Elsewhere:

"Everyone leaving the bank!  Get down on the ground now!" he calls, trying not to let his nervousness show through. Grue's darkness is unnerving to watch -- billowing like smoke one moment, and then flowing like liquid the next. He tenses, ready to react.

She starts pulling on the space around them, widening the street and pinching off the sidewalks. The tension of holding a bubble around the back of the bank sits in her head, but she can manage it. The Undersiders would not be getting away this time. The villains were slippery, but this time her team had a plan. As long as she could keep them tied up here long enough, Clockblocker could freeze the dogs, and then they could finally take them in.

See, if he pokes the spell like this and tells it to go not a mile in space but a "mile" somewhere else, and spends all his power to open a much smaller portal than that would usually get him -

Absolutely not. Portals without using any diamonds or powdered pit fiends or anything? Not on My watch.

No, wait! Don't squish him just for trying to go places!

...how about We let him go out of Creation? Then it won't be Your problem that he has cool cheap magic.

Go, little butterfly flying squirrel! Fly, be free!

He has to use all his power, and squint in the right metaphorical direction, before the portal finally opens. On the other side is a calm river, under a dark blue sky with piercingly bright stars. 

A sudden blast of air strikes his back and lifts him up and through the portal. Ahmose barely has time to fold into a ball to avoid touching the portal's sides. 

No no no, go back, he didn't mean to step through -

But the wind is still blowing out of the portal, and it's hanging a foot above the waterline. There's no way for him to climb back into it, he'd lose his hand if he tried.

He treads water and screams for help, but no-one comes, and he's growing tired. This river is as large as the Sphinx at Sothis, and very salty; he can't see the shores, and doesn't want to swim for his life in strange waters.

He can't open another portal back without closing this one first; it took all his power.

He can't use this portal. He might as well close it. And then he'll do his best to focus while swimming (badly) and also in fear for his life, and open a portal right beneath himself, in the only orientation he safely go through.

Doing this means he falls through it once it opens, and water starts pouring furiously on his head until he closes it.

Unfortunately, he isn't back home.

He falls into darkness, hitting something hard. Rough stone, perhaps.

The place is strangely quiet -- the rush of water seeming distant even as it pours over his head.

The ground under him is smooth and level, suggesting that he's probably indoors. It is too even to be a natural cave.

"That should give them a reason to think twice before blindly opening fire where they can’t see," Grue remarks, starting to turn back to his teammates. He pauses, and stares into his darkness. "What the fuck?"

"One of the heroes?" Tattletale asks. "No. A hostage?"

"Some guy dressed in robes and drenched," Grue tells her. "Skitter, try and get a bug on him. Bitch, we don't know what he's capable of, so be careful. But it doesn't look like he's doing much right now."

Tattletale thinks for a moment, while Bitch whistles for her dogs, and then they charge into the darkness. Tattletale snaps out of her stupor.

"No, wait!" she calls. "Damn it. They're going to get slaughtered. We'll just have to be fast"

"Grue!" she shouts. "Aegis and Clockblocker switched!"

She turns and runs deeper into the bank.

Aaagh scary magical darkness?

He'll try to... carefully crawl out of it, in an essentially random direction, and hope he's not going in circles.

He sets his hand on somebody's clothed leg, which spasms in surprise, nearly kicking him in the face. 

The darkness pulls back, leaving wisps and tatters curling around his hands. There is no sudden brightness, because the world outside the darkness reveals itself as cloudy and overcast. He is surrounded by impossibly tall buildings. He is on the edge of a large flat area, paved with even black stone, although the edges of it shimmer and move like a soapbubble.

Several brightly and strangely dressed people stand on the opposite end of the flat area. One of them shouts something in a language he doesn't speak.

The woman whose leg he touched looks at him in fear, but stays huddled to the ground, her hands behind her head.

"...blocker," he tells Bitch. He throws a hand in Vista's direction, covering her in a fresh blast of darkness.

