And they find themselves -

Well. Not in Boston. In the wilderness somewhere; there's a sparse pine forest, and a lot of mud, and it's eerily quiet. 

"Motherfucker. That was supposed to be the easy part!"

Also holy fuck, outside is big. He can't maintain awareness of the whole room he's in because it is incomprehensibly large in every direction. All four of them instinctively shift to face away from each other.

"More people went out the gates in the last twenty minutes than have ever gone out in one day before. Maybe it--wore out somehow."

"Doesn't matter. We're out. We just need to find some civilization, get on the phone, and our folks will buy us plane tickets home. It'll be a funny story a month from now."

Somehow in all the frantic work of the last several weeks Marcy ended up--not thinking they wouldn't get out, exactly, but not being able to imagine being out. This doesn't seem any stranger than if they had shown up at their actual exit point because anything that isn't more of the same is maximally strange. But Abigail always knows what to say to keep the rest of them going. She nods. "Right. Let's pick a direction and get moving."

Marcy scans the horizon for any sign of people, contemplates asking Abigail to give Kevin (the tallest of the squad) a vision boost. Their bodies and power-sharers are brimming with mana, because there was no point leaving any in the central enclave sink in the doomed school.

With a bit of a boost they can see a stone fortress on a hill a long ways off, and some isolated houses in the valley behind it.

And, in the other direction, a really weird force-bubble of some kind.

Kevin spots the force-bubble first. "That's . . . weirdly public."

"Maybe it's disguised to mundanes somehow. Or we're so deep in the middle of nowhere they're not worried about anyone walking up. Let's go to those buildings, they look--habitable, at least." And presumably inhabited by wizards if at all, with the blatantly magic bubble right there.

They all set off for the fortress at the steady jog of extremely fit teenagers who could stand to warm themselves up a bit. It's really cold here, at least compared to the seasonless uniformity of the Scholomance.

It's a long ways off, but once they're clear of the trees and heading towards it they get noticed. Five people approach on - force-horses, which they appear to be riding like normal horses but which are definitely some kind of spell; their misty hooves don't actually touch the ground. 

They open fire (from longbows) when they're still a quarter mile away. Innocent human teenagers just out for a jog, sure. 

Argh fuck they're definitely in the middle of nowhere with no mundanes and apparently strangers aren't welcome. She's not about to start a fight with five adults on their turf while she's trespassing; she puts up both hands and yells "We're here by accident! We mean no harm!" in one language after another until they respond.

The others follow her lead; Franklin puts up a shield for the whole group because he's the one who's supposed to do that in this sort of circumstance because he can do it the cheapest. (He's expecting the arrows to be enchanted to pack more punch than regular arrows, not that he'd want to get hit with one either way.)

The arrows are fired from a holy longbow with other magic on it, and would, in fact, do more damage than normal arrows, though the shield knocks them all away easily enough.

"It's a trick."

      "No kidding. Hold your fire anyway."

"- under protest, sir."

      "They just put up a shield; it'll be easier to hit them anyway once it has expired. And it could be a lost patrol."

"That lost their uniforms?"

     "The lack of uniforms is actually if anything weirder if those are demons! They could easily have disguised themselves with uniforms!"

"It's probably a distraction so someone else can try something somewhere else."

The arrows stop. The adults do not approach. An explanation is not forthcoming. 

In lieu of an explanation, actually, there are some mals approaching from the other direction! Unfamiliar ones; human-height, acidic slime, hard for the eye to track, carrying metal spears.

Kevin spots them first and opens fire (actually it's lightning). "Four on our six! Big ones." And either dumb as hell or even stronger than they look, if they're going after four adults in the open. Best not to assume the former.

Abigail tries to blind the mals with a stream of French.

Franklin shifts the power flow to the shield to strengthen it on the side facing the mals and chants in Latin to surround the mals with a sphere of inward-crushing force.

Marcy keeps one eye on the wizards, but if it looks like the others don't have the problem in hand she can pull a gun that shoots shurikens of solid light and join in.

"- that doesn't, in fact, mean they're not demons. Most demon-killing is in fact done by demons."

         "I'm actually most baffled by the lightning. Maybe there are some poor demon sorcerers out there with lightning spells but why would they use them."

                    "Could've just looked like lightning -"

         "Nah, the babaus ignored it like lightning, too."

                                "If they're fighting demons at the border we have treaty obligations."

"Surely not if they are literally themselves demons."

                                "No, but we don't in fact know that for sure. They could absolutely be a very lost adventuring party."

"Of all spellcasters."

     "The one on the left isn't a sorcerer, she's just using an item."

"This is a trap labelled 'trap' and you're all going 'hmm, traps aren't usually labelled, maybe it's not a trap'."

         "I'm going to call backup."

(The mals were, apparently, foolish; they aren't easy to kill, but they are distinctly killable.)

(Kevin switches from lightning to fire when the lightning fails to do what lightning should.)

(The shurikens aren't electric; they're just glowing temporary constructs. When your affinity is projectiles you get good at disposable ammo.)

Once the mals are dead she puts the gun back in her pocket and goes back to miming, if not harmlessness, at least peaceful intent. Did it look like any of her eight languages got through at all or do the others need to start trying?

Franklin tentatively takes the shield down now that there's no immediate incoming from either direction.

Backup will have someone who has third circle spells and can prepare Tongues, in case the obvious trap is not a trap. It'll take a while for backup to ride out and catch up with them, though. In the meantime a couple more demons will try to make their way across the barrier; they shoot them.

"It may look like a nalfashnee, but or all you know, it's just a lost adventuring party," the archer says, putting a dozen arrows in a nalfashnee.

     "None of us have seen through the illusion, yes? And we've all tried? Maybe it's not an illusion."

"That is true, it could be a polymorph."

And then backup arrives and they stop quibbling and ride closer. 

"This is Fort Traves," a voice yells in English when they're in yelling range. "Identify yourselves."

"Marcy Park, Boston enclave, today's Scholomance graduating class," she yells back. "We did not intend to trespass; our exit gate sent us to the wrong point and we're lost."

"- haven't heard of Boston, haven't heard of the Scholomance, you landed at the Worldwound. Do any of you urgently need food, shelter, or medical attention."

What. Is there an enclave in Siberia that hasn't interacted with the rest of the world in three hundred years? But they have someone who speaks English for the spells?

"Not urgently; if you have a telephone we need to call our families, though. What is the Worldwound?"

"I do not know what a telephone is. The Worldwound is the hole in the world through which hostile inhuman monsters of the Abyss escape and try to eat everybody."

They're in range for divinations, now. The mysterious sorcerers are Lawful Good. This is - a significant point to their credit, if it's not faked, which it might be.

(These adults are not dressed like people who've had any contact with the rest of the world in three hundred years. They're wearing and wielding a reasonable number of fancy magic artifacts, if anyone can see that.)

Abigail has a spell that lets her sense magic, but she's not using it right now. Anyone on a horse like that is clearly wealthy and/or powerful and therefore almost certainly wearing a pile of artifice.

The Worldwound sounds immensely terrible.

Maybe they're somehow inside an enclave and the Worldwound is like their gates? That's probably insane, she's hardly an expert on what the sky looks like but she's pretty sure what's above them is that.

"Where are we relative to--the rest of Earth?"

"...the Worldwound is in the far north of the world. Which is round, and not the Elemental Plane of Earth, I'm not sure if we're having a translation issue or a deeper one. Fort Traves is on the southern border of the Worldwound, in what was formerly Sarkoris and is now a protectorate of Lastwall. The border with Ustalav's about thirty miles south of here, and the border with Mendev's about forty miles east. The Sellen runs along the border." If this is a trap it's at this point likely to be 'they're all distracted here and missing something else'. 

"We're definitely having some kind of issue. Earth is the name of the planet--big round thing with a north--that we were trying to get to, and I don't know what an elemental plane is." She hasn't heard of Sarkoris or Lastwall or Ustalav or Mendev either but that doesn't mean anything; there are loads of little countries.

"There are actually many planets, but you look human and there are many fewer of them with humans. The elemental planes are - other parts of the universe not accessible by any amount of travel in a direction, even for a very long time, but only by planar transit magic. This is also true of the Outer Planes, usually, though right now there is a rift to the Abyss here so I guess the Abyss is technically accessible without planar transit magic right now."

This explanation is interrupted by someone spotting some invisible crossing coloxus demons. Everyone pauses in being confused to murder those.

Pausing a conversation to do a bit of murder is the most normal thing that's happening right now. Once that's done: "Were the elemental planes and the outer planes constructed deliberately, or naturally occurring? The Scholomance, where we were this morning, is a thing like the planes and it was constructed."

"The word we use for deliberately constructed other planes is demiplanes. Spellcasters can learn to make those. Very powerful people can make large and permanent ones at great expense. The elemental planes and outer planes are older than this world, but I don't know if some god made them or what, exactly. I'm neither a historian nor a theologian. This is a Worldwound fort. We fight the Abyssal demons."

So: they're on an alien planet with alien humans. Getting home is going to be either difficult or impossible. There are enclaves and mals and also other dimensions, one of which is apparently chock full of mals, and there's a portal to the Mal Dimension right here. Also their parents are going to think they're dead and then be so fucking confused when they hear from everyone who saw them go out the gate.

She turns to confer with the others.

"Too bad El isn't here; I bet she could break the Abyss off the portal the same way she did the Scholomance."

"That would be pretty cool, yeah. I think we should assume it's going to be a giant research project to get home from here." Because 'giant research project' is something that will keep Marcy and the others feeling like they have a goal to move towards but also because she does in fact want to give researching it a go; if the Scholomance connected to this place then maybe a smaller temporary Void structure built here could connect to Earth.

"So what do we do in the meantime? Get jobs here?"

"That's not a bad plan; they'll have different spells from us so there's some good trade opportunities there too . . . wait a minute." She turns back to the spokesperson.

"If this is another planet, how do you speak English? Do you have spells for translation? Also, are the people who run this place looking to hire additional guards?"

" - yes, I am using a translation spell. And yes, we're hiring. - well, Fort Traves in particular is for people who have enlisted in the military of Lastwall or sworn oaths to a closely cooperating paladin order, but Lastwall also runs forts that hire independent adventurers, and Mendev hires independent adventurers. The Worldwound in general has too few people guarding it to keep the demons in, such that more people working on it saves lives."

Commanding the forts that take all well-intentioned comers is broadly considered one of the worst jobs ever. It is extraordinarily important and also random well-intentioned adventurers make terrible soldiers, cause fantastic amounts of creative trouble, and die in all kinds of truly bizarre ways. The last time he got drinks with a colleague who commanded Crusader's Fort the colleague had recently dealt with some sorcerers from Holomog who opened a planar rift inside the fort itself to give it positive energies so everyone would fight better. It was working perfectly, but when asked for how long it'd keep doing that the sorcerers said 'oh, you know, it varies', and when asked what would happen if it stopped the sorcerers said 'oh, you know, it varies'. And then they got very annoyed when asked to please close it. 

That sounds like more combat wizards than you get in one place on Earth, but if anything was going to get a huge group of wizards working together it would be a portal to the mal dimension. Translation magic is incredibly cool and also either makes everything they know obsolete or makes everything they know sellable; they'll need to think through the implications there once they knows how much mana it costs and whether there's anything commonplace on Earth but unknown here. Really they need to get more oriented to this place in general. 

"Can you tell us how to get to one of the forts that hires independents? Also are you interested in trading the translation spell for one of ours?" It'll be in a language she doesn't speak, but she can just learn random bits of random languages now and not get any homework in them, hah.

"Oh, are you a wizard? We took you for sorcerers. I can trade you spells. - actually, give us a minute, please -"

      "They claim they're friendly adventurers from another planet."

"Not the weirdest thing that happened this week."

      "What kind of week have you been having."

"There was that succubus who looked like my sister -"

      "No, the people from another world are definitely a lot weirder than that."

"See if that's how you feel about it when it's your sister."

       "- anyway. The location of Crusader's Fort isn't a secret, right, sir? I may as well give it to them?"

                 "Go ahead. Crusader's Fort will be better equipped to vet them, too. They can make it there safely?"

       "They seemed to think so."

                   "Right, then, the patrol can return to their usual duties, you can see they get good directions, and the poor heroes at Crusaders can sort things out."

"I can trade you spells," the man says again, switching back to English. "Crusader's Fort is about thirty miles east of here. If you stick by the barrier you won't miss it, though you will run into a lot of demons and some other patrols that will take you for disguised demons. If you go south along the Sellen you'll be safer, though it'll take longer. You don't want to cross the Sellen here. We administer southern Sarkoris; across the river it's Ustalav, and not as safe to wander around in."

"I don't know the difference between a wizard and a sorcerer but 'wizard' translated as the thing that we are. How many miles is it if we follow the river? We don't want to cause trouble with the other patrols but we didn't pack any food. Also, any particular thing you want in a spell other than 'good for combat'?"

