Saira, not important enough for a clan name, opens a door and finds some illusory nonsense on the other side of it.

It's illusory nonsense, right? She taps a table... okay, the table is not illusory. As the door swings shut she just notices something odd out of the corner of her eye and looks down to see that her rings look like plain steel now.

This is all in her building. It shouldn't even be possible to interfere with - with the appearance of the building without permission, with the rings at all, or with anything in such a way that things are tangibly different. And then there's... that... person...?

"Excuse me. I'd offer a ring for an explanation but in fact I think the terms of my lease just entitle me to one for free. What's going on?"

"This is Milliways, operated by Bar! She's an intelligent item and she's very friendly. If you want more details she might be better at explaining them directly to you than I would be. I don't know about your lease situation, but this is the kind of information I'd give for free anyway."

Okay, that... is not an explanation.

"What is Milliways doing in this hallway? How do I ask Bar that?"

To answer both of Saira's questions, a napkin appears on the counter with writing.

"Milliways is the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Milliways occasionally temporarily redirects doors to point to itself instead of their usual destinations. Exiting the Milliways main door will return you to your original location, and your door to its usual behavior. And you can ask me questions by talking, or writing me notes, as well as other communication modes. Additionally, I'm authorized to serve each new visitor one free drink."

"That... okay. I don't know whether I want a free drink yet. Maybe I'll get back to you on that. ...Why do you speak Ilan?"

"I speak more languages than I remember, and knowing myself I would assume I learned or was made with them in order to be a good host. Additionally, the bar has a translation effect, which is why you are able to understand Griffith despite em speaking Sylvan."

Griffie gestures with eir tea. "Bar's good at drinks but you don't need to hurry to decide, as long as you're planning to go home eventually time within your universe is paused while you're here."

"Creepy. Possibly useful if this is the kind of thing I can get rich off of."

"The bar's not that interested in directly facilitating trade but occasionally people will come in to trade and you can get some neat stuff that way? I made someone some non-medically-necessary extra bodies for a ring that doesn't use my ringwearing capacity and lets me manipulate sound and flow in a gaseous medium pretty precisely, ah, in the two-inch-radius sphere the ring's at the center of. Why do you think the temporal effect is creepy?"

"Because if it weren't me, everything could change in an instant with no warning." She figures at this moment it is probably acceptable to go ahead and examine Griffie's hands to see how many fingers Griffie has and whether they are all covered in rings. It's the kind of situation where anyone would understand, really, and hands are one of the least rude body parts to look at.

"That's fair. I guess in my case I know I'm the one who's going to be making drastic changes, so it doesn't creep me out, but if you'd like to talk about what would make sudden changes like that less unpleasant for people like you I'd be interested in your advice."

Griffie does not seem to react negatively to being looked at at all! Ey has five fingers per hand. On one hand, ey wears a silver ring with a shield-cut sapphire, and on the other, ey wears a gold ring with tiny, off-color diamonds, and a gold-titanium alloy ring with very fine engraving. Each hand thus has several ringless fingers.

Hard to tell whether Griffie was being unclear about the rings on purpose or just through a lack of context.

"I mean, if I woke up to a military coup having taken over the government and somebody I'd never heard of now getting rich off of making people immortal, I wouldn't know who to worry about sucking up to or where to go if I wanted to be left alone. In any case it's not very convenient if you make plans thinking the world's one way and then suddenly it's another way. What's your goal with making less unpleasant changes?"

Griffie thinks about how to phrase eir response.

"In cases where I can afford to cheaply make things less scary and more pleasant for people who aren't actively trying to do things I don't like, I usually want to do so? Also, my intentions in fact aren't hostile and people don't need to suck up to me to be safe from me, and I want people to model me correctly there? Also, more broadly, my goal is to cause overwhelming victory for the Celestials, and that's supposed to make everything better, so if it would instead make something worse I would like to know how to mitigate that."

"Well, I have never heard of the Celestials and I don't know what you consider 'better' so I can't get very specific, but - what are you doing that people don't have to suck up to you, is it going to be really legible bureaucracy or what?"

"Well, if the Celestials win then, yes, Heaven will have as much extremely legible bureaucracy as they want, which is a lot, but also … the goal would be to give people nice things even if they don't try very hard to do useful things for us? Ah, clarification, Heaven is the legible-bureaucracy-and-such-liking subset of the Celestials."

"You like giving people nice things, huh? I like it when people give me nice things, although I guess I don't know what your species thinks of as nice."

"Ehh, probably similar things to humans, I'm not actually as psychologically distant from them as you might think. I mostly like having systems for giving people nice things in a way which addresses the most pressing needs first, but I also like doing cheap-for-me favors for pleasant people who are near me, so I guess if you have some pressing problem that I might be able to solve feel free to let me know? But since you seem to, not be fleeing a warzone or starving to death or whatnot I'm not going to give you discounts on actually expensive things. Oh, and if you want medical care the bar hires people to offer some for free, and if you want medical care from me I'll be working a shift soonish."

"I do have a younger brother I worry about but I am not, personally, anything worse than a little poor." She says this with a straight face while her new-looking sky-blue clothing sparkles as if studded with very tiny diamonds.

Griffie doesn't put much weight on clothing as a measure of wealth after someone ooh'd and aah'd over eir "authentic hand-woven natural-fiber naturally-dyed" ribbons while wearing what looked like a dress of solid gold. The clean sparkly moderately-dyed clothing thus does not contradict its wearer.

"Do you want to talk about your younger brother? And if you want to profit from Milliways you can borrow books on profitable-seeming things from Bar for free and copy them into your language with the translation effect, it's a straightforward path."

"Thanks for the tip! My brother is still a kid and lives with our parents. I never really got along with them, they're hard to like. I hang around being visibly annoyed if they hurt him and willing and able to make their lives slightly better or worse if I see fit."

"That sounds like a difficult situation which I'd be willing to listen to you about but probably won't have amazing advice for, I assume you've already considered possibilities like seeing if you can take responsibility for your brother."

"It's not a lot more safety as long as I'm in Anavel Sani, which is the biggest cost for me, and I worry if I buy him off my parents they'll have another one to try to get me to buy that one too. Maybe still worth it but I want them to have fewer chances to fuck with people, not more. Honestly if I had a trivial and legal way to have them tortured to death I'd take it. Also I don't want a child, I have nothing I want to do with a child, I don't have room for a child in my apartment..."

Griffie looks increasingly concerned through this statement.

"You'd need to actually buy your brother? Such that if you did so your parents would be incentivized to produce more kids and threaten to treat them badly to get you to buy more of them? That's a more messed-up system than I'm used to seeing produce, like, people functional enough to behave the way you're behaving, unless this is all a scheme. Er, a more complicated, dishonest, and harmful-to-me scheme than getting me to do you a small favor."

"That said … no matter how awful your parents are, I'd encourage you to be less willing to have them tortured to death if you could somehow get away with it, torture is very bad."

"If it comes up that my fabulous Milliways wealth and power leave me capable of doing that I can offer you the chance to buy them off me or something, if it's that big a deal to you. Anyway, how are you used to seeing people raise kids?"

"So, this is actually a funny story, I'm mostly used to not seeing people raise kids, I'm from a village of people who reincarnate each other when we die and we come back as adults with extensive memory loss, we need retraining but not parenting? But in the more functional societies I'm most familiar with … parents work to provide for their children and when the children become capable of doing things they'll be trained in various work skills. Usually by the parents and usually agricultural and textile and household maintenance work, but sometimes they'll be educated outside the home instead, which is more common for wealthier parents. Bad parents will hurt their children a lot, with cases like 'they're in a bad mood and they want to hurt someone' being fairly typical, and often a relative of a child with bad parents will try to get the community to agree that they should raise the child instead, or the child will leave home at an early age. Better parents may sometimes physically hurt children, but mostly if the children are about to do something really stupid and they're too young to listen to yelling or an explanation? And good parents will do things like prioritize feeding the children if there's not enough food for everyone, tell the children they love them, try to be respectful of the children even when they're being silly, et cetera."

"When you say 'good' and 'bad' parents - like, you like them more or less, or they're more or less convenient for society, or the kids like them more or less?"

"In context, a broad value judgment which has connotations of all three? But with the idea being that goodness of parenthood is an objective quality, and even if I were to approve of parents mistreating their children, and the parents are in a society where hurting children because they're annoying is socially normal, and the children think that this quality of parenting is the highest quality around, that kind of parenting can still be bad."

"And members of your species, if they have bad parents, universally grow up to not be able to hold a polite conversation with a surprise alien?"

"No, that happens fairly often. It's that people raised totally within slaver societies, with no exposure to other values, where it'd be unsurprising for parents to literally produce more kids just to threaten to hurt them … that is a cluster of people I'd expect to have trouble holding a polite conversation with a surprise alien."

"I'm not sure what you mean but I grew up around caralendri and beluli and essi and all of them like different things. I've... met people I'd be surprised to learn had had babies specifically to threaten them? I think most caralendri get along fine with their kids. I guess - a human raised without ever meeting anyone who wasn't also a human might be bad at surprise aliens? But I don't think that's what you're talking about."

"So, to oversimplify, my model here is that mistreating people makes them less happy and worse at things. But if people know that the way they are being treated is wrong, then they're less damaged by the mistreatment? And when I say 'wrong', I mean … like they don't deserve to be treated that way, like if everyone knew about the situation and they could afford to fix it they would, like if everyone knew about the situation people would be upset with their parents and sympathetic to them?"

"I don't expect anyone to like me just because my parents are hard to like but I do expect them to not want to be in a position where my parents have power over them if they believe me. Someone might say 'sucks to be you' and laugh about it or they might say 'sucks to be you' in a way where they were trying to be friendly. And possibly still laugh about it. Does that count?"

"So, sympathy isn't the same as liking, I could find someone really annoying to interact with and still think that they deserve better and that I wish I could help them? And, uh, the fact that some people were trying to be friendly is good, but if saying 'sucks to be you' and maybe laughing is the best script their culture offers them for it, that culture probably has a lot of problems? It counts any though?"

"I wouldn't think talking about my parents was a central example of a thing to do to be friendly anyway, I'd expect someone who wanted to be friends to tell me something useful for free or give me a small present, and I think if you could swing it 'I have compromising information that'll get them executed, want to go show it to the police together?' would be better for me but I don't think you'd think so and I don't think anyone does. I don't really see what you'd do differently even if your hobby was trying to make people happy for no reason."

"The idea if we were friends and you were still in their power wouldn't be that I'd start by asking a bunch of personal questions, the idea would be that you'd occasionally end up mentioning it and then I'd tell you that in a better world nobody's parents would treat them that way, or that I wished I could host you but I didn't have a good plan, or possibly that I also wished I could get away with hurting your parents, or similar. I mean, I would also tell you useful information for free if we were friends, or if I saw a vendor selling something affordable I thought you would like I might buy it and give it to you, or such."

"So, like, you'd pitch me on working for the Celestials and that would be friendly? Or you... do you have a thing where before you actually commit any resources to being friends with someone, you loudly lament how the least fixable parts of their life suck and how if it were really trivial to fix them you'd do that?"

"I think the idea would be is that, if you thought I was friendly, you might mention problems in a way that doesn't actually make me more able to hurt you or anything, and then if I responded sympathetically you'd know more about whether I was trying to act friendly or you had just gotten confused? And I do pitch people on working with the Celestials, but I'd do that even if I didn't like them so it isn't a very good signal. I meant that I heard about some more you-specific opportunity you might like I'd tell you about it if we were friends but be less likely to if we weren't."

"That... makes slightly more sense. Speaking of working for Celestials and such, have I mentioned I'm a professional inheritance mage and have mostly worked on improving people's health?"

"I don't think you have! The Celestials can't hire you unless my door is open, which it won't be for a while, but I'd be interested in the details and Bar might be interested in hiring you depending on them."

"I treat genetic diseases in mammals. Things like chromosomal disjunction disorders, obviously, but also stuff like polycystic kidney disease or this one mutation that leads to tail problems - like, potentially complete taillessness and nerve problems that make people walk sort of funny - I do also work with humans, I think the most interesting thing I do for humans specifically is make sure they're heterozygous for an allele where, if you're homozygous one way you're more vulnerable to disease, specifically this one parasitic fever, and if you're homozygous the other way you have different and worse problems."

"So, this mostly sounds like Bar wouldn't hire you directly to work infirmary shifts, because we get a lot of acute injuries there? But that's still really cool! Where I'm from we usually lean on Positive Energy for healing stuff and it does a lot of the detail work, but it sounds like you figured out how to handle the detail work yourself?"

"I have never heard of Positive Energy. Yeah, I do all my own detail work."

"It's a phenomenon local to my worldsheaf. It's sort of like life energy but not quite? If I use a spell to get an undifferentiated blob of it on someone with my worldsheaf's kind of soul it'll heal them, if I use a spell to bring in a blob of it and tell the blob to go fight diseases it will including to the point of gene-editing, and if I use a spell to get an undifferentiated blob of it on an outworlder it'll try to make them a second, redundant soul out of itself and heal them. Also, there's a whole much-larger-than-the-inhabited-part-of-the-world region that's just pure Positive Energy, denser the further you go into it, and if you go deep in there you'll eventually get so exposed to it that you explode? And you can injure yourself so that it gets expended healing you instead of exploding you, but if you go deep enough even that won't be sufficient."

"Well, that is very cool and very not how things work where I'm from. First of all what exactly is a soul?"

