"Sending the note at all. You think I'm going to walk into a random world with no intel?"

Sigh. "Yeah, sure. Checking if the free drink is poisoned. Trying to find out if people can confirm this, um - it's sort of an ontologically fundamental tendency to do people favors, I think? I want to figure out if we can confirm that, uh, of all things some water has that, but also a person I want to know if I can trust."

Oh, boy. "And that's something that's a specialized skill where you're from?"

"It's one in twelve. Sort of. A little more because they kill the nobodies at birth. Other people do other things - I do gene editing."

"Makes sense. Where I come from people just kind of meditate about it but it's... pervasive."

"You have goodness quintessence and atoms of earth?"

"What'll you pay me for a physics lesson?"

Griffie had not previously heard that Saira's world kills babies for not having magic! It is not an appealing fact! However, it is not as though Saira is on an errand to kill a baby, so discussing this can wait. Also, the infirmary worker's reaction to a discussion of divination for quintessence is suspicious.

"Bar or I can probably recommend you a physics text for my world, if you want one, might be a better plan than paying for physics lessons before you've tried the free stuff."

Griffie turns to the infirmary worker. "And … excuse me, I skipped introductions, which was rather rude. I'm Griffith, and this is Saira. What's your name or preferred mode of address?"

"You can call me Jim." People mostly don't notice that you can call me is not the same claim as my name is. He'd go with a name from the book he's reading right now if they couldn't easily get their own copy and notice.

That isn't just evasive, it's gratuitously evasive. Probably unproductive and rude to point out right now, though. "It's nice to meet you, Jim. Thank you for considering our request."

"It's my pleasure." He raises an eyebrow very slightly.

"I would like to ask you a few questions prior to recommending that Saira hire you, if you don't mind."

"I am not secretly a devil in disguise using the errand as a way to get into Saira's world and mind control everyone there into maximizing suffering."

"Alright. So you use precise word tricks to imply you've given me a name even when I would be perfectly accepting of you just giving me a title, so you have some reason to not want diviners to look at you too much, some people are like that. If you're not a human, that's okay too, we don't need an actual human, though apparently it's not the maximally inconspicuous form for this errand so if shapeshifting is trivial for you we might want something else."

"But that's a very specific thing to even bring up to deny, and you also specifically don't like the idea of goodness-quintessence detection. It makes your evasiveness more concerning to me."

"I don't know if you actually are bound to not lie or not, but I would want you to tell me what your intentions would be if we hired you before I could possibly recommend it. Or, y'know, this is a neutral zone. You can tell us to go away and we will."

"See, I have this problem. My problem is, I don't like lying to people in ways that make it impossible for me to later have them trust me, my hobbies include torturing people because of the thing where I deliberately rejected goodness and decided I'd rather do something else, you're very perceptive, and I came here to heal people and read alien books and I want to do that. If you want to leave, you can leave. I'm not the boss of you."

"You want to heal people and read alien books. That's fine, I'm not going to get in the way of that. I'm curious about why the deliberate rejection of goodness, but that's very personal and you may not want to tell me anything. For now, I just want to know whether we can trust you to go help Saira hire someone to verify some information about Bar and myself and such, or otherwise participate in verification procedures, none of which are about doing any divinations on you."

"Oh, yes, you can definitely trust me, and moreover you can definitely trust me to be telling the truth about whether you can trust me. This is very sensible and not at all circular."

"Oh, for the love of Zohls— look. You noted I'm a perceptive person. What if that were convenient instead of inconvenient? If you're willing to not cause problems if Saira hires you, just look me in the eye and tell me as much, and then the only case I'll be concerned about is if you were spending this whole conversation actively pretending to be worse at deception than you are."

He looks Griffie in the eye. "I have spent our conversation optimizing for being believed later over being believed in the moment. Also, looking people in the eye is not a reliable signal of honesty among people from my worldsheaf. Also, it seems plausible to me that I will not end up doing anything that would make Saira regret asking my help."

"It's not a reliable signal of honesty in my world either, it just makes reading you marginally easier. Saira, unless Jim is playing a really complicated game here, I think his current statement and thus his past statements are credible. Your choice how you want to engage with that."

"Everyone I have ever previously interacted with has been evil, just to be clear, if I got precious about it I'd literally never have had any interactions. And similarly for people having powerful magic that could kill or enslave people."

"…alright. I'm not trying to be precious about it. Jim, I guess you have a job offer? If Bar okays it I can staff the infirmary while you're out."

"Oh, neat, you heal people too? Come hang out and talk shop some time."

"Saira actually does medicine too! Once she's convinced that she can eat or drink things at the Bar and thus isn't on such a tight time limit we can all talk shop."