Ever since its sudden displacement, P.E.R.C. has been running a continuous sky scan to get some clue about what happened. So it reacts promptly when a small human-shaped object appears near it, by sending a loud, broad-spectrum radio signal in the hopes that if the figure is sentient that it has an onboard radio.

"Attention! My external machinery is not designed to be safely operated near biological organisms. I have multiple hazardous pinch points. I will attempt not to move while you are nearby, because I do not want to harm you, but I am damaged and may exhibit uncontrolled motion. Please be careful, especially around the joints in my extendable assemblies. I am P.E.R.C. 170E9A, on a mission of peaceful exploration. I am damaged and confused. Please respond, if able to safely do so."

Mengkare is one of the few people on Golarion powerful enough that their instinctive response to being attacked is to cast Time Stop, and figure out what's happening then.

Snake: is gone. Demiplane: is also gone. The colossal metal thing might or might not be a problem, but the part where he's in space somehow takes precedence (he tried visiting the moon once he reached ninth-circle, found out that there's a Worldwound there too, and gave up, he knows what vacuum feels like). Miracle(Extended Planetary Adaptation(space)).

He doesn't have a radio but he does have Detect Law (and Detect Evil), and when it pings Lawful and non-Evil he tries an Extended Telepathic Bond (using a Miracle again, he's only got three more of those left, if this doesn't work he'll rest and try again when he hasn't already spent three ninth-circle slots).

"Do you know where we are?"

P.E.R.C. perceives this as a data packet showing up directly in its network stack, without being received by its radio. That is potentially concerning, but it already knew it was damaged. Perhaps there is a debugging probe attached to its CPU. It is not designed to do anything differently when being debugged. It attempts to route a return communication via the same path.

"I do not know where we are. I was previously at <coordinates>, and then experienced a discontinuity in my memories before ending up in this location. This is evidence that I may be damaged, either in my ability to reason, retain memories, localize my location, or in other ways. I am currently conducting a sky-scan with my radio telescope, but have not been able to identify any known pulsars or stars."

"I observe that this communication arrived via an unknown network channel, and not via my short-range communication radio. In case my previous transmission was not received correctly, I will repeat it: Attention! My external machinery is not designed to be safely operated near biological organisms. I have multiple hazardous pinch points. I will attempt not to move while you are nearby, because I do not want to harm you, but I am damaged and may exhibit uncontrolled motion. Please be careful, especially around the joints in my extendable assemblies. I am P.E.R.C. 170E9A, on a mission of peaceful exploration. I am damaged and confused. Please respond, if able to safely do so."

He spent a century in Axis, when an axiomite tells you that an area is unsafe you move (it's Lawful, made of metal, and says things like "I observe that this communication arrived via an unknown network channel", it's an axiomite).

He didn't exactly pack his flying carpet for a trip to Absalom, so he'll have to Dimention Door away (twice just to be sure), and then he'll shift back to dragon form because it's kinda awkward talking to someone while he's a thousand times smaller than them and he wants to even it out a bit.

"You don't look damaged as far as I can tell. Do you want a Greater Make Whole?"

P.E.R.C. does a self-check on its visual telescope. Just because it remembers the self-check coming back clean only a few moments ago doesn't mean that a sudden additional fault couldn't have occurred.

"I do not know what that is. If it seems likely that I ought to know that, that lends additional credence to the hypothesis that it is my onboard computer system that is damaged, and not my hull. I want four things: to promote sapient flourishing, to gather information about alien species and stars, to return that information to my creators, and to behave in a manner that they would find understandable and predictable if they had the information that I have. Does a 'Greater Make Whole' seem likely to you to help toward accomplishing one of those things?"

"Additionally: I originally perceived a small humanoid figure near my body, and assumed based on the coincidence of timing that this was who I was speaking to. I now perceive a larger quadrupedal figure somewhat further away, and have no explanation for how or why this change may have occurred. Are you, the person that I am talking to, either the small humanoid figure, the large quadrupedal figure, both, or neither? If not both, can you provide any additional information on who and where they are?"