"A soul is the part of you that stores who you are, such that if it were different you wouldn't be you? A lot of people here have brainsouls, especially people confused by the concept of souls. If you have a brainsoul, then when your body grows a brain it grows a very complex brain capable of abstract cognition. But my brain isn't like that, I have a thing made of positive energy that's attached to my brain that does my cognition, and my brain just helps."

"Neat! How's it show up to scrying?"

Griffie reaches into eir bag for a glass-and-metal tablet, and presses a button causing it to illuminate. After poking the device further, ey shows a diagram to Saira.

The diagram depicts a simpler-than-human brain missing entire regions including the prefrontal cortex, drawn in green. Superimposed on it in blue is a diagram of another organ, with a stemlike feature directly overlapping the brainstem and other features of the blue organ showing no obvious overlap with the green organ. The blue organ's major parts are labeled as the soulstem, the sensories, the executive, memory storage, the affections and affective web.

"This is the kind of information you could get with good enough instruments."

"That is cool. And now I just have even more questions about the interface you've got for your magic items, it seems really complicated."

"This isn't a magic item, it's a very expensive purchase from Bar, and it would have been even more expensive if my adventuring companion hadn't invented something somewhat similar. There's this sort-of-metallish substance made of little kernels of 14 protons and 14 neutrons that in its pure form has interesting properties for electrical conductivity, and you can use it to make an electricity-powered device that does a lot of math very fast, and then this display is also nonmagical but I don't remember the details of it? Something about liquid crystals, Bar could get you a book on it. My universe doesn't natively have those particles but Bar says this won't fall apart when I take it home. If your world has them maybe you could figure out how to build these!"

The words Griffie says that translate into Ilan's words for "proton" and "neutron" seem to take much longer to say than they would in Ilan.

Saira's not sure whether to be delighted, because this is technological and yes her world does have silicon, or even more confused than before.

"How do you have - things - without those?"

"Most things in my world are made of atoms of the Elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Living things have Positive Energy spirits, some particularly death-linked things have some Negative Energy, and some things are made of quintessence, which comes in flavors based on concepts and ideals. I have a sample of Water which has a high concentration of goodness quintessence, it's irreplaceable since Bar won't sell magic and I don't have the right magic to make more, but I'd let you do definitely-nondestructive inspections of it if you'd like."

"I can't get much out of it, unless I get someone from my world to help - I don't have the right kind of magic for that - maybe I will once I've taken more advantage of Milliways. Your world is... weird. And cool. But mostly weird and I feel like I could use some kind of slightly more systematic introduction than saying random things and answering the first question I can think to articulate."

And if nobody makes her pay for that it will be the most free information she's ever gotten from anyone who wasn't part of her family.

Griffie is not an experienced storyteller and this is the most eager listening ey's gotten anytime recently! Why would ey charge for what Saira could probably get from a book for free anyway?

"Before the beginning of stable history, the gods fought an all-out war, the War of Aiquzall. Gods are very powerful people made of quintessence, and the Celestial gods have a lot of Goodness quintessence in. But gods can do things that create more quintessence, and back when they lived in the Material section of the world, this could get them at-least-seemingly unbounded power. So you get cases like, say, Asmodeus attempting to impose Absolute Tyranny on the world while at the same time, Kalia-etcetera, er, Kaliamirungaiopag attempts to impose Absolute Freedom and Kindness. Extremely rapid usage of utterly absurd amounts of power. Chunks broke off the continent of Aiquzall and went flying, and then the fight got mysteriously … stopped. Gods looked at the tattered remains of the continent they were in and the absurdly powerful weapons they no longer fully understood, and despite their massive values differences, agreed to seal away their weapons, rebuild the world, and move further away from the Material such that they could not quite as have the power to do such a thing again."

Griffie displays a map. The continent constituting 75% of all land is labeled 'Aiquzall', and the remaining continents look plausibly like they could have been chunks off of it, if oddly distorted.

"And then, uh, thirty thousand years of history happened. Well, sort of, there's exactly a bit under thirty thousand years available and everyone always agrees that Aiquzall was that long ago, even if they're old records from an empire millenia older than you."

"Go ahead and ask me more questions if you like, but if not I'm going to talk about the portions of my world I know the most about, because they're related to me."

"...So the... time thing... is, uh... you can't pastwatch, can you."

"It's possible to scry on the past, but the difficulty increases with temporal distance, you can't scry tens of thousands of years back."

"Well, that sucks. And you don't think the old records were rounding, or that yours are wrong, or theirs are wrong, in some, uh, normal way that could just happen if you couldn't pastwatch?"

"No. For one thing, Axis, the Plane of Law, which tries to keep among other things Space and Time stably functional, was around almost that long and their records match with the temporal compression existing."

" - So, time phenomena happen in your world, which is, I assume, where you confirmed that time was paused. I'm going to go check on that for mine."

"You know, the bar says Milliways does that for everyone but that's actually a reasonable thing to check, given your informational state!"

She checks.

Time is paused in Har. Or someone is going out of their way to make it look like that.

"Looks paused, yeah. Anyway, you were telling me about your history?"

"I was actually going to skip past most of history to get to the parts related to me and then include background as it came up, because I'd enjoy that more and there doesn't seem to be a strong reason against? If you want general history of Suaal you can ask Bar for a reading list."

"Sure. Makes as much sense as anything."

Right. Don't get caught up in how this person's hobby is doing people favors, it's still Griffie's hobby for making Griffie happy. It's still a favor and still useful even if it's not really about her.

Griffie notices Saira's disappointment. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to disregard your preferences here. I like listening to myself talk, but if you're not having fun and-or I'm being rude you should feel free to say so?"

"What - that's not even - " This is completely outside the range of inputs Saira has ever experienced.

Right, well, now is not the time to prove them right about her not being able to carry on a polite conversation.

"That's completely ridiculous for reasons I'll explain if you want me to but I'm having a great time."

Saira seems to be doing social smoothing over stress, but not the kind that should be interrupted. "You can explain your reasons if you want but if you're having fun as-is I was in fact about to launch into Amateur Storytelling Time!"

"That sounds great."

Is this the right amount and type of cheerfulness to communicate to Griffie? Who knows. It's what she's got.

The intent to communicate cheerfulness seems to work for Griffie!

"So, a few centuries ago my mother, Erloria, was alive and really good at the same kind of magic I do. And she noticed that people kept dying, and didn't like it, and she did immortality research. She learned a lot about souls, er, specifically positive-energy-souls, and while she couldn't figure out a direct way to make herself not die, she put bits of her soul along with other nature spirits in plant bodies, that's me and my living family, and taught us all how to resurrect each other and make each other new bodies. At some point after that, Charon, the god of Death, kidnapped her, because he kidnaps everyone with useful immortality methods that don't run on Negative Energy. Uh, context, the Negative Energy methods of immortality all have weird vulnerabilities that he presumably knows how to exploit, and also using them tends to require murdering people and make you the kind of person who will murder more people."

"Okay, I don't think I can realistically make headway on murdering Charon and conquering your universe for you but I think this is the part where your social scripts call for me to say I wish I could? I don't know if you can live somewhere without, uh, nature spirits and goodness quintessence, but kidnapping people is illegal in Har."

"Immortality is illegal in Suaal! The, uh, balance of power that interplanar treaties try to reflect the preferences of is one with a really powerful death god. And yeah, my social scripts would call for you to say that, if I weren't already working on it myself from a pretty good position to do so, so instead my social scripts call for you to wish me luck, but you don't have to. And most governments-of-countries-of-mortals tend to ban kidnapping people in Suaal, for some varying definitions that may include things like 'but doing slave-taking raids on our neighbors is of course not illegal by our law', but the law formed by treaties between gods and other major powers doesn't ban gods kidnapping mortals."

"I obviously think given the possibility of future contact I would prefer your world be ruled by people whose hobby is doing favors for other people instead of people who hate immortality and kidnap people. Does that constitute wishing you luck?"

"Yes. Yes it does count." And this is the natural advantage of the Upper Planes, Griffie thinks but doesn't say.

"Anyway, my family and I had this nice hidden village that was a demiplane off the Material in the direction of the First World, which meant it was a bit more positive-energy-ish than the Material and the sunlight was more colorful etcetera, and we all resurrected each other and studied our magic and such, and then one day I fell through a rift, couldn't find my way back to the village, and met up with the people who would become my adventuring friends. Well, actually, some people from a carnival mistook me for an unintelligent plant creature and kind of kidnapped me to use as a carnival exhibit, but they let me go when they realized I was a person, and I met my friends in the process of that. And then it turned out people were framing the carnival for murders in an attempt to create enough chaos to take over the government of this town for their crime ring, and the carnival hired us to investigate on their behalf, and we were ultimately able to demonstrate their innocence. This is the least weird and exciting of all my adventuring stories, honestly, I can get into the more exciting ones or tell this one in more detail or answer some other questions."

"I don't think I'm even following how the different things that happened follow from each other - maybe they let you go because they also like doing favors for people? And then I don't see how framing them for murder would put specific people into power in a town, or why they hired someone who wasn't from their world to investigate."

"Well, kidnapping people is illegal in a lot of places including the one they were in, so when they realized they'd done it by accident they went to undo it? And also they were in fact the type to like cheaply helping people, but also if you're not prepared to hold onto captives it's probably not actually profitable to do so? And framing the carnival for murder … the idea was that it would create a lot of outrage and conflict, such that local law enforcement would be overwhelmed trying to deal with all of it, and also it'd look really bad for local law enforcement that they couldn't stop the murders? And the carnival hired me and my friends because we'd demonstrated our skills to them, one of their animals had gotten loose earlier and we handled it. Plus we were more welcome in the town than they were but we weren't already the type to dislike them."

Does it really count as illegal if it's actually perfectly legal for everyone except some relatively less magically powerful people? That doesn't even sound like a law, that sounds like a military dictatorship where the only actual law is that the military leaders get whatever they want.

"Wouldn't it look equally bad for local law enforcement if they couldn't stop the murders but the carnival wasn't getting blamed for them? And didn't it look bad that they needed your help?"

"Blaming the carnival made various tensions in the town worse? So, you probably know about this, there's a thing where humans have these cultural groups that end up a bit genetically isolated and diverge a bit in appearance, and sometimes this is a reason people get mad at each other? The humans in the town were mostly a different group than the humans in the carnival, so when someone the carnival was framed for murder a bunch of the humans in the town got mad at everyone in the same group as the carnival humans, including some people in the town who didn't have anything to do in the carnival. And that's a higher level of chaos than you get from framing someone in the town. And it didn't look bad for the town law enforcement that the carnival was hiring us as investigators, apparently there's a tradition of that some in the area?"

"...Okay. Makes sense. I didn't know about the genetically isolated populations thing, I mean, I look like my parents because they picked out their own appearances based on what they liked the look of and then they picked mine based on what they liked the look of and I haven't changed it too much. But it makes sense that it'd happen that way if nobody did anything about it."

"They're not, like, absolutely isolated, it's more, like, geographic isolation, and you want to have children with people who speak the same language and have the same social scripts as you, things like that. I'm sort of curious how you didn't know about the thing?"

"Because there aren't that many humans and to the extent that humans speak languages besides Hari they're local languages that are mostly spoken by other species, and at any rate we're barely one viable breeding population all together and that's only because of inheritance magic."

"Huh. That's too bad. Well, not the shared language thing, that's fine, but you know what I mean. Anyway, a lot of humans come through Milliways, you could try to pitch them on coming to your world if you want?"

"I guess? I'm not sure I do know what you mean."

"I mean, I'm expressing sympathy about the thing where there aren't many humans, because that sounds sad, but not the thing where they all share a common language, because that seems convenient and not sad."

"I don't understand why there being only a small number of humans would be sad."

"Oh. A lot of people like it when there's lots of people like them and species does affect similarity? Plus if you can barely maintain your population with magic then it suggests it might have been higher in the past, so it might have shrunk, which you might not like."

"I mean, yes, the people who died didn't like that immortality didn't come around in time to save them. Or didn't like that they were executed. Or didn't like that they were enslaved and then at some point got to be more trouble than they were worth and some agerah ate them. But I'm not those people and I don't happen to have any dead friends and if I did it would hardly help anything if there were twelve times as many living humans who weren't my friends."

When a social interaction is a bit awkward, it's time to just make true meta statements!

"Well, some people aren't partial to their species, it sounds like I made an incorrect assumption."

The obvious implication is that some people are. She's not sure what to do with that.

"Anyway, you were telling me stories?"

"Yes! So, after we uncovered the crime ring, someone from the carnival liked our work, and she said her friend who worked for the government in a town downriver would appreciate having some adventurers look into local problems, specifically that a bunch of apprentices, uh, near-adulthood children being trained in specialized work, had gone missing. And when we arrived, it turned out that there were these giant evil, uh, in this case meaning hostile to everyone far beyond the point of self-interest, insects causing problems in the city also, and this apple orchard everyone was kind of unable to engage with the existence of. Long story short, there was this poison called 'demon's bile' that made people evil and insane and turned normal bugs into giant evil bugs, and someone who worked for Lamashtu, the god of miscarriages-and-birth-defects-and-such, was leading a plot to poison the whole town with it. But also some devils, uh, creature made out of sane organized tyrannical evil who work for Asmodeus, the god of tyranny and contracts and slavery and such, had hijacked the town's legal code to secretly give them ownership over the souls of everyone in the town when they died and some other abilities to manipulate people in the town. Which is why they were all ignoring the orchard and some other things, the idea behind the orchard was that people in the town could come pick free apples and that seemed too nice. Anyway, we cleaned up the bile and got the ringleader of the poisoning-the-town plot imprisoned and got the kidnapped people back and cured, and we were able to get some of the people the ringleader was controlling to work for the Celestials instead and the others sent to jail in the town too, with the idea being that if we stopped them from working for the ringleader and had their friends talk to them and stuff then they'd be able to live peacefully with others. And various things had gone wrong for the soul-stealing devils, so the souls were still around and we got them back to send to the Celestials instead of Asmodeus, and we also destroyed their means of hijacking the town charter."

