed you wouldn't lose much?"

"I'd lose the opportunity to give the money I paid them to my brother instead."

"Okay, that's fair. I'm not sure if I have any particularly useful advice on this topic."

Griffie pauses and thinks. "So, I buy strategically useful information but I don't buy non-strategically-useful information. I don't think either of us think you have information useful for defeating my world's evil gods, but if there's information you think would be useful to me I'll buy it? Or you can ask me questions or I can tell stories, I was enjoying that. Or if you've suddenly been convinced that actually giving people free information is fun I'll listen."

"At the risk of sounding like an imbecilic attempt to scam you out of things you were giving away for free, I don't know enough about your situation to be sure whether I know anything useful. And if I realized I did, I'd charge for it but one possible price might be proof you and the Celestials really do just want to end death and do people favors and have nice legible bureaucracy and not go to war with my world."

"I suggest you ask Bar for publications from my world by various factions that discuss each other. I think I shouldn't suggest more detailed queries unless you feel stuck, because that opens more room for possible manipulation. Also, only some of the Celestials like nice legible bureaucracy, it's just that if nice legible bureaucracy is what works best then they'll send the nice legible bureaucracy people to do it."

"Is there a circumstance where legible bureaucracy wouldn't be what works best?"

"Some people really don't like it for various personal reasons? And also I … do want to be clear here … that what I am doing is in flagrant violation of divine law in my world, and I am doing it anyway because I think it is the correct thing to do. If you think that sort of thing a lot, that it's better for you to sneak around divine law instead of investing resources and making binding agreements such that your enemies can't sneak around it either, that you'd rather have an active conflict than have everyone try to predict the outcome of a counterfactual conflict and negotiate a fair division of spoils in advance … that kind of puts you at odds with legible bureaucracy as a force even if in theory you'd be fine with people building one for your side if your side wins."

Griffie looks somewhat sad by the end of this, as though ey doesn't feel the best about what ey's doing even if ey's not going to stop.

"I'll tell you a probably not very strategically useful story from my world that you reminded me of, if you want. Not one I lived through, just... history."

"I'd appreciate it."

She takes a seat at the bar, spins around on one of the stools, and puts her thoughts in order.

"Long ago, the world was at war. Or, like, so the official imperial history goes, and they can't be wrong - people can check anything like 'there was a battle between these two armies on this date at this place' as far back as they want - but they can be... putting things together in ways, or drawing your attention to things, or speculating in kind of a motivated way about causes and effects.

"The world was at war. The world was at war for a very long time, longer than I've been alive, longer than it's been at peace. It's natural that ereli, who can only feed on beluli, and beluli, who don't like having their blood drunk and can catch diseases from the bites, would fight each other. It's also natural that everyone else would fight, because even though they don't need to in theory, in practice, they want each other's resources or they're afraid of each other. The most wasteful thing that happens is if one faction attacks a second because they're afraid the second faction would otherwise preemptively attack the first faction out of concern that otherwise the first faction would attack them.

"I don't know what war is like in your world. In mine it looks like long sieges where the besiegers try to figure out what the defenders are planning without being able to see or hear or smell them, punctuated by occasionally finding some backdoor into the besieged area or undermining the ground underneath it. Or sometimes the besieged come up with a way to kill everyone anywhere near them. Or, if people are caught by surprise, it looks like sudden inescapable death exactly as slow as the attackers want it to be.

"We lost two continents. Even the land - the sea over what used to be there is only a few feet deep at most, some places less, but we didn't just lose the people and the buildings."

She thinks for a moment, running her fingers over the bar.

"Anyway. No one liked that. And this one country, the Republic of Har, up in the northeast, combined not liking the current world order with being composed of carnivores who could just eat everyone else. They depopulated what's now Meiu and most of Erhau and moved their people in, and then advanced south.

"The way the clans of Anavel Sani would have us tell it, it's not interesting what happened in Anim Ret or Ethornak or Devor. The people living in Ethornak now or the places that used to be Anim Ret and Devor aren't all Hari-speaking agerah. They'd already had to give up on genocide. But the clans don't like to acknowledge that because the way they like for people to tell it is...

"The clans banded together to defend their land, Anavel Sani, which belongs to them." Her solemn storytelling cadence breaks and is briefly replaced with bitter sarcasm. "The Caralendar Confederacy, made up of the clans, bravely and proudly stood up to the Hari Empire which had conquered everywhere else in the world by this point. They fought Har's ravening legions to a standstill and when they finally negotiated their surrender, it was on the condition that no one at all be given over to be eaten, that the clans live on their own land that Har would acknowledge belonged to them, that all their citizens get a vote in the Hari imperial elections, and that their land be admitted to the empire as its own state and not cut up into tiny pieces and attached to neighboring states that would vote for different sorts of leaders.

