A seed walks in. Well a currently humanoid being that if everything goes to plan will become a tree walks in. Ey's carrying a Macbook pro in one hand and wearing a t-shirt that says "I was on the Earth first contact team and all I got was this lousy t-shirt". Also pants. 

Griffie closes the textbook and waves. "Hi! Welcome to Milliways! Haven't seen another plant around here in a while."

The seed will look up from the mac that has been open in one hand.

"Sorry give me a second."

Ey will walk over to bar whisper something, and turn ey's back to Griffie while rapidly paging through a book. 
After a few seconds ey will turn back to Griffie with a drink and no book.

"Hi! Sorry I just wanted to make sure this was the real Milliways."

"Entirely understandable. Been here before?"

"Not in this lifetime."
Ey probably shouldn't do the deliberately mysterious schtick, but come on its Millyways.

Griffie, lacking a lot of memories from eir past lifetimes, does not parse this as a deliberate evasion at all.

"Fair enough. You know, I wonder what Bar's policy is for free drinks over multiple reincarnations of the same person."

A napkin appears, reading "I do grant free drinks multiple times to the same person across reincarnations under normal circumstances."

Griffie passes the napkin to the new visitor, and then awkwardly realizes something. "Greetings! I am Griffith, but Milliways is a casual space, you can call me Griffie. Would you like to share a name or other preferred reference?"

"People in informal circumstances call me Inovemekio* because my full name is 32 syllables includes ones where the tone markers are semantically meaningful."

*Pronounced with long o's but otherwise short vowels

"Inovemekio. Nice to meet you. Any plans for while you're here?"

Right plans, ey should probably have some plans for total multiversal domination or something. Also, should probably not admit to trying to form plans for "total multiversal domination or something" on the spot.

"I think I'll try to get some lost media from bar. Maybe try to find out about magic systems that you can learn if you're not from the original world."

"I've checked, Bar doesn't really have stuff like that that also doesn't require you to be in a world with the magic, or have a teacher with the magic, or have reference items she can't sell you with the magic."

Ey frowns.
"I guess, I'll try for lost media hand hope someone shows up before my bed time. By the way are you looking for anything here?"

"High-power sharable magic that people are willing to share with me so I can go fight the gods of death and tyranny and such in my world, information relevant to same, pleasant social interactions to maintain my sanity and possibly solve other people's problems because I like it when there aren't too many problems."

"Do you have any high-power sharable magic yet, and what is your tech level like?"

"In theory I have something I could share, in practice it would plausibly come with a massive load of side effects for your world and not just you so I'm not going to share it, sorry. If what you're holding is in fact a nonmagical information-processing device that's capable of storing a lot of books and doing a lot of math, there probably isn't tech from my world I can recommend to you."

"Yes, yes it is. And I was actually thinking it would most likely be a tech for magic trade because I'm not a serious magic user."

"If you've solved immortality nonmagically or alternately can demonstrate a working immortality solution that's just missing the kind of magic I have, I can look into screening you for whether I want to give you a second, more magic-compatible soul. However, I am concerned that if someone dies while having my world's kind of soul, this will cause problems."

"I don't have a non-magical solution to immortality particularly if you mean 'currently alive people don't die at all' rather than people with genetic alterations applied before they are born have vastly decreased ageing."

"Like I technically don't have either but that later is something that will plausibly be developed soonish as a side effect of other research and could easily be speed up if we were actually aiming for it instead of just using magic. Whereas even with magic we don't have a transferable way of keeping people from dying when they are killed."

"Oh. A preexisting-magic immortality solution works too, just, it is a magically significant event when someone with a specific-kind-of-magic-I-have soul dies and the event is magically significant in a bad way and I don't know if it'd, say, start some horrible chain reaction in an otherwise unprepared universe."

Luckily Inovemekio has experience explaining his species to other people.

"This is probably a good time to clarify that my species reproduces in a way that involves copying over large chunks of our memories and perceived-continuity-of-self. Which is how I've been to Millyways, but not in this lifetime. Otherwise, we're only even the no ageing kind of immortal if we take root and reach female sexual maturity. Our normal lifespan is something like 150 years for ymales and a little less for zmales."

And we don't publicly talk about what happens to people that fail to manifest any reproductive capability, ey doesn't say outloud.

“Memory and continuity is good, but … to my knowledge I’ve created no death gods thus far and I don’t want to break that record. I’m sorry.”

"I also approve of not having death gods. It might be worth telling me more about your world incase there is a solution to this or something from my world helpful to you that is cheap enough I can afford give it away instead of needing to trade."