"My blinding spell is good for stopping groups so you can pick them off one at a time, if you don't mind that French is one of those languages where you have to sound all casual about it. I don't know if translation magic gets around that kind of thing."

"Wizards can learn spells from one another, sorcerers mostly can't. Fifty miles, I think, if you go by the river? I don't know a mass blinding spell, don't know why the language it's spoken in would be a complicating factor at all though maybe that's a sign we're misunderstanding each other again, and will definitely get you some food in addition to Tongues if you have a mass blinding spell. What circle is it at?"

" . . . I don't know what it means for a spell to be at a circle."

"Is it a measurement of mana draw? I don't even know what it is in our units, it's not one of the ones that's pointless to learn out of affinity but it's not so easy a fourteen-year-old could cast it."

"I think you first picked it up at sixteen? Cost scales by number of targets and they don't all need to be next to each other but it doesn't get anything you don't know is there."

" - right, aliens. Our wizards learn spells that stabilize in specific topological configurations - did that translate - and they translate to how much power you need to cast them....also sixteen is young to be casting any but the weakest spells, did you had a really rough couple of years in there?"

Topology is a math thing, right? She looks at Franklin.

"That's not how our spells work. Only a very few of our kind of spell involves topology at all. It seems possible we won't be able to learn each other's magic without a lot of up-front work."

"I agree; if we want to do this we should try to teach you ours first so if it only goes one way you can pay us in food. Also where we're from mals go after teenagers specifically because they're weak; anyone with any magic basically has to have started learning before they're fourteen and go as fast as they can from there or they're dead meat." How does this planet have a portal to the mal dimension and also enough slack not to teach their kids fast. Maybe "demiplanes" are easier to secure than enclaves and kids just don't go outside.

"- where we're from demons can pretty much kill most people, if they get loose of the wards. Not well-equipped and prepared veteran soldiers, and not powerful spellcasters, but - the overwhelming majority of normal people, demons can and will just eat."

"If they get outside the--wait, do all the demons come from the Worldwound? They're not just, like, around and breeding in the background and getting into everywhere?"

" - no. Nearly all the demons anywhere else in the world are ones that escaped the cordon here. I think most demons can't breed at all. ...your world just has an ongoing demon infestation everywhere?"

"Yes. Ours are probably weaker; they generally can't take out a well-prepared adult wizard unless the wizard is really old or sick or unlucky. And they can eat normal people but they usually don't; it's mana they want. Also it's hard to do magic in front of anyone who doesn't believe in it, so wizards generally hide and mundanes can sometimes just kill a mal because they think it's a rat or something. So, wizard kids are the tastiest targets."

"It's...hard to do magic in front of anyone who doesn't believe in it? I don't know that to be false here, to be clear, but ...everyone believes in magic... because it's - extremely obvious that magic works - it'd be like not believing in trees."

"I can see how that's an equilibrium a planet could end up in, yeah. Especially if there's few enough demons most places that believing in them doesn't put people in a bunch of extra danger. There'd be no reason for secrecy."

"If we could figure out how to cut off the Worldwound the way El cut off the Scholomance, that would just--solve the demon problem? Not even just for a generation, but until something opened it again? I'm not saying we can, there have to be loads of people trying and none of them have gotten it, just--it's like the thing we did with the Scholomance is already almost done except for the cutting-it-off step."

That makes him smile broadly. " - yes. If you could - figure out how to cut off the Worldwound - then the world would just - not have a demon problem. You did something similar in your own world?"

"We were at a school in the Void--kind of like one of your demiplanes, it sounds like--and there were two really powerful people in our year who were able to clean out the area in front of the exit that's usually a horde of mals, and someone had the idea: what if we lure a shitton of mals into the school, then run out and cut the school off the Earth and strand the mals in the Void? Then there'd be no more school for the kids to hide in but they wouldn't need one because there'd be so few mals left, and everyone would have years to get ahead of the problem before it got bad again. And as far as we know it worked, except the exit portal dropped us here instead of where it was supposed to."

"- you lured the demons off the world into a demiplane and then stranded them all there?

- right, okay. I'm not a theologian but I think we owe you guys dinner for that one, even if we can't learn your spells. And if you have any ideas on closing the Wound - it'd be at least up there for the most important thing anyone could possibly do with their lives."

"It wasn't just us, there were hundreds of people working on it. I won't turn down dinner and more magic discussion, though; it sounds like we're different enough that we might be able to do things you can't same as you can do some things we can't." And if they can do something that matters here it would make there be some kind of point to any of it instead of just being stuck unable to go home forever.

"They're not going to be excited to let you into the fort - nothing personal, just, the cleverer kinds of demons have a lot of goes at infiltrating the forts - but I bet they'll pass us food out. And I do have a bunch of questions, and if you're not lying you're allies and as much as we can afford to we'll help you get oriented." He gets down off his magic horse. "Marit. Nice to meet you."

"Marcy, and these are Kevin, Abigail, and Franklin. It's nice to meet you too and we'd be happy to demonstrate doing things humans can do and demons can't if there are any, or cooperate with truth magic if you have it. I have something that works as a truth spell in a pinch but of course there's no reason you'd believe that if you don't already believe me in general. This isn't really a problem back home because there aren't mals that can hold an intelligent conversation." And if nobody in the fort has a solution and they have to sleep outside, well, at least there's no curfew and they can stick together and take turns keeping watch.

"There's truth magic, there's also ways to beat truth magic, there's expensive ways to be sure but we mostly save those for emergencies, maybe ol' Nines will say a truth spell's good enough or maybe he won't, I just can't myself promise anything. Sleeping right out in front of the fort is pretty safe, anyway, because we have archers on the walls who can see invisible things and some of them are paladins on top of that."

"That makes sense. We're fine with whatever security precautions your people think are appropriate." When in Shanghai.

They're charming kids, which is probably evidence in favor of the hypothesis that they are demons. Most eighteen year olds are incredibly annoying. He'd know, he takes them as apprentices. 

"Did you have more questions while we walk over? The translation spell'll last about an hour."

"What kinds of things are easy with magic and what kinds are hard? Do you need to build mana and if so how do you do it and how much does capacity vary between people? Is all your magic mathematical spells or do you also have artificing and alchemy, or other things we don't have? Is the ability to do magic inherited? How many people have it? Is everyone at the Worldwound a wizard or, the other thing, sorcerers, or are there also a bunch of mundanes with guns? What's the government like here? Is anything illegal that you wouldn't expect to be obvious?"

"Uh, easy for our kind of wizards - doing a light, or moving things that aren't heavy around, or changing the flavor or texture of food, or making water hotter or colder. Wizards can do those things pretty much for as long as they can concentrate on doing them. Pretty easy - making basic protective force armor, protecting someone from hot or cold weather, disguising yourself, setting a basic alarm spell - those are all first circle. Second circle is, like, invisibility, energy resistance, glitterdust, seeing invisibility, mental and physical enhancement spells, minor temporary extradimensional spaces. ...obviously there are hundreds and hundreds of things people know how to do, but these are the classic ones you use all the time in this line of work, that everyone thinks of first.

Third circle's Fireball - you can throw a little fire before third circle but the standard 'drop an explosion at a great distance' is third - and Fly, and Haste, and Heroism, and these fake horses, and the translation spell I'm using, and short range scrying and dispelling. Fourth circle's short range teleportation and invisibility that stays in place in combat and long range scrying and dimensional anchor and Stoneskin. Fifth circle's a proper Teleport, and Mage's Private Sanctum, and Dominate Person and Polymorph and Permanancy. Sixth circle's an Antimagic Field and a forcible Teleport and Chain Lightning and Contingency and more comprehensive dispelling and telepathy and geases and so on. Seventh circle is greater teleport and greater scrying and true demiplanes and magnificent mansions and mass flight and mass invisibility and Limited Wish. Eighth circle the big ones I've heard of are Mind Blank and Clone. Ninth circle - man, name something, ninth circle wizards can probably do it. They burn down cities, or raise islands out of the sea, or scar land forever so magic never works there again, or stop time, or become gods."

"I think we get some of the fire and blasting type stuff quicker, and shields, and maybe dispelling though how much power it takes for our magic to dispell how much of your magic is an open question. And Franklin and I might have an advantage in turning things into items. And Abigail has a bunch of things that you didn't list at all that might be useful."

"I have an affinity for spells that affect the senses, both impairing them and improving them. I can give people the ability to see invisible things, or magic, or in complete darkness, or around corners, or connect two people so they both hear anything the other hears, things like that. All temporary, but I can do a lot of them as potions so I don't have to be right there when you need it."

"I expect a fort will pay well for any of that. We can do some of those things but as spells expensive enough we can't have them generally available to every patrol. If patrols can go out with potions for emergencies, that stretches our resources a lot farther. An affinity is a - specialization? Mine is enhancement of the self."

"Yes, spells in one's affinity are easier to learn and cost less mana. We build mana by doing anything effortful and we can pass it to each other--the four of us can share with each other at a distance but for anyone else it'd be by touch. Is that all the same for you?" 

"Spellcasters are limited in how much they can do in a day, recover with rest, and - cannot share spellcasting capacity with one another at all, that I've ever heard of. That sounds unbelievably useful."

Recovering mana by resting is complete bullshit. On the other hand it sounds like they can't bank mana across days to eventually do something awesome with it.

"Huh! Now I kind of want to see if I can give you a bit of mana and whether you can do anything with it." It would be incredibly lame if their comparative advantage turned out to be mana farming for the local wizards to cast with, but you sell what you've got and it's an interesting experiment.

"Well, you're welcome to try, but I'd be surprised if I could do anything more with that than I can do with, say, a ley line."

"What's a ley line and what can you do with them?" She holds out a hand for the experiment.

"Places with naturally occurring magical energy. You can learn to use it to cast your spells like you're a more powerful wizard, but you can't just scoop it up and then cast more spells." He holds out his hand as well.

"Woah, we do not have those. Mals would slurp them immediately. There are artifacts that can store mana you put in them but the really good ones that don't leak are made by professionals and none of us are professionals. Franklin's best at it." She boops him on the hand and attempts to pass him a dribble of mana, enough for a freshman to set a tripwire alarm with. 

"If there are any of those around here, we'd love to take a look at one. What sort of controls on their access are there?"

Trying to pass mana to him works as well as trying to pass it to a doorknob. 

"There aren't really access controls on ley lines, beyond 'no trespassing', and some of them go through land the command or the Church could get you access to."

"It would be great to check one out eventually. Though it turns out I can't give you mana at all, so who knows if the stuff in the ley lines bears any resemblance to what we're used to."

"Can you tell me more about the government and, uh, the church, in general?" She doesn't know much about Earth churches beyond what the more religious students do in the library on Sundays.

"Yeah, of course. Lastwall was founded almost nine hundred years ago at the end of the Shining Crusade, a decades long war between an unfathomably powerful necromancer called Tar-Baphon and the people who didn't want him to enslave the whole planet. The crusade succeeded at trapping him, but there was no way to destroy him, so they left Lastwall with the responsibility of watching over his prison so he can never threaten the world again.  - when the Worldwound opened up we took that on, too, because someone had to.

The great heroes of the Shining Crusade set up rules for Lastwall, so that we'd remain a Lawful Good state, and not be steered by whoever was in charge into whatever wars empowered them personally, and not lose sight of our duties. And the greatest of the heroes of the Shining Crusade, Iomedae, ascended, as the Lawful Good god of just war and prioritization and triage, and Her church is kind of the big one, locally, though we don't take issues with any other worship so long as it's not Evil."

. . . She's on an alien planet and has no idea whether any of that is true.

Necromancer sounds from the morphology like it might be the local magic's equivalent of a maleficer, except even more dangerous, and she sees no reason to disbelieve that part. Same with the part where he ended up immortal but sealed away though she doesn't think that ever happened with an Earth maleficer.

'Our country was founded by a god to be better than the other countries', on the other hand, sounds like total baloney. Not even real baloney. Scholomance cafeteria imitation baloney. Marit sure seems to believe it, though. 'We have freedom of religion except for the evil religions' is, well, the Scholomance often chose to provide its charges with spells in the form of history classes. On the other hand maybe this planet has maleficer cults or some shit.

She settles on, "A lot of people on Earth believe in one or another god but there's none that everyone agrees definitely exists." That'll be a useful statement to gauge his reaction to.

" - there's disagreement about whether your gods exist? Can't you, uh - actually, wait, let me think what I'd do if I were trying to verify that the gods existed. 

So obviously something picks priests and paladins, but I guess they could all be, like, getting their powers from some unknown and unknowable force of the universe, since that is a thing that happens sometimes. Hellknights can smite. Obviously powerful priests say they commune with the gods but I guess all the powerful priests could be conspiring together, or just talking to some entity that isn't the one they thought they were talking to. Angels and archons and so on, if you summon them, will confirm they know the same gods we know....I guess they could be lying?

