Vakt follows the way of Kofusachi, as she has for her entire life.
It's not always easy, but it's important. And, having been blessed with His powers, she wants to make the most of them in this life, wants to spread the joy and prosperity that she and her God both value.
These days, she wanders from place to place, healing and helping people with their problems, bringing prosperity and joy into their lives. It's... fulfilling.
After her morning channel, she notices someone glancing her with I have a concerning problem, but can I really bother this powerful adventurer about it? body language. She'll give them an encouraging smile.
"Ah, Chosen, if it's not too far out of your way, there's a cleared out dungeon in the woods north of here, quite safe and empty unless things move in, but my son was checking if anything had and there was a room he hadn't seen before opened up..."
"It's not too much trouble," she reassures. "How far north?"
(Vakt doesn't love being called Chosen, but the Taldane translation she knows for her title overlaps with the one the Desnans use, so she tends to be conservative when correcting people.)
"That's fine," she says, still smiling. "I have some people to help this morning," (mostly with specialized healing) "but I can go check it out in an hour or two."
A hike through the woods is a good opportunity to practice mindfulness and keeping her focus on the beauty of the material world as opposed to letting it wander into unproductive mires. (She has had plenty such practice already, but more won't hurt.)
Before too long, she's at the dungeon, which she inspects with keen eyes and also Detect Magic.
The door to the new room has the faintest traces, like something concealing the space wore off recently and is dissipating. Beyond, though, is a circular room, with a design etched onto the floor that is mostly filled in with sand, and a pile of extra black sand near the empty line segment. It might be calligraphy in a weird Azlanti dialect, some of the markings. None of this is magical at all.
...Huh.
Vakt doesn't know what to make of this, but the fact that it's entirely non-magical means it's almost certainly harmless.
...she can't ask Uma about it via Sending, because you can't transmit a diagram in 25 words or less, but she can sketch it and ask via Dream later, if she wants.
Journal retrieved, she walks through the room to get into a good position to draw from.
Her cloak brushes the pile of nonmagical black sand into the nonmagical grooves on the floor.
Magic flares with a terrific brightness.
Some kind of fiend appears just barely long enough for her to get a look at him,
Her adventuring-reflexes have not been worn away by time; she's casting as soon as she processes the fiend's appearance.
Bestow Curs-
This effectively disrupts her ability to cast spells! It's also excruciatingly painful.
Air blooms into existence, and a moment later so does light. The fiend is still there, the light is drifting away from him - no, it's tethered to his belt loop? - the air isn't coming from anywhere in particular and it's pretty windy in all directions away from the two of them, but it's livable. "Are you okay?"
(She recovers very quickly for someone who was just exposed to vacuum!)
She attempts to take several steps backwards from the fiend with unknown (but clearly dangerous!) abilities, and then realizes she can't, due to the lack of ground.
...the fiend looks about as surprised and confused as she feels, though, and it's speaking Celestial - Celestial with a Tianji accent, even, which is - a pretty confusing thing to do, actually? (And if this were a trap, why let her breathe?)
She keeps her guard up. Looks and fiends can be deceiving - she's very good at reading people, but there are people out there who are better at lying.
"Where are we?"
"I was going to ask you! One second we were in a room with gravity, and now we're here, looks like deep space or something?"
...Vakt will inspect her new environment while she keeps the fiend(?) in her field of view.
???
"...it doesn't look like anything to me," she admits. Her limited planar knowledge is not helping her here at all (she wishes-)
"Right, I could put the light out and we'd be able to see if there were stars better but then I couldn't see you and you might drift out of the air zone."
She peers at him for a few moments and then sighs. "I don't know where we are. I was in northwestern Avistan when you teleported on top of me."
"...Avistan is the smaller of the two the continents that directly borders the crown of the world. We're speaking Celestial. How did you learn it?"
"It comes automatically with the summon so you don't have summoners and their daeva-outsiders staring at each other going 'no hablo Ingles' or whatever. Uh, the crown of... what... world?"
"The Crown of the World is the continent on the north pole of Golarion," she says as she processes the rest of what he just said. "...daeva-outsider? Do you know who summoned you?" She didn't have Detect Magic up when he appeared, but summoning isn't usually something that can be done at range or quickly, which rules out a lot of options.
"I am assuming it was you because I didn't see anyone else in the room and I speak your language with the same accent you have."
"...I don't see how it could have been me. I didn't cast anything." She doesn't even have any summoning spells prepared - it doesn't come up much.
(...he's right about the accent, though.)
"Did you draw anything on the floor, or trip a switch that might have projected something onto the floor in light, or anything?"
Vakt frowns. "There was a circular diagram in ash on the ground in the room I was investigating? But if it was a summoning trap, it was... weirdly disguised, it was in plain sight but it didn't ping as magical."
"I... don’t know what you mean by that. A circular diagram in any medium is the sort of thing that would summon me, though."
Okay, they're both very confused (nice and symmetric, Rids would say).
Break it down into smaller parts. "Which parts of what I just said were unclear to you?"
"I can guess from the phrase summoning trap approximately what you might mean but it is unfamiliar as a practically implemented thing. 'Ping as magical' I don't recognize as a concept."
