"Huh. Well, in my system, you can just make the body work better, and you can just make the mind work better, not in any particular direction, but I'll be careful if I try to reinvent it here. I'm not that kind of enchanter at home anyway, I mostly just do weapons, and I think the Tea God - Tea Entity - said that's what my special skill would be here, too. 

.....maybe I can do it without spellsilver. is that the kind of thing a special skill could be?"

"Have you noticed how I haven't mentioned my affinities to you?  I mean, maybe you just plucked it out of my mind already, but maybe you didn't, if you were telling the truth about it being a Skill with a cooldown.  Either way it's not a thing I'd just blurt out without thinking about it."

"You either have your magic already clutched around my heart and a spell that warns you the moment I intend to betray you, or you were careless with who you told about your Unique Skill, just then.  Some Heroes die or leave Kekaro without ever saying explicitly what Unique Skill they had."

"I think - I'm not saying this is who you are, deep down, but here you seem kind of - innocent, in a way that leaves you very vulnerable.  If that's a deliberate illusion because of how deep I'm actually trapped inside your web, you can ignore that, I guess, but if that's not so then it's an act of loyalty that I warn you of this."

- nod. "I don't know anything about - which things imply which other things, which things people would guess just by looking at me, which things there's an easy spell to find out... which things it's even useful to keep secret. There are some obvious things from my magic system - I'm not going to tell anyone my name, I'm not going to let anyone see my face, I'm certainly not going to explain how my world's magic works even though it'd save us some time on planning - but when it comes to things that are possible to keep secret in your world and about your world's magic system, you need to warn me. 

Would turning up with tons of magic items not suggest to people a magic item related skill?"

"Lots of Heroes have been good at crafting.  They get good at a lot of things.  If you come up with a ton of weapons specifically that do things that should be impossible, but nothing else, they might start to suspect."

"Or do you mean - doing that in town?  If you make a bunch of daggers with affinities drawn from Fire, Air, and Light elements they'll figure you're an enchanter with Plasma potential, or that we're merchanting for an enchanter like that, but that doesn't sound bad to me."

"If that's not risky, then maybe we start with that. How are magic items made, in the local system, what do you actually do -"

"I mean, for the most basic sort of item, you hammer around affinity mats until mana getting pumped through it will come out as a spell, which is a lot more complicated than somebody just casting that spell?"  Almys reaches into her left pauldron, detaches a switchblade from the bottom, unfolds it.  "This one is more complicated, it's got an Earth enchantment that keeps it perfectly sharp, and requires somebody to run some Earth mana through it occasionally for that to stay true.  You could guess that maybe I've got Earth affinity, from that, but I could also have a friend who does it for me; I maybe keep this around to fool people, especially if they see that it was apparently hidden like I wanted to keep it secret.  Or maybe I'm showing it to you now because you're my liege and we're predictably going to have to form an adventuring party at some point."

Does it look like anything to Detect Magic?

It looks like a child's concept of a magic weapon that couldn't possibly work.

It contains no spellsilver, hasn't been imbued with the potential that spellsilver carries; there's just magic stuck to it for no visible reason, like a few bits of somebody's scaffold got stuck in there and impossibly stayed in place.  And that magic has some unfamiliar - color, texture, flavor, something, that Carissa has never seen and cannot offhand imagine any way to do to a piece of magic on purpose by Golarion methods.

The foreign magic is structured - carelessly, sloppily, in huge scribbles, not just by Carissa's standards, surely, but by the standards of anyone in Golarion who could make a magic item at all, right.  Any kind of spell you could cast by pumping mana through this awful scribble would have to be three spell circles simpler than a cantrip, and even then it couldn't work unless the mana itself was somehow just way easier to work with and shape into spells.

HOW have there been MANY PREVIOUS HEROES who thought that FIGHTING ALL THE GODS was a higher priority than FIXING HOW EVERYONE ON THIS PLANET DOES MAGIC ITEM MANUFACTURE. 

She's going to be so incredibly cool here if she doesn't die or get betrayed and enslaved or both!!!!!

"How much do I owe you if I break this?"