You could truth spell the angels, and the priests powerful enough for Communes, and adventurers powerful enough to have had cause to go to the realms of the gods, but all of those entities are the kind who can beat a truth spell sometimes. I assume you do not find the objection compelling that angels wouldn't be Lawful if they were engaged in a giant conspiracy to hide that the gods don't actually exist, because devils are still Lawful somehow. Iomedae Herself would've had to not have guessed about this conspiracy, presumably, because She wouldn't have ascended if this just caused you to stop existing, and She was a paladin of Aroden, but I guess technically paladins wouldn't necessarily have to be in on it, they don't get Commune...

I'm sure this has an answer, to be clear, but I'm now kind of embarrassed that I don't actually know it. I'll ask someone when we get back to the fort."

". . . That is at least very much not the sort of answer someone from Earth would give if I asked them how to verify the existence of their god. Priests don't have magic powers unless they're also wizards, some people believe in angels and devils but nobody goes 'oh let's just summon one and ask them questions' . . . I'm not sure what paladins or hellknights are and it sounds like you're using Lawful as a technical term in a way I'm not familiar with. Also 'archons' is translating as a kind of civic government official from ancient Greece so we might be having translation glitches again."

"So, some people have innate magical ability. We call them sorcerers and I'm back to thinking that's what you are, just an alien kind. Some people learn how to manipulate magic with specialized tools through study despite having no innate magic, and that's what we call wizards.

Some people are given the ability to do a different kind of magic, divine magic, by powerful extraplanar entities. The most common form of that is that a person devoted to a particular god, and often already formally committed to that god's church, gets powers. Healing and strengthening their allies and specialized spells for destroying demons and so on. They receive their spells every day through prayer to their god, they cast them using a holy symbol of their god, and they get picked for being the kind of person that god approves of. Their god can stop sponsoring them if they stop doing things their god approves of.

Priests no longer being sponsored is pretty rare. For paladins it happens more often because paladins are - they have very strict vows, they cannot knowingly do Evil, and if they ever betray their oaths, intentionally or even under mind control, they lose their powers. Though it's easy to get them back when not mind controlled, if it was mind control. Because the paladin rules are so strict, if you meet a paladin you can be pretty sure of them. 

Lawful is - well, it is a feature of the world you can use magic to detect, whether a person is aligned with the great impersonal force of Law, but in practice it mostly means, are you the kind of person who wants people to be able to rely on your word and whose word is actually reliable, even to your enemies. ...all four of you are Lawful Good so I suspect you know what I mean even if we're having translation issues, people who haven't heard of Law in any form usually aren't doing it."

"That all sounds a lot more likely if gods exist than if they don't." Though she wants to see a priest do some priest magic with her own eyes (or better yet, with Abigail's magic-seeing potion) before she's really sure. "Lawful sounds like it's at least a similar thing to being honorable--keeping your word, dealing fairly, making decisions based on being the sort of person you want to be who makes the kind of decisions you want to make instead of chasing momentary advantages. If you have magic that detects that I expect it's really useful." It would let people build reputations in a society of more than a few hundred people without two hundred years of tradition vouching for them.

"I admit I cannot personally prove it to you but I am really pretty convinced about the gods existing. Whether we can trust them is a more complicated question, especially for the ones who aren't Iomedae and didn't leave us her entire life history, including the terrible mistakes and stuff, and all her intentions and plans for godhood. But for them to not exist it would really have to be an incredibly well organized conspiracy by people who don't get along and don't obviously gain anything by it.

Being honorable translates right. With our magic you can see who is honorable, and it is one of the requirements for most roles in the command and in the Church."

"What a great thing for magic to be able to do. We have some mindreading spells back home, but they're like trying to read a book when you can only see every third word and if the person isn't trying to show you the specific thing you're looking for it's more like only being able to see the vowels. Can you tell me more about what gods there are? It sounds like there are a bunch."

"There are, yeah. Uh, Pharasma, Neutral, the creator of the universe, goddess of birth and death and judgment - Nethys, also Neutral, god of magic - Erastil, Lawful Good god of farming and family, Abadar, Lawful Neutral, trade and commerce, Desna, Chaotic Good, travel and exploration, Gorum, Chaotic Neutral, war, Sarenrae, Neutral Good, healing and redemption, Shelyn, Neutral Good, love, Cayden Cailean, Chaotic Good, ascended human god of revelry and drink, that's most of the big non-Evil ones in this part of the world. I know they have a completely different set in Tian Xia and some of them are ours by different names and some aren't. There are also plenty of minor gods and I can get you a book with a list but I don't know them all offhand."

That seems like a reasonable set of gods for a planet with gods to have, and if they're local to this part of the world and other countries or continents or something have different ones it's no surprise that Earth doesn't have any of them. "And then is Good-Neutral-Evil another magically detectable thing? Whose definition of Good and Evil does it use, the person doing the detecting?"

"Uh, some people say it all goes off Pharasma's judgment which is fundamentally arbitrary and just happens to halfway resemble human values, some say that Pharasma's kind of aggregating the values and priorities of mortals, some say it's even more ancient than She is. Either way Good is doing things for the benefit of others, and Evil is hurting others. If you're not wronging anyone and not helping them either, or if you're going around wronging and helping in sort of equal measure, that's Neutral."

"Huh. That also sounds really useful. Do most people pray to all the non-Evil gods or just pick one or two favorites?" If she's going to be expected to be religious, the god of magic and the goddess of prioritization and just war (which presumably includes fighting demon incursions) seem like good picks at a first glance.

"Most people will pray to Desna if they're travelling or to Erastil for a good harvest or to Pharasma for the soul of a dead kid, you know, as it comes up. Some people get more into the service of a particular god or a few than that."

So not too far off from polytheistic Earth religions except for the probably being true part. "We should probably read some more about the gods at some point--wait, the translation magic is on you not us. I should learn your language and then read up on gods. And learn the common kinds of demon and what they're strong and weak against."

"I can give the translation spell to you sometimes but it's at third circle and so competes with other things the fort needs very badly. There's a rarer spell that shares the language directly into your brain. Someone can prepare it tomorrow, give you a head start on learning the language the slow way. 

Demons are generally immune to electricity and to poisons, and vulnerable to cold iron weaponry and to weaponry aligned with Good. Aligning weapons with the fundamental forces of Good, Law, Chaos, and Evil can be done with spells we have, or the weapons of sufficiently powerful paladins and so on will just count as Good. We can teach you to recognize everything that shows up a lot. There are a ridiculous number of kinds of demons but most demons you see will be the same dozen kinds." They have started winding up the narrow, exposed approach to the fort. The wizard is a bit out of breath but it'd be rude to get back on his horse and make the guests walk. "I should get you some other books, too. The Worldwound's, uh, a big problem, but it's not the only big problem, you'll want to at least know what else you could be working on."

Marcy misses the first part of the tactics explanation because she heard the words "shares the language directly into your brain" and was immediately overwhelmed with greed, or possibly lust.

But that's okay, because the other three were still paying attention.

Abigail notices Marit being out of breath and slows down a bit so the others do too. "A list of this world's problems would be good. The Worldwound sounds very like the sort of thing we've been training our whole lives to handle, but there might be something else we'd be even better at."

"Well, Tar-Baphon's prison is still there and various people with varyingly dumb reasons still try to spring him out, and it's possible your alien magic would make that possible to solve in a way it isn't otherwise. And, uh, Asmodeus is the Evil god of slavery and torment, and He runs a large and powerful country and tries to run it in such a way as to make everyone in it Evil so they all go to Hell which is His afterlife where you get eternally tortured."

"Wow, what the fuck." There's a reason Kevin doesn't usually do the talking, but like, come on.

Yeah no he was really just saying what everyone was thinking there, what the fuck.

What the fuck. "I don't have any immediate ideas for how to deal with either of those but I'll definitely think about it. Uh, our kind of wizard, I mean sorcerer, is pretty good at--bending space and hiding things, not all the way to demiplanes but sort of making paths from A to B through nowhere in particular. If there's a country people need to escape from it might be worth trying to reinvent some of that. Definitely a question that deserves more than thirty seconds of thought. We're accumulating kind of a lot of those."

All of that and also Yikes.

" - yeah, if you can help smuggle people out of Cheliax that'd be really cool. Also Nidal. Nidal is run by the god of torture. ...also Geb, which is run by another evil necromancer."

". . . I think your planet may actually have worse problems than ours. Also what's a necromancer, it's translating to basically 'death wizard' but not to our specific word for evil wizards who get magic from killing people."

"They can animate the dead and force them to serve them. It's sort of debated how conscious you are for the being a slave while your corpse slowly decays, but it's not 'not conscious at all' and your soul can't go on to an afterlife because it's trapped and enslaved like that."

Wow! That was not a kind of thing that needed to exist! 

"I'm really glad you trapped one of them. Does he have a bunch of dead people trapped in wherever he is with him or did you find a way to kill them for real. Also are there afterlives that aren't Hell." He mentioned angels earlier so maybe there's also a Heaven and maybe it even goes so far as to not suck.

"Yeah, you go to an afterlife based on the kind of person you were in life. - it's approximately accurate about the kind of person you were, which isn't to say that it's all right that some people go to the Evil afterlives. The Evil afterlives are all appalling. The Neutral and Good ones are mostly quite nice, tastes vary. Lawful Good people go to Heaven.

I...think some of Tar-Baphon's servants are probably trapped with him in Gallowspire. Hopefully not that many. I'm not really an expert."

"That's--probably a smaller problem than the entire countries being ruled by evil gods thing, aside from the part where he might get out."

"Most countries aren't ruled by necromancers or evil gods or full of demons, right? This is just the list of the worst ones? Not that any of that stuff is okay either way, just--getting a sense of scale."

It is cheapest for gods to select their priests from among those mortals whose shape mirrors their own, the way things mirror across the boundary between mortals and gods. This isn't exactly the same thing as the mortals understanding them (though it tends to help); someone can understand a god perfectly and still not innately reach for the world the way the god would.

Sometimes the lights that glint the brightest in a gods-eye view of the world are the ones who have never gotten an account of the god at all - especially if the god, themself, is a mortal who was themself in a world without any god of being that self. 

Iomedae anticipated this problem, obviously, and tried to teach her church how to be like Her, rather than how to follow Her; to be like Her is to check if She's got her priorities straight and then use Her as leverage to get things done, because that is what She does. 

That there? That is a very recognizable pattern. It'd be expensive, to look at it as closely as it probably warrants, but it's not expensive to gesture at a mind like that and say, yes, this one.

"Most countries are not ruled by evil gods or evil necromancers, most countries are just ruled by people with normal person strengths and failings," Marit confirms. "I listed the screaming moral emergencies, since you asked. There's also plenty of places with normal problems like civil wars and peasant revolts."

"We did ask. We're just not really used to dealing with multiple screaming moral emergencies at once. Thank you for helping us get oriented; I'm sure we'll be able to get leverage on one or another of--"

She trails off, train of thought disrupted by an unexpected sensation. It's a bit like the first time she pulled mana from a power sharer, a sense of leaning on something vast and strengthening. It's a bit like the silent but unquestionable companionship of having her squad behind her. It's a lot like something she's never experienced before. And then it almost entirely fades, leaving only a sense that isn't reporting anything, like the difference between being deaf and being somewhere silent.

"Did anyone else feel that?" she asks, not alarmed--it was the opposite of alarming--just wary and curious.

It's like getting a hug from her parents, warm and calming and proud of her. It's like the moments when the whole team is working together perfectly, one mind with Marcy's brilliance and Kevin's situational awareness and Franklin's diligence and her own empathy operating four bodies with a single plan. And then it fades almost entirely and she has a new sense that's almost like her spell for detecting mals but broader and subtler and not costing her anything.

"Yeah, I did. It gave me a new sense."

"I didn't feel anything."

"Me neither."

If this is a demon plot it's a pretty obvious move but if it's not a demon plot it's also a pretty obvious move. He doesn't have Aura Sight up anymore, so he can't check.

"A new sense?" he says neutrally.

"It's not picking anything up right now. It's a bit like being able to sense mals when there aren't any mals." She mutters something under her breath. "It's obviously magical in nature but it's not a sense for either our kind of magic or the local kind. I appear to be able to turn it off and back on again. It's directional like sight rather than omnidirectional like hearing."

Abigail is awesome.

"You kids are pretty impressive," he doesn't say, because it'd come across as condescending even though he really means the exact opposite. "See if it lights up when demons get within sixty feet. I guess that obliges us to let the next demon we see get within sixty feet but if you guys have plenty of spells left - plenty of magical energy left - it's probably safe enough."