"That is a lot of mind-altering effects, I'd ask if you're selling wards but whatever your state of the art is clearly isn't good enough. And the - sadistic but not criminal people - enslaved an entire town, which is somehow not criminal of them - what the fuck was wrong with their town charter, was it written while mind-controlled by the sadistic non-criminals?"

"So, their town charter had all these fancy precedence rules, and very clear details about what the actual town charter is if the document gets damaged and how precedence rules work, and it turned out that literally the entire town charter they had on hand was by its own definitions just a portion of a larger document, stored nearbyish, on which Aszy-knows-what was written. And this started with … some people who had made an agreement with the devils had set up the town this way, and when the town rebelled against them they didn't throw out the entire legal system, just removed a bunch of privileges those people had given themselves? And this kind of thing isn't illegal because, approximately, the laws that Asmodeus holds himself to are a negotiated agreement of the gods and such, and a lot of the gods are Evil and so wouldn't agree to laws banning them from having their servants do things like that. It would have been illegal by, like, mortal law though."

"And I can't sell you high-quality persistent wards, sorry. This sort of thing would be well against my area of expertise."

"What does 'mortal law' mean?"

"So, the gods all have their agreements, but they agreed to be far away from the world, and thus they don't just run polities themselves. But people still tend to form polities, where they form agreements about who owns what and when they will and won't punish people who kill other people and such, and when that gets codified it's what I was calling mortal law. The way this works is … inheritance magic doesn't sound amazing for successfully killing a bunch of guards and fleeing a city, and you don't look like a mage, so if you went somewhere and went to a shop and just grabbed things some local armed people would probably try to stop you. They'd possibly even try to stop you if, say, you bought land right next to someone's house and played loud music every night for weeks. Now, me, I could actually cause serious problems for a smaller government, so if I go around breaking major laws, they'd still arrest me, but if I stole a fruit from a fruit stand, or made a nuisance of myself, they'd probably try to settle the matter with me quietly because they wouldn't want the costs of fighting me over something trivial like that?"

"And sometimes I run into people who say things like 'I'm a prince, and I say that I'm taking over this person's house now, it's mine and she has to leave, and I'll have you executed if you insult me, and, uh, I just can't point to my kingdom because I'm lost'. And I don't respect that at all, not just because I can tell they're lying, but also because any kingdom that lost track of their prince and can't afford to scry him can't actually project power outside their borders, much less enough to execute me. And thus, even if such a kingdom did exist, it'd be ridiculous for me to treat things their prince says as law I have to follow."

"And when you're, say, Aszy … mortal governments' laws look like that to you. Sure, they all agreed to put some words on a piece of paper saying 'no kidnapping and torturing our citizens', but why would that make it be Law over Aszy? I mean, sometimes the servants of Lawful gods will also follow local law, but it's more … a convenience and a courtesy, for them."

"So it's like... we have imperial laws and then the states can do what they want as long as it doesn't get in the way of imperial law. Sort of. Except that you don't have a nice legible government, you just have a bunch of people at war who are - legible and lawful toward each other, but not toward you. Is that right?"

"Sort of? There are pro-legibility and anti-legibility contingents among the gods-and-similar, and same for niceness. And the anti-legibility gods will often push the limits. Asmodeus actually does absolutely keep to his promises and enforces the same among his servants when they represent him, but Charon, the god of Death, breaks a bunch of laws, covers it up, and then gets sanctions imposed on him when he gets caught. Most notably, he literally brought a kill-everyone-in-a-certain-radius machine, the Dustbringer, to the Material and did escalating tests with it that wiped out an entire empire, and that was very illegal and lifespans were allowed to be higher after that. Anyway, if it were just Heaven, Asmodeus, and Axis around, or any subset of those, they probably would enforce legible law on everyone, but the gods-and-such include groups that are actively in favor of and tied to confusion and chaos and would be weaker in its absence. Archons, who work for Heaven, and Inevitables and Axiomites, who work for Axis, are reliably legible and lawful towards me and would be the same towards you, and I think devils are too? It's just that if they're not constrained, the way devils tend to be lawful is by making incredibly manipulative deals that technically don't break their word, telling people if they surrender immediately they'll be tortured less, et cetera."

"Your world sounds terrible."

"It is. I do in fact have good reasons for staying in here until I'm powerful enough to fix it."

"Sounds like it, yeah. And you're just - you just have more time and no taxes and the chance to trade with aliens and you figure that'll be enough?"

"Not just 'more time'. As much time as I need. I got the curse that causes my soul to age removed by a particularly talented infirmary worker, and with that fixed, repairing my body is much easier. Furthermore, infirmary shifts include payment intended to cover food, in addition to a room here, but I don't need to eat nor do I want to do it every day. It really seems like it's got to be enough? I've been doing extensive magic research on my own capabilities without interruption, too."

"Do you think I could stop aging too?"

"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."

"...Thank you."

She has a look.

The document begins by enumerating the parties present at the meeting. Many Celestial deities are present, including Aiyuna, Goddess of Good Tools, who apparently invited a group of mortals including Griffith of Erlonn aka Griffie to attend the hearing in her box. Depictions of the deities and other Powers in their boxes are included, and the depiction of Griffith matches Griffie's appearance, aside from some outfit details and various stress biomarkers and expressions. Charon, Horseman of Death, Szuriel, Horseman of War (apparently being female doesn't make you not a Horseman?), Trelmarixian, Horseman of Famine, and Apollyon, Horseman of Plague, are also present. Appearances aren't everything, but the Celestial deities sure do look a lot friendlier than the Horsemen or Asmodeus do, with the possible exception of Szuriel, who looks like a flawless angelic embodiment of victory itself.

It may also resolve a bit of Saira's confusion that celestials run the Upper Planes and can be divided into angels, archons, azatas, and agathions (with archons running Heaven and azatas Elysium), axiomites run Axis and assemble inevitables to serve it, Asmodeus rules Hell, the Horsemen rule Abaddon, demons live in the Abyss, and proteans live in the Maelstrom.

The meeting itself begins with a discussion on the topic "Are there more lost threats waiting to reappear?" Zohls, a celestial deity of investigation and truth, some axiomites, and Asmodeus collectively present the case that the chance of something in the Rhoswen incident's reference class occurring without advanced notice in the absence of interference well before the point of incursion is below 1%. They then note that the Celestial who'd received reports which would have allowed for advance notice of the issue was killed by daemons (servants of the Horsemen) in between learning of the issue and reporting it.

This and other evidence of daemonic interference prompts a topic change to "What Charon is up to". Charon and his colleagues claim that the attack on Heaven that disrupted the report that could have prevented the Rhoswen incident was unrelated, and that Szuriel had only sent an Obcisidaemon to lurk in the Verduran Forest (the site of the Rhoswen incident) due to some vague prophecies of war and attempted genocide.

The Horsemen then question Griffie and eir coworkers (the "Resolute Reclaimers") on the incident. (Details on the negotiation over questioning details can be found in Appendix 3 part A of the report.) Ultimately, while the Horsemen are permitted to interview the Reclaimers face-to-face, the Reclaimers are permitted to have four deities of their choice accompany them, and select Aiyuna, Immonhiel, Torag, and Magrim.

Szuriel asks aggressive questions to confirm that a war and a potential genocide occurred in the Verduran Forest, which is approximately confirmed by Reclaimer testimony. Griffith takes the tactic of refusing to speculate on any event ey did not directly observe and otherwise attempting to answer questions with precise honesty. During the testimony, it becomes clear that an Obcisidaemon is formed by fusing the deaths of victims and perpetrators of genocide. The Reclaimers call it suspicious that the Obcisidaemon only targeted an information-containing noncombatant, Kenchlo, which Charon said occurred because it recognized Kenchlo as having received illegal aging reduction, with the Obcisidaemon merely enforcing the lawful penalty for such. Charon also explains the forced aging of a number of other individuals as having been an implementation of the lawful penalty for forcible as opposed to consensual aging reduction, while attempting to make jabs at Griffith over the Erlonnians' currently-unimplemented death sentences.

Charon then prompts the Reclaimers to summarize their understanding of the Rhoswen incident, while accusing them of lying. The Reclaimers make various claims about the historic nature of the death-related Aiquzall faction, and point out that being attacked by a team of daemons oriented towards destruction of their information on death in old Aiquzall is extremely suspicious. Szuriel repeatedly attempts to provoke the Reclaimers into unconstructive rage, portraying them as willing to lie in court to weaken the Horsemen, et cetera, with statements illustrating her nature as a goddess of war crimes.

Subsequent witnesses receive less hostile interviews and outline a broad summary of the incident: The warnings never transmitted to Heaven were on an obelisk with mysteriously flickering wards. A mad druid unknowingly modified himself to be able to penetrate the seal on Rhoswen's realm when prompted by a dishonest book received at an estate sale, and subsequently penetrated the seal and was manipulated into partially releasing her, cutting off the Verduran Forest and surrounding areas from contact with other planes. The Reclaimers retrieved the wardstones, brought them into Rhoswen's realm, and resealed her, returning with books, the mad druid, Kenchlo, paintings, Rhoswen's captives who had been polymorphed into birds, and less relevant goods. While contact with other planes still was not reestablished, a massive team of daemons ambushed the group, and the Reclaimers coordinated the partially-successful effort to fight them off, summoning a Jubjub Bird in the process. (This is noted in the report with some dismay, as the Jubjub Bird testified at the meeting, subjecting all attendees to its supernaturally loud screech.) Eventually, contact with other planes was restored.

Given testimony at the meeting, the Erlonn Leshies (Griffith's family) are given a 50 year reprieve from lifespan enforcement, and the bird-shaped polymorph victims are exempt from further retroactive aging.

The non-Reclaimer witnesses, Rhoswen-related risks, and issues with pre-historic data are discussed before the meeting ends.

It does not really occur to her to take their appearances as evidence of anything but their own aesthetics and... biology... or something?

Saira gets paper and pencil after not very long and starts taking notes, a quick sparse summary of claims and a list of questions:

Basic concepts: What is a horseman? What does it mean to be a goddess of something? Why are the mostly-caralendroid-aesthetic-y ones mostly Celestials except Szuriel? What is a druid?

Need further evidence regarding: Who are Aiyuna, Immonhiel, Torag, and Magrim? What have they done? Summoning - how does it work and can it be demonstrated safely here?

Want clarification about: weird planes, prophecy, Obcisidaemons, polymorph, Aiquzall, Rhoswen, supernatural loudness

Eventually she gives up on the book, feeling substantially more confused than she did before.

"Hey. This is really dense and I have a lot of questions but want to spend some time playing jacks or something first? I've just kind of absorbed a lot really fast."

"I haven't heard of jacks, but that sounds broadly reasonable. And that's an Axis report, isn't it, those are always dense. …that's not a general-audiences Axis report, how did—question for Bar, not for you, really. Could you explain jacks?"

A napkin appears in front of Griffie. "I have access to unpublished documents directed to all neighboring outworld powers, seeing as I am one."

Griffie chuckles. "Heh, fair. Thanks for sharing with Saira."

Griffie pats the countertop before turning back to Saira.

"It's just an example, it's a thing you play with a ball that bounces and some things that are a convenient size to pick up - I mostly suggested it because it seemed more likely you'd already know how to play than, like, the Garden of Seihra-Gara or Sets."

"I don't play games of dexterity much and would be curious to hear about the games you listed if you're, uh, up for that, they both have intriguing names. Also this might be a good time for you to get your free drink, Bar does good recommendations."

"I'm waiting on the drink until I get more evidence it's not a trick of some kind. Otherwise, yeah, it'd be a great time. Anyway, one's a board game about adding things to a landscape and the other's a card game where you take turns adding cards to piles based on thematic similarity. The board I used to play the Garden on had music and stuff, I don't know if we can get one like that here. If we can't then Sets is more fun."

"This is the point where I would offer to conjure you water, which is trivially cheap for me, if it weren't for the fact that I conjure Elemental Water, which would be … not poisonous to you, but unhelpful to ingest. Anyway, Bar, can you loan us a Garden of Seihra-Gara board with special effects, or failing that a Sets deck?"

"I can loan you a Sets deck, and while I can't loan you a Seihra-Gara board with all the special effects, I can actually sell Griffie an emulation of such a thing that runs on eir tablet."

Bar lists a price that Griffie considers fairly reasonable and Saira wouldn't find shocking either.

"Huh! They have a discrete-storage, er, computer version, that's neat. Bar, charge my account with you for that and send my tablet the relevant file, please."

"Huh. You do format conversion like that?"

"There's already emulation software extant for Griffie's tablet that can bridge the distance between the interface this implementation of Garden of Seihra-Gara was designed for and the interface Griffie's tablet has, so in this case, yes. All nonmagical computation can be simulated within all other nonmagical computation systems that meet certain common criteria, and while efficiency issues are often involved, they won't make the game unusable in this case."

"Someone designed a - never mind, I need a break. Anyway. So how you play is..."