"Sorry! Sorry!" He snatches his hand back, and then backs up a few steps to be sure. "I didn't mean to touch you! I was just trying to get out of the darkness!"

Is anyone else looking at him? Do they seem to be shouting at him?

It's hard to tell! There is certainly a lot of shouting going on, but it seems like it is mostly pretty general.

Of the brightly dressed people, one in a red-and-white skintight suit appears to be trying to tackle a monster. The monster is being directed by a woman with her hair cut short who sits astride it. The man in the white costume covered with arrows is being mauled by another monster, while a man in blue tries to assist.

A man in full plate is pointing vaguely in his direction and shouting, but it's hard to tell where he's looking because of the face mask. Actually, he might notice that everyone who is fighting has their face covered in some way.

Another man in full plate goes tumbling off some kind of flying shield, smacking into the smooth black surface of the road, but not before knocking a man in well made black leather armor to the ground with some kind of spell.

The other men and women cowering on the ground around him are mostly too busy looking at the fight to be looking at him, and too busy being terrified to do much shouting.

Monsters!! ...but also, people fighting on their side? Bandits? Evil adventurers?

He's practiced for this. Well, "practiced", in his head and on probably-innocent not-quite-monstrous crocs on the riverbank who weren't savaging anyone just at the moment.

They're moving too quickly for him to cut their heads off, and he doesn't know anything that's a mile from here that he can use, but he can - spend three seconds opening a portal under the one mauling that man? And if its leg falls into the sudden hole, he'll close it and the monster will have one less leg to stand on, and hopefully that'll be enough for the man on the ground to get away.

Judas is entirely too focused on his task to be distracted, because he is a Good Dog. And good dogs maul when the Alpha says maul.

Which means he is taken entirely by surprise when his left forepaw sinks into the ground. He tries to pull back, but it's too late.

He totters on three legs and lets out a pained, panicked bark as the Biteable Man pulls away, and then wheels to regroup with his pack.

Aegis sees the dog go down, and quickly takes advantage, but he didn't see who put the portal in place.

"There's an unknown," he tells his team. "They took off a dog's leg with a portal."

"I think I see him!" Gallant responds, loosing a blast of apathy at Regent. He thinks his aim was on this time, but Regent doesn't seem to react. "He's with the hostages."

Oh good, that worked! He'll try to get all the other monsters' legs. It's quicker than trying to swallow up a whole monster; big portals take longer to open.

She lets out a sharp whistle, and Angelica pivots under her, incidentally dodging another tackle.

She takes in Judas's injured state, and growls deep in her throat.

Grue fills the area with another wave of darkness, getting away from Kid Win, who pivots wildly, looking for someone he can target. He releases a shot at Regent, but the shot goes wide and hits the bank's facade.

Ahmose manages to get Angelica's back right leg, prompting Bitch to roll off of her and come up cursing.

Which is when Ahmose find himself covered in a swarm of bugs. They aren't stinging, but they are trying to climb inside his nose.

Aaaah monstrous vermin!! He squeezes his nose closed with one hand and frantically bats them away from his face with the other. This stops him from casting the laundry spell, but he doubts making his face taste bad would make them go away, these vermin are clearly hostile.

There are more bugs incoming, a whole cloud of them. Ahmose abandons all stealth and steps through a portal to the top of the tallest building he can see. If he can find a pool, or even the river, he'll risk going underwater and hope that makes the bugs on him leave him be.

As soon as he closes the portal to where he previously was, the insects stop acting with hostile intent, and disperse on the breeze.

From the top of this building, he can see that he is in a truly enormous city. The distance is fogged by rain, so he can't be entirely sure whether it ever ends, or whether it simply keeps going.

He can see the ocean from here, gray and forbidding. There's some kind of metallic castle built in it with a pearlescent dome visible where it interferes with the rain.

Wow.

He'll still portal a few more times. Just in case. Try to find some - abandoned street or park or something, to get his breath back and try to calm down after the everything.