...headtilt. "Something 'pings as magical' if the spell Detect Magic identifies it as such. As far as I know, all summoning is magical? There are ways to hide magical effects from detection, but summoning is a -" what did they call it again - "a subschool of Conjuration."
"Summoning is a magical event and it is possible to identify daeva and read our bindings by magic, and security by obscurity is all I know to be doable about it, but mundane substances or light suffice to perform a summon. 'Detect Magic' as a particular spell with a name is not a thing I know about and even less is 'schools'."
Huh. "Detect Magic is one of the simplest possible spells and is extremely widely known. ...on Golarion, at least."
...she looks closely at his light-emitting object.
Little LED in enough of a casing to be attached by paracord to his pants. "I am not familiar with Golarion. And, uh, would expect to know about all interestingly distinct pockets of habitation anywhere within the five planes I am accustomed to."
Frown. "I have never heard of a kind of summoning that works the way you describe it, though there are lots of kinds of magic I know nothing about. ...and we know of more than five major planes. Besides the Material, there's the Astral, the elemental planes, and the outer planes..."
She looks at his wings.
Blue, same color as his pants. Battish (or possibly dragonish, though there's no scales). "The ones I know are called Hell, Heaven, Fairyland, Limbo, and just 'the human world', none of the proper nouns have caught on."
"Our Heaven and Hell are our Lawful Good and Lawful Evil afterlives, and Golarion is on the Material plane. What's your human world called? Our scholars know of a few other populated planets..." She is at this point taking notes in her distinctly not-modern notebook.
"It has various names in its various languages. Earth, Terra, etcetera. Do you have - other afterlives?"
headshake. "I haven't heard of any of those." She writes them down, though, for her next Sending to Uma. "We have nine total - Heaven, Nirvana, Elysium, Axis, the Boneyard, the Maelstrom, Hell, Abaddon, and the Abyss. The Mother of Souls sorts mortals into them when we die, based on how we lived our lives."
"We don't have that! We have the three daeva realms which contain both naturally occurring daeva and also dead summoners, and Limbo which contains dead non-summoners, plus the human world where live people are."
She takes a moment to digest this. "That's... very different. Who or what determines which afterlife your dead summoners end up in?"
...this doesn't seem like the most important thing to dig into right now. "I think we were teleported here from the room you appeared in using my world's magic? Let me..."
She starts casting Detect Magic.
"It sure wasn't mine, which can't move living people and would have felt different even if it only grabbed me."
Okay, so -
Fact the first - the (alleged) daeva-outsider does not (or claims to not) be familiar with magic, Avistan, Golarion, or most of the planes she knows about.
Fact the second - it is (allegedly) possible to summon his kind of being with a diagram, and (allegedly) security against this is obscurity.
Fact the third - based on the strength of that aura, a god (or something with godlike power) used a teleportation effect on the daeva-outsider (and also Vakt) less than half a moment after he arrived, to send them... wherever they are now.
"...would you describe yourself as having destructive or destabilizing capabilities?", she asks, a bit unsteadily.
"...I mean, I wouldn't put it on my business cards - sorry, that translates as individual words but not a whole concept - you could say that, sure."
"I think that maybe Someone noticed? And they sent us here instead."
(Celestial has a clear distinction between someone and Someone.)
"Like you think that literally happened five minutes ago," he clarifies.
...nod. "It maybe could have been an archmage, or some similarly powerful entity..." (She doesn't know enough about magic to be sure about where exactly the line is, but.)
"Okay, uh, in the spirit of listing things we are and are not familiar with, that is not a thing I would have expected or a kind of entity I'd anticipate meeting."
"Your world doesn't have gods, then?" It's hard to imagine what that would be like.
"The interventions of our gods are not the kind of thing where you could be uncertain about their existence. The major ones all have - domains, things they care about and want, and they act on the world with those interests in mind, usually via empowered followers." Her hand brushes against the string of coins she's wearing around her neck.
"...lotta religious people at home say there used to be more obvious miracles and they've backed off for some reason since the relevant historical period but I take it that is not what you mean."
She nods. "I'm a cleric of Kofusachi - the spells I can cast are tiny pieces of His power, bestowed to me. I can show you a basic one."
"The obvious orisons - spells weak enough to use freely - I have right now are Create Water and Light." (The Celestial names for these spells are about as straightforward as the English ones.)
"Well, if I were you I wouldn't create a lot of water in zero gravity." He is adjusting his wings a little in the constant wind so as not to be blown away from her nor directly smack into her.
Hmmm? Oh, because there's nowhere for it to go. That's sensible. She nods.
Light. She taps her notebook; it begins to glow.
"I could make us a little spaceship with artificial gravity. And no exterior lights so we could get photos of whether there's anything within umpteen light-years of here."
"...I'm unfamiliar with that type of ship and did not know gravity could be manufactured. How would you make it?"
Well, yes, but she was hoping for more a bit more useful context than that most people are not at their best after being coercively teleported into the void. And he might not want to tell her what all he can do.
"Having somewhere to stand would be nice, but you would know the tradeoffs better than me," she says neutrally.