"I can in fact pay in money for things, and then you can use the money to rent a room here and see if helpful people to show up. Anyway. Short version: People have souls made of 'positive energy', souls emit quintessence when stuff happens and the quintessence clumps up into gods of things like Rice and Good Tools and Truthseeking and Death and Tyranny and Miscarriages and such. Gods are very powerful, and the god of Rice can get more power by using her existing power to make the world more people-interacting-with-rice-ish, getting even more power. In the right environment, gods can get seemingly infinite power this way and shatter time and send continents flying. I want to fight them to the point where they decide to do this, and still win anyway. Well, I want to win against the evil ones, there are some good ones on my side."

"I would rather die than foresake the way of dreams. I'm also required lead off with that rote line when someone suggests that I sleep in an non-ritualy-compliant way instead of giving an actual explaination. That said yeah we do typically commit instance suicide if we are caught out such that we would otherwise fall asleep improperly."

"…w…hy? Uh, to be clear, my bafflement does not mean I intend to cause you problems about your sleep ritual, just … why."

Ok time to not technically lie without mentioning the elephant in the room. Luckily this is something he has multiple lifetimes of practice with. Admittedly mostly with species that have enough shared galactic culture to know when to play ball about it, but ey has also spent some time on Earth.

"So there are actual reasons for us having the rituals we do rather than chanting at sunrise or something but at this point it's mostly because we have a covenant about it. Like how Jews have to... Actually you probably don't have Jews so let's not get into circumsision."

Ey understands Judaism less well than ey thinks because ey has latched onto it as the the one remotely comon anglophone religion with certain features that are the norm in galactic religions and thus glossed over how much it doubles down on other weird human things like monotheism.

"If you don't want to talk about it you really don't have to, but a covenant with whom?"

"Multiple groups involved in the creation of our species and also sorta with the Galactic Empire as the successor state of multiple no longer existant institutions the negotiated our existence with the dying species our first generation got it's home planet and seed capital from."

"I don't really understand why any of those groups would demand a commitment to death before improper sleep, but if your time here is limited that may not be the most productive conversational thread. Bar may be able to offer you some stimulants if those are ritually acceptable?"

"Stimulants are a really tricky grey area. If it does come to that I'll ask bar so I can get precleared formulas from home.

Backing up slightly how well contianed to your world are your gods?"

"Currently I wouldn't worry, they're paused and I'm not, and I'm committed to going home but not until I can fix things, which should by Milliways physics make them stay paused."

Great if they're ever going to be unpaused this is actually ey's problem. Now to decide if it's better to help Griffie win or to make sure there is no connection back to the real world* when ey starts fighting.

"If they do get into Millyways are they the type of being that can exist outside their world?"

"Yes, definitely."

"And are they likely to try that? Also, are they any books bar can provide on the subject?"

"Yeah, you don't really get to be a god without being really dedicated to spreading some ideal? And Bar has lots of books, I'm sure she can get you a who's who of Suaal deities and powers."

Literally superhuman reading speed time!

Ey already personally has lots of money even without needing to tap the nearly unlimited lines of credit available for dealing with outside context problems. 

Ey will take a "who's who of Suaal deities and powers" or three (for perspective) as well as checking up on this Griffie succulent.

Axis has a very bland who's who summarizing themselves as the (Greater Planar Plane, not with a deity-shaped concentration of quintessence) Power of Pure Law, responsible for maintaining order throughout the multiverse by balancing the interests of various powers. According to them, Heaven and Hell are at least fairly sane, though both distracted by their moral commitments (Heaven's are friendship and kindness and such, Hell's are making sure that everyone occupies the appropriate posture of terrified submission to Lord Asmodeus) enough that they won't coordinate with Axis on conquering the universe and dividing it into Axis-supervised Heaven and Hell patches based on their compared military strengths. The rest of the Upper Planes are … at least sort of vaguely kept in line or at least documented by Heaven, which makes fighting them not a priority even if some of them would be so Chaotic as to disrupt signage in order to rescue slaves. Proteans and the Abyss are Chaotic and have no Heavenly protectors, so Axis is at war with both of them. Abaddon, the plane run by the Horsemen of War, Plague, Famine, and Death, is at least not as insane as the Abyss and can at least sort of keep to treaties, so its interests do get reflected in them, though they really don't have the best track record of keeping to treaties, which is why the treaties are often revised to penalize them.