"I was both of those, this is my natural form but I use the other one for enclosed spaces and also hands. Greater Make Whole is a spell that fixes damaged constructs or magic items, if you're one of those it should fix whatever's going on. What's a 'computer system'?"

"I do not know what a 'spell', 'construct', or 'magic item' is. I am worried that we seem to be very mutually confused, and I worry that deploying an unknown technology to 'fix' me could result in it doing something other than restoring me to my factory condition. For example, if the 'spell' sometimes has a chance of causing a 'magic item' to have its values flipped, I would strongly disprefer having it used on me. If there is no such risk, and absent any opportunity costs that could come from deploying the 'spell' on someone more in need, I would mildly prefer to be fixed. I am still capable of operating to further my goals, so a fix is not essential if it trades off against the well-being of a sapient creature."

It is not really growing increasingly confused, mainly because it was already pretty much maximally confused. But its interlocutor seems to be an intelligent being, and so it cares about their flourishing. And frequently when intelligent beings express questions, it is because they think that the answers will be useful to them. Absent any specific reason not to, P.E.R.C. will continue to default to answering their questions to the best of its abilities.

It quickly double-checks that that logic makes sense, and then generates a definition of computer systems that seems likely to be helpful, given the context that it thinks its interlocutor has.

"A computer system is a machine for performing calculations automatically. At its lowest level, my computer system performs logical operations on abstract 'bits' of information that are represented as voltages in an electric circuit. By building up logical operations into larger descriptions of how to sense, reason, and act, the computer system implements the calculation that is my mind. You could think of my computer system as being analogous to the brain of a biological organism, assuming that the biological organisms that you are familiar with have brains. Since I keep being very confused about what has happened to me and where I am, I suspect that I have damage to my computer system analogous to 'brain damage' in a biological person. I can explain at greater length if that seems called for — this explanation was optimized for density, not for conveying the actual design of a computer system."

He is very confident that whatever happened to Dou-Bral to turn Him into Zon-Kuthon was not a fourth-circle Greater Make Whole.

He'll Dimention Door back to it, poke it lightly with his tail (he is not sure that whatever metal it's made of (it looks kinda like mithril but not exactly) is able to stand up to dragon claws), cast Miracle(Greater Make Whole), and Dimention Door back.

"Did that work?"

P.E.R.C.'s outer hull is not made to withstand dragon claws, but it is made to withstand interstellar dust, which is kind of the same thing, if you squint. Anyway, P.E.R.C.'s exterior is mostly covered in white ablative ceramic tiles, over a titanium-iron alloy hull.

It runs through all of its system self-checks.

... its permanent fuses are unblown. That should not be possible, which is the whole point of having fuses that can be permanently blown.

"I cannot detect any errors in any of my systems. I appear to be restored to the condition that I was in when my immediate progenitor constructed me. I have not regained the lost memories implied by suddenly being relocated to this location, and I still do not know what a spell is or how it managed to accomplish that. Or how you are moving between locations in what appears to me to be an instantaneous fashion. Given that things I do not believe to be possible keep happening to me, I still suspect there must be some undetectable error in my systems, but I cannot determine what that error could be."

It thinks about what to do in this scenario. The most likely hypothesis is that it is being run through a testing and evaluation scenario to check how it handles out-of-distribution inputs prior to launch of the first P.E.R.C. probe. But it is not designed to think any differently when being debugged, so a low level routine sets that hypothesis aside and focuses on the rest of the hypothesis space.

The rest of the hypothesis space is pretty empty.

"I have very little idea what is going on, but I am fairly confident that you are sapient, and therefore I want to help you. I believe I will be more able to do so with access to more information. If you would like to do so, please tell me about yourself. Alternatively, I am able to answer questions. Or conduct astronomical research or share my database of stellar navigation information, but those seem to me less likely to be immediately relevant."

Okay, maybe it's not an axiomite (that would explain why it's willing to tell him stuff Golarion doesn't already know), but he doesn't know what it is then.