"Well, I can’t get rid of the ship after but that seems probably not a problem." He glances at her feet so the floor can be under them. A capsule grows into place around them. He was slightly "higher" than her, and stumbles as the gravity kicks on, catching himself with a wing flare.
(He can't get rid of it? Isn't matter conjuration temporary -) this train of thought gets derailed as a spaceship appears around her.
She also stumbles as the gravity kicks on, but the floor appearing under her feet stops her from tripping, which is good, because her attention is on the ?room? she finds herself in, not her balance!
Carpet, leather piloting chairs with narrow backs, screens and slots and gizmos, a couple doors. He tucks his little light into his jeans pocket, since there's lights in the ceiling.
It takes Vakt a few moments to take this all in!
She stares at the ?illusion screens?, temporarily overwhelmed by familiar thought patterns.
(She wishes Rids and Uma were here. They would be so much better at this than her, and it'd be such a treat for them. She would have loved to have seen them get to experience it, watch them ask the questions she won't think of on her own and instead of getting any of that she's in over her head in a quite serious situation and knowing they're doing well where they are doesn't help when she needs them here -)
(They aren't here. She is. All she can do is her best.)
She takes a deep, shaky breath. "This is... quite unlike every ship I've ever been on."
"What, uh, technological level, are you coming from? Like... nonmagical electricity use yes or no."
"We don't have that anywhere I've been or heard of." She looks up at the ceiling light fixutres. "...are those not magical, then? The light is so regular."
"The making is magical, the made things are not. Though I can do stuff you couldn't manufacture per se."
She doesn't think he's lying and it would be a weird thing to lie about but it's still a bit difficult to believe! (Her fingers brush her coins.)
"What is it for?" There's text she can't read, but it's mostly images that don't quite make sense to her either.
"I mentioned we can see pictures of the outside to see if starlight has ever reached where we're at? It, uh, kinda looks like the nearest star is maybe..." He appears an object and looks at the light it projects in midair. "...several million light years away," he concludes.
She looks curiously at the apparition. "A light year is a unit of distance?"
"The distance light can travel in one year. My world's humans' planet of origin is about eight light-minutes away from its sun, for comparison."
"...oh."
She thinks about this for a moment. "Well. Even if we're still in the Material, I suppose this means we can't return to Golarion via intraplanar means?" A lifetime of Teleport castings wouldn't get them that far.
"I can cast Teleport a few times a day, but the range is only about a thousand miles. It's faster than any non-magical transport at home, but won't help us here."
Sigh. "I can do a Plane Shift, but... that'll be trickier." She doesn't have a very wide selection of forks, and if she's right about what happened being a god intervening, she's not sure it'd be a good idea to bring him to Nirvana or Elysium. And her other two options are... variously inconvenient.
"You can't Plane Shift to the plane you're on, it regularly misses its destination by hundreds of miles," (she momentarily looks quite sad) "and you can only Plane Shift to a plane you have an attuned object for. ...I have a few, but none of them seem like great options. And also I won't be able to even try until sunrise, I don't have it today."
Sure. He will investigate the astronomical properties of Extremely Deep Space.
Kofusachi - I'm very far from home. Much further than I had thought it was possible to be on this plane.
I don't know if You can hear me and don't expect to find out until tomorrow, but - I don't think there's anything I can do to spread prosperity out here. So I am going to try and get back, unless my family tells me not to - or You do, obviously.
Greetings, Otolmens! So, quick question regarding this intervention right here...
She summoned THAT THING. Won’t be very prosperous to destroy the whole solar system, will it?! Otolmens has also annihilated the summoning diagram. It is a last resort to mess with another god's cleric, but she did SEE the diagram so she’s going to be aaaaall the way over there. Otolmens is not even positive if killing her will do the trick! The THING has a magic system concerned with information theoretic death! YOU'RE WELCOME that Otolmens didn’t eat her soul!
....are you sure? It would be really quite unlike her, to be summoning something to destroy the solar system with.
(He takes a closer look at "THAT THING".)
...Kofusachi is really quite sure that specific thing won't destroy the solar system. He has much better visibility on it than Otolmens, you see, on account of how it ended material scarcity at its home.
He would like to submit that His cleric should be allowed to try and make her way home.
These things sometimes do stuff not on purpose. Like if they're enchanted and stuff. You cannot just rely on their motives.
DON'T YOU DARE.
What if He - okay, okay, Fine. Kofusachi will not dump cleric circles on it even though it clearly deserves them.
...is Otolmens going to try and stop His cleric from getting home? She's not actually stranded out there, and she's going to try.
Sigh.
...are there things Otolmens wants communicated to That Thing about the bounds of Her intervention via Kofusachi's handy cleric? Depending on the message, He might be willing to compensate Her for the intervention cost.
That Thing is absolutely not to go anywhere near the Cage. If it's so keen on not destroying things, it'll consider not going near any other planets, either, but especially not that planet.
Okay. Will She also pay a bit for a nudge to highlight the dangers of the Enchantment school? Since She's so concerned about that type of thing.
Well, Kofusachi predicts that it will more reliably stay away from the Cage if it knows.