"We had a store of it in the school and we took as much as we could carry when we wrecked it, and we're used to fighting in close quarters anyway; we should be okay unless it's a really nasty one. Is people getting spontaneous demon detection something that happens a lot around here?" And why only half of them, instead of either all of them at once or just the one with a relevant affinity?

"Paladins have it. If you have it, it is probably because Iomedae decided that She should empower you as paladins, and She'd have picked - the ones who would want it and could benefit from it and were cheap to give it to. It could in principle have been some other god, too, other gods also pick paladins, but we were talking about how to prioritize among the screaming moral emergencies, at the time - ah, shit." Because that's a flock of vrocks, their exact numbers hard to count what with their ability to each appear to be in half a dozen places to make them harder to target. And this is a group of spellcasters. "Don't let them get close, they'll stun you. We can check if you're paladins some other time. Or you can smite them, I think you can do that at a distance." He's casting Haste.

There are mals that do that and you learn the signs, especially if you're Abigail. The real ones are now glowing.

And they can get fried.

She pulls out her gun and--oh, there's something other than mana she can put into firing it now. Her shots rip through the demons.

If he does the crushing force spell on one at a time, does that make them fall out of the sky? Let's find out.

It takes a lot of crushing force to knock them out of the sky but it is doable.

Marit's trying to estimate the approximate combat capabilities of these kids for his report and just coming up with 'a lot'. Which is either great news or terrible news, there's really no middle ground here.

"- cool, okay. Sorry about the demon situation around here."

"I'm sure if you'd landed on us at most times in the past we'd've been saying the same thing to you. So you were saying that you think Iomedae decided to give us these abilities because she thinks they'll turn out to be useful for whatever we end up doing here? Does that suggest that she's indicating that the most useful thing for us to do involves being able to detect demons, or is it more general than that?" The bit about some things being cheaper for gods explains why only half of them, and with her longer range and Abigail's perception affinity it's a sensible choice of which half.

"Paladins get some useful abilities for spotting and killing all Evil things, and the in-many-contexts-more-useful fact of being paladins, which means they're Lawful Good and not doing anything evil and not conducting negotiations under false pretenses and so on. I have no idea whether Iomedae thinks you're going to need the literal ability to smite demons or the fact-of-being-people-She'd-choose or both. ...or the added durability. Paladins are a lot tougher than sorcerers."

"Those all sound really useful! Does tougher mean harder to injure or faster healing or something else?"

"Both, I think. More powerful paladins get magic healing they can apply to themselves in the middle of fights, and also they're harder to injure and harder to affect with spells and so on." He does not sound jealous because powerful wizards are of course even cooler.

"That's so cool! Does the healing work on allies too?" She experimentally bites her own wrist to see if she can notice any difference.

There is a noticeable difference, actually.

If the wizard thinks Marcy is weird he conceals it. 

"Yep. You have to touch them to do it until you're more powerful. There will be a pamphlet back at the fort, all about paladin powers and how they work as far as we know, though of course a bunch of things are individual and also probably different if you're an alien sorcerer and also you aren't going to be able to read it."

"We all have practice learning new languages and the spell you mentioned should help a lot. Is the written form ideographic, syllabic, or alphabetical?"

"The latter. I think. I'm not an expert in languages, myself. Taldane, which is spoken in Lastwall, will make you understood for the most part in big enough cities anywhere on this continent, and the other languages I have encountered are written the same way."

"That shouldn't be a problem then. Are there also books on, hm, the history of the Worldwound, what's going on with it magically, things people who have tried to help with it and how those went, that sort of thing?"

"I don't know how great the selection is going to be here, this isn't a fort where a lot of researchers hang out, but I'm sure that someone can find you. The short version is that a hundred years ago the gods had a war, one of them died, it caused a bunch of catastrophes all over the world, and a very powerful witch took the opening to rip the rift open. The world was scrambling because of all of the other simultaneous catastrophes and by the time we got things under control most of Sarkoris was gone. People built the wardstones, which maintain the barrier, and now we just have to patrol it, but that's - spending more than we can really afford just to avoid losing ground, and sometimes some demon manages a coordinated assault on a wardstone and we lose one and then we're that much weaker, forever."

"I really want to study the local form of wizardry, and the barrier in particular.--My affinity is containers."

"Huh, cool. If you enlist and have relevant talents you can get wizard training paid for, generally - that's what I did - and obviously if we could make the wardstones better then everything would be much easier."

He's nervous about enlisting in an unfamiliar military; it sounds like promising to take orders from someone he's never met. On the other hand, learning an entire new form of magic. He looks at Marcy.

She gets it and his concerns are totally reasonable.

"Can you tell us more about what enlisting involves? Mundanes on Earth have militaries but there are a lot fewer wizards and we don't really have governments larger than one city."

"- there are also other ways to get wizard training, I just don't happen to know much about them. Uh, enlisting soldiers take a class on their obligations and rights under our laws, and swear to obey their commanding officers and the charter of Lastwall, so long as those orders are compatible with regulations. You can resign effective end of your deployment at any time but resign effective immediately only with the approval of your superiors. You're subject to our military law and our courts. I doubt this is a very compelling pitch, if you aren't used to militaries. It sucks but you get superpowers and may save the world."

"I'm sure it works well when it's what you're used to, but--uh, important context we might not have explained yet, we spent the last four years in a demiplane with several hundred people, none of them older than we are now, and no government other than 'if you're more of a menace than the constant stream of attacking mals someone will get together a big enough group to kill you'. It's going to take us a bit to get used to normal society."

"....you're Lawful Good," he says, a bit pointlessly.

"I'm not saying I definitely won't join the army. This seems like the sort of situation where it makes a lot of sense to have an army. I just don't want to rush into anything." Also he wants to clarify with the others whether their promise to each other expired when they went out the gate, or hasn't expired yet because they're not back in Boston, before he promises anything else, but that's an awkward subject to bring up in front of Marit so he's just kind of kicking the can down the road.

Abigail gives Franklin a quick reassuring hand-touch. They'll get some time in private sooner or later and they can figure out where they stand and what they need from each other then.

"Are paladins expected to join the army, will it cause problems if Abigail or I don't?" She's aware of the same difficulty as Franklin, but also has an additional difficulty where she's been given something valuable by a being she's never met and has only the most general idea of how she's expected to pay for it.

"No, absolutely not. You can do your own thing entirely, if you want, and there are non-Lastwall orders you can join if you prefer those. The powers are not a promise you've made anyone and no one's going to ask you to make one. ...paladins who try doing their own thing are more likely to fall, but most people aren't Lawful Good in a besieged demiplane with no government in the first place, so I expect you'll be fine, probably."

'Decide what kind of life to lead and what group of people to lead it among' is not at all the kind of problem Marcy is used to solving. It feels entirely too similar to having gone too deep into the library stacks, except for how instead of being surrounded by books and wishing she wasn't she isn't surrounded by books and wishes she was.

"We'll take a look at our options and figure out what's honorable--Lawful--and will put us in a good position to help with the demon problem. Or one of the other problems, but fighting demons is something I know we're good at. I doubt we'll need more than a handful of days to decide unless a major complication comes up."

"Travel times are a lot longer than that, if you're going anywhere other than Crusaders'. But by all means don't try to decide today, you just got here. You could as easily have landed on Cheliax's side of the Wound."

Oh right, places that aren't in walking range of each other exist. (The last time any of them got somewhere other than by walking or the induction spell, they were ten. After that excursions outside the enclave would have been needlessly risky.) And they should make sure to put some effort into verifying the truth of everything Marit is saying, since if there are Good and Evil countries you'd expect people from either to claim to be from the Good one if they could get away with it. But saying you're going to put effort into verifying what someone is saying is rarely the best course of action so she doesn't. 

"Cheliax has a side of the Wound? . . . Are they fighting against the demons or with them? Is the Abyss the demons are from related to Hell?"

"Nope, the Abyss and Hell hate each other. They're both Evil but the Abyss is monsters running around killing anyone they can beat in a fight and Hell is the monsters in power planning the tortures of the monsters of lesser rank. Cheliax fights to defend the world from the Wound, because they don't want it overrun by demons either. There's a treaty; we can't bother their forces here, and they can't bother ours."

"That sounds a lot better than all the evil factions working together effectively. Is the god who runs Cheliax Lawful as well as Evil and that's why you can have a treaty with them even though I assume you hate each other, am I understanding this system correctly?"

"Yep, you've got it. Hell is the Lawful Evil afterlife. You shouldn't try to make contracts with them, they'll try to screw you over with a loophole and they're very very good at it, but for something as important as the Worldwound you have Lawful beings from the Outer Planes draft a treaty that's airtight enough even Hell is limited in how far they can push it.

...and I don't hate the people of Cheliax. I feel bad for them, because they're all going to get eternally tortured. The government, sure, but the soldiers are just people who got unlucky where they were born and believe that being a terrible person is their only real option."

"Yeah, I wouldn't really expect the people would have a lot of choice in the matter. The god sounds pretty hateable, though."

"I still don't feel like I understand the gods and what they can do and what kind of constraints they're operating under."

"Gods mostly act by empowering people who care about the things the god cares about. They can also send visions, or send their servants to convey messages or directly fight in wars, or do big miraculous interventions, but they usually don't. Powerful priests can cast Commune, which lets you ask them yes/no questions, and it's also possible to just travel to Heaven though I think you're only supposed to do that for a good reason.

I don't know any of the details really but I think there are a bunch of agreements among the gods, so that they don't usually have godwars, because when they do it's really really bad. So obviously Iomedae wants Asmodeus dead and He probably wants Her dead too but they don't actually spend all their time fighting." 

Sort of a twentieth century Cold War situation, then. Complete with proxy wars between empowered humans which then reach their own Korea-style awkward stalemates. "That all makes sense."

The fort is made of stone, squat and seamless. There's a gate. It doesn't open for them. Marit yells something in a different language at people up on the walls. They yell back. 

"Someone's going to come out to speak to you. They want to know if they should bring anything out, too."

Quick exchange of glances. "Could they bring us some water?" They could have brought their canteens with them, if they'd known they weren't going home, but, well.

"Of course. Should be just a minute."

It is, as promised, just a minute; the gate opens and an older woman with a permanent scowl strides out, holding four waterskins.

She speaks briefly to Marit in Taldane. "Proceed with the guards to Edel South."

       That's in the dungeons. This is not exactly surprising but it does - feel like possibly making a mistake Iomedae was telling them not to make. "Inquisitor. - I think it's very important we try not to scare them off, there's - a lot to lose if they're on the level. They aren't used to, uh, governments."

"They're not going with you. You proceed with the guards to Edel South."

       Which makes much more sense. If this is a demonic plot he has probably been mind controlled, and he's not going to be scared off the cause of fixing the world by spending the next day in Edel South having very tedious conversations over and over again, nor is there a Law-shaped case that in arresting him the command is being something different from what he thought it was. He tries not to look too annoyed. "Yes, sir."

And she turns to the four alien sorcerers from another planet or demons who thought it was funny to pretend to be that, and offers them the water. "I am Inquisitor Tanatius, head of security for Fort Traves. I will confess, all this is very surprising to us. Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves?"

This time she's going to explain things in a reasonable, comprehensible order.

"On our planet, magic is kept secret by those who have it because anyone who knows about it is at risk from the local monster population, known as mals. The mals' favourite prey is teenage magic-users--we only have one kind and they're closest to what you call sorcerers--so until this morning there was a school in something like a demiplane, made as secure against mals as possible which was far from perfect, where as many magical children as possible are sent at the age of fourteen with no adults. They stayed there until age eighteen, getting stronger with age and education, after which they had to graduate: fight their way out past the horde of mals living near the exit. Usually about a quarter of the people who went in got out; outside it was one in twenty. Last year, two unusually powerful sorcerers were able to repair the machinery that was supposed to burn the graduation horde, and this year everyone remaining in the school, especially those two, took advantage of this to do something different. We lured a substantial fraction of the whole planet's mals into the school while escaping ourselves, then one of the two powerful people was set to cut the school off from the planet and send it and all the mals off into the Void and come out last. We think it all worked, except at least for us the exit gate that was supposed to teleport us home instead sent us to a couple miles that way.

The four of us were the oldest year group of students from Boston, one of the hidden magic cities called enclaves. This gave us some advantages inside, both in the form of physical resources and in the form of having some people we knew and trusted going in. Boston's culture emphasized what this planet calls Lawfulness--honesty, trustworthiness, fairness, consistency.  There wasn't a government inside, just reputation and the knowledge that resources spent fighting each other were resources you couldn't spend defending yourself from mals. Marit said your magic reads as Lawful Good. Probably the Lawful comes from that history and the Good comes from helping with the escape plan; we didn't do anything impressive before then except survive."