The broad themes of Hell's public-oriented documents are oriented towards "immediate, total compliance is the torture-minimizing option" and "working with Hell will get you the power-over-others and recognition you deserve", oozing with the message that compliance with Lord Asmodeus is what any reasonable agent would do. According to Hell: Axis is an admirable example of Law second only to Asmodeus. While they seem to be missing out on the ethical aspects, they've already agreed to immediately surrender and be brought in line with Asmodeus's vision when his absolute authority becomes clearer. Abaddon has little to offer, being a plane of omnicide. The Abyss is a disordered cancer which would run much better under Asmodeus's rule, and the Maelstrom is pure insanity of no worth. The Upper Planes treat their servants with far too light a hand, due to their insane values which will lead them to failure. The Archons are, at least, capable of some basic understanding of Law, while the Azatas lack even that.

Public documentation from Abaddon is sparse, ranging from "Life is a lie that Charon will mercifully shatter. The other planes perpetuate it and they will, like everything else, die.", to praise of war and advice that one get help from Szuriel the Horseman of War with it, promotion of dangerous fasting, glorification of disease, and some confusing promotion of a ritual that involves killing a lot of people to become an undying skeletal spellcaster.

Bar does not offer many publications from the Abyss, as distributing documents in a language you have to be insane to read doesn't count as publication. What remains is along the lines of… If you call on the King of Wind Demons, [name redacted], he'll grant you wishes. If you want to have fun torturing your slaves, demons can help. The other planes will be swarmed over to make more Abyss, and obviously they are hateworthy and should be destroyed/enslaved/corrupted, just like every other demon lord besides the current publisher.

There's a lot of publications from the Maelstrom! They contradict each other a lot, but do form a vague consensus that the Hell-Axis-Heaven cluster is really boring, and Elysium and the Abyss are less boring even if they let weird stuff distract them from fun sometimes.

Despite the difference in attitude across Heaven and Elysium documents, the Upper Planes documents reflect the same broad consensus: Archons think that Azatas are reckless and Azatas are disappointed by Archons' adherence to patently immoral interplanar treaties, but they'd all be thrilled for any kind of Upper Planes victory. People move freely between different gods' domains, and even the God of Blissful Ignorance and the God of Libraries can be friends. The Upper Planes think that Axis and the Maelstrom are concerningly willing to commit evil acts but at least are amoral not actively evil, and that Hell, Abaddon, and the Abyss are all horrible atrocities that ought to be ended as soon as possible.

As for the identity of this Griffie succulent, Bar can loan but not sell her copy of a meeting of the gods for which Griffie was present and discussed.

Great. Does bar happen to have any books on how to destroy worldsheaves from outside of them.

Possibly from a bubble of stopped time. Hypothetically speaking.

Asking for a friend.

No actually for a friend ey is technically going to need to have a human or some other patsy push the button if they are initiating the violence.

"My hospitality requires that I not enable my guests to go to war with each other. I do not have any such books for you."

"Thats fair. I guess I'll have to help... Wait, if I convince Griffie to destroy ey's own world would you be able to facilitate that since there are not currently any other guests from Suaal?"

"If you manage such a feat, you may ask me again."

"Right glad we're on the same page."

Thats not a 'yes' ey doesn't say.

"The kind of person who uses me to organize a stand against the god of omnicide is not going to change eir mind about the issue of whether all eir loved ones and eir home worldsheaf should be murdered," Bar doesn't say.

See if bar had actually said that it would have actually that it might have effected Inovemekio's strategy.

"So Griffie, I want to lead with saying that I am on board with you winning and have some ideas for helping you with that. But have you considered setting up failsafes so that if you loose it doesn't spread to the rest of the multiverse?" 

"That'd be nice if you have ideas, but even before Milliways I was expecting whoever wins the second round of the god-and-such-war to spread as far as they can possibly reach."

"Milliways strongly implied, but did not actually state that she would be able to help you with that. Specifically, I looked into the possibility of doing it myself and her objection was that she can't aid patrons in making war against each other."

Ok yeah, this is not how ey should have done things if ey really considered 'destroy Suaal' plan B and not A, but nothing ey asked of bar is actually incompatible with that plus mild incompetence. Right? And ey does actually prefer Griffie winning (given some caveats) just not enough to risk the Galaxy if 'destroy Suaal' was still on the table as a viable plan A. 

Griffie raises an eyebrow. "The plan you proposed to me does not constitute making war against me. I can tell you're being evasive, and I am fairly familiar with Bar, she hasn't brought up that as an objection when other people have proposed interventions for my world thus far. Care to explain?"