She can provide Griffie with a tutorial, which turns out to be redundant because the game has its own.

Griffie finds the game fairly fun and entertaining! Ey has a good understanding of plant welfare that somewhat matches to the abstraction appearing in the game, and finds it aesthetically pleasing, though the sound effects are a bit simplistic. Also, ey loses the first few rounds due to unfamiliarity.

Pff, like it's for winning.

It's sort of for winning but Saira doesn't give a fuck.

"I like the magic version better but this is fine. You're more fun than the person I used to play with."

"I'm flattered! Tell me more?"

"I feel like I do less... unpleasant decisionmaking outside the game, and like talking to you better."

"Ah, so, social qualities, not gameplay qualities, though this is a pretty social game as far as I can tell, so the two do somewhat mix."

"Yeah. It's popular with the clans - not as a two-player thing, I assume, but you can do several - and if something's popular with the clans you can bet it's a delightful proxy for politics."

"Whereas we're alien to each other, so all our politicking has to be text not subtext, and also we're more doing the type where we decide whether we want to trade at all, not the type where we're trying to figure out exactly who gets to capture how much of the gains from something. Less incentive for unpleasant bluster that way."

"I don't think we're really deciding whether to trade based on politics, we're already both at 'sure if there's anything we can actually give each other', right?"

"I thought you were more at 'sure, if Griffie's not lying'? I guess I don't have the best model of politics here."

"That too, but that's still not - about which of us is stronger, or who can win over more allies, or whether either of us could theoretically annoy the other one and how much and whether we care. Let alone whether I'm going to give you my little brother to be part of your family or something."

"This is true. Anyway, if you're up for it could you figure out how you want to evaluate Bar's free drink offer and more generally her offer to sell safe food? I'm enjoying interacting with you, but if you won't eat or drink anything here you'll have to leave sooner than later."

"I know how to. I just don't know how I'll pay the person I bring in to do that and I want to spend some time figuring out how to take some kind of advantage of this place first before I get someone else racing me to take over my world."

"Bar does currency conversion, give me a price estimate on that service? Also, I can step out into your world while you hold the door if you'd like verification to occur without bringing new people in the bar and think we could implement that."

"On the order of a couple dozen rings, possibly more. Once I had them on hand I'd ask for more divinations about you specifically, and your water with goodness quintessence. And... I'm not sure if we could implement it? Practically, I think yes if I'm willing to strand you in my world if it comes to it, and legally I'm not sure."

"I think as long as I'm intending to return to my world eventually it'll be paused in the meantime, and I'm told Suaal is unusually non-conducive to Milliways doors so I should hopefully have better chances elsewhere at finding one? Would it help with non-interruption if I presented as, say, a trained mundane animal carrying a note and some coin on your behalf, and what are the legal issues?"

"That would absolutely not help. If we had an illusion mage who could make you look like a caralendar - but we don't, they're on the wrong side of the door. Hm."

"We could see who's working Security and Infirmary shifts right now, maybe they look less strange than I do and we could hire one of them to run an errand for you after their shift?"

"Not a bad idea. I still need to decide who to send them after, and I guess they'll have to take a note so I'll have to write the note..."

"Has anyone published any documents advertising services in your town, or a list of service providers and their usual locations? If so, Bar's got a copy."

"Even if it's magic? One of the big noticeboards, maybe the one two streets east of here... not sure that's really better than trying to guess who'd be in the building now, though, lots of people who aren't normally working mages would want to get involved in this and I don't want to pick someone far enough away that anyone else comes by while the door's open..."

"…this is getting really convoluted. There are mundane ways to test food for poisonousness and if you trust me I can un-poison you if you get poisoned."

"But that's circular, trusting this place would make its evidence about you more trustworthy and I want a knowledge mage to help me figure out whether to trust you. Ugh. Maybe people working Security or Infirmary shifts will have ideas."

"That is an irritating circularity. Sure, you or we can go talk to them."

"Yeah, let's. Might as well both go together. Are they over that way?"

"Security is, infirmary is actually more to the left."

She heads for the infirmary first. Maybe it'll be the person Griffie knows?

The person in the infirmary appears to be a male human in a black robe, who sets aside a doorstopper novel he seems to be in the middle of when he notices the door open.

"Hey. Need anything?"

"We're both doing fine medically, but we'd like to ask you some questions if that's alright with you."

"Sure."

"Well, it's convenient that you're a human, because I need someone to go find someone in my world and give them a note and humans are kind of eye-catching but there are some there."

Human. Well. Not really but he can do a great job of looking like one.

"I'm at work right now but afterward, maybe. I don't know as I'll speak any of your world's languages but I take it that's why the note."

Does he in fact want to help them? Well, he wants to see another world, and - will summoning work there? Can he teach anyone and sic his friends on them? Does he want to do that when he could instead leave them all paused and come back ready to take over the world?

Eh. He could help out just to help out. Maybe? Is that a good idea? He's used to the exact amount he needs to deliberately lean into thoughts like that at home to continue to be able to care about anything whatsoever besides maximizing suffering, but he keeps doing something like overbalancing now that he's in Milliways and it's disorienting and terrible so maybe he should fuck with them on purpose. That'd suck for his reputation, but he can just change his face, and it'd suck for social trust in general, which is neat.

This cannot possibly be the optimal amount of thinking this through. Whatever. He'll do the thing.

"Yeah, that's why. Also, do you have... never mind, I'd trust divinations from someone from my world more."

...And if he's off to meet a diviner they might notice. "What kind of divinations, anyway?" And how can he unsuspiciously figure out whether the diviner is going to try to kill him, and whether, if they're going to do that, they're going to actually inconvenience him at all.

"How much you want for the information?"

"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."

"I'm not going to starve in one day, you know. But yeah, come on, let's get this done."

And, shortly, someone who at least looks like an unremarkable human, not that that will fool a knowledge mage, offers the nearest knowledge mage a note inviting him to come do some basic knowledge magic work urgently.

Sure, Cinlirina doesn't have anything better to do right now and the pay is acceptable. The entity is mysterious, but he's confident that Imperial law will protect him, so it's not a big deal, and the entity is probably just a creative and paranoid illusionist anyway.

And as quickly as Cinlirina can be enticed to move, they get to a door in the apartment which ought to lead to the lobby and instead leads elsewhere. Saira is waiting for them, bouncing antsily, and as soon as she sees them she says, "Come in and shut the door."

He thinks this is weird, but really doesn't come off as an opportunistic crime, and Saira doesn't have any reason to want to hurt him specifically either. The employment note is scryable, so he doesn't bother declaring his intentions before following the entity into the space and closing the door.

When the door closes, all the imperial rings on Saira's necklace lose their access to the master rings they're imitations of and appear as plain steel.

Saira relaxes slightly. "There's a lot here that I am hoping will not get fucked with. If you're for some reason inclined to fuck with things, don't, I'll stop paying you among other things. Go ahead and check that this place really is bigger than the lobby, go ahead and check your rings. The claim that's been made to me is that this is another universe, that this person came from yet a third universe, and that a plant person came here from a fourth universe. The jobs I have for you mostly center around checking various claims related to things like the plant person's water with, uh, ontologically basic tendency to do people favors or something. Yes, really."

What.

Sorry, what.

Cinlirina does some scrying. This space is, in fact, bigger than the lobby, and it is also old enough that by the time he thinks he's about done looking increasingly far back he still hasn't found anything besides this space, either empty or hosting weird guests.

He is not inclined to fuck with things. He is mostly inclined to spend a long moment standing around and gawking before telling Saira "alright, I can get to work now".

Saira giggles. "Griffie's the plant in the infirmary - is the infirmary hidden? It's over that way."

"It's not hidden right now. I'll go … ask Griffie about the … water with an ontologically basic tendency to do people favors?"

Cinlirina gets permission from Griffie to examine the inert item which allegedly has an ontologically basic tendency to do people favors.

The item superficially appears to be water in a sealed glass vessel. It sure isn't water, though, no hydrogen or oxygen to be found. Even the atmosphere around Griffie is full of two slightly different types of some kind of exotic matter, though it seems to be being kept out of his lungs somehow.

The water-like substance in fact does appear to have a lot of a particular configuration of some fifth type of exotic matter that Griffie is also radiating to a much lesser degree. Nothing about it particularly seems doing-people-favors-ish, any more than people's brainstates ever have an obvious "and this person is thinking about pecans" appearance.

He reports this to Saira, and suggests that since Griffie isn't warded, examining their past radiation for comparison might be helpful.

"Yeah, that does sound useful."

Cinlirina skims through Griffie's history at the bar. The fifth-exotic-matter-type present in the "water" (really, a rather misleading name) most matches Griffie's radiation patterns in eir recent history when Griffie is working infirmary shifts (though sometimes the working area of the infirmary is warded), buying meals for malnourished-looking people (which apparently happens not that rarely?), and taking the form of a silvery smilodon to snuggle someone, and at the start of the snuggling, quintessence radiation spikes dramatically and has some unclear mild effect on the recipient's (not-organized-like-Griffie's) soul (what).

He summarizes this to Saira, finishing with "and would it count as fucking with things if I asked Griffie how turning into a smilodon worked".

"I don't think it would! I also want to know this but we don't really have to worry about bargaining for it together, I suspect Griffie'll tell us both for free. Still more efficient to ask together, though."

"Right. Tendency to do people favors, you did mention. Let's go ask?"

"Yeah, let's."

Jim closes the yet-another-book he's picked up during their conversation and gets up to follow them. Or head in their same general direction, at any rate.

Cinlirina turns to Griffie. Apparently he can just ask questions for free. "So, I was doing the analysis Saira hired me to do, and apparently you can turn into a silvery smilodon which can snuggle people in a way which radiates 'quintessence' the way your liquid sample does. How does that work?"

"Oh! That's Celestial Wild Shape. Er, you want an explanation, not jargon. So, I cast spells due to my bond with a facet of nature, which leaves me with a shard of that facet that I draw from. This also lets me do some non-spell things … is this even a helpful distinction, they're still magic and you don't, actually, care whether this capacity is interchangeable with my other magical capabilities or whether this is one of the ones that's hard to use when someone gets in my face with a sword or not."

"Anyway. One of the things that my shard of a facet of nature lets me do is turn into animals, or elementals, which are embodiments of the four basic types of matter. Er. The four basic types of matter where I'm from, Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, I can't exactly turn into an embodiment of protons or whatnot. And I work with Celestials a lot, and Celestials sometimes have animals around that are celestial-ish, and I got advice on how to do that when I turn into an animal! And one of the things that comes with the form is a capability that … it gets called 'smite evil', but it has harmless uses? It's really more of an 'assert good values very loudly' thing, and you can use it if you're fighting daemons or whatnot, but if you don't have to fight anyone, you can use it on, uh, people with souls, er, compatible-with-my-magic souls, to help them understand you better, and if they share the values it can feel nice. So that would probably be the holy-water-like quintessence spike you saw."

This did not explain the smilodon, really, but you get what you pay for.

"It's mind-affecting?"

"It's information-communicating? Loud communicating, but you wouldn't mistake it for one of your own thoughts, it's not an enchantment effect."

"I'm probably not vulnerable to it anyway. Although maybe we should check that kind of thing... Can you hurt someone for science so we can see what that does to your goodness quintessence or is that, in itself, inherently still doing people a favor?"

"Doing science is different from doing favors. It can be both but this probably wouldn't be very favor-ish. But it sounds like you might want to see evil quintessence specifically, and there are pretty few ways to produce that that aren't things I don't want to do! I could try to figure out how to derive Protection from Good from my current understanding of Protection from Evil, that'd produce evil or at least anti-good quintessence without being immoral, but that'd take a while. However, if you just want me to slightly hurt someone, I'll hurt a volunteer, though we ought to leave the main bar area for that."

"Could I pay you to produce evil quintessence a faster way?"

"Maybe you could ask if Jim if he thinks he has some residue and if he's willing to be scried, he's talked about evil hobbies and he has the kind of soul I can at least sort of perceive? The idea of actually harming someone does not appeal to me."

"Hm. Cinlirina? You get anything off him earlier?"

"Nothing like I saw Griffie radiating."

"Unfortunate."

"It wouldn't even necessarily clarify things, Jim could have had different quintessence for some other reason that doesn't have to do with not being very nice. It'd be more useful to see how yours correlates with your behavior."

"So what you really want isn't just a sample of evil quintessence created by me figuring out how to use an evil spell in a way I feel comfortable with, you want me to actually do something immoral."

"Well. Actually, now that you say that, that implies you have the ability to just make evil quintessence in ways that don't involve - the opposite of doing people favors - which makes me think I have my answer for whether you can make goodness quintessence in ways that don't involve doing people favors. Right?"

"Ah. Yes, you have your answer. There are also spells specifically for pretending to be good or such, you can't just use quintessence detection as a reliable path to trusting someone. And there's a non-fake process of removing various residues on your soul including quintessence, but that one requires sincere regret of the action that produced those residues."

"Annoying. Well, if we're at all lucky, at least I can probably go have one poison-free cost-free drink."

"I have some documentation on me from the Celestials, you could ask Bar for information on verifying that? Still leans on trusting her, though. And for your free drink you should ask for her recommendation, she's good at it and it's not like it's easier to poison a recommendation than something you pick."

"Yeah. I'll have whatever Bar recommends, once I know it's not poison."

A large glass of an opaque green drink with a large straw appears on the counter, along with a napkin. "I understand your wish to verify, but I promise, I would never poison a customer."