"Are there people you want to try to get in contact with? Do you have spells that work across planes, with which Boston could be contacted?"

"We don't have any communication spells we'd expect to be able to reach our planet from here, but if you have any it would be really great to be able to tell our parents we're alive."

"How is the teleportation spell that was supposed to send you home meant to work?"

"The spell for getting into the school was called induction. It pulled students into their dorm rooms from locations all over the world. It's not technically a movement spell: the school is made of space borrowed from the real world into the void and at induction it borrows the space you're occupying and takes a certain maximum weight of you-plus-possessions along with it. At graduation you go out the gates and it puts that amount of space back where it came from, which you experience as appearing at the same place you disappeared from four years earlier. I'm not sure how it handles people getting taller, but people are generally carrying a lot less stuff going out than coming in and it probably has something to make up the difference. Franklin?"

"A proper explanation would involve general relativity but basically it borrows more with the next freshmen to make up for it. I know one or two of the relevant equations but for real understanding you'd need Julian."

"Do you have any idea how it would've sent you to the wrong world? Do students go missing from it frequently?"

"So, every previous graduation about half the people who started the run didn't make it to the gates and it was basically impossible to track what was going on, everyone just contacted each other afterward to say they made it. But it was also usually groups who came in from different locations going out together, and if only part of a group had vanished that would be really obvious. So if this has happened before either it started last year and we hadn't heard about it yet, or it was based on us all having gone out at the same time rather than all being headed for the same place. My best guess is that it has something to do with having already started the process for breaking the school off into the Void, in which case a lot of the oldest year could have gotten misdirected--we went out youngest first because even with the spell to distract the mals we knew it was gonna get dicey at the end, we were about seven eighths of the way through the order."

"I think I understand. Or as much as I'm going to, I'm not a planar transit specialist. And then once you arrived here, you ran into one of the border patrols?"

"Yes. They were worried we were demons impersonating humans; we're not but we don't have a good way to prove it on hand. If there's anything we can do to help untangle that that wouldn't be made pointless by telling us about it we're happy to cooperate." 

"We're hoping we can think of a way to do that," she says. "Unfortunately, demons do sometimes try things like claiming that they're lost soldiers. We have some spells that might help with determining whether you are demons, and if it's all right with you, I'll have some people cast them; I don't want to tell you precisely what they do in advance, because a demon who wanted to imitate the effect probably could. 

I got a report that someone or something may have given you paladin powers on your way up here?"

"That's our best guess for what happened; Abigail and I both had a very weird but pleasant mental experience and acquired a new sense that we haven't had a chance to check yet but might be demon detection, and I and possibly her also got the ability to do something that made my shots hit harder. I don't think I mentioned the shots hitting harder thing to Marit so if our stories don't match that's why. You can go ahead and cast whatever verification spells you're planning on and I'll let you know if I notice any of them." Conveniently she doesn't currently know any secrets that are relevant to anyone in this fort, so if one of them is detailed mindreading it's not going to get anything more sensitive than her opinions on which of her classmates were unreasonably pretty.

The first thing they're going to try is actually Reduce Person, on a random two of them. It doesn't work on demons, and it can be cast from behind the walls such that it'd take arcane sight and good spellcraft to guess what it is and fake it (and take more skill than that to fake it without any visible trace).

(Also Discern Lies but that shouldn't be noticeable at all.)

Now Kevin is about three feet tall! "Ack!" He's already constantly scanning for mals demons out of habit and there aren't any so it's probably a side effect of the attempt to prove they're human.

And Marcy is even shorter than that! "Wha--I presume that was part of the plan."

Hopefully he wasn't also supposed to shrink; he doesn't think he did anything that would prevent it.

And if they're demons they should have an ever harder time appropriately timing the dismissal of the spell, which the wizard through the wall will do at a time not known to her in the next few moments. "I regret the inconvenience," she says politely. "The spell doesn't work on demons, and it's among the simplest that doesn't. It takes about five minutes to wear off and will not have any effects once it is gone. Can I ask for the rest of you to give me your own accounts of what happened here?"

"By here so you mean since we arrived?" She and Kevin and Franklin can take turns recounting the events of the past hour or so, interrupting each other to add details. Between the three of them it's a very thorough account.

Shortly into it those who were resized return to their original sizes. She listens patiently. Thanks them.

Pulls out and opens a box with a bunch of glass vials of liquids in them. "Do any of these stand out to the new sense that you received unexpectedly?"

Staaaare. "Yeah, there's something in there that registers."

Several more seconds of staring. "The green one third from the left."

"I agree."

"All right. I'm going to cast a spell that is seriously injurious to people who are not Good. You all appear to be Good, so the spell shouldn't affect you, but if any of you deliberately used magic to make yourself look like you're Good when you aren't, this could kill you, so I'd rather you tell me now."

"Not on purpose but I don't know how our kinds of magic interact, and the gate should have dispelled everything on us but we already know it malfunctioned, so can we have a second to counterspell ourselves first and see if we still read Good?"

"Of course, go ahead."

They make sure their persons are clear of any lingering enhancements and put some of their copious jewelry (not their power-sharers) in a little pile on the ground. "Okay, if we still read Good then go ahead."

She pulls out a scroll of heightened Holy Word. 

She is not, to be clear, going to use the scroll of heightened Holy Word. It is ludicrously expensive. If one can't check whether an apparent lost adventuring party is an actual lost adventuring party or some disguised demons using exclusively first and second circle spells readily available to a Worldwound fort, one has no business being an inquisitor at a Worldwound fort. But demons relying on the fact that no one at this particular fort is above fourth circle might be a little nervous, and Lawful Good sorcerers from another world will not be able to tell the difference at all between this and the spell she actually has cast, Fear the Sun, which blinds everyone it affects be they Good or Evil. A demon blinded by Holy Word would probably try to fake not being blinded; a Good sorcerer would probably just be genuinely confused, or assume the spell does that to everybody.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

"ohfuckohfuckohfuck"

"I--can't see--"

Shitshitshit something went wrong and they're all gonna die

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa no stop get it together, you're everyone's best chance, what's the right counterspell for this--

And six seconds later it wears off and they switch from shaking in terror to shaking in relief. 

"I'm okay, is everyone okay? Uh, temporary blindness, if you're wondering what happened."

They all assert their okayness in variously shaky voices. 

(They all remember that kid who got the cursed magnifying lens from home. Memories are all that's been left of him for a long time now.)

"I'm sorry we don't have a better method of verification," she says. "All of our tests were consistent with what you're saying, and you are welcome to come into the fortress now. I am sure we have lots more questions for one another but it would be very understandable if you wanted a meal and a rest first." 

Oh good, this place is enough like the Scholomance that they're not bothered by the ways people come out fucked up. They pull themselves together and get their artifice back on.

"Any reason not to eat and swap questions at the same time? Starting with, I thought that spell was going to either do nothing or be permanent; is it being temporary a thing that's known to happen or did it interact badly with our magic in some way?"

"No, I just lied to you about what reaction we expected because it would have been easy to fake the outcome of the test if you'd known what it was supposed to be. Most people here have oaths that preclude lying to their allies in any context; I am permitted to, specifically with respect to what outcome on a test counts as a passing one. The spell that I appeared to be casting, to someone who knows Golarion magic, has no effects on Good people and temporarily blinds Evil ones too strong for it to kill; the one I actually cast temporarily blinds everyone.

An Evil person who knows how our magic works would have expected to be blinded, and likely tried to resist the spell or if that failed pretend that they weren't.  I'm a little worried about bad magic system interactions, even though everything so far has functioned as you'd expect it to, which is part of why I didn't want to actually use the spell that kills or blinds Evil people. Though the bigger consideration is that that's an expensive one and we save it for emergencies."

The gates open. "We can absolutely eat and swap questions at the same time. If you have truth magic of your own, we are willing to be made subject to it."

"A sensible set of precautions," she says as they file through the gates. "Our truth magic is sufficiently difficult to use effectively that I want to think more about what questions to ask, but we'll want to take you up on that eventually. As for questions, can you tell us more about how paladins work, both magically and the details of the obligations that come with it?"

"So I wouldn't think of it as 'obligations that come with it'. Most paladins take vows, but you haven't, and shouldn't, at least not any time soon, while you're new to this entire world and all the surrounding context. You have no obligations as a consequence of being a paladin. Iomedae ensures that it is true of all of her paladins that they act honorably, that they do not do evil except where every alternative was even worse, that they can be trusted when they give their word and do not give it casually. But that's still not a promise you've made; you wouldn't have done anything wrong, necessarily, if you did something that made her decide to withdraw the endorsement.

Magically, paladins get powers that are extremely useful for fighting evils and protecting the innocent. They get both the ability to detect evil and the ability to smite evil, pick a particular target and fight it with particular clarity and strength and fervor. Paladins also possess unusual resistance to hostile magic. As they grow more powerful, they also get healing magic, become incapable of experiencing fear, and can cast spells granted to them by their god. They can form what we call a celestial bond with either a horse or their weapon, which lets them grant those powers as well. Like sorcerers, paladins benefit from enhancements affecting their force of will and determination for their spellcasting and their healing abilities."

"I agree that we're not oriented enough to take any kind of vows yet, though it might help to get some examples of the sort of vows other paladins have taken. Mostly what I'm trying to understand is--Iomedae, if that's who it was, must have had some reason for empowering us, and I want to understand what that is and either cooperate with it, in the sense of doing things that won't make her regret it, or--and this is less likely--deliberately decide that it's not something I want to commit to and give the powers back. Maybe what I really need is more information on who Iomedae is as a person, or force of nature, or whatever the gods of this world are best understood as. I'm working from a model that's based a lot more on legends from another planet than on facts from this one and probably making all kinds of mistakes."

"That is very reasonable of you. And the kind of thought process that would strongly predict someone becoming a paladin. 

Iomedae was a person, when she was alive, and left us a lot of notes on what kind of person, what she cared about, how she thought about the world, how she understood honor, the vows she decided to make personally and decided to require of her order. We have history books here with all of that. She also arranged for the church of another god to be able to convey verification, that she had turned into the god she intended when human. The god She wanted to be was one of allocating the resources of Good as well as possible across the worlds towards the cause of ending the Evil afterlives and the other great horrors of Creation. 

The gods are - not quite like people, though it's probably easier to imagine them as people than to imagine them as anything else. The gods are unfathomably intelligent, but their attention is usually fragmented across thousands of worlds and millions of sources of information. You might want to imagine a - very busy person, who can magically make temporary less intelligent specialized copies of themselves, and receive reports from the same, and who is commanding an army made entirely up of those."

Marcy follows the Inquisitor silently for a minute, thinking.

What a fascinating sort of god to try to become. When she imagines the sort of person who would do that . . . she remembers the first three years in the Scholomance, focusing completely on keeping her squad alive. She remembers Annisa talking about how you can only want one thing, and her thought that the two ways to get around that were to have a lot of resources and to have someone else looking out for you symmetrically to you looking out for them. She remembers the announcement that the graduation hall was empty, and the debates on what to do about it that gradually expanded their scope from "what's best for the seniors" to "what's best for everyone in the Scholomance" to "what's best for all the wise-gifted children of the world". Was Iomedae, then, someone ambitious enough and possessed of enough resources (or expecting that becoming a god would get her enough resources) to extend the scope of her plans to the entire universe? In the years before Orion and El, anyone who tried to go through the Scholomance with the goal of making sure as many people got out as possible would have just died, or else ended up doing basically the same things as someone focused only on their own survival, because the road to survival was that narrow. Last year, the road got wide enough for it to matter--and part of what made it wide enough was that everyone noticed the opportunity and got on board and made it happen. So the question is: is Iomedae's plan one that Boston should get on board with, and not one that will just get them killed? At first glance it sure looks like it--she ascended to godhood and recruited an army--but it feels like the right direction to probe in.

"How well has it been working? Allocating all the resources of Good to solve all the emergencies, I mean. Also how long has Iomedae been a god? I can't imagine the kind of problems I've heard about would be solvable quickly."

It's not hard to follow Marcy's logic; it's the same logic the whole student body worked through, more or less thoughtfully, after that first suggestion to send the mals to school.

It is not very confusing why Iomedae picked these people. "- it is hard, from one planet among thousands, to get a sense of how everything is going," she says, after a moment. "Iomedae can't tell us all of Her plans - the agreements among the gods limit how much they can tell us, so we only ask strategically relevant things - but on this planet, things are going badly. Iomedae, when She lived, was a paladin of Aroden, another former human god with many of the same concerns, and the plan was that a hundred years ago He'd return to Golarion for unspecified vast triumphs over Evil. Instead, there was a war among the gods, He died, the planet was devastated, hundreds of millions of people starved, the Worldwound opened, and Cheliax fell to Hell. 