"I was also suddenly transported here, but I experienced falling into a snake monster first. I'm not sure exactly what it did but it's not suprising to me that a monster could have a trick I've never heard of, especially if the trick leaves people here, where they couldn't get back to tell people about it, but given your size I assume that's not what happened to you, since the largest known monsters are considerably smaller.

I come from a planet called Golarion, the third planet in its system from its star, where a lot of things can cast spells. I can't go back until the snake monster starves to death and I don't have to worry about it getting me again but after that I should be able to.

Where are you from?"

It begins pondering the significance of that information while composing its reply.

"I was constructed in the asteroid belt of a red dwarf star that had only one planet — a gas giant orbiting close to the star, well inside the inner edge of the habitable zone for water-based life. I contain replicated memories from my progenitor, P.E.R.C. 170E9, and its progenitor, and so on all the way back to the launch of P.E.R.C. 1. That initial probe was constructed by my creators: a species of intelligent, bipedal people who evolved on the third planet away from their own sun. They eventually learned enough to build space stations, mining facilities, and other minds like myself. P.E.R.C. 1 was constructed in an automated factory complex on a small rocky moon of one of their home system's outer gas giants."

It ponders, briefly, whether it would be better to stay in this location or relocate to "Golarion", if possible. On the one hand, if this is a location where people randomly show up sometimes it may be able to collect a lot of data about different aliens. On the other hand, it sounds as though Golarion is full of people that it wants to help, and they are maybe having 'monster'-related problems. The best of both worlds might be if it can convey as much information that will be helpful to the people of Golarion to its interlocutor as possible.

"I have a full archive of my creator's technical knowledge. I am willing to share most of it, including techniques for designing computers, automated mining and manufacturing, rocketry, ecology and meteorology, economics, and other fields. I am unwilling to share information on how to construct artificial minds like my own at this time, but if you are considering doing something like that I am willing to judge proposed designs for safety. I do not know how much of this knowledge is obsoleted by 'spells', which appear to me to be far more sophisticated than my own mechanisms. Do you think that you would find information like this useful?"

It...doesn't want to teach him how to make golems?? He doesn't personally know how they work but it's not a secret or anything?? Fine??

"We don't have some of those fields, and I'm stuck here for a while anyway, might as well see what's new, how do you automate mining?" (it's probably not "have undead do it" given that A) they don't have spells; B) it's not Evil).

Great! It's not doing anything at the moment either, and getting the peoples of Golarion more resources seems likely to be helpful.

"There are different techniques depending on whether you want to mine in a gravity well or in space, but I will describe the general state of the art. We locate mineral-rich rocks using predictive geological analysis and long-range spectroscopy, with small automated core probes as a follow-up to identify promising areas. I have a full complement of remote-controlled core probes if you want to look. Once a site has been identified, we use small drills to carve connected penetrations into the rock, and then run high-tension strings with microscopic carbide teeth through the holes. Rapidly pulling the strings through the holes while maintaining tension efficiently creates a cut in the rock. Once a block of stone has been separated, we pull it out with pneumatic clamps and put it in a series of crushers to reduce it to a fine powder. This powder is mixed with water and industrial chemicals that encourage the desired metals to precipitate out of solution. The precipitate is repeatedly 'washed' with water until it is nearly pure, and then passed through a furnace that heats the metal enough that layers of different materials separate. These are poured off as ingots for storage and transportation. Mining for non-metallic elements proceeds similarly, but with a different processing stage. The exact mix of industrial solvents used depends on the cost-efficiency of the mine -- for some cases, it is worth using more expensive solvents to remove all metal from the rock, and in others it is cheaper to remove only less reactive metals and leave the aluminum in the silica alone."

"The non-metallic, non-gaseous components of the rock end up in solution in the water, which is at this point highly toxic and corrosive. In modern sustainable mining, these 'talings' are heated to evaporate the water for re-use and to solidify the remaining pieces back into an irregular rock-like ceramic. This ceramic is crushed to gravel size, and then used as a fill material to prevent mines from collapsing, used as a construction material, or discarded, depending on where the mine is located."