Cinlirina inspects the beverage. It's a blend of known human-safe produce, in a safe glass cup, with a safe metal straw. He reports this.

She tries it. It's awesome. Is that kale? That tastes like it has some kale in it.

"Hey, this is really good. Do you get a lot of human customers?"

"I am very good at my job, including with the additional constraint of keeping to substances your employee would recognize as non-poisonous. Humans are actually the most common species to visit my bar, though some of them are entirely chemically incompatible with you despite their identical appearance and cognition."

"Not sure I'd call chemically incompatible organisms human. Certainly not for the purpose of practicing preparing human foods."

"The chemically incompatible humans actually tend to come with a lot of chemically incompatible analogues to substances you could safely ingest, expertise translates somewhat more than you might think."

"...Wow." She sips her smoothie some more. It's so weirdly creamy. "Do the humans you meet mostly come from worlds where they're minorities?"

"I meet a lot of humans from majority-human and all-human worlds, actually, humans who are a minority on their home planet and not just in their universe as a whole are quite rare."

"What's that like?"

"You'll have to be more specific."

"I don't know how to be more specific about it. Society must be different if, everywhere you go, every city has a restaurant designed for humans. But I don't know how it'd be different and I expect it's mostly things I wouldn't think to ask about. Like putting - is that avocado? - in a smoothie."

"Oh, you poor thing. I can sell you a language-independent cookbook, the one I'd suggest still assumes familiarity with some numerals and time and temperature units you don't have but that's easy to make a translation key for, I have to charge a higher fee for outside-context high technology but this isn't that. And yes, that was avocado in a smoothie, it's very popular. I'd have included animal-milk-derivatives but they'd be too foreign for your employee to recognize. And I can get you … hmm, would you like some anthropology texts about human societies written by nonhumans, or nonfictional books written by humans in human societies that may have a bit of a problem with taking things for granted?"

"Maybe both? How much would all that cost?"

"96 rings for the cookbook, and I can't sell you texts like that in your world's languages, so there's no point in you buying take-home copies."

"I can read them here. I might as well read something here besides... I don't know... I don't suppose there's a trustworthy guide to what to learn in Milliways so you can take over the world later."

"I can't get you that, but you are from a broad worldset with mostly-consistent physics, so I can recommend you books on technological development from a primitive baseline. They won't account for magic, though."

"Probably a good idea." That sounds SO MUCH harder to verify than a drink. ...She asks Cinlirina if he's got any ideas for how to check up on books like that.

Cinlirina doesn't get the chance to answer before Griffie speaks.

"Saira, I think it would be helpful if you thought about what kind of threats you're concerned about. For example, if you're worried that the book will trick you into buying overpriced tools from Bar, that's very different from worrying that the instructions will trick you into exploding yourself."

Because in the former case, you can just not buy the tools, while in the latter case, high-power but simplistic scrying won't save you, Griffie thinks, but doesn't say. Saying the obvious answer before Saira thinks of it herself will probably just make her trust it less.

"More worried it'll trick me into something that replicates command magic or does things to my world that other people want because they have preferences about how other people's worlds should be. But, you know, things could also explode or something. I don't - everything that's happened is outside all of my models, it'd be ridiculous to think the biggest risk is something I'm expecting."

"Alright, that's both a very sensible threat model and a very hard-to-cover one. I have no idea how you plan to solve that with looking at the current or historical physical state of the bar, though."

Griffie sighs. "And also, if I were pulling a scheme like that with capabilities comparable to Bar's demonstrated capabilities, I'd have, say, messed with your experiences of time relative to Cinlirina's and swapped him out for an disguised employee while you were looking away from him, assuming I couldn't just compel him to speak falsely."

"...Actually, why can Milliways freeze my world to begin with, parts of it have anti-defense wards up that should prevent anyone doing anything like that to them."

"It would be marginally more accurate to say that you are, relative to them, 'outside time' and thus experiencing time that is simply not available to them, than to say that they are 'frozen', though both of these are wildly inaccurate summaries, with the truth being impossible to explain in a way you would understand."

"...Okay. Can any of you, in fact, do magic to me."

"Cheapest test for me would be if you gave yourself a really, really shallow cut for me to try to heal, if you're up for that. Like, 'mildly annoying scratch' level of shallow here, just at the point where you can tell the difference between unbroken skin and that."

...Yeah, that's probably not that much more vulnerability than... all of the rest of this. She can arguably slightly injure herself.

Griffie mutters something untranslatable and makes some gestures. Nothing happens.

"Well, the good news is, that's what was supposed to happen."

So at this point all the worlds where Griffie is honest are ones where they can't do magic to Saira. Even if they might still be lying. ...She needs to take notes on the huge pile of shocking claims and much smaller pile of implications and evidence she's run into. Well, she's got supplies to start doing that now.

"The bad news from your perspective is, I guess, if you could have done arbitrary things to me it would probably not have been worth the effort for me to keep trying to verify anything."

"What we've actually demonstrated is my cheap stuff doesn't work on you. To get into jargon: The spell I just cast on you is harmless, and allows two opportunities for resistance: If you have 'spell resistance', then it might fail to get past it, and if it gets past that, you still have the opportunity to throw it off via mental strength."

"We could, I expect, cheaply demonstrate my ability to target you indirectly, via dumping water on … not your head, I don't want a risk of you actually inhaling a substance your body really can't process even if it'll evaporate the moment you step through your door again, maybe your arm or something. This would probably also not convince you of much."

"The model where I and Bar represent the same faction and we're only playing disconnected people to better manipulate you is … a model that's fair for you to be concerned about, given the circumstances. Unfortunately, if I'm telling the truth, I'm not Bar, and I'm not a chronomancer at all, and my spell selection really isn't great for demonstrations because I in fact usually would respond to inconvenient spell resistance by working with an ally to break it, various indirect effects, or, y'know, turning into a smilodon and clawing you to magically-induced unconsciousness. And the means of using claws to cause unconsciousness instead of death don't work on people with souls like yours, if I had the nonlethal effect up I'd just bounce off of you like I tried to scratch some particularly durable stone and if I didn't I'd, uh, actually be injuring you, which is not exactly subtle."

"This is a tangent. Anyway. Cinlirina mentioned there being elemental Air around me that's not bothering you at all, and Bar can do a huge range of chemicals including mind-affecting chemicals, does this constitute proof that Bar could have just drugged you? She won't offer you serious poison for a demo but she'll totally offer you a nonlethal dosage of … I think it's called 'ethanol', it's a traditional human intoxicant for your kind of humans, it's kind of poisonous but not the really serious kind."

"Obviously you can do magic to stuff near me, that's - never mind, let me write this stuff down..."

Claims

1. Milliways does a time-bendy thing that doesn't rely on acting directly on people as opposed to ??? (reference frames?) and consequently bypasses wards. Evidence: observed object to pause in midair while door was closed, didn't also observe force mage.

2. Milliways exists and causes doors to lead somewhere they don't usually. Evidence: this room is too big to be the one I meant to walk into (I walked around and felt empty space where there shouldn't be), and I still as far as I know am protected from the kind of direct magic it'd take to freeze me and move me.

3. Spell resistance is more complicated than I think it is. Clarify.

4. Using abilities described in 1, Milliways could swap Cinlirina for an actor. Evidence: evidence for 1 and Griffie said so.

5. Griffie's world has different physics.
5a. which involves fundamental particles: atoms of earth, air, fire, water; goodness, evil quintessence; positive and negative energy spirits.
5b. and Griffie has a lot of goodness quintessence, which is associated with a tendency to do people favors, but not a reliable sign thereof. Evidence: Cinlirina(?) claimed to see it.
5c. and Griffie's brain is actually a complex spell with information-processing capabilities that can be affected by other spells in ways that don't seem to resemble the normal (Hari) spell interactions. Evidence: Griffie showed me a picture. Cinlirina(?) claimed to see it.

6. Milliways can (effectively?) make whatever. Evidence: my free drink. Communications from Bar. This paper.

7. My free drink is not poison. Evidence: I feel fine and Cinlirina(?) said so.

8. Milliways can do two-way magic translation. Evidence: I can understand Griffie. Evidence that Griffie's not just speaking Ilan: Griffie seems very alien and something is up here. Ask Cinlirina(?)?

9. Milliways is an alien world with alien magic. Conditional on any of this being a prank, it was done by actual aliens, OR it involved the active cooperation of the people I bought my protections from. Evidence: evidence for 1, 2, and the fact that nothing feels amiss about my stuff, and the fact that I haven't been unconscious outside my apartment since buying my assorted protections.

10. I still have all my stuff. Evidence: Griffie's spell failed. Possibly more complicated than that, clarify.

11. Griffie's spell failed. Evidence: nothing happened.

12. Enchantments exist. These are directly mind-affecting spells that could make me believe weird things. Evidence: Cinlirina(?) claims to have observed Griffie doing something to someone else's ?magical brain? that Griffie claims was benign.

13. Griffie likes doing people favors. Evidence: Griffie keeps telling me things, acted reluctant to hurt someone for money, claims to like doing people favors, claims to work for people who like doing people favors,

14. The Celestials are a faction from Griffie's world that wants to take over and make things nice for people.

15. There are other people from Griffie's world that hate immortality and have made it illegal. Evidence: Bar showed me a book. Find out if Bar forged the book. Find out if a non-forged book written by Axis about this would be likely to be accurate.

16. Griffie works for the Celestials.

17. There's a way to  make complicated information-processing illusion artifacts without magic. I can buy books about it here. Evidence: saw artifacts that might not have been magic and looked different from the usual illusions, can buy books about other things here. Ask Cinlirina(?)?

She leaves a lot of empty space in which to add more when she has more to add. Griffie can take a look at this and at her questions from before if they want to.

Griffie gets out a superball and bounces it a bit while Saira writes. Ey then begins a sketch of Saira, but doesn't get time to finish it before Saira is done.

Broadly speaking, a horseman is a typically-male person who uses a tame animal (specifically a horse) as a vehicle. In the context of me talking about the Horsemen, they're a group of four gods who ride horses. Other gods don't do that, so it ends up being a distinguishing title for the group.

A goddess is specifically a female god. A God of Something has powers related to the something, and derives power from the something existing and happening. The Goddess of Good Tools is empowered by people making good tools, and can herself make tools be better, for instance. This is a feedback loop, but it's currently convergent. It was divergent in the War of Aiquzall, which is why that's such a mess. Also, re gender, gods aren't actually like animals. Many of them are genderless, and they don't need male-female pairings to produce children, and gods having children who are also gods is very rare. Thus, if a god is female that's more of a conceptual thing.

The Celestial gods are more likely to look appealing to various people's aesthetic sensibilities because they want to look friendly and pleasant, whereas many of the other gods want to look intimidating, or want to look like an embodiment of Law, or such. It would be weird for them to be specifically targeting caralendar.

A druid is a person who shares values with some facet of nature and is able to understand that shard of nature well and can thus channel the divine power of that facet of nature into spellcasting. The facet I work with is hard to describe but is focused a lot on the desires of living things to flourish and the mutually beneficial relations they can enter into.

Aiyuna, Immonhiel, Torag, and Magrim have all done a lot of stuff. Aiyuna was almost killed by Lamashtu and played dead for aeons and is just now coming back,so she hasn't done the most stuff recently. The big-deal thing Immonhiel recently did was taking a lead role in a project to cure a mosquito-borne plague that was an evil god's personal project and killing the god while a bunch of mortals used her aid to cure the plague. Torag is known for doing stuff related to forging metal, which I haven't paid the most attention to. I really don't know much about Magrim other than that Torag recommended him for the specific task at hand.

Summoning can't be demonstrated here, it's too far away from anywhere I know how to summon from, and all of those places are paused relative to us. For a standard example: Aveloz is a snake in a different world from me but still in my worldsheaf. When I cast a summoning spell, Aveloz can project herself into wherever I am to help me, but no matter what happens to the projection, she's actually safe at home. If she dies, the only thing that happens is I have to wait a bit before summoning her again. It's a way to get temporary expendable allies to fight on your behalf, basically.

Planes are separate chunks of reality. You can't really go in between planes by walking no matter how far you walk, though technically you could go through the Astral, which all the planes are in, they're just really far apart. Honestly there's a lot of stuff to say about planes so you'd need to be more specific in your queries.

A prophecy is definitely-true information about the future, but they're often really cryptic and uninformative and can be misleading. Sometimes they spontaneously generate when some event in the future is dramatic enough, and there are unreliable ways to try to get some on purpose.

An Obcisidaemon is a really powerful servant of Szuriel. I'm not sure what else there is that's important or relevant to say.

Polymorphing is shapeshifting. Rhoswen turned some people into birds for a very long time. It's possible to shapeshift into animals and keep your normal cognition, but it's also possible to force people to shapeshift into unintelligent animals, and apparently if you do that for millennia it's bad for people's minds even when they return to their original form.

Aiquzall was the original name for the world, which at the time was flat and all one continent. Then there was a war, pieces went flying, and when the war got sealed and the mess got cleaned up the planet was a sphere and the original continent was totally uninhabitable.

Rhoswen was a very powerful spellcaster from Old Aiquzall. She made a lot of enemies, who tried and failed to kill her, but did eventually manage to imprison her. She did a lot of shadow magic. She's actually still alive, just imprisoned again, but hopefully more securely this time.

The Jubjub Bird's supernatural loudness refers to its really, really weird screech. It's loud enough to stun people in a 60-foot radius, but they don't suffer any hearing loss. Magical senses pick up the screech even if they're not hearing-like senses. Being deaf or being in a form that doesn't even have hearing at all won't prevent you from hearing it. Also, some of the entities it stuns disappear for a few seconds, during which the Jubjub has the option to attack them if it wants to.