We don't know what went wrong, exactly. Presumably Aroden took a bet that was worth taking, from what He knew, and did not work out. But things here are worse than they have been in a long time, maybe since Iomedae's time."

Gods can die? Well, shit. He gets points for not trying to sugarcoat it, at least.

"So then I guess the question is--is whatever Iomedae wants us to do something that will leave us and the planet better for our having tried. Where I guess the answer isn't necessarily no even if we die doing it, given afterlives." (Annisa would be so jealous if she knew. Marcy hopes she's alright, back with her family or somewhere better.)

"Oh, that I think we're more sure of. She wants Her church here to hold or figure out how to close the Wound, and keep Tar-Baphon imprisoned. And do something about the country ruled by the forces of Hell, though while that is a concern of Her church, it is not a concern of Lastwall's military, which has formal commitments of neutrality with respect to Cheliax and shared responsibilities with them at the Worldwound."

"Yeah. And that all sounds a lot more straightforwardly understandable by humans than the plan that got Aroden killed."

"I'd like to know more about the afterlives, please. So far all we know is that some of them are Evil and bad places to live--I mean exist--and the others are okay." 

"That sounds like slightly underselling the non-Evil ones. There are nine afterlives, corresponding to the nine possible combinations of Law and Chaos and Good and Evil. Lawful Good is Heaven; it conducts the war on Evil but it's also, you know, a place where you can spend eternity without material scarcity doing whatever interests you, just one where people are overwhelmingly the sort not to be content with that while everyone else doesn't have it. The Neutral Good afterlife is also reportedly a very pleasant place; a more major emphasis is on healing from the injuries to the person inflicted by living through very difficult conditions and under a lot of constraints, as nearly every living person has. Elysium is the Chaotic Good afterlife, and like most of the Chaotic afterlives somewhat defies description because it is infinite and different parts of it are very different. It also has no meaningful scarcity and people can do whatever's interesting or important to them. They throw unfathomably cool parties, reportedly." She says this like someone who has never in her life been to a party or wanted to.

"The Lawful Neutral afterlife is Axis. It is an enormous, very prosperous city whose disparate parts are connected by a million portals. The Neutral afterlife is the Boneyard. It's mostly petitioners who are too young to be sorted because they died as children. The Chaotic Neutral afterlife is the Maelstrom. It defies description even more than Elysium, not possessing persistent traits for more than a few minutes at a time, but its inhabitants report being happy, when they're possible to communicate with. They grow less so over time.

Hell is the Lawful Evil afterlife. It is ruled by Asmodeus, towards his interests of tyranny, slavery, and torment. Zon-Kuthon, the other torture god, has His own realm on the Shadow Plane. Petitioners in Hell are tormented over centuries to attempt to reduce them to building blocks from which devils can be made. Abaddon is the Neutral Evil afterlife. Its inhabitants mostly eat souls sorted there, and there is also a large population of humans in Abaddon which are forcibly bred, and raised in captivity so that daemons can eat their souls. The Abyss is the Chaotic Evil afterlife. It's full of demons and stranger things. They eat some people sent there, enslave and torment others, etcetera.

Most of the differences between the Neutral and Good afterlives are a product of differences in what kind of person they attract and what that kind of person builds. It's not as if you couldn't have a million person spontaneous art party in Heaven, Elysians just tend to want to do that more often; no one in the Maelstrom will stop you from trying to start an merchant venture insurance company, but if your heart's desire is to run one then you are more likely to end up in Axis. Over time, though, an afterlife tends to also make the people in it more like its fundamental nature, though in the Good and Neutral afterlives it's generally believed you can decline to be so altered if you want, at least to whatever extent the alteration is magical in nature rather than a product of the situation.

Most people think this is also basically true of the Evil afterlives. Their inhabitants are mostly the kind of people who'd enslave and torture or eat other people given the opportunity and who are given that and nothing else for the rest of time. I don't know about that. Hell seems worse than the kind of thing Lawful Evil people build on their own, though they do build some pretty terrible stuff on their own. Most Chaotic Evil people are not, in life, crazed torture-happy serial killers."

"Interesting. It sounds like it sort of drags everyone more towards the extremes of whatever they were in life." Which is bad for the evil afterlives but on a purely personal level is a satisfying way for an afterlife to be.

Marcy sounding satisfied about becoming more extremely herself is, well, extremely Marcy of her. Franklin's not complaining, though. Marcy being Marcy is great.

"Heaven and Nirvana and Axis all sound lovely."

Elysium sounds pretty cool to, at least to Kevin's ears, but if all the honorable people go to Heaven or Axis they're probably better.

"They tend to be the favorites around here," she confirms. They've reached a windowless conference room to which someone has brought stew and bread and potatoes.

They wait for Inquisitor Tanacius to take some food first,

Get food for themselves,

Examine it for mals or poison out of habit,

And then fall on it like underfed teenagers when it proves to be edible.

"We've been asking a lot of questions," she says once they've slowed down a bit. "Would you like to ask some of us?"

Military rations at Worldwound forts are not good. Add it to the long list of evidence that these people have had a time of it, along with the reaction to being temporarily blinded and the fourth or fifth circle equivalent spells before they're twenty and the fact they say they're from a demiplane where teenagers have to fight their way out past a horde of demons.

"I'm actually not sure I do. The immediately important strategic questions, from our perspective, are - what your magic makes possible, whether it's possible to contact your world, whether it's a good idea if it is possible, whether more people from your world are misplaced here, and what we can do to demonstrate to you that our aims align with yours, if they do. But the first three of those, I don't need to know, because this should be escalated, the fourth you don't know yourself, and the fifth seems likely to look more like you asking questions than my asking questions."

"That makes sense. Though a lot of those questions interact with each other." In particular the question of whether they can contact Earth, the question of what their magic makes possible, and the question of whether their goals are aligned. They still need to verify that Lastwall's goals are what they say they are, but if they are--she needs to talk to the others. She can predict what they'll say a lot of the time but this is too big and too unexpected. 

"If you don't want to dig into the first three questions right now, I think what we really need is some time for the four of us to talk in private, and then ideally to ask you some questions under a mind-altering spell that makes it hard to lie."

"Absolutely. Powerful magic of our world can make a place impossible to magically eavesdrop on, but we don't have that here. You are welcome to put up any precautions against eavesdropping you know. No one here will have orders to try to listen in, and I don't think they'd do it without."

"Sounds good. We have magic we can use for privacy." She's under no illusions that their magic will definitely beat local eavesdropping magic, but they're not likely to discuss anything it would be a disaster for someone to overhear.

"In that case, open the door when you'd like to speak to me again or think of anything else you need." And she stands to depart.

Once she's out, they'll put up a privacy spell and a tripwire (they haven't seen any mals or demons or anything in here but you can't have a serious conversation without a tripwire).

"Even if we figure out a way to contact Earth, any significant back and forth is going to lead to mals finding a way across. Either we'll be able to go home and that's it, or we won't, and that's it. So, we need to decide what to do in either case. And what we'll be to each other if we stay here."

"I think, if we stay here, even if we decide to avoid taking any oaths or joining any armies, it's still going to be more like being outside than being in school. So we can be--allies who have graduated." Closer than friends, closer than brothers, but with their promise to each other fulfilled, free to pursue separate goals and care about things other than their collective survival.

"I agree. We can still look out for each other; we don't need a promise for that."

Abigail puts her hand on the table between them, and everyone else puts a hand on top of hers. They didn't have any kind of plan for a formal acknowledgement--their oath was supposed to expire when they returned to Boston--but it feels right.

"We all graduated from the Scholomance."

Something in Marcy's chest relaxes, just a bit. They all graduated. Four out of four. The thing that mattered more than anything else for as long as she can remember. 

If she was back in the enclave, would she feel lost? If they had graduated normally in a normal year, with no Orion and no El and no grand plan, would she know how to make new plans and want new things?

"If there's a way to tell everyone we survived we need to do that," says Franklin after a long moment. "But once we've done that--if the options are spend years figuring out how to go home or not that--" it feels like an insane thing to be thinking.

"You want to learn the second kind of wizardry that's all math and make amazing things with two kinds of magic."

"Yeah."

"And I want--to see what's possible. To see if two kinds of magic lets us do something like the plan here too."

"You want to be the game-changer. Like Orion and El."

"Yeah. I know it probably won't work that well, almost nothing ever works as well as the plan did, but--if I don't I'll always wonder what would have happened if I'd tried."

"We're adults now. We're allowed to want crazy things."

"What do you want, Kevin?"

 (It's obvious what Abigail wants. She wants to let herself care about more things and more people.)

"I'm not sure yet. To find somewhere I fit, I guess. And 'fighting demons with you three' is more likely to be that than anything else is." 

"We'll always be glad to have you watching our backs."

(Firm nods from Marcy and Franklin.)

"So we'll learn this world's magic and deal with this world's problems--if those are what they seem to be. I think they are--the demons and the forts are real enough--but we should make sure." Which means using the stupid terrible interrogation spell, but lots of things are stupid and terrible and need doing. "Let's figure out a set of questions to ask . . ."

They open the door not too long afterwards.

There's a guard at the door who can send for the inquisitor.  She's just a few rooms over, having finished making a report-via-being-scried-by-her-superiors.

"Hello, Inquisitor. We're agreed that we want to help with the problems here, either as part of your organization or independently, as soon as we've verified that the situation is basically as you've represented it. You mentioned being willing to be questioned under truth magic, but while I don't know what sort of truth magic your planet has, ours is--complicated. The best spell I know for the purpose works by making the target temporarily trusting, impulsive, and confused, so it doesn't occur to them to lie and they have trouble coming up with additional details for a lie on the spot. We'll be careful to confine our questions to things we need to know, but people subject to this spell do sometimes blurt out unrelated secrets. We can promise not to spread anything irrelevant we learn and to try to avoid acting on it, but none of us are perfect at pretending not to know something. Given that, are you still okay with it?"

"I'd rather you cast a spell like that on someone who isn't the head of security for this installation, but I don't know if that'd be sufficient for your purposes."

"Switching out for someone who knows fewer secrets is fine. It would be ideal if that person was Marit, the wizard who brought us here and can be asked things like 'have you lied to us at all', but we can also do it with a new person if Marit is busy or also knows too many secrets."

"You can do it on him. I'll have him come up here now." And she can pass that instruction along. 

And Marcy can explain again the ways in which their truth spell is awful.

"Wow, yeah, that's way worse than the kind Iomedae hands out to her priests. You can do it, though."

"I'm glad you have a better one and hate that we don't." 

Kevin does the actual casting; it involves a bunch of chanting in Latin which to someone with Tongues up is obviously a poetic description of the thing Marcy said it was going to do. It feels like being drunk at a party with your best friends, cheerful and relaxed and like nothing matters enough to be worth thinking clearly about, no reason not to just say whatever comes into your head because surely nothing bad can happen here.

Marcy makes her voice light and casual, just a friendly question: "Did you lie to us at all, earlier?"

"Nah. I didn't know if you had a way to tell, and I knew there'd be a review afterwards and they'd be on my case if I screwed up at explaining anything."

She hopes nobody will judge him for this. "What happens to people who screw up?"

"I mean, it depends, right? If you screw up at fighting the demons, they eat you." He giggles. "If it's a really stupid screwup you probably get demoted, or discharged. It's not really my job to talk to aliens, though! If I really screwed up at talking to aliens they'd just chew me out and make a note I shouldn't talk to aliens, probably. That would sure be a note to have in your records. And I'm a third circle wizard, so no matter how stupid I am they want me around to put up Phantom Steeds. Third circle wizards don't grow on trees! At least, not any trees I've heard of!"

"What are your organization's goals?" Not the most casual way to phrase the question, but she really does want the organization's goals and not Marit's personal hopes and dreams.

"You mean Lastwall's goals? Don't let the Whispering Tyrant out, hold the borders, hold the Worldwound. People who are more ambitious say 'close the Worldwound' but we don't know how to do that, and we do know how to hold it, so guess which one we're doing."

"Hold the borders against whom?"

"Belkzen. 's full of hordes of orcs. I guess we also want to hold the other borders, but no one's really fighting us for the other borders." He giggles. 

Getting an account of the start of this war and what the orcs' opinion on it is is best done from someone other than Fucked-Up Marit. Ditto for the demons' side, actually; if they're smart enough to impersonate humans the situation might me more complicated than "they're basically mals; kill them". She sticks a mental pin in it.

"What d'you think is the worst thing about Lastwall?" (They discussed a lot of variations before settling on this particular question; it's a good way to check for a broad spectrum of secret nefarious motives or internal factions without being as fraught as 'what do you most want us not to know'.)

"Huh. Man. Everything I hear about every other place makes it sound way worse. I guess it's that we're losing? We're too small to save the whole world."

Ow. 