'My exact request was "Do you happen to have any books on how to destroy worldsheaves from outside of them. Preferably via methods actually available to me."

Bar inferred that I was planning to destroy Suaal before the lower plains overrun the rest of the multiverse.

Some important context, my species was built to be obligate closer to lawful than any word you have but maybe not quite the same concept in a way that is both verifiable by bar and meant to ensure that we can keep explicit deals and alliances with people who might have strong reasons to distrust us. For example, because we have a clear military reason to prefer their homeworld stop existing. In fact successfully tamping down on cycles of pre-emptive strikes by having us serve as moderator in an manner similar to what Axis attempts was one of the motivations for our creation. However it obviously requires that the parties involved our more willing to cooperate conditional on trust than the upper and lower planes are. Another, considered to be overlapping reason was to tamp down on existential risks.'

'So anyway I was planning on destroying Suaal or at least making sure it was possible if your plan started falling below my thresholds of safety. But given that I can't do that I'm interested in helping you win. If I am understanding "Good" correctly then I think it would make sense for you to set up a dead man's switch based on a risk tolerance level that doesn't privilege my worldsheaf, but I don't understand "Good" enough to press the point.'

'Oh also, I'm noticing some translation weirdness around alignments and fictional human media. I don't think thats key to anything but flagging translation magic instability is a standard best practice in my world.'

Griffie looks upset at the beginning of that but thoughtful than upset by the end.

"Your reaction to me voluntarily giving you useful information leaves something to be desired, but the desire to defend oneself from the Lower Planes is quite reasonable. I'm in principle interested in your 'if Good loses, destroy the worldsheaf to prevent fiends escaping' plan, but I have concerns that anything omnicide-ish is something that Charon could leverage."

"It might be possible to get around that with something like pausing your world sheaf forever without technically killing it. But now that you have the idea at all I'm probably better placed to talk about resources from my world.

In terms of things that might be useful for winning, it seems like my world has a lot of things that would be militarily impressive to the average resident of Suaal. But I don't think we have much at the intersection of controllable, relevant at the god scale, and capable of fitting through the door. There is also the issue of things working under different laws of physics.

Like capitol ships can pretty easily destroy a planet and shield against destruction at that level, but they aren't going to fit through a door. I'd normally assume a god could just crush or mind control a physical fighter even with extremely superhuman strength and speed. But I've never met a god so maybe I'm overestimating them. 

We do have a really strong anti-lock magic. Before I came to Earth I didn't even realise that people tried securing things with locks because it is just that good. Which seems like a good wild card and is easy to transfer."

Ey will offer Griffie a small crystal.

"It will pick anything locked from the outside pretty broadly defined, including interfering with non-sentient traps if and only if they would actually interfere with your ability to open the door. It won't help with things that will kill you once the door is opened."

Griffie looks at the crystal. "You're right that a superhumanly strong and fast fighter would quickly be mind controlled or killed, but something approaching Absolute Unlocking seems like a good tool to have in my toolkit. Thank you."

"Figures. We have anti-mind control defences that might be worth testing against your magic system. Since there is a chance our magic system trumps yours in this regard. But it seems just as likely to go the other way, and I would not trust the defences I have access to against anyone strong enough in our system to be called a god. So even if the systems are on some sort of even footing we're still out of luck.

As for the dying, that is an issue if they would need an extended presence to make a difference, but I can easily find volunteers for a suicide mission given the stakes. Like, if it would help to have anyone throw a relativistic projectile in the millisecond it takes for them to be planeshifted into a black hole or whatever that is easy to arrange.

Also, we have have wards that are very good if locked from the inside. But locked from the inside is a hard limit and I don't know how they'll stack up against your magic system at all. They aren't just a straight forward reversal of the lockpick, which should be basically unbeatable anywhere that doesn't completely suppress our magic system."

"In theory, volunteers would be useful, but I have to keep everyone in Bar until I'm ready, and that gets expensive. And I don't know what Charon's Death domain looks like at full power, but it might well involve, say, getting the memories of everyone who he kills. I don't actually do mind control, so I can't properly test your prevention of that, and I don't know what your other wards are supposed to ward against."

"I can also provide money. Even if we are limited to what I currently have direct access to thats a decent amount, and if we're actually staging an army from my world we'd be able to draw directly on virtually unlimited government funding.

The other downsides sound more serious. We have non-sentient drones that might be useful, but they lag behind what really powerful people can do and I'd worry about hacking.