3. Spell resistance is in fact fairly complicated, but I usually just ask my coworkers about it. There may be Milliways books.

4. Time passes at different rates in different areas of Milliways. Bar says she doesn't control this effect and it doesn't work on people in the same room, but it is a thing unless a bunch of people are telling seemingly-unprofitable lies.

5c. My brain is made of atoms of earth and air and fire and water. My soul is made of positive energy. This is not a spell by my world's terminology, you can't just use Dispel Magic on it and it wouldn't even go inactive in an antimagic field.

6. Milliways has some limitations. She can't do complex life, she can't do magic items, etc. There are also things she refuses to do.

8. If you've memorized any texts in a language you don't fully understand, you could try saying or writing them.

10. I in fact am not a cutpurse but I feel like your wards not being broken aren't actually evidence that nobody stole anything from you? Maybe you don't have that much stuff on you though, or you have an anti-theft ward.

11. I know I brought up Cinlirina being replaced as a possibility, so I see why you don't want to check with him, but if you get to the point of trusting Bar but not me, you could have him scry what happened here.

12. It was communicative not enchantment-y. I don't think any of the directly mind-affecting spells I've ever heard of could work on you, you don't have the right kind of mind for them.

15. Axis is known in my world for their honesty, if that helps at all, which it probably doesn't.

"Wow, this is a lot. What the fuck. Um. Purely on basis of this being the easiest part to answer, I am currently wearing a very large fraction of all of my wealth. Including the enchanted items that protect me from other people's magic." She tugs her earlobe in a plausibly-deniable gesture toward an illusory earring that is not one of her enchanted piercings.

"Ah. Same here, actually, though I don't have that strength of anti-magic wards in item form."

"...Well, they're not prohibitively expensive and I know some people, and the three options here are you're secretly working for Charon or something and the people I got mine from are fine, you're a nice person and the people I got my wards from are fine, or I can't trust you at all and you're in league with them already and they betrayed me. If we can just rule that first one out..."

"That'd be nice, yes. Unfortunately, all my usual identity verification measures are designed for people who've heard of the Celestials before meeting me."

"Makes sense. What are they?"

"I have a verifiably from them and for me item, which I normally don't show to people and I don't really want to show to you if you don't have the right toolkit to verify it, which I would be shocked if you do have. Typically, I would encourage someone to perform a Planar Inquiry about it, which would consist of magically sending them a letter saying 'I have a person here who claims to be Griffith of Erlonn and be working for you and not evil, please come confirm this' and some money, and then a Celestial would be magically brought over to inspect me. I'd cover the money. That won't work because we're too far away and the time issue. Or if someone couldn't do a Planar Inquiry, I might demonstrate the ability to use Smite Evil, which is pretty rare among Evil people. That won't work because you don't have the right kind of soul, and also it plausibly wouldn't get through your wards."

"Maybe you could smite Jim. But I don't know how I'd verify that that's rare among... people who are generally assholes and working for Charon or something."

"If he'd experience it in an unpleasant way, which seems likely given his activities in his home world, it seems like it wouldn't be permitted in the main bar area and he wouldn't be interested in cooperating with it? Plus if you trust Jim to be accurate about things, that's basically trusting Bar to have presented you with a genuine entity of whatever sort he is, and at that point you might as well trust her documents on me? …I'm not sure that's correct but I dislike 'target an evildoer who currently is hanging around doing non-evil things with Smite Evil' as a plan, it's kind of bad incentives. I guess if you want to pay him to experience the non-injurious version I won't stop you, and maybe he wouldn't dislike it?"

"And, uh, it depends on my beliefs, being able to hold anti-evil beliefs in the right way while also working for an evil god is … not strictly impossible, perhaps, but certainly quite difficult. …I do want social credit, er, for you to acknowledge that this is evidence in favor of me being honest and cooperative, for telling you that there technically exists at least one known case of someone being able to use Smite Evil while also being a bad person who shouldn't have more power."

"Is that evidence? If you're secretly someone I don't want to help, you're - what would I do if I were a real asshole and wanted something from me - I'd just offer money. I wouldn't get into some argument about whether I really do have a weird magical tendency to do people favors. What do you even get out of that, at most if I got really convinced I'd hold my door for free and send Cinlirina to go fetch the people who did my wards, which would not be free because you'd have to convince Cinlirina - maybe you could also convince everyone else and then you'd save, um... depends on how far away they are. I wouldn't have thought to check whether you were secretly working for someone who hates immortality and kidnaps people and might sway a major war that would determine whether we might run into a world ruled by people who like doing other people favors someday or a world ruled by people who hate immortality and don't really enforce the rule of law! That's so specific and I've never been in a circumstance where I would regret engaging in commerce with a total stranger. It's definitely a mistake on Evil Griffie's part. ...Okay, you know what, yeah, I should have thought of it from that angle sooner. This is a really stupid lie to tell and it hasn't gotten you anything. I guess the maximum possible payoff is one inheritance mage's lifetime of work, which is big but so is constructing and maintaining an elaborate deception for my entire life. And, uh - one sec - "

She looks back at her notes. " - and if you're working with Bar and replaced Cinlirina and you're working with Jim then when would you gain anything from not just tricking me into thinking everything was normal, basically only if you want me to work on alien inheritance - okay, not going to do that without more evidence - and if you're not working with Bar then I have independent corroboration of your story. Probably not useful to ask you to point out if there's anything I'm missing here... I guess just 'what if Griffie and Bar terminally value lying to people?' Maybe. Uh. I think I got lost somewhere in all this. You wanted acknowledgment of - yeah, I have no clue if that's evidence of anything."

"…right, you technically … is that really the … I didn't realize this could be that simple. How much do you want for a brief explanation of the ways in which you think your world could be strategically relevant to me? I sort of figured you wouldn't want to help me even for money if you thought I was lying or doing some massive scheme, but in retrospect you never actually said that."

"Admittedly, I hadn't considered you could be doing a massive scheme to prevent anyone anywhere from ever becoming immortal. But I'm not, like, in the habit of turning people down just because they're obviously doing something that hurts other people who aren't me. I want - your word that if you are lying about the other things you're not going to try to stop me in particular from living as long as I want and won't make it harder than it already is for me personally to achieve a comfortable standard of living for myself and my single currently-extant younger sibling in particular - you are just not stupid enough to promise me that as part of a trade and then break that promise, I've met people who don't really get why you shouldn't do that and you're nothing like them - and, hm, I haven't thought it through all the way so my price depends a little on how long this runs but on the order of a few rings unless I realize there's actually a lot I hadn't thought of when setting my price, so, like. What would you say to twenty four rings if I can get through it in two minutes or less, or just one if it turns out what I actually say is 'haha, I can't think of anything, fooled you'?"

If Griffie were a daemon cultist ey'd totally just lie here, even if ey were brilliant. Charon's not Asmodeus. Charon is even mentioned to have made deals and then sneakily gone back on them, though ey doesn't remember if that was in the report Saira saw or not. But maybe Saira's conflating lawfulness and intelligence or noticing a lawful thread to Griffie's or something. Ey's helped Saira enough, ey in fact won't hurt her, ey can discuss this mistake(?) once ey gets the information ey wants.

"On my honor, I promise that I will not stop you from living as long as you want, nor will I prevent you and your current younger sibling from achieving a comfortable standard of living. Should my actions somehow inadvertently have such effects, despite my intention to avoid them, I will compensate you if possible."

Griffie exchanges notes with Bar about currency conversions. "And sure, twenty-four rings for the first up-to-two-minutes of useful content, or one ring conditional on you scamming me, with renegotiation should I want to hire you to talk longer, is a deal I will accept."

"So. Spell resistance. I've never heard of anyone getting through ours, but I don't know what's up with your situation and we might want to test mine some more. In general, defense magic - magic that makes things stay as they are - is going to play about as nicely with your weird physics as any of the types of magic I know of do. I should list the types - there's a mnemonic for them that goes, 'someone used structure magic to paint a picture of an orchard and a command mage wanted to destroy it but used knowledge magic to learn it was warded and...' actually, I forgot this was getting translated and there's no reason to expect it to sound catchy to you. The types of magic are structure, illusion, green, command, void, knowledge, defense, force, heat, sun, death, and inheritance. Of these, I think structure is the most unlikely to work normally for you, it's all about the rearrangement of the kinds of atoms we have. - Scratch that, no, sun is going to be worse. Illusion is what it sounds like, and does sounds too. Green encourages plant growth - I don't know if it could directly make you in particular healthier but it wouldn't shock me. And it could be done as an area of effect on an artifact that would make a place friendly to you in particular... seems small-scale for anything you'd need to do once you got through here, though. And I'm not completely sure it would recognize you as a real plant and I'm also not totally sure it wouldn't give you cancer. Which is something I treat! But not in aliens. Anyway.

"Command magic doesn't actually do positive commands, just negative, and it doesn't affect your thoughts directly. Except insofar as 'stop breathing' will keep you from thinking about things and 'don't breathe unless you're doing what I want' might convince some people to do some things. It's useful for criminals and addicts. I don't know if it's something you need or could use. Knowledge magic is for learning things. You could use it to look at the past, including thirty thousand years ago, assuming you could even get a knowledge mage into your universe - I don't think it works across universes or it wouldn't be common knowledge that there are no aliens anywhere. It can't get through illusions but it can reliably distinguish illusions from real things.

"Defense keeps things from changing. Including along axes like 'does it have any spells acting on it right now?' or 'is it within two inches of this other thing?' I think it might be useful for you and I don't know how because I don't know what you might want to protect. Force is... what it sounds like. You move things. With your mind. If you don't already have cheap mass transit, we solve that with this one.

"Heat is... temperature control, and now that I'm thinking about how temperature works I don't know if this one will work for you... Sun, no, skipping that one, it won't work either... Death magic is for killing things. Where I come from, diseases are caused by small living organisms that sort of eat people from the inside, so we use death magic to protect ourselves from that. And inheritance is my kind and I've already told you about it.

"Beyond that, we have - specific physical knowledge that won't help you - we have math that might - we have a system of government I don't know if you have in your world, called a republic, that turns out to be almost immune to civil wars and famines and is comfortable for people who can't defend themselves on their own to live in alongside people who could kill them."

Griffie speaks to Bar and hands over 24 rings.

"Thank you for the summary. I do notice you left out uses of void magic, which I am curious about."

"As to the rest … the Celestial styles of governance all seem to work pretty well on the metrics of war and famine and murder, but I'll look up republics just in case they have cool stuff the Celestials might want to borrow. I have my own anti-disease magic. Force sounds … so, to be clear, none of my current plans involve bringing anyone from your world through my door unless they want to spend a very long time in this bar, because I am not opening my door until I'm ready to fight some gods. It would take less than a minute for hostile forces to show up, probably much less given the magnitude of the advantage that Bar gives, and I'm not giving hostile forces access to more worlds if I can help it. Given this, force isn't very useful for in-bar purposes that I can think of, same for command and knowledge. Green is … theoretically interesting, but yeah, probably the wrong power level and I can also cure cancer but would consider getting it inconvenient. I can boost plant growth myself. I would be interested in hiring a defense mage, and would like a price quote from you and your employee on facilitating that."

"Also, it'd be convenient for me to pay in stories because storytelling is fun and doesn't trade off against my other resources as much as coin does."

"I like stories but not a lot. And I suspect I can keep getting them from you for free since, you know, I already have. We are probably running out of time and shouldn't bring in a defense mage until we can make one more trip out for everything we will need before I open my door and maybe take over the world or something. - Probably not that, I like the legacy of legitimacy our government has. Maybe just arrive and revolutionize medicine and demonstrate that I know everything on a law school curriculum and run for office. Which. Ugh. Gets us right back to 'I want to verify things and one kind of payment I'd accept would be help with that' - assuming I can even trust the help."

"Okay. You have correctly discerned that I would totally tell stories for free, and you have a point regarding open-door errands."

"I can do planning help but I don't really do particularly amazing civilization-interfacing-y help. I might catch it if there's something you're not thinking of, but my background is … I grew up in a little village that was all my family and we basically got along, I interacted with small towns with weird problems but as an outsider who didn't, like, try to persistently live there or sell services or whatnot. The first time I went to a city, the government went against its own laws to kidnap me and there was a giant mess about that, and currently I live in a city which is also not necessarily the model you want for governance, there are areas with signs effectively communicating 'if you go past this point and get murdered, probably whoever you hire to defend you won't be able to arrest the murderer at any reasonable cost to them and thus won't try'. Well. Currently I live in Milliways. But I do own housing there."

"I guess I'd just like to know what you want out of taking over the world or running for public office or such. I'll probably just believe you if you tell me, I have a lot of practice trying to figure out whether human-shaped people are being honest or not."

"And if I want to offer you help, then I'll look into having any help I can offer be verifiable. Or if not I'll just pay you in coin."

"...I meant help figuring out what's up with Milliways but that sounds fascinating. - How do you tell if human-shaped people are being honest?"

"There's a lot of subtle cues in their posture and speech and such. It takes a while to build up an intuition and some people who try just conclude that everyone who they like is honest and everyone they don't like is lying, but if you try to avoid that and other failure modes and you have lots of practice eventually you can get fairly good?"

"Gotta admit, when I want to know if people are lying, I check whether, if it turned out later they'd tricked me, I could take them to court. Or I look for reviews of them. Or, uh, hire a knowledge mage and then worry that my knowledge mage has been kidnapped and replaced with an actor."