(Everyone here has seemed so impressed by the magic calling them Lawful Good, and the Law is real but the Good is just luck, really. They spent three and a half years, or possibly over a decade, believing they were too small to save the whole world and using that as their reason not to try to save anyone other than themselves.)

Stop that. The interrogation spell has an ongoing mana cost. "What are Iomedae's priorities?"

"Fix the Evil afterlives. Stop the Evil gods. Stop everyone running torture-countries. All the other bad stuff that's worth stopping, after that, I guess."

"Do you agree with those priorities?" It feels like a blatantly stupid question, at this point, but dropping a question you planned to ask because it felt stupid is a bad policy.

"I mean, I'm probably not perfectly Lawful Good, like She is. I have priorities like 'become a super cool wizard' and 'impress girls with how I am a super cool wizard' too.

But, yeah, when it comes down to it, that's the important stuff."

(They got so close to getting all the way through without accidentally making it personal. Stupid garbage spell). 

"If you or your government was going to lie to us, why would they do it?"

"The inquisitor can lie to you about how her spells work and what she's looking for and how she'll interpret evidence. She can't lie to you about the law or about, like, things outside her inquisiting remit. Lastwall paladin oaths don't allow lying at all - well, even the paladins can lie to a third party - uh, say we're enemies, and I'm a paladin and I know you're spying on a conversation, I can say something false for your benefit, and clear it up at the first opportunity with the person I was actually talking to.

I think your question was kinda incorrect, theologically? But it's not a big deal."

That was the last of the planned questions; she gives Kevin the thumbs up and he drops the spell, and they give Marit a bit to get his thoughts in order.

"Thank you. As far as I can tell you're the ideal sort of people to work with on the kind of problems you're working on and I look forward to a productive collaboration. Sorry again for how unpleasant the spell is."

He blinks a couple of times, orienting. "Huh. It's not that bad, honestly. I guess if I hadn't known it was a spell I'd be all confused about myself as a person now or something. Anyway, I'm glad I could help."

Huh. Must be worse when you actually have something to hide. She smiles; she's a skilled fake smiler but this one's mostly not fake.

"You mentioned that my question about lying was theologically incorrect; I'm curious what was incorrect about it."

"Oh. Uh - if you're Lawful the way paladins are, you don't lie for reasons, you have contexts in which you are or aren't expected to be doing the thing where your words convey meaning. And the situations where your words are expected to convey meaning are - most of them, for paladins, and the exceptions are like 'I was talking to someone else and you were eavesdropping' which is a situation, not a reason. So I wouldn't say 'why would the government lie' so much as 'when would the government lie', because the answer won't reference their interests at all. But that's being insufferably pedantic and I wouldn't get into it most of the time."

"'When we're trying to get a solid grounding in theology quickly' is an excellent time to be pedantic about it." The distinction only matters if they are what they say they are, but now that she's sure enough of that to be getting on with it's important and she's glad to hear it articulated more clearly than she could have done. Being around people like this is going to be good for them.

"So I think the next order of business is either getting into more detail comparing forms of magic, or getting that language-sharing spell so we can start reading up on military regulations and paladin vows and things. Should we talk to the Inquisitor about who to talk to about those?"

"Probably, or to her boss, the fortress commander. I'm happy to stick around and compare details of magic unless someone tells me to do otherwise, and I can prepare a Share Languages though it'll take me a while, I have the opposite of a knack for divinations."

"That would be great. Can you talk and prepare the spell at the same time? I don't know how preparing spells works."

"It's pretty involved, I can maybe talk a bit but not that much. If you have magic detection, you can watch, see if it's the kind of thing you'll be able to pick up yourself or not. Some sorcerers can also learn to prepare spells in a kinda wizard way."

And he starts setting up the scaffold of magic on which he'll rest his spell, which is going to be a pain to hang because it's a divination and he's terrible at those. Oh well.

Abigail casts the best magic-seeing spell she has on Franklin so he can watch.

It's orderly and precise and clean and mathematically regular and it'll do the same thing every time. He might be in love.

It takes him about twenty minutes. By then someone else has brought in Lastwall's code of military regulations, the oaths of the Knights of Ozem and two other paladin orders that happened to have members deployed to this fort, the Acts of Iomedae, and a history book that someone who likes history books happened to have.

If it's single target Marcy is the optimal person to cast it on. How long does it last?

"A full day, sun should be about the same place in the sky tomorrow when it expires. One of the priests can do it for you tomorrow, priest spells aren't as valuable as wizard spells generally but they get theirs at dawn and can't change them up midday when needed."

And he taps Marcy with a page from a dictionary to impart all of his knowledge of Taldane.

"This is my new favorite spell," she says matter-of-factly, and sits down to read all the texts while meditating on Taldane grammar and vocabulary.

A lot of most people's difficulty learning languages, Marcy believes, comes from their tendency to learn words by memorizing the correspondence between a word of the new language and a word of their native language. This isn't how they learned their native languages and it's not the right way to learn a new one. The right way is to learn the correspondence between words in the new language and things in the world directly. And indeed, this is exactly what the spell has given her: the meanings of words, not in words as a dictionary would give them, but in the same sensory and conceptual form as her ordinary vocabulary. If she properly focuses on it and gets the spell recast every day, she expects she'll be able to carry on a reasonable conversation in Taldane without it by a week from now.

(A lot of the rest of other people's difficulty learning languages is that they're not as good at it as Marcy is.)

Abigail is now the point person for the foreseeable future. "Can she have pencil and paper to take notes for the rest of us?" They're all going to learn Taldane eventually but it won't be fast enough to obviate needing notes.

"I'll ask for it." He starts putting his spellbook away. There's actually a knock on the door before he stands up.

"Thanks!" Abigail is already standing, so she goes to get the door. Is it someone thoughtful with pencil and paper, or the person they're supposed to talk to about magic systems?

He introduces himself as fort commander Rethin Tavas, and he does not happen to have pencil and paper. Marit stands at attention. 

"I want to ask the four of you to not identify yourselves to other people as aliens from another planet with exceptional and rare sorcery," he says without preamble. "Marit knows, and will be reassigned to accompany you and help you compare magic systems and so on. I understand that you may in the course of learning about our world want to tell the whole story to some people outside Lastwall, and that is of course your right. But your powers are unusual, and unusual things are much much more of an advantage when they are secret. And your powers are sorcerous - that is to say, hereditary - and there are many unscrupulous parties who'd be interested in having control over a sorcerous bloodline. If you present yourselves as adventurers, two paladins and two spellcasters, who're from far off as people will infer from the fact you are of two different human ethnicities, you'll raise few questions. And I think you'll be safer."

Abigail nods along thoughtfully. "Those are important considerations, and we'll take them into account before telling anyone else and default to avoiding it. When you say two paladins and two spellcasters, do you mean that Marcy and I should avoid using magic at all when anyone else is watching?" She frowns. Pretending not to be a wizard sounds like a major stretch of her acting abilities even if they make sure to stick together so the boys can cast anything they need and only do anything that's obviously mana-building in private.

"Powerful paladins have some spellcasting. You'd want to be conservative with it, though, lest people notice the things you're doing are not the things they can usually do."

"Maybe Kevin and Franklin should be out and about and Marcy and I should mostly do alchemy and artifice  off in a workshop where nobody's looking. Right now it looks possible that a lot of our usefulness is ability to do enhancements and items for lots of people, and it wouldn't have to be obvious where you got them."

“Yep, I think that would not immediately lead people to the conclusion you are aliens, and could be enormously useful for helping Worldwound forts have more emergency options. And of course lots of operations are secret and if they go well no one would know you’re involved. 

What resources can you make use of right now?”

She can give a rundown of alchemy and artificing supplies and equipment, prefaced with the understanding that they'll need to adapt to what's available. Pretty much all plants are useful for something in alchemy; she'll need to do a bit of experimentation if they have different plants on this planet. Other useful substances include wax, rocks and minerals (many of which are catalysts that can be reused for several batches of a potion), and certain animal products. Various apparatuses for heating, cooling, grinding, filtering, and sieving are also helpful. Artificing needs basically the same equipment one would use for nonmagically creating glass, wood, or metal tools, plus a subset of the alchemy reagents. 

That’s not exactly how local magic item creation works but it’s easy to accommodate and they’re happy to provide, in exchange for a fair share of the products or some other reasonable arrangement. If they can make potions relatively cheaply by local standards that would be very valuable and easy to make a lot of money off while concealing responsibility.

Some sort of trade of potions and items for equipment and either money or room-and-board-and-such seems logical. The cheapest potions they expect to be useful do things like keener vision or hearing, steady aim, faster reflexes, night vision that doesn't work on magical darkness, and the somewhat more expensive "potion that makes you faster and stronger and tireless and able to ignore injuries for an hour and then you fall over for three hours". Artificing is mostly Marcy's specialty; she makes ranged weapons and ammunition that do all kinds of different things.

All of that is possible but expensive with their magic and if it’s cheaper for the aliens there is a ton of potential value there. Maybe Marit can walk them through more comparisons of what magics can do so they can identify anything else valuable. They’re fine with a payment agreement that’s not all that complicated, it’s just better to have one up front so no one is under the impression of being owed favors for anything anyone else thought was paid.

And of course they are honored and delighted to be working with them.

Having an upfront payment agreement is very important; she'd offer to write up a draft but it would be in English and she doesn't know how much the local money is worth. They're likewise honored and delighted to be working with Lastwall.

They can draft one for Marcy to review. For a larger scale thing one often goes to the Church of Abadar, god of contracts and trade, which can also arbitrate disagreements, but that probably isn't necessary or worth the added complications for a temporary agreement to pay Golarion-standard rates for potions and charge locally-typical prices for ingredients and room and board.

She expects standard rates will work fine, though if they include a price sheet explaining how much of their currency buys various common objects it will help prevent misunderstandings. They're used to an informal barter system of mana, objects, and favors but adults from their world use money and they basically know how it works if not what things are worth how much around here.

They can provide a price sheet for standard things and how much they generally cost! Potions and magic items but also mundane utility things like cloth and rope and shoes and horses and swords and housing. For comparison here's the pay schedule for Lastwall's soldiers. 

(A person from Earth and not the Scholomance would probably find these fabric and shoe prices mindboggling.)

Abigail can generally tell when someone is trying to screw her on a deal and commander Tanat isn't. She shows the price sheet to Franklin so he can get a start on budget math.

In that case he'll leave them to it; they can of course contact him if they need him further. Marit has new orders so that he can spend most of his time helping them with magic system interaction testing, outside emergencies.

If they don't get unlucky with the local plants they're gonna have several outfits each. (If they had gone back to Boston they would already have as much clothing as they could want but here they get spare clothes and cool local magic, so.)

And now they get to test the cool local magic and how it interacts with theirs! Does Marit have any experiments he wants to start with or should they just start listing ideas?

He wants to get them a proper list of the wizard and cleric spells widely known at each circle, in more detail than the talk he gave them on the way over, so they can notice if there's anything they have a wildly more efficient spell for. A lot of wizard spells are improved by some other kind of spellcaster having a much more efficient way to do it and then wizards imitating. 

He also wants to watch them cast some spells with his own magic detection up, see if he can figure out what they're doing, and he can show them more of what he's doing. 

How about he puts up his magic detection and watches Abigail give him their kind of magic detection and then they do some simple things so he can watch both ways?

(Kevin has been standing on one foot for the past while, now that they have enough room in their mana storage for it to be worth building more. Also because he's antsy.)

Sure! He'll cast Detect Magic. There's better magic observation spells than that but he doesn't have the available spell slots today since he did the Share Language.

They can do this again tomorrow if it looks like it would help. Now he can watch her chanting in Greek to give him a very synaesthetic and vibes-based arcane sight. It shows most their jewelry as passively and fixedly magical and their bodies and one armband each as much more actively and potentially magical.

- weird. Does his body look magical too or is that just theirs.

His body doesn't but his spellbook does. And so does his headband, though that may be harder to notice what with it being on his head.

"Huh. To your magic, though not to mine, all of you look very magical in a respect in which I am not myself magical."

"Probably related to how you can't store our kind of mana. If I was totally out I'd show up a lot less but not none." She casts a little floating light spell so he can watch mana flow from her body into the light and dissipate from there.

"Huh. I wonder if sorcerers from our world look to you like they're - storing mana - in the relevant way, or not. And I wonder if magical beasts and outsiders glow." He'll cast his own floating light spell, for comparison: after he casts it he catches the magic in the air and tucks it away back in his spellbook so as not to expend it.

"Did you just recycle that spell? That's really cool! We can't do that at all."

"Oh! Yeah, cantrips are spells we've gotten down to a simple enough structure it holds together during casting and you can learn to catch it and keep it and cast it all day. They're really useful. Magic detection is one, and light, and laundry, and cooling liquids."