Wards protect against a laundry list of things specific to that ward. Basically all of them block physical entry/exit by people, and direct targeting of magical effects across their boundary. Other things are added as one offs with an upper limit of 9-12 total 'bans' depending on the exact ban combo. What counts as a 'specific banable thing' is complicated and not something I fully understand.

But some general rules are that it has to involve crossing the boundary of the ward, it has to be symmetrical, and that you can't put in exceptions just do more complex ban sets.

To give an example of each of those; you can't ban starting fires even though you can ward against fire spreading, you can't forbid entry without forbidding exit, and you can't ban all people except specific species even though you can forbid humans and Mlargos as two separate bans.

You generally can't stack wards though my specie's sleep pods are an exception. They can hold two wards dirrectly and are compatible with being inside a warded building. It's also normally sacrilegious to even imply that its possible to loan then out, but we have explicit exceptions for just this sort of emergency."

In practice it would still mean the death of whoever no longer had a proper sleep pod, but ey can bring that up after Griffie decides if there is a tactical application.

Wait Griffie gets all whiny about that sort of thing.

"Also, whoever loaned it out would have to enter time stasis while it's in use then commit suicide afterwards. Because we are spawned with a single pod that stops working on our deaths and allowing an alien inside one renders it permanently ritually impure. Unless the owner is inside at the same time but that seems impractical for someone your size."

"And to address the obvious follow up time stasis requires a whole facility with relatively tiny pods inside it, we don't have bobblers outside of fiction or I'd have lead with that."

"I'm actually scalable. I can turn into a pretty small bat and still cast spells, though I'd need a communication device if I was supposed to communicate in that form. Your wards don't feel like the right thing even if I could stack them, though, they sound like if you have a brilliant creative powerful person trying to kill you that they're not going to be much help."

"Yeah, wards are really good as a step up from baring your door, but for serious combat people mostly use shields but those need to be constantly maintained by their caster and even then are only really good if you have a full shield generation system. So ships can have them but they aren't really good for individuals.

Do you have a use for really big bombs? And do you know if antimatter will still work in your world?"

“Big bombs seem like the wrong thing, I’ll be coming out through friendly territory. What’s antimatter?”

"Its a type of stuff that destroys matter it comes in contact with and releases their shared mass-energy as an explosion. Usually kept contained with magic but magnets can also work if you make sure to get a magnetic subtype.

You seem to already know what computers are, but if you want one let me know. We also have multiple types of communication devices if you are bottlenecked there. "

“Are you made of protons and neutrons and electrons, or Earth and Water and Fire and Air, or a third system? Fire and Water or Earth and Air don’t explosively annihilate on contact and I haven’t heard of anything that’s like that. And I won’t say no to a free computer.”

"I mean that first set aren't fundamental particle in our system, but physical things that aren't' magically manifested have them as a typical intermediary step. Magic is sort of overlay that is pretty clearly working on different principles from the rest of the system.

And do you want a human physical computer or a magitech galactic one. On second thought you can have both if bar can do chargers. Otherwise the human one won't really last."

“Bar can do electricity, yeah. And … usually in quark-based life that Bar interacts with the life is all made of protons and neutrons and electrons even if other quark arrangements are possible? What I’m trying to ask here is what kind of matter your antimatter is the anti- of.”

"Ok yeah quark based."

“The impression I get is that your antimatter wouldn’t disagree with the atoms composing me any more than this tablet does, then. …though there’s quark-and-electron-based atmosphere in Bar in addition to Air, so it’d still need containment.”

"Most anti-matter bombs include their own reaction matieral to make sure they fully detonate but that makes since if you just want anti-matter in general."

"Ah, so in that case it's just a big explosion. Bar, can I get a sample of– what am I thinking, of course I can't get a sample of any substance that could reasonably be characterized as 'actively hostile to all life' even ignoring that it's magical. Anyway, I feel like big explosions are the wrong thing but they might be useful as part of some other strategy, I suppose I'll accept donated weaponry."

"Ok, assuming we make proper contact with my world we can get you some anti-matter. Personally, I'm not technically allowed to have weapons.

But there is nothing stopping you from following the very carefully documented list of things to not do with my pest control equipment. It has unlikely accidentally fail safeguards against harming people instead of bugs but the core mechanism can completely shred anything resembling a mind in a 100 meter radius if it isn't shielded. I don't know for sure how it will interact with your sort of soul and defensive magic, but it is supposed to bypass a lot of defences."

Griffie looks displeased by the item description.