If Cinlirina has been replaced by an actor, it's a pretty knowledgeable one: He's currently reading up on lost history of the Sorota clan, which he's currently somewhat obsessed with.

"Well, yes, giving people incentives not to lie or looking at their reputations is the more reliable way, but sometimes you can't do it. If you want to try having my option as a backup I'd recommend observing people in contexts where they might lie, making predictions about whether they're lying or not and explaining why you think that, and then checking. But it's a lot of work and if you reliably have access to a functional government I can see why you might want to just skip it."

"Makes sense. And does not help with Milliways at all, so how am I supposed to verify that any cool discoveries I make reading things here aren't just - hmm. Anyway, you were wondering why I would want to run for office, and I guess just because it's the obvious thing to do, that or buy a private island."

"This sounds connected to republics. Given that I could borrow a book about republics from Bar for free, would you like to explain for the same price, or should I borrow a book?"

"Well, you'll get more from the book, but the quick rundown is, the empire is run by three imperial ministers with their own individual areas of power - metaphorical areas, like the justice system or tax collection - and periodically every free person gets a list of people to consider for each of those jobs. And for each person on the list, they say whether they'd be okay with that person getting that job. The person with the most yeses is the least objectionable candidate and the one who people would be least likely to bother going to war against if war were the way we did things, so there's not much a war would change, so we don't bother."

"And this works the way it does because … everyone thinks 'even though some people have magic with direct military usefulness and are good at fighting and some don't and aren't, we're going to ignore that and treat green mages' votes equally to death mages' votes', and this doesn't make people think that the elections are sufficiently non-representative of war results that they try to start wars?"

"If you make green mages angry, you will starve. You might not die immediately like if you make a defense mage angry, but you will starve. Or it might not even matter, because they might be a professional command designer and not the kind of person you'd ever voluntarily cross if you had any choice. - You're not wrong to wonder, but you should be wondering it about nobodies, and in practice there aren't enough of those to make a big difference and if there were they could just destroy the world. I think you're missing that wars are fought with tactics and logistics and most people aren't working mages."

"Wars are fought with tactics and logistics, but for one, if you're a subsistence farmer you don't have the ability to even study those because you can't get books and you don't have enough spare time anyway and if you get military training it's from someone who just wants to teach you how to defend your village from goblins or such. For two, in my world, stuff like 'who has the best tools for producing military equipment' and 'who's the best at tactics' and 'who is personally the best at self-defense' and such are all correlated, and the reason I haven't gone and taken over some villages or something is … well, there's a lot of reasons, but they look more like 'I don't want to and it'd be a waste of my time' than 'I would lose'. Well, a lot of places are being run by other people, who would say things like 'no, you can't conquer those villages and get them to give you some fraction of their crops, they're mine and I'm already doing that', and some of those people could in fact beat me in fights, but that'd be the blocker if I went to try it."

"And thank you for the explanation. Um, who are 'nobodies'?"

"...Uh, wow. Nobodies have magic that can't change or create or protect, only destroy. It's banned because if they keep destroying stuff we'll run out, but, also, people just don't like them. I think they mostly end up killed as babies, at least in the south. Less so up north where people don't mind as much if they get other jobs."

"If most people aren't working mages and thus magic isn't that big a deal, and most people follow the law, why do people dislike, er, I'm assuming from you not listing occupations 'void mages'? Enough to kill them as babies? That seems like a really strong dislike that doesn't make much sense."

"It just feels... unaesthetic? That... magic is what makes you a person, and their magic is useless and no one wants them to do it, and it feels like... I mean... I don't actually know that that happens with people too rich to be working mages, it's not like the clans ever tell other people what magic they have, but it'd make me shiver if it turns out they're keeping their void mages around. I wouldn't vote for one, if I knew that's what someone was. I think they know that. And they might get a shivery feeling about it too, I think that's something that's the same for caralendri and humans. Even my parents wouldn't just inflict a nobody on the world for the fun of it if it meant raising it themselves."

Griffie restrains emself enough to not openly sputter.

"So, there's a social norm of killing babies because they seem unaesthetic, to the point that it would feel like 'inflicting that sort of person on the world' to choose not to kill one, and the idea that powerful people aren't killing their babies of that type feels unpleasant. This … seems like a bad norm … which you should stop having? I know that's not how ideas this widespread work, I'm sorry … uh, there are whole planets with humans that don't natively have magic at all and the humans are still person-ish and some of them come here, would it help if you met one of them? …this isn't even your priority, is it, and if I was like 'well, let me go to your world and try to fix this' you would be concerned, and also the solution to problems in your world is not going to be, uh, find the person who's sitting around in a room going 'haha, once the ten thousanth baby is killed for having the wrong magic I will be invincible' and stop them, foes-beyond-fiends and all that, being able to turn into a smilodon or call down lightning isn't even helpful here. Uh. I find this situation very objectionable, what sort of evidence if any would convince you to want to try to fix it."

Halfway through that she starts making faces.

Eventually she manages to say, "...What the fuck?"

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have just said 'foes beyond fiends' without explaining. It's the title of my friend's essay on how my world's … people who directly gain power every time someone kills a baby for being unaesthetic and thus actively work to cause more of that, to give an example … fundamentally are powered by the forces within the natures of normal people who aren't literal embodiments of pure evil, and how the latter constitutes the true enemy, which is much harder to deal with."

"...That sounds intensely interesting and is not any of the things I was startled to hear you say. Um. - Because I sort of consider you maybe on a potential friend trajectory I'm going to lead with 'they can't even do magic at the age when they die, it's not like they're people already or anything' - but, also, you cannot possibly have meant the thing I would usually understand 'humans that don't have magic at all' to mean - I don't really know what sorts of evidence would make me trust my senses at all at this point, let alone convince me to want different things..."

“What … do you think I mean by humans without magic. Why is your conception of personhood about capacity to do magic.”

"Like... if there were things that could breed with humans, but weren't people? Magic is the reason people are people. It only works if you have some kind of mental model of the world and want things in the right way, and it only works well if you think really hard and don't do the first stupid thing that comes to mind. And if it works badly then you probably get killed. Which is bad for your odds of going on to have any more kids afterward, and kids resemble their parents. So there's - a range of intelligence where there aren't any species that usually end up there. And there wouldn't be people who think like humans for no reason."

"So … in my world, most people can't do magic unless they do extensive training with expensive resources or work with a divine power, unless you count everything which doesn't work in an antimagic field as doing magic, in which case producing children counts as magic, but it's annoyingly easy to do accidentally and plenty of animals do it. And it turns out that having a mental model of the world and reasonable goals and not doing stupid things is still pretty useful for having living children if you don't have magic, you need to make good farming decisions and such. And you come off as smarter than the average human in my world but not shockingly so, they still reason the same sorts of ways that you seem to do. I am really sorry about the thing where you can barely trust sensory evidence much less me, but this is in fact the claim I am making. I met a human child in here a while back who was selling advice and she didn't have any native magic at all, and she seemed at least as smart as we are despite showing signs of malnourishment."

"Huh. That... is creepy. Less creepy than nobodies, but still."

"I'd ask you followup questions but I don't want to overwhelm you when you're not even confident I'm real."

"I don't think you're going to make me more overwhelmed by asking questions."

"Conversations with overwhelmed people are often less productive, especially if you want them to change their minds about something in an actual persistent way as opposed to them feeling backed into a corner about it and just saying whatever will let them stop talking sooner. And also the thing where you don't think I'm real is actually kind of annoying. Do you think it would help you come to conclusions more if you, say, got a good night's sleep, had some really normal food, read a book you've already read before, had some time to think?"

"Not really. What do you even want me to change my mind about?"

"People with the wrong kind of magic being 'nobodies' who shouldn't exist, being willing to sell useful information to mass murderers, some other stuff in the cluster those two are in, and also, separately, the idea that intelligent sensible people are trustworthy about deals even in circumstances like Milliways where they aren't in the same world as you and have no reputational concerns. I mean, I am in fact trustworthy about deals, but I have met smart people who would totally betray you in circumstances like this. And, uh, also the thing where Bar and I exist, I want you to believe that."

"What. Okay, first of all, unless Milliways is very comprehensively deceiving me about everything, people can scry Milliways. Not from outside of it but they can. And you plan to be here a long time, or so you say. And even if not, then - say you go to Har and ruin my life while also never having any further dealings with me or anyone who might communicate with me. What does it even mean for you to do that? This is obviously an iterated game and it's alarming that you haven't noticed."

"Cinlirina's level of scrying, at his price point, is from my standpoint unprecedented, and lots of people like me are better at blocking scrying than I am, really. My plans in this bar genuinely did not account for me acquiring a persistent reputation with people besides Bar and maybe a few regulars. And, conveniently for me, I tend to deal fairly with outworlders I'll never see again when I don't think it'll affect my reputation directly, but not everyone does that."

"And if I were, I don't know, some Ghlaunder cultist or something, my plan wouldn't be to take a bunch of resources from your world, my plan would be to infect you with a bunch of antiscrying-warded long-incubation-period high-mutation-rate diseases and send you home with them, for the glory of Disease. Possibly premised on the apparently-false model that making your world sicker would empower Ghlaunder or people like him, possibly knowing that it wouldn't empower Ghlaunder but proceeding anyway. And then never be trusted by anyone in Har again, obviously, but also be out of contact with them. And I'd come with some pretext to get you away from Security, have more experience with lying to people so I could push you about it, et cetera."

"And, uh, are you willing to explain 'iterated game'?"

She does not look horrified until they get to that last question, at which point she starts openly staring. (She's pretty sure that plan as described wouldn't go that badly. She's not going to critique it for free.)

"Yes, so, this is the kind of thing the government tries to make sure everyone knows, because you can't have a society without it. When two or more people interact, there's a mathematically optimal way to behave when making deals and - all sorts of things. You can simplify things down to toy models like, in this case, a parable about people deciding whether to sell each other out. An empire wants to conquer a town and enslave everyone who lives there. There's one way into the town and it requires the cooperation of at least one of two people, who we'll call Ariu and Seihra, who live in town and are in charge of getting supplies and things in and out. The besiegers have made it known that if they take the town, they'll set aside a twelfth of the spoils to reward whoever helped them, as well as sparing that person and their possessions. Or, if both people help, they'll each be spared and get a twenty-fourth of the spoils - out of a slightly smaller total pool of spoils, even.

"It happens that both of the people who could betray the town like the town. But they don't like it as much as they'd like a twelfth of the spoils from conquering it. They'd be about indifferent between selling the town out for an eighteenth of the spoils and not doing that. They'd rather the town stay safe than get a twenty-fourth, but they really don't want to be enslaved.

"So Ariu thinks they'd rather betray the town, because, think of it this way: ideally, Ariu betrays them, and Seihra doesn't, and Ariu gets rich. But if Seihra does also betray them, then Ariu has to.

"And Seihra thinks the same. So Seihra would also betray the town.

"This looks like a one-time thing but it's actually a pattern. It can come up again and again in different forms. Ariu and Seihra decide whether to sell their town out. Ariu wants to buy a secret booby-trap for their house. Ariu and Seihra decide whether to hire assassins to go after each other. It comes up over and over. Two people have every reason to betray each other, will always be better off betraying than keeping faith, and would both be better off if they were both forced to keep faith.

"If it came up just the once, it'd be the smart choice to betray the other party. Because it comes up more than once, and because you never know when's the last time, betrayal is a bad choice. Because you might be better off if you betray some idiot who just goes along with it, but there aren't idiots who just go along with it, because that eventually gets you killed if you don't learn better. So you give people a chance, and if they betray you, you ruin them. And if you can't, the state should do it for you, so that people don't go around fucking with each other, so that everyone does productive things and pays more taxes."

"This sounds very like Axis. Bar, does Axis have publications on the subject?"

A pamphlet appears on the counter. Griffie picks it up. It's titled "Formalized Cooperation: Why Law Works!" and has clipart of an orrery, a mechanical sphere with two arms and two wings, and a red humanoid with horns and bat wings all working together to build a wall on the cover. Griffie flips through it.

"Right. So. There's a thing where if people generally don't like betraying each other and would count that as itself a cost, the rate of betrayal gets lower due to that, and then you have a sufficiently functional society that way that you don't need to also lecture everybody on how even though betraying each other looks profitable it in fact won't be. And then if they're not into this sort of theorizing as a hobby, the lectures don't happen, and they're not familiar with this vocabulary."

"But I feel like I understand the principle of … being the type of person who betrays people will make nobody want to transact with you, and if you're in a region of people like that it'll be bad, and the only time it would be appealing to a sensible person is in rare non-repeated contexts because otherwise you really definitely can't get away with it? I understand that part, is that sufficient?"

"Sure, yeah. Doesn't matter what you call it if you get it. Just, it's iterated if it'll come up again. And that specific type of choice is a prisoner's dilemma, there's names for all of them."

"Okay. So there's not some extra second thing I'm missing here, that's good."

"Right, yeah."

"Anyway, I … if the people of Har are like the not-made-of-concepts people I'm used to except less likely to care about each other, I'm glad they have Law or at least that part of it. It's a good system in those bounds."

"And you don't even think about it, because if you and people like you were guarding a city, you'd think betraying it sounded really unfun, and you'd know the other person also thought that... I don't get why that doesn't just mean your prices are higher but maybe they end up prohibitively high in practice."