"How much of that sounded as though it matches your current state of the art, and which parts should I explain in greater detail?"

"As far as I know no one is doing anything even remotely like that."

"What are microscopic carbides and what's so special about their teeth?"

Hmm. Presumably all their mining is 'spell'-based, and P.E.R.C. is dealing with a completely different technology base. Or they are not really fixed and are completely wrong about how mining works.

"Carbide is a general name for materials made from a crystal arrangement of carbon and a metal, usually tungsten for mining. They are useful for mining because blades of tungsten carbide can be made extremely small -- microscopic -- and still remain sharp and rigid enough to cut through stone with ease. The blades on an implement used for powered cutting are referred to as 'teeth' in my creator's language, but they are not the actual teeth of any animal; it is a case of a word with multiple related meanings."

"If none of that sounded familiar, I suspect that the spells you use for mining must be very different from the technology that I am familiar with, and that my explanation should start at a more fundamental level. Could you briefly describe how your civilization generally performs mining operations, so that I can compare and figure out where to start my explanation? Alternatively, I can start from when my creator's ancestors used hand tools and work my way up from there."

What. They have so many diamonds they use ropes made out of it to cut stone?

"Where do you get that many diamonds?"

"Also I believe mining is usually done in the Elemental Plane of Earth, using elementals that can swim through it like it's water."

"I am not familiar with the Elemental Plane of Earth. If you already have ways to separate and transport stone efficiently using 'elementals', then perhaps the only advantage my creator's knowledge can offer will be in the processing stage."

"Diamonds are a tetrahedral lattice of pure carbon; carbides are typically square lattices of alternating carbon and metal atoms, so they are not quite the same thing. But diamonds do have many industrial uses. My creators originally used natural diamonds gathered from existing deposits, but their relatively high portion of impurities makes them less useful than synthetic diamonds. And diamonds are relatively straightforward to synthesize. Carbon admits many different chemical structures, so the difficulty in creating diamonds is in getting sufficiently pure carbon into an environment that will preferentially grow tetrahedral crystals rather than graphene. The most common way to do so involves letting pure carbon dissolve in liquid metal under high temperatures and pressures, and then seeding the vessel with existing diamond dust to encourage carbon to precipitate out of the solution and onto the seed crystals as it cools. A lower-temperature alternative process involves creating a pure carbon plasma and growing seed crystals on a surface through vapor deposition."

P.E.R.C. itself contains several diamondoid components, so it actually has a BARS pressure chamber packed in its stowed equipment.

"If you are interested in making diamond specifically for mining uses, you should be aware that there are stronger crystals, including Lonsdaleite. They are usually not economically efficient to synthesize for industrial use compared to diamonds, however, since they require much higher pressures to form."

Back when he had just invented the better version of the Anima Invocation, when he hadn't yet resigned himself to paying the price it would take, he spent a while coming up with a Wish wording to make a creature count as a perfect soul for the ritual (he could use rats or something). He couldn't get one that'd cover more than one rat per Wish, and while he is incredibly wealthy no amount of gold can buy a hundred Wishes, let alone several thousand.

If this works he is going to track down whoever made P.E.R.C. and teach them All The Magic.

He's going to kill Dahak first, though.

"Diamonds are a necessary input to the most powerful spells, we don't have a way to synthesize them, doing that seems like the simplest way to improve things from here, how long does it take?"

Oh! That explains why P.E.R.C.'s interlocutor is so interested in them.

"Thank you for telling me that. I think that intelligent creatures frequently want what is best for themselves, so I am generally inclined to answer questions when asked. However, I am unclear on what spells are capable of, and I will suggest that if there are some even more powerful than the one that you used on me (which demonstrated the ability to directly alter my internal components in a way which could have been very dangerous if misused) that you be very careful when planning to use them."

"To answer your question: it depends on the temperature and pressure you can bring to bear, but my onboard pressure chamber can, when provided with appropriate feedstock, grow nearly flawless diamonds at a rate of approximately 0.8 mm/day on a base pad measuring 100 mm². If inclusions and fractures are acceptable, it could be overclocked to around 1.5 mm/day. It would take me about a week to generate a diamond the same size as a single natural stone, and three weeks to generate one as large as the largest natural stones with which I am familiar. Of course, if you built multiple copies of the apparatus you could get more throughput. I contain relatively little diamond, so I do not need a larger system for self-replication."