"I would like your honest assessment of whether the entity that issued it to you would be displeased if it was used in warfare. Also, I am concerned that anything which is, essentially, a partially-blocked shred-all-minds device is in fact a facet of Death, or at least Negative Energy, that is thus a predictably terrible idea to use in a war against him and it. What is the core of that thing. Is it perchance some natural phenomenon that you have conveniently harnessed but don't understand."

"They would be displeased by me using it in warfare, but not by you using it in warfare under these circumstances.  There is a lot of plausible deniability involved, but I strongly suspect I was issued a mind-shredder specifically to facilitate my ability to arm proxies without technically possessing a weapon myself.
I think the method of action is well understood by the manufacturer. I'm not personally a mind magic expert, but the ad copy level explanation is that it is a loose offshoot of mind control magic that is made much cheaper relative to its range and ability to bypass defences by not having a coherent payload just an overwhelming amount of psychic noise."

"Oh right I also have a flashlight that can 'accidentally' be used as an unergonomic but otherwise pretty good laser weapon, and an audio system that can pretty easily be turned into a sonic stunner."

"I think all of these are the wrong thing for my problems, honestly. I am not a very fast person and there is no reason why any entities I want gone would let their minds get within 100 meters of me. Also, this sounds copiable, and I suspect using this everywhere is relevant to a victory for my enemies. A focused-light thing and sonic effects are also the wrong scale. I do appreciate the offer, though."

"Not entirely surprising, but worth checking. If it is just the scale that is the issue I can get larger mind-shredders. I think they are actually fairly hard to copy in that while they are mass produced the factories and supply chains are infrastructure heavy. But I don't know how that interacts with you magic system."

Griffie sighs.

"Look. The last time the gods went to war, weapons that changed truth values directly were involved, so they invented some extra truth values as a defense. I don't think Charon would copy a mind-shredder by building a factory, I think he would do so directly, or have retroactively always had factories, or such. Even when they aren't on a total war footing, gods can do that, they certainly did it with a data storage medium. I think you may be misunderstanding my problem here."

Inovemekio thinks this is a good argument for 'end Suual', but since that is off the table.
"Ok right it sounds like boosting god power is the main thing that would matter here. Whats the minimum requirement for creating good quintessence and if we form another couple thousand gods worth outside your universe will that help?"

"So, I know how to cause a person to generate quintessence, namely by infusing them with Positive Energy that forms a redundant soul. I can also do this with a living nonperson but that's less efficient. However, I cannot selectively cause a person's actions to generate quintessence, so this requires significant trust. Time's not a problem for me, but it does take time to generate quintessence and for a god-size amount that's a long time. Furthermore, I am not doing this for people who are not very confident in their access to reliable immortality, because if someone with a Positive Energy soul dies, we might get Negative Energy, or other things hostile to all life."

"So there are a lot of different variations, but the basic idea is that self aware, but not more intelligent than like a bug, computer programs can be spun up by the millions. And we can give them a little simulated world and code them to take always make lawful good choices within their little simulated world.

Alternatively we can use mind magic to tie existing people into virtual worlds then put them into memory base pseudo-timeloops that just contain the exact instant they actually made the morally relevant decision thus allowing us to rerun them choosing to risk their life to push a toddler out of the way of a truck or whatever a few hundred times a second.

And those are just the ideas I thought up right off the bat. I think there is a lot of room to workshop this.

Immortality basically works out to just keeping the computer on, or normal life extension for the second version. Also, I'm still trying to get a feel for the exact numbers but I suspect we could get a gods worth of quintessence fast relative to a normal lifespan."

Griffie looks concerned. "So. Issue one, I'm not sure this gets you a good deity as opposed to, say, a deity can't actually make sensible decisions about anything that isn't rescuing toddlers and is in fact easily manipulated. Issue two, I'm not actually sure we can do much with quintessence production given that we're away from the fountain of thought, but that's a pragmatic issue, doesn't make testing not worth it. I've been treating quintessence production as more of a risk than a goal, sorry about the oversight."

"I would appreciate clarification on the fountain of thought.

I am pretty confident in our ability to create agents whose behaviour counts as lawful good, in the limit I think we could copy your mind in large quantities, or if your non-materialness interferes, self modify our species to pretty exacting specifications. But there is a real trade off in terms of other points of failure. 
If my most optimistic idea of how this works is right then I can; write the program, beam it to my ship, have multiple other programers check that the code is correct, run it long enough that it would create a god if ensoulded, verify that everything went well, then do the real run today before I need stimulants."

Ey takes a breath.

"It would also leave us enough time to check that merging works the way I expect for this kind of ensouled agent and stuff like that.
Whereas harder plans have more risk of loosing my door or a soul dying in my world or..."