"Twenty currency units that I imagine don't mean anything to you.  Two weeks of my living expenses.  If this goes anything remotely like I expect it to go you can owe me a pocket knife that oneshots young dragons and we'll call it even."

"Slaying weapons are usually one-off," she says absentlymindedly, and starts picking apart the pocket knife.

Magic items need very specific instructions or, obviously, they won't do what you want them to do. If they need to have an attribute, you need to have built that attribute in, and anchored it exactly properly, and run some magic through it a bunch of times to make sure you don't observe any clumping or sticking. Mana does not want to cooperate with your magic items; mana wants to dissipate like water wants to flow downhill, and you can make water flow through a precise sequence of hundreds of gates in order but not by vaguely hoping it will.

Forget spellsilver; spellsilver is for copying out the attributes of mana that you need to get it to behave precisely enough, copying out the willingness of magic to stick to metal at all. 

This mana wants to do what it's told. But no one in the history of the universe has known how to tell it anyway. The spell needs occasion refreshing with Earth because it's leaky; the spell just keeps the blade sharp because there's no precision in its mandate.

Can she in fact just start prying up the mana and telling it exactly where to go and exactly what to do, like she was working with spellsilver even though she isn't? Can she tell this knife that it is not only forever-sharp (all magic weapons retain their edge!!!) but also spell-storing, and concealed, and agile? 

Not on literally her first try, no.

She can pry out a bit of the strange mana-flavoring-structure, presumably Earth-affinity mana, from its underlying material; she can hold the resulting Earth-affinity mana for as long as she cares to; but once she takes the affinity-mana out of an underlying material she can't put it back, just like she couldn't have done that in Golarion if she was trying to burn magic into something without any spellsilver to help.

The entire structure of the blade looks like... actually, it looks like somebody used smithing tools to lay down a pattern of affinity material, rather than burning a magical pattern into the material using outside power - as you might expect, given that there's no spellsilver involved.  You can literally see the outlines of the magic physically in a pattern of the blade alloy.

Carissa could potentially refine that pattern some by selective ablation, or maybe by pinching the affinity-magic that runs through a material to be a narrower more intense band in places; without her having to reforge this whole blade, or her getting a few dozen pounds of spellsilver and learning how to produce the flavored mana.

Before then, it might help if Carissa had any idea of what it looked like to actually activate this blade, because right now, based on any laws of magic she knows, this spell-pattern cannot possibly work; she can intuitively see how it's trying to yell "SHARP" at the metal, and she can definitely see how it would leak mana while yelling that, but not how that yelling actually... helps.

It would be a great time to assassinate the summoned hero, if you wanted the world to end: she's totally absorbed. "Can you show me how you activate this?"

"Noting that you're asking me to reveal my Earth affinity for definite, if I have one, and that's something you shouldn't tell to other people.  To be clear there's all kinds of people who'll call themselves the Plasma Mage or whatever, but sometimes they're running a complicated bluff using items and batteries and only their adventurer-partners know all of their affinities for sure."

"That said, yes, sigh, fine, most people think I have at least a Metal affinity and they're right."

Almys takes back the blade, and activates the sharpening.

Fact one:  The weirdly textured mana behaves in a fashion that one can only call merely three-dimensional.  It takes a shape, as it bounces through the grotesque messy pattern, and mostly keeps that shape modulo entirely visible tensions, and doesn't twist off into complicated dynamics with lots of hidden state requiring mathematical analysis to predict.

Fact two:  The pattern seems to want to - correct itself?  The blade-pattern presses impressions into the magic, and those impressions develop into deeper divots and form more precise curves, for no reason evident in the kinds of laws of magic this affinity-mana seems to be obeying.

The structure of mana that fires, once it's been built up, still looks a bit sloppy and wobbly; it wouldn't hold together for even that fraction of a second, if it was normal mana; but that final magical-action makes way more sense than the magic item's pattern, and is definitely more coherent and less sloppy than the patterns of the affinity materials.  There's features the pattern developed, while pouring through and building up, that seem entirely inexplicable in terms of the much cruder structure that built it.

- huh. 