"I'm not a defense mage. I hired one to protect me, and I trust them because the empire enforces laws against fraud. Even if I hadn't, I'd probably still be safe. I could go visit Har - the state, not the empire, I live in the empire - and it'd be full of nothing but agerah who think I look tasty, and I'd have no reason to be afraid. And - I couldn't get away with getting revenge on my parents and taking all their stuff to pay for a house in Cloudbreak. And I could say I wish I could get away with that but - the government at least wants me to think that there's no option where I get that and also don't get eaten. That it's all or nothing."

She shrugs. "So. I don't know. Maybe you're right to want war instead. All I have to tell me you aren't is government propaganda."

"I appreciate you telling me the story."

Griffie pauses. "I … the thing is … what Axis would like me to do, I'm sure, would be to call them immediately after finding the door to Milliways, and say something like 'I have a first-mover advantage on an incredibly valuable thing, please compensate me appropriately for reporting this instead of using it'. And if I'd done that … I wouldn't have met Taliar, Taliar wouldn't have healed my soul, and I at the time hadn't been expecting that to happen here, so Axis and I would radically undervalue the opportunity this place represented, for me, and thus radically undercompensated my faction for this."

"And the other thing about your war comparison is … the agerah, presumably, want cheap tasty food, they don't intrinsically want a social order where others have to forever live in fear of being eaten. Asmodeus … isn't like that, there isn't some compromise that he'd accept with that the Upper Planes would too, and the same applies to the Upper Planes. Axis has been proposing to Heaven and Hell that they divide up the universe between them for aeons, and they've rejected the offer, because they don't, actually, consider compromising with each other on the 'should people flourish or should they live in pain and fear of Asmodeus' issue to be acceptable. And Heaven and Hell are the most Lawful of the non-Axis factions, here."

"It does sound like you have more inconvenient people to deal with than I do. And I'm not selling my door to the government, or even alerting the building manager, either, so I'd hardly expect you to. It's just that this is the first time I've seriously entertained taking over the world and it sounds like it's not your first time."

"It is not my first time, no."

"You mentioned interest in immortality research. That's how it started for me. I'd been created with this wonderful capacity to be reincarnated, and it was sad meeting all these people who didn't and would be gone in decades, so why couldn't everyone else have what I had? I could just help my friends with their medical problems, be inquisitive and persistent, and things would be fine. One of my new friends talked about ending death, and it seemed like a pretty good idea, so I was on board with it!"

Griffie sighs, and takes a sip of tea.

"At the time I didn't know Death was a god. Was a god, had a god, whatever. Much less that he'd had dozens of millennia of head start, and could make my family's cozy reincarnation situation unfeasible whenever he felt like it, just by reporting us to Axis."

"But I still didn't want to die, and I still don't, and so it's not like I have any room to compromise, here. Either my side wins, or I die or, I guess, Aszy wins and I get tortured forever, but that seems less likely than the other two. And anyway, if the scope of Charon's actions were fully known, it'd be sufficient provocation for total interplanar warfare anyway. Trying to get information to Axis that'd revise the treaty situation seems like a path to get killed by Charon doing his best to cover his tracks, and his best is, I am sure, very, very strong, and also illegal. So you could say it's not escalatory for me to go all-out, given that."

"But if you actually don't like the idea of hanging out with someone planning to restart a war that launched continents and shattered time … I won't blame you."

"I don't see how hanging out here where Charon is not would put me at risk. I like you fine, you're not planning on destabilizing anything I care about and you're lovely to talk to."

Griffie isn't going to bother explaining all the reasons why someone might object to interacting with em, it doesn't seem like they'd apply to Saira.

"Well, I appreciate it, it's nice to talk to you too."

...She should NOT get convinced Griffie wants to be her friend in particular, Griffie's just like this as a person.

"Anyway, I was going to encourage you to do some reading on my world so you can get a sense of whether I'm lying or not. If this constitutes a significant time investment for you I'll buy you a meal while you read, screening for lies is an obviously sensible prerequisite for deciding whether to share useful information and I encourage it."

"Yeah, probably a good idea. Publications and... I don't know what else yet, I have to worry about whether you're just a prankster from my world and whether you're secretly working for Charon..."

"For the former I can plausibly demonstrate my different magic system, or you can take some trivial biological sample from me and watch it disintegrate on the other side of your door. For the latter … I have various things issued by the Upper Planes but I don't know how well you could verify them. Ah, and I can transform into a Celestial animal, it'd be hard for me to do that if I weren't with the Celestials, and that gets me the capacity to shove my ideals at people in a way where they can be felt, that's probably hard to fake … but it doesn't work if you don't have the right kind of soul, and if I worked for Charon you'd be insane to consent to me poking at your soul structure. I don't know what detection capabilities you have, I'll cover some costs of verifying me but I don't think you should ask me to make a fancy plan."

"Hmm. I... might be able to detect that, but not on my own... anyway. Um. Milliways? Can I get some evidence of Griffie's claims?"

A hefty document appears on the bar in front of Saira, entitled "Meeting of the Gods and Planar Powers regarding the Rhoswen Incident." The document is attributed to Axis, with an arcane date format that's hard to follow. A napkin on top of it says "This is actually my copy and not for sale, but you can have a look."