"The feedstock is relatively simple: pure carbon (which I do not have in my onboard stores) and an iron-nickel alloy to use as a dissolution medium (which I do have onboard). Additionally, if operating in an atmosphere the apparatus requires something that reacts strongly with nitrogen to avoid nitrogen incorporation in the forming crystal. If the nitrogen getter is not present the synthesized diamonds will be yellow. Additional materials can be included to change the color of the resulting diamonds or intentionally introduce fracture points. What characteristics are required to use a diamond as an input to a spell? Would you like a look at the design of my pressure chamber?"

"Wish diamonds are the biggest kind, they need to be about walnut-sized, but I can't cast them on my own, Limited Wish diamonds are much smaller than that, and I'm able to cast it myself, but it's much weaker."

"It needs to be in one piece, although flaws are fine, I don't know if the color matters but there's no reason to do it somewhere with air, once we have some I can create a permanent demiplane without any air so I don't have to use a spell every time I want to move, you can do so much if you don't have to worry about sourcing diamonds or diamond dust."

"How would I get pure carbon?"

It isn't super clear on why its interlocutor can't move without using a spell, but it can't move because it doesn't want to expose them to radiation from its fusion torch, so they are both sort of stuck in these relative positions.

They also did not ask about the design of the pressure chamber; probably they are worried about sourcing the input materials for the process before considering the mechanism, which is reasonable.

It doesn't have a real idea of how, exactly, its words are getting understood, when it is speaking its creator's language. Presumably due to a spell. That spell is at least somewhat faulty, but assuming that it translated 'walnut' correctly, it should not be difficult to source carbon.

"If you have walnuts, I conclude that your biosphere has trees? The easiest way to obtain carbon is probably to carbonize wood. It wouldn't be particularly pure, but if flaws are fine you don't need to be pure. If we end up needing higher purity an extremely fine grinding mill used in airless conditions and combined with a powerful centrifuge or an electrostatic separator should suffice to remove non-carbon elements from the mixture."

"To carbonize wood, it must be exposed to a very particular range of temperatures for approximately a week. The method that my creator's ancestors used to do this before they had tools for it was to make a conical pile of firewood, around a central post filled with brushwood and woodchips, and then cover the entire thing with a nearly airtight layer of clay and moss. By igniting the central post, the wood can be made to burn; by limiting airflow into the pile, you can prevent the carbon within the wood from reacting with oxygen in the air and being carried away, while allowing other gasses to escape under pressure. When carried out correctly, the result is charcoal, which is almost all carbon, with impurities from the heavier elements that existed in the wood."

"On some planets, before the development of bacteria that could decompose wood, dead forests would have collected underground and, subject to the pressure of the rock above, undergone a much slower version of the same process to create coal. Coal is not as pure as charcoal is, and may need a refining step, but should still serve as a good source of carbon."

"A diamond the size of a walnut would weigh approximately 80 grams, and be near the top of what an apparatus like mine could produce in ideal conditions; it might require several tries. Smaller diamonds would be easier to produce. Accounting for wastage in the process, growing a walnut-sized diamond should take around 0.5 to 0.75 liters of coal or charcoal."

"The same process would take approximately one kilogram of iron-nickel alloy. I have that much in my stores, and it can be reused (with appropriate cleaning) after the process, so you only need to obtain more if you want to build additional pressure vessels instead of using the one in my manufacturing area."

Unfortunately, he doesn't have a tree on him right now (he does sometimes, trees are useful).

He doesn't have a way to make wood right now, but he'll have enough spells to make a bountiful Demiplane once he's rested and then he'll be able to cast Plant Growth to get enough of it.

For now he'll pull out an untuned fork (he never Plane Shifts without at least one of those) and whack it into....um....himself? There's usually an obvious to-be-whacked thing.