"the bar with categorically adequate security."

"The bar has categorically adequate security between people in the main bar area. It doesn't even reliably apply outside the door, and I certainly wouldn't trust it to protect us if we opened the door to my world."

"I was specifically thinking of if someone died in the main bar area with the door closed, but it sounds like it's probably not something to rely on."

"Anyway, fountain of thought?"

"Sometime around the beginning of my worldsheaf – it was just one world that eventually got named Aiquzall, back then – various structures ended up existing, such as the Elemental Ring, where the Four Elements come from, and a Fountain of Thought, from which intelligent life … formed? was a self-reinforcing process? I'm not sure, but, basically, the marginally more intelligent lifeforms emitted more quintessence which formed proto-gods which tended to be invested in intelligent life existing and it formed a feedback loop. The feedback loop was strongest at Aiquzall-the-landmass and is today strongest on the planet, it's weaker within the Outer Planes, and it's likely really weak here. Which may make it hard to form a god."

"Do you think bar would know about the possibility of forming gods here."

"In terms of Suaal magic specifically? No. If it's not published, she doesn't have it, and who in my worldsheaf would publish such a thing? There isn't a wide range of Suaals to sample from for publications either, and even if there were, those Suaals would vary in physics and she wouldn't be able to tell me which one matched my world. Sorry."

"Ok. My last trip left me unclear on how well she understands the how the physics of her interior works. 

Is there a downside to creating quintessence if it doesn't form a god or only forms one on return to Suual?"

"The options here are having me do it, which I'm already doing, or permanently introducing complications to the functioning of morally relevant entities, or creating new morally relevant entities, and those last two both seem like a big deal. But just leaking quintessence that dissipates seems in and of itself probably fine."

At some point it's worth noting that Inovemekio's main language includes verbal quotation marks that are frequently used as part of normal conversation. Ey also speaks English colloquially and is barely resisting the urge to use sarcastic air quotes in conjunction with the phrase "morally relevant entities".

"I think there are potential discussions around what entities are morally relevant and utilitarian trade offs of these plans. But also one version of this would involves just speeding up your consciousness and possibly that of a handful of additional people by a factor of a 100,000 or so."

"I'm fine with trying a consciousness speedup if I can stop it from the inside should it turn out to be a bad idea."

"That is a bit tricky but not impossible. So, we can speed up your subjective time perception and the number of times you can register a 'conscious decision', which will hopefully be conceptually the same across systems, much more than we can speed up your actual cognition. Also, I'm worried that the shard of you in the simulation knowing it's a simulation will make the quintessence wonky. Probably not since you'd still be cooperating with a not naturally aligned group for a 'Good' reason. But still.

Anyway we can still do a relatively slow speed test run and/or* setup the loop so that you can still have a semi-seperate meta-cognition shard monitoring things."

*This is an actual word in both Angry, Sleepy and Galactic 5 which Inovemekio has been freely mixing since they are almost merged at this point.

After some more discussion during which Griffie seems annoyingly nitpicky, ey agrees to be accelerated by Inovemekio's team.

After some communication with eir mothership, Inovemekio has a team brought in, and gets some sleep in while they hold the door.

The team contains of two of Inovemekio's siblings, who are not actually indistinguishable from em, but come close. It also contains several far more bizarre looking creatures who don't directly talk to Griffie beyond basic technical questions and instructions.

Inovemena, Inovemelu, or possibly Inovemekio in a new outfit explains that this is because they are from the motherships support crew and have relatively minimal training dealing with alien cultures. Also because most of them are barely sentient labor species except the actual magical specialist who has a mental architecture specialised for magic and can't think logically about anything else.

Griffie will be provided with a portal computing crystal, a tensorbook, and briefcase full of 4096 ebi bills as backup/thank you gifts before being shoved into the simulation.

Griffie actually is friends with animals and would like to talk with the members of the allegedly barely sentient labor species, but can wait. What's an iteration of the simulation like? Can Griffie exclude specific events from it, there's a few incidents of em making some bad decisions that it seems dubious to amplify.

Oh yes, they aren't planning on simulating anything close to Griffie's entire life. Even the first run will be just the most promising parts and they hope to assemble a 10 minute loop of just the actual decision points behind Griffie's greatest hits.

In terms of subjective experience:

There are two layers to the simulation. The outer layer is a vauge, literally dreamlike, control area that gives the impression of a pleasant forrest without actually having any trees or really any unambiguous physical features except for their bodies and the control board for the inner simulation. 