"Infinite laundry spells," she says enviously. "Wow." (All four Bostonians are pretty disgusting by modern Earth standards and sufficiently used to this that they're barely aware of it when it's not being brought to their attention.)

"You want me to show you that one?" Marit does not himself conform to modern Earth hygiene standards either because of having been raised in a society that is not modern Earth.

"Sure!" Abigail at least remembers what it was like to shower and put on new clothes every day even if she's long since gotten used to not that. She does the magic-seeing spell for Franklin too so he can watch the cantrip get recycled.

Then he'll prestidigitation all their clothes and selves! It kinda tickles.

Nifty and luxurious!

Intellectually fascinating!

Marcy goes from book-fugue to high alert with a shield up and her knife in her hand and then back to book-fugue in the space of a round.

Marit takes an apologetic step back and brings the palms of his hands together in front of him in the local style for 'I'm visibly not taking spellcasting actions' and then goes back to prestidigitating. 

"Sorry about that; I should've warned her. We won't attack anyone who looks human and isn't really obviously attacking us first. Unless you surprise one of us in our sleep."

"I will be sure not to do that. If you do attack people, priests have very good healing, just try to get one as fast as possible."

She nods. "Got it. And we'll work on retuning our instincts to be the right ones for this place."

"I mean, I don't know how much retuning you even need to do. I guess in the fort you're mostly pretty safe. It's tough to make a place totally impenetrable to demons but it's not that hard to make it not worth their while; they're mostly trying to sneak past us to go eat innocent people. There've been a couple occasions where they've done a coordinated infiltration effort on a fort - not Traves, but there's lots of forts - but that usually looks like lots of mind control, more than something sneaking up to eat you while you're in a workroom."

"Some mals do mind control but it's not super common and they basically don't work together in groups. Are there procedures for avoiding or detecting the mind control we should know about?"

"It usually makes people act a little strangely, so if you notice anything's up with one of your friends, tell security. They won't get in trouble, there's ways to free them as long as we know there's a problem. And sometimes demons will try to do subtle mind control, you know, so you aren't sure whether it was you doing it or magic making you, and they're hoping they'll get you to do something you wouldn't normally do and then not tell anyone because you're embarrassed.

So just, you know, don't be a dumbass, tell security "I decided to open a locked door to a secure area for some fresh air, I am aware that is super not allowed, I don't know if it was mind control or not", they're not going to be happy but you only get in real trouble for most things if you don't report them right away.

Demons mostly don't work together in groups unless they're mind controlling the other demons or a strong one is threatening weak ones. If they could actually just work together we'd be screwed, but luckily they suck at it."

"Makes sense. And I've gotten distracted from research. Do you have the spell for invisibility you mentioned existing? I have some for seeing through invisibility and I'd like to see if it works on yours."

"I know it but I can't do anything more at second circle or higher today, it'll have to wait for tomorrow. Sorry."

"Oh, right. How many spells at each circle do you get each day? Do more powerful wizards just get more spells or can they also cast more powerful versions of the same spells? What makes wizards more powerful?"

"If I hang as many third circle spells as I possibly can I get three, and then on top of that can do four at second, and then on top of that can do four more at first. Or I could do fifteen or so if I do them all at first, and I can't do one at fourth even if it's the only thing I try all day. Wizards get stronger over time, and the thing that is understood to help the most is using magic in real combat situations. You also need to study to master specific spells, but the world's greatest spellwork genius isn't going to be able to hang something that requires more power than they have. 

As you get stronger, your spells get more potent - harder to resist, longer-lasting - and you get more spells at each circle, and you get higher circle spells, and you can work out other tricks that you're personally interested in mastering. Ways of modifying your spells on the fly, ways of making them last longer or affect more people or be harder to resist. All first circle wizards can do pretty much the same thing, but two archmages will be wildly different."

"Our kind of sorcerer gets stronger as they get older, both in terms of being able to hold more mana and in terms of being able to cast bigger spells, and then levels off somewhere around twenty or so. After that it's mostly about learning more spells and accumulating useful items. For anything really big you need multiple people casting it together, hundreds at once for the largest workings."

"Huh! We mostly can't do that, but it's not that it can't be done, it's that it's one of those lost arts. I think the Lung Wa empire used to have a lot of it, and then when they collapsed, there was no one who had hundreds of people with the relevant training anymore."

That's a sobering thought. 

In particular, how much knowledge will be lost indefinitely with the destruction of the Scholomance library, and its rooms with their helpful Void-walls that handed out spellbooks?

"We know the fundamentals of doing it our way, but I'd be surprised if any of it transferred. . . . Do you have the thing where books about magic will get minds of their own and disappear and turn up somewhere else decades or centuries later? Or is it mainly that it was hard to learn from a book without someone to demonstrate?"

"- I don't think we have that problem! Maybe with intelligent books but most books about magic aren't intelligent. The problem is more - even if you had someone who could teach Lung Wa ritual casting, who has hundreds of wizards who can take years to learn it and then do ritual casts? No one! ...Cheliax, I guess. No one good."

"How did Cheliax end up with more wizards? Are they a very large country?--I know we're still supposed to be talking about what we can do but that sounds like an important problem."

"Their population is ten or fifteen times ours, I would guess, they're a much bigger country. And much richer, because Hell subsidizes them, they can afford to train everyone who might have the knack to be a wizard and we can't afford that."

"Hmmm. The Scholomance was able to teach people magic with books and construct-lectures and no human teachers at all. The four of us can't replicate all of that--it was one of those great workings that needed a lot of people at once--but maybe some parts of teaching your kind of magic could be automated the same way?"

" - wow. Yeah, that'd be really huge, if you could do construct-lecture magic classes so we could train every wizard. We could get 'em in from other countries, too, if we had that."

"It'd be a major research project even without counting the part where one of us needs to learn enough curriculum to know how best to present it, but it's the sort of thing our magic can do. Something to work on once we've got a good rate of potion production going." Illusions aren't directly in-affinity for her, but they're adjacent enough that she's picked up a bunch of spells for them in the course of class projects and reading what her room gave out.

"Well, I can try to teach you our kind of wizardry, if you're interested, some people who have a natural knack for magic still learn a lot from how wizards do it and it'd help with curriculum design. Do your potions stay good forever or are they the kind that gets unreliable eventually?"

"We should definitely learn your kind of wizardry. Especially Franklin, he's the best at math out of all of us. How long potions last varies, I'm afraid. Some last weeks, some last years, a few last indefinitely. If Franklin gets glassblowing equipment he can make bottles that extend the shelf life and they might work for your kind of potions too."

"Crusader's Fort probably has glassblowing equipment. This one doesn't, we don't do potionmaking or item crafting here. Most potions made here can last years, stored properly, but alchemists can mix up potions that are very powerful but not very stable at all, and ancient potions dug out of tombs or something have usually gone wrong."

"It might make sense for us to go to Crusader's Fort if it's more efficient to use their equipment than buy our own. Or would we need to get our own anyway for secrecy reasons, if the things we'd be doing with it would look like nonsense to locals?" They've never actually kept a secret more complicated than a spell incantation or a piece of temporary school intrigue before and have only basic theoretical knowledge of how it scales up.

"I think they'd probably set you up with a private lab but being that amount of secretive is totally normal and won't raise any eyebrows. Most wizards are a bit secretive. It's a lot easier to kill you if your enemies know exactly what you can do."

"Is wizards killing each other a problem within the fort, or just more generally? In the Scholomance people were secretive because if you're the only person who knows how to do something you can sell it."

"No one kills each other in a Worldwound fort. ...I mean, probably something's happened somewhere. But we're all subject to the treaty, and so it'd be a major incident and there's no way anyone would get away with it and it's not a real thing you have to worry about. But most people don't necessarily intend to spend their whole lives here, and for more conventional adventuring you don't want anyone to know your capabilities. Or if you go into the spy service, or if you quit and join up with the people who oppose Cheliax, or whatever."

"Yeah, of course. Earth hasn't had a war between wizards in a while and I don't think we have whatever adventuring is."

"So, we get stronger through combat, right? And one way to have that is to be in an army at the Worldwound, but the other way is to be a mercenary, and what a lot of people will do is form mercenary groups with a few of their friends with complementary abilities - that's how you guys parse, as an adventuring party - and that makes it somewhat less dangerous, because your buddies will save you if you get trapped and maybe even raise you if you get killed - and there's a lot of problems a small group of spellcasters and some powerful soldiers who can protect them can solve."

"If we get contact with Earth I bet a lot of people from here would love being enclave guards. Well, contact and some way to prevent mals from coming across. They're way too good at getting into anywhere magically accessible."

"Huh. ...contact with your world sounds almost undescribably valuable and I bet the command would figure something out. Maybe prevail on an archmage for a specialized permanent demiplane setup where magic doesn't work at all in one of the demiplanes in the middle? Or maybe everyone could Plane Shift between worlds going over Heaven as an intermediary? I have no idea, this is wildly above my area of competence. But we can consult Iomedae for important matters like 'is this transit method going to introduce reproducing demons to Golarion'."

Abigail blinks. She hadn't really understood how far Lastwall would be willing to go for regular interaction between the worlds but now that she thinks about it it makes sense. They're bigger than any group of people she's used to and can make bigger investments if the payoff is enough. "Lastwall has spells for traveling between planes? Do you have any that just do communication? There are information mals but a lot fewer of them than the physical kind, and it might be easier to secure travel if we could coordinate from both ends. Asking Iomedae might still be a good idea for that depending on how difficult it is; information mals are also pretty hard to kill."

"Information mals? 

...Lastwall only has, as far as I know, the capabilities to travel to other planes we've been to and designed targeting items for. Which includes Heaven, and various demiplanes we've made, but definitely not your world. But there is a Good archmage, archmages can travel to planes without a targeting item, and also the command probably knows some things we can do which I don't. 

There is a fourth circle spell, Sending, for communication that works across planes. The priest here can prepare it, though if we'd want to ask Iomedae first which depends on what an information mal is then that requires communicating with Vigil."

"Information mals are--hm. Do you have computers? Or telephones? Or the concept of a ghost, a disembodied mind?"

"No computers no telephones definitely yes ghosts."

"Okay, so then I guess the best way to explain it is that an information mal is a malicious, hungry ghost that's also a message. They can travel between places when information is passed between those places even if nothing physical moves from one to the other, and they don't have physical bodies but that doesn't stop them from sucking the life out of you. There are also psychic mals which are similar except they move through space like physical things despite not having bodies and they mess with your thoughts and emotions as part of killing you."

"Wow, I hate it. Does Protection from Evil work to block them?"

Yeah it's really hateable, he's so right. "That sounds like a really useful thing to test and I have no idea how we'd test it without having mals here already. There are spells in our magic that can shield against them; the trick is finding out one is nearby in time to react and then killing them before you've spent too much mana shielding. . . . I guess we could test whether your kind of shielding keeps out our magic and that would be at least somewhat informative on how it would stack up against mals."

"That seems worth a shot, yeah. Protection from Evil is at first circle; I can prepare the equivalent spell Protection from Good, if you want to test how your magic interacts with it. ...Protection from Evil won't block your spells because you're not Evil."

"That seems like a good test. I can try to hit you with a very small amount of lightning that won't injure you even if the protection doesn't work."

"Sounds good, though it's pretty weak as a shield spell, what it's most useful for is protection against possession and mental tampering, which it blocks completely."

"I don't have a lot of stuff I'd call mental tampering but I could do the interrogation spell again. Or if you'd rather not I could try to make you hear colors. It's a pretty useless spell because mal senses are too different to be affected, but it was in a book I read once. Uh, spells are sticky, once you learn one you basically never forget it even if it's stupid."

"That's cool. Sorcerers are usually like that, I think, but wizards don't have that, if you ripped a page out of my spellbook I'd have a bad time reproducing it from memory. And yeah, I think the spell you used on me earlier ought to be the kind Protection from Good is good against."

"Sounds good, we can do that." Wow, if her kind of wizard had to hang onto a physical book with all the spells they knew that would be so difficult. "Do your spellbooks ever get annoyed and escape or is that just ours?"

"No, a wizard's spellbook isn't intelligent and stays where it's put even if it's put in a pocket dimension, as is fashionable for powerful wizards."

"Yeah, that would definitely make it easier to hang onto all the spells you need. And I can stop talking so you can prepare Protection From Good."

"Sure, give me another twenty minutes. Sorry. Some wizards learn speed spell preparation and it sounds super useful but I don't have the knack myself yet."

"No problem." She can join Kevin in low-key mana-building for twenty minutes. (Franklin is sitting across from Marcy, reading her accumulating notes upside down.)

And eventually he has a Protection from Good. They can watch him cast it, and he can talk about why it looks different than the Share Languages  - it's an abjuration, they're hung differently, and first circle instead of second, and it won't last nearly as long, you can see from watching how minor destabilizations ripple through the spell...