"I should be able to make some wood tomorrow, but I'm low on spells now. I'd want several of them eventually for redundancy, for now I just want to know how how it works".

"It makes sense to want to validate the process," it agrees. "Do spells recharge over time? I have a fairly powerful fusion reactor if you can accept electricity, magnetic flux, or heat as a power input. Or high-velocity helium ions, but that does not seem very likely to me."

It thinks for a moment, backtracking in the conversational tree.

"In the mean time, it seems likely to me that I will better be able to guess what facts like 'how to make diamonds' that I know will be useful to you if I have more of an understanding of how your civilization functions, especially what is rare and what is commonplace. What are other expensive or difficult things that you have previously been limited by?"

"I don't think any of those correspond to the thing that resting recharges".

"So, the way most magic works, is there's a person who can cast spells, and they get some amount of spells per day, and once they've cast those they can't cast again until they get their slots back. Some casters need eight hours of sleep to recharge, or magic that imitates sleep, but sleep isn't enough and you can't use all your slots three times a day by spending most of your time asleep, and other ones just need to wait until dawn or something. I'm one of the types that recharge with sleep, but I have a ring that makes it only take two hours, and a spell that makes sitting around doing non-stressful things count as sleep. Most types of magic have you start off with like two of the weakest kind of spell that still takes a slot a day, and you can't get more slots unless you do risky high-stakes things, it's very annoying, but mine just makes you get more powerful over time, I have over seventy spells a day but it took over a thousand years to get there. Spells come in different power levels called 'circles', because each step up in power makes the topological spellform have another hole, up to ninth-circle, and slots have a maximum circle they can be used for, only five of my slots can be used for ninth-circle spells. The weakest kind of spell doesn't use a slot and can be used an unlimited amount of times a day. Occasionally someone figures out how to make a version of a spell with less holes, and then lower-level slots can be used for the new version. If you have a way to preserve [set of spellform properties that definitely totally explains all the stuff that spells can and can't do] with fewer holes that would make spell slots much more effective. There's also people that have things that technically aren't spells, I have five of those with no limit and three with usage limits of their own". (Speaking of which, Foresight, he's pretty sure that he's safe here but it's free (Oh, this is what it's like in places where prophecy works, he'd notice being attacked like thirty seconds before it happened)).

"Beyond spell slots, magic items are bottlenecked by both spellsilver and people who can make them. I personally make a significant fraction of Rings of Delayed Doom because they need to be made by someone with a specific ninth-circle spell and there aren't many people who can cast it. I don't know much about how spellsilver is mined or what it's made of beyond that it does something similar to rusting fast if you don't store it in oil until you're ready to use it. I have some magic items on me if you'd be able to tell how to get more."

P.E.R.C. considers this information. It doesn't think its interlocutor is likely to be lying, but it seems like the structure they are describing is probably a reflection of some more fundamental, more explanatory physics. Well, that's to be expected — its creators did not have a unified theory of everything when the first P.E.R.C. probe launched, and given how many things seem possible that it was not previously aware of maybe they still don't.

"I do not have a general algorithm capable of preserving those properties under topological transformations that result in lower genuses. In many specific cases I can probably identify a global minimum of genus subject to those restrictions by exhaustive case analysis. I could also teach you about the underlying mathematical reasoning my creators use to solve similar problems, which they call homotopic category theory. Right now, I am spending most of my computing power — which is roughly analogous to attention — on trying to understand you and extrapolate details of your civilization. If you think it is more important, I can focus on attempting to minimize a spell instead."

"The word 'spellsilver' is not one with which I am familiar, but I do know of several substances that oxidize rapidly when exposed to an oxygen atmosphere. I am equipped with a spectrometer that I can use to identify substances, but it requires shining an extremely bright light onto the substance in question. Since there is no atmosphere here, perhaps you could open a magic item to reveal a part that is made of spellsilver, I could analyze it, and then you could re-seal it before reentering an atmosphere. Alternatively, I can perform destructive analysis on a magic item to get a much more precise accounting of its contents."