"Change of plans," she says absently, "I just want to quietly live in your cellar or something for the next couple days, see if I can make existing items that look like a normal enchanter made them but that leak less or are more powerful. If I can do that then we have a nice inconspicuous way to make some money, and I think while I try I'll get a handle on - the thing you all are doing. One thing that might be worth building is something that blocks an affinity of the holder, so I can go get Guild-registered with a set of abilities. I think work I do in spellsilver will be very conspicuous, and might want to wait until we have an independent power base. 

Am I right to guess that while dimensional spaces might stick around longer than at home, and might be persuadable to get bigger even though I don't know Create Demiplane, this seems like the kind of thing where the next summoned hero is dealing with a dimensional goo incursion?"

"I don't think I understood that last part but that lack of understanding is itself not something I'd consider an encouraging sign."

"I don't have a cellar.  I rent a bedroom, in a house with a shared kitchen and shower.  But finding you a cheap inn somewhere is... something that should be relatively not that risky, if you don't give yourself away somehow, strangers rent rooms in inns all the time.  Midvale has the sort of government that doesn't approve of anybody except the government robbing people..."

"You know, never mind, I'll spend twice as much money and get us both rooms in the same inn."

"I don't know a lot about making magical weapons, but I know that magesmiths have, like... smithies.  I'm trying to think of weapons I've seen that wouldn't require that... maybe arrows, carved from wood and bone mats?  But I don't know how much it would cost to buy the carving-tools, probably a significant chunk of money, and I'm not sure whether or not it's the kind of thing you can rent."

"Oh!  And I should definitely be able to rent you some textbooks on crafting, if you think that'll be helpful at all, or buy them outright if you want to take notes in the margins.  I recall that some Summoned Heroes are from places that don't have cheap books and they're often excited when they get here and find out how cheap books are - just one day's wages, here, ever since the time of the Book Hero, Myne, who didn't break anything."  It's occurring to Almys that this Summoned Hero also needs positive role models in her life.

"I'd love some textbooks on crafting," she says. "I can probably - at home I'd be able to get the use of a smithy pretty cheaply if I'm willing to use it at night, I don't know if that holds here. I'd also like a book on exercises for children who've just identified their affinity to strengthen it, if you have any of those. What's the law on self-defense."

"It's going to go a lot better if you've got a friendly witness who isn't a stranger in town, or the perpetrator is known to the guards as a not-well-connected criminal.  In your case, given your total absence of papers, I'd say that the law on self-defense is to kill them while there aren't any witnesses and get me to help hide the body... is that okay with your Lawful thing?"

"It's not ideal? If self-defense is legal but you don't have truth spells so I'd have a hard time convincing the court I wasn't lying, I'm fine not reporting it. If I'm actually just not supposed to defend myself - well, ideally we'd go somewhere where I'm allowed to, but I can probably just Grease them and run away unless that looks like Obvious Summoned Hero."

"It's legal, but you're theoretically supposed to report it every time, except nobody would do that in real life unless they were real confident they had an in with the town guard or the local government, so actually the reporting requirement is there so that if they feel like arresting you or blaming you they can do that because you didn't report it."

"Grease... if that's what it sounds like, it sounds like something you could do with Mud affinity or even just a clever Water spell.  The thing I'm worried about is whether you doing literally anything in front of a sufficiently high-level caster is going to inform them that you're not from this planet.  I don't have reason to be sure that's true, it's more of a guess, but -"

"I mean, just for a start, if what you're doing looks like casting with mana that doesn't behave like any known affinity then a sufficiently high-level mage might notice something about that.  See, you can get Skills around working with mana you can't generate; most really good Tier-3 mages are going to have the ability to do crude spells with all six Elements, they just can't do it with their own mana.  So they're not all going to just assume - your spell must have an affinity they don't have - and even if they do assume that, what if they compare notes and exclude all six basic elements?  What if you do the Grease spell in front of a mage with high-level Water affinity and they're sure there's no Water in what you just did, including as the Mud complex affinity?  If you're advanced enough you could possibly cast Grease, if that does what it sounds like, using all kinds of weird mana, I'm not saying it's a giveaway, but good mages will notice."

"Makes sense." Sigh. "This seems pretty unlikely to come up, but, what procedures are there for preventing spellcasters you arrest from just...escaping."