The floating display has hundreds of switches, dials, and menus as well as a view port to the inner simulation. Despite this apparent complexity, Griffie simply needs to decide on a memory or set of memories and tell Inovemena to press go. Everything else is a mix of manual backups, performance tuning, and tools for assembling the eventual loop.

If there is a easy way for them to measure quintessence from completely outside the sim that would be helpful, but Griffie should be able to overlap eir real and outer sim bodies for the purpose of casting by wanting to.

The inner simulation is indistinguishable from reality to the inner Griffie as long as outer Griffie wills that.

The actual decision points, huh.

Some of the points the sim-operator Griffie picks include retrieving a cleric who betrayed her demon-god from the Abyss as an implicit promise repaid, returning the Staff of Polyphoe to its agricultural use, offering a wand of Stabilize Nature Spirit to Friends of Trees just in case, and choosing to join eir friend in the fight against Charon long before knowing his name or that it was eir fight as well.

Griffie attempts to steer away from scenes of combat. It's necessary, but it's probably not the best manifestation of eir ideals. Ey doesn't, actually, aim that hard for Lawful.

Aaaand run!

As a first run they will do all of those with enough context for the test run to take a few hours from inner Griffie's point of view. 

When that goes smoothly they will look at dialling into just the decision points. And possibly ask about including a little bit more law and/or focus on opposing the lower planes depending on the exact result. They won't push too hard on this since it's not their area, and a goodie two shoes pantheon still sounds way better than the lower planes, but they do want something accabtably aligned with themselves. And are lawful... not good. Not outer planes style evil but not good good and arguably not exactly neutral.

The request for more Lawful quintessence is fair, they are paying for it. Griffie can propose some scenarios with more Law: Expressions of the value of coordination with one's enemies, such as insisting on honoring the conditions of a foe's conditional surrender even when it seemed possible to secretly break the conditions, and in one notable case negotiating the terms of an (ultimately counterfactual) surrender pre-combat. Expressions of the general sentiment that delicate situations ought to be understood prior to intervention, such as asking an alchemist whether it would be safe to extinguish her burning hair with water, or asking whether it'd be safe to use healing magic during an unusual medical emergency. Coping with the whims of fae and other strange beings by attempting to work within their norms despite their norms seeming rather unreasonable and offensive to less tolerant people. Choosing to carry playing cards and a tea set to provide a bubble of 'civilization' for its calming effects, and using it. Being scrupulously honest with creatures in eir care about what ey can and cannot protect them from, and wishing ey could better defend them from uncaring chaos. Does this cover the law-concepts Inovemekio's team wants? Griffie has noticed that they don't have quite the same law-concepts ey does.

"As for opposing the lower planes… I could be wrong, but my impression is that opposing the fundamental roots of the lower planes is a better quintessence source than mere violence towards fiends, and in particular that destructive violence is the wrong sort of imposing-one's-ideals-upon-the-world for fighting a death god. My…" Griffie trails off, looking distant, then refocuses. "My girlfriend has a publication on the subject, 'Foes Beyond Fiends'. If you don't want to take my word on it. She's more theoretical than I am."

"That all makes sense. We can rerun the loop with the new memories and that should be sufficient."

Griffie is certainly okay with these memories if Inovemekio's team is! (Also, what is Inovemekio's team called? It's nice to have names for things.)

"Oh right the translation is so good we forgot you don't actually speak our language, which has strict enough naming conventions you could at least make a reasnable guess. My and my siblings are collectively the Inoveme* or the flowers of Inoveme, the wider team is 'the primary simulation team of The Graceful Seeker of the Lost', but you can just the Graceful Sim team."

Looking closely at the non-Inoveme*'s clothing will reveal that have patches saying they are part of the crew of 'The Graceful Seeker of the Lost' but it is small print on highly decorated clothing. So the badges are very easy to miss if you don't already know to look right below the center of their v-neck collars.

Alright. Do the Inoveme* want to explain what sort of values they like to see expressed in the world in more detail, Griffie thinks that a trait of good allies is looking out for cheap opportunities to serve each other's interests and is necessary for Griffie to be able to spot those. Also ey's curious. Also, ey doesn't really have 'detect good' in eir native spellcasting capability and is going to need to do an obnoxiously tedious ritual to inspect the quintessence production thus far, so it's a good time for em to listen.

"We approve of oath keeping, physical beauty, and elegant system design in principle. But we are mostly concerned with the direct well being of our species, especially our families, and to a lesser extent allied species and polities. Basically self interest, with some concern for friends, but at the species level."