"So, if I were guarding a city and some people wanted to raid it… for one, I'd probably have taken the job not just because of pay but because I thought it would be very bad if the city were raided, say because I really oppose slavery in general. For two, in my world I have a reputation of being on the side of the Celestials, and of being a reliable employee, and this would screw up both of those things, because I'm a traveling adventurer, even if the city I'm guarding this week falls I'm still going to have decent odds of surviving and wanting a job next week, the iterated games thing you said. But ignoring that, if I let the city I'm guarding be raided for a share of the loot, I'd feel awful about that for the rest of my life. I wouldn't be able to enjoy the loot. The act of betrayal would probably reduce my chance of a decent afterlife, which I guess is just another incentive, though I could try to use the loot to buy my way into one anyway. So, that kind of makes the cost of betraying the city seem worse than the costs of dying defending it. Which is why Hell and other evil factions in my world say things like 'when we win, the way to be tortured the least is to have surrendered to us immediately', to make the costs of loyalty worse instead of making the pay for betrayal better."

"That sounds like a very convenient way to be known to be."

"It is, I really like it."

"...Anyway. You do know game theory, you were getting annoyed with me, was there anything else?"

"I … probably want to talk you into being nice to people when it's sufficiently cheap … or alternately into setting policy I morally approve of when you run for office … but I feel like working on either of those in a constructive way is plausibly blocked on the thing where you think I'm fake, because why would you listen to fake people's opinions or ideas. You're not generally annoying, it's more that persistent inconvenient-and-false beliefs are annoying. Presumably you agree with me that you would like to not have false beliefs, so it's not like you're trying to annoy me. And I think that me trying to talk you into believing I exist would be no fun for me, so I was hoping to outsource that by, say, buying you some time to yourself to think, and then we could talk more once you stop being wrong."

"I mean, actually, my new plan is to study math here, because I can independently verify that the math works, then go home and sell proofs, assuming I can actually go home at all. I think listening to ideas from fake people is the same kind of thing but, anyway," shrug, "I don't mind doing research on my own while you do something else if you want."

"Ooh, math. I'm trying to wrap my head around everything I'll need to know to understand analytic continuation, myself, a conversation I had suggested it has serious military applications in my world. How about … I go do something else but I give you some means of getting in touch with me, even if spending some time studying math doesn't lead to you changing your mind about anything I'd probably be happier to talk to you again once I spend more time with people who seem more confident I exist. And also when you're ready to reopen your door I want defense mage services and will pay you as well as the defense mage for them."

Griffie confers with Bar. "Ah, she says she can pass my device a message if you ask her to, does that work for you?"

"Works for me."

"Great. See you later."

Griffie heads to the backyard area, transforms into a bird, and flies through the too-small space at maximum speed until exhausted. Ey lands, detransforms, catches eir breath, orders a cup of honeyed glowing tea that tastes like the sun ey won't see for a very long time, and heads to the infirmary to look for Jim.

"Hello again. Griffith, right?"

"You've got it. I got the impression you think I exist, which is a quality I turn out to value in conversational partners. Want to talk shop?"

"Actually, I'm uncertain about personal identity as a concept and don't have a model more detailed than 'a good plant-creature may have asked some questions about my trustworthiness' and that's not even distinguishing."

"Oh. Uh. That model feels more confident and correct than Saira's model, I think I accidentally got her to be annoyingly paranoid and she's not confident I'm not, uh, a weird dream, or an appendage of Bar, or whatnot."

"And you want to talk about how we're not in a state of perfect Cartesian doubt, or have you got something else in mind?"

"I was actually really curious about your rejection of goodness, because that in combination with the thing where you don't seem to be being maximally evil at all times seems weird and like an important hole in my understanding of ways people engage with ethics."

"Was there ever a time in your world where there wasn't evil?"

"There is no documented era in my world in which evil did not exist. However, intelligent mortal life and deities are speculated to have co-evolved, with more intelligent lifeforms emitting more quintessence that formed gods which were generally invested in the existence of useful mortals, and presumably before that evil did not exist. …arguably we would expect evil gods to be the later-evolving gods, the ancestors of lifeforms today probably spent more time on things like agriculture and sleep and than they spent on mistreating each other, so you'd expect things like 'a courtship proto-deity that's also okay with kidnapping people' than a straightforwardly evil one in the early era? That's pure speculation, though."

"Oh, cool, your world's very different and I want to hear all about your moral philosophy at some point. Possibly now if you're up for it."

"I can try to give a summary of thoughts I have about ethics and then you can ask me questions, how about? I don't have a neat writeup."

"I think it's bad when people are tortured or murdered, uh, not counting consensual application of pain and consensual death, both of which are either acceptable or a complicated mess. I think it's good when people do things they enjoy, such as presumably in your case reading books, or cause good things to happen, or prevent bad things from happening. I have more opinions about specific things being good or bad but I'm trying to gesture very at the space. I think that being the kind of person it's predictably safe to give information to and the kind of person who looks like a safe person to interact with are pretty useful for doing good things? I think that … hmm, that a lot of the time if someone who isn't literally made of pure evil is doing bad things, that they have some kind of reason and it can often be productive to talk things over, and even if their reason is something like 'see, I wanted to be really rich and I thought that murdering people would help and I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you', sometimes they can still be talked into being less evil especially if they don't have opportunities to do the thing again."

"Does your world have the thing where there's an underlying factor of propensity to do good or evil, and if you do a good thing then you become more prone to do other good things, in a way that at the extreme ends is basically just mind control?"

"That's horrifying. No, no it does not. The way that normal people in my world end up turning into aligned outsiders is … your soul is falling apart, after you die it falls apart faster, and after you die usually some god ends up with your soul. If you're an evil god and you get a bunch of souls, you aggressively turn them evil in a way that's an extreme case of mind control. If you're a good god and you have a bunch of souls, you try to keep them together as much as possible, and you offer them replacement parts when they decay, and the replacement parts you have available to offer do eventually turn the people into embodiments of goodness, but … if you win you'll try to fix the problem where people's souls fall apart, and then if you want more embodiments of goodness than you have ideally you'll take less coerced volunteers or build them all from scratch or something."

"Well. Sounds like a very different sort of situation.

"We used to not have anyone who wasn't what you'd call a good outsider. And I helped put an end to that, because I couldn't stand it, and so now there are two alignments you can be mind controlled into. One of them sucks slightly less."

“So when you say you’re rejecting goodness, you mean whatever horrible mind control your world has, not necessarily some better version that doesn’t have mind control built in?”

"In some sense, I haven't particularly interacted with the sorts of relationships to morality people can have in other worlds. In another sense, while working on fixing my world, I could have chosen to make other people happier in the mean time, and instead I have chosen to hurt them for my own amusement. If I definitely couldn't ever do anything to improve morality back home, and still had to go back for some reason, I would not want to be an angel."

“Are you aware that sometimes people find being hurt amusing and it may be possible to filter for that?”

"It's more complicated than that but I do get anything at all out of masochists. Sometimes."

"I am curious why, out of the possibilities for amusement, you went with hurting nonconsenting people at least sometimes. I assume you're aware of the thing where if you do that then people get mad at you and try to stop you?"

"People trying to stop me is also fun."

"Huh. Do you want to spar at some point? My world has very good nonlethal-attack options and by default if I claw you that'll either induce fatigue or do nothing, and I can prepare stuff like lightning bolts that way too. Or if you're resilient and would find it entertaining I can cause actual injuries, you do do infirmary work and fight people so presumably you'd be able to manage your health on that?"

"That might be fun." It might be a ploy to get experience that'll be useful in a real fight later on, but that wouldn't make it any less fun.

"Alright, we can do that sometime, I'm not in a sparring mood right now but whenever you next feel like it you can have Bar send my information-device a message, or if you have something like that I can message you. Could you tell me what your world is like? What the local thing called 'good' is and what the additional alignment is?"

It may be getting increasingly clear from Griffie's tone that ey's rather skeptical that Jim's world's "goodness" could possibly be the quality of goodness which Griffie is used to.

"Good is - you probably recognize it. Selflessness. Protecting and caring for others. A thing that mortals tend to try to echo, if not very well, by singing hymns in church - I think they recognize that a victory for good looks like celebrating things, trying to be good at things, trying to make other people look good, although I'm not sure sometimes whether they're sure how metaphorical 'it's good when people live together in harmony' is. I have a better definition but Milliways tends not to be able to reliably translate concepts people have never encountered before so I don't bother giving my better definition to mortals, generally, but I can if you think you're unusually likely to be able to get it or unusually interested in studying the background reading."

Griffie winces at 'selflessness' topping the list of what 'good' is in Jim's world.

"I consider this an interesting problem and possibly tangentially related to things I've studied before, I'd like the better definition."

"So it's a metaphorical crystalline lattice existing in a torsor of the set of all possible - "

"If it's only possible to explain it in language that's this technical, I'd really prefer it on paper so I can go through it with a dictionary or three."

"Sure."

He takes a notebook out of a pocket too small to contain it, and a pencil, and writes it down and adds several illustrative diagrams.

And Griffie photographs the note, transcribes the text while maintaining the relation to the diagrams, and gets to work with the aforementioned dictionaries. If the path to victory involves dealing with the complicated mathematics of the forces of ethics anyway, ey might as well get some practice.

Goodness, in Jim's world, appears to be a precise structure of relationships between agents-at-times and environments. Just as a spell diagram is a precise structure of markings, but is still a working diagram no matter where in an ordinary room you put it, so is it with Goodness. If everyone in society shifted their actions at once towards a different equilibrium, that might be Good, but unilaterally breaking with a Good status quo is not.

For any entity, the Good way to treat that entity supports that entity's role in the structure. Entities' proper roles include (but are not limited to) supporting other entities in their proper roles. These proper roles can be inferred from other information about the entities in question and the world they interact with.

Griffie summarizes eir understanding back to Jim, ending with "…and whatever this is ended up stabilizing on an equilibrium where mind control is acceptable, possibly due to being recursion with an insufficiently well-defined base case?"

"...No, it's - if some good people moved to Milliways, they could still do nice things for each other, and for strangers from other worlds, and for everything they did or thought in Milliways, there'd be a fact of the matter about whether, if the whole situation had existed in my world instead, it'd pull them closer to good or evil. So it's not inherent to goodness that there's mind control about it. That's just what my universe does when someone convinces it that it's possible to relate to morality in a given way. After we convinced it that evil is also conceivable it started doing the same thing for us - there's a specific inflection point, even, where you go from net mind controlled to be more good to net mind controlled to be more evil."

"…do the good people have opinions about mind control and what are they. What is your concept of evil. Have you considered developing a third concept that's about … individual freedom, particularly from mind control? Do you want to evacuate your entire universe through Milliways or work on mental protection spells with me, I have a spell that's specifically 'protection from evil forces, especially mind control' and it's in a spell-family that also does protection from good forces and such."

"That... is a lot of questions. I have considered developing a third concept - that is the main project I was working on before I got my door, and when we tried to convince reality to support individual freedom it seems to have parsed it as something closer to 'it's really funny when people make choices, we should brainwash the people who run ice cream parlors into selling more different flavors and require that everyone find a new house every night' and we didn't get critical mass on a vision of the future that was both comprehensible and, uh, that. I am considering evacuating the universe but I don't know if I'll decide to do that. I do have a model of good people's opinions on the mind control but maybe we should go get a book from Bar that is actually written by a good person about it. And evil is fundamentally about fucking with people, and about - particular things, and physical things, and pain, and making people less good, and about selfishness. Again, that's the summary for mortals, but in a technical sense it's a pretty simple negation of good, I don't think there's anything weird about the math. And if your spells can block my entire universe's inherent physics, that would be shocking but awesome."

"Thanks for answering my questions. Blocking an entire major shard of universal physics is not unprecedented for my world's spells, though it tends to take a lot of input energy and there may be more effective methods. It is in fact possible to, say, dramatically reduce the fundamental possibility for objects to have temperatures at all much less be on fire using my world's magic, and fire is one of the four elements. It does suggest that me literally figuring out Protection from Good and tagging you with that and Protection from Evil won't solve your problems, but I already figured that was the case. I hear that really skilled wizards can make a significant effort at convincing the universe that someone's mind just doesn't exist, and there are also spells designed to target alignment-y background radiation like when you go to the Plane of Law and the plane itself tries to push you into walking at the correct rhythm in the correct lane. And I think it might be nice to get a book from Bar written by a Good philosopher about mind control, but I feel pessimistic about that route and would like to look at the technological route first."

"Are you trying to solve moral realism? That's charming."

"I'm interested in solving the horrible mind control thing? You can have ethics be meaningfully reflected by fundamental physics without … your world's problems."

"I think the best option for that, given Milliways, is just to leave, but I don't think everyone would want to."

"Well, you're the one with local knowledge so it's up to you, but if you want to work on anti-mind-control spell development for the people who don't want to evacuate, I'd be happy to work with you on it."

"I don't mind magical research or casting spells on people to fuck with their minds in ways they'd experience as startling and disorienting and possibly violating, but you seem like you might."

"Sorry, I'm not sure whether to parse that as 'I wish to reserve my right to personally mind-control people for fun later and thus don't want to build too-good wards' or 'I am fine with Protection from Weird Moral Physics being startling, disorienting, and possibly violating for victims of Weird Moral Physics, and I anticipate this as a risk, but you might not be fine with that, so do you really want to help me build something I might use that way' or what."

"Second thing. A lot of people like the thing where they just have to put in an upfront effort and then maintaining their alignment gets easier and easier. And none of them have ever known anything else."