But, wow. Is that what Aktun is like? He knows he's not in Axis, because Axis doesn't have monster attacks, but - Sothis isn't that big! Could he be in Absalom? It's nowhere near his village, not enough for a Plane Shift error, but... maybe his portals are different?

Ahmose tries to approach a random person on the street (who did not see him portal anywhere) and ask where he is.

The man he approaches -- a tall man dressed in long blue pants with unpatched holes and a simple shirt -- stares at him for a moment.

He replies in an unknown language, but probably the same one people were shouting in.

Taldane? Kelish? Vudrani? Necril - that's not a real language, it was just a children's adventure book...

Aren't the names of countries and cities are the same in most languages? Has this man heard of Sothis? Osirion? ...Absalom?

He has not.

When Ahmose doesn't understand him, he tries repeating himself more loudly and slowly.

When that doesn't work, the man waves a hand with one outstretched finger at him and walks away.

Where in the world could he have landed? Shouldn't people anywhere in Garund or Avistan understand at least one of his languages?

Even if he somehow ended up in Tian Xia, he can make his way home as long as he knows which way that is. There's probably a way to do it without knowing where he's starting from - go north until he finds the Crown of the World, avoid freezing somehow, figure out which of two ways is Avistan, go south again - but he's a bit over-adventured for the day. 

(If he could only figure out how to open portals at an angle to each other, he could look through portal-chains until he saw a familiar-looking continent. He thinks he can maybe get somewhere by alternating which side of a portal he looks through? An experiment for another day.)

He'll try to find the richest-looking part of the city and look for any familiar temples, occasionally checking if people in the street can understand him. Everywhere has an Abadar's, right?

This city doesn't appear to.

The nicest part of the city is probably the densely-built area by the sea-side. Despite the rain, there are still crowds of people flocking between shops there, buying many different goods. Set back a bit from the water are more of the tall buildings, with people coming and going.

Large metal carts travel the streets apparently autonomously. There are larger carts that carry groups of people all at once. There are red and green signal lights that control the passage of the carts.

None of the buildings along the waterfront are a temple to any god he recognizes, although there is a nice white building with what might be holy symbols worked into its decorative windows.

Ahmose doesn't understand much of what he sees. He doesn't let that bother him; he's a poorly educated provincial and the world is vast and varied. He just needs to find out where he is, and which way home is, and then he can come back here sometime he's better prepared.

No-one here understands any language he speaks. They don't seem to understand when he asks for the major gods by name. He doesn't know that the gods all have the same name on other continents as they do around the Inner Sea, but it's still weird.

Also, he hasn't seen anyone but humans (and those monsters). It took him a while to realize, but Sothis always had the occasional half-orc or gnome or oread or gods-what-is-that-person. This place seems to just have humans. Maybe the other races live in separate quarters? He might not have seen anything like a representative sample, this city is so enormous. (There are no horses either, or any working animals really. A mystery for another day.)

All the women are - he's not sure what word to use - they're clearly not Osirian women. He hopes they're happier that way. It's a distant ache that he doesn't want to think about. He wants to get back home and rest and not think about any of this again until next week.

After the tenth person who can't understand him he gives up trying. Someone in this city presumably has a translation spell but he can't find them and he can't make the locals guide him there.

Time to find out what his spell is really worth, then. He finds a secluded spot where he thinks no-one can see him, and concentrates.

Ahmose can open a portal anywhere he can see within a mile; the other side opens in hand's reach. But once a portal is open, he can look through it to open another one, to a place that is two miles away but only one through the first portal.

If he opens small portals, just big enough to look through, and closes each one after opening the next one, he can move his viewpoint by a mile every few seconds. Not in the city, where sightlines are limited; he aims his first portal above the rooftops, and goes horizontally from there.

The portals are always parallel to each other. He can only open a new portal at an eighty degree angle or so before he can no longer see through it. But once he has, he can move around his end of the portal, reorient, and go on. This means he can turn around in less than ten seconds, with some undignified scurrying around. (He dreams of having a big crystal ball, to put the view-portals in, so nothing coming out of the portal can hurt him, and going around that... not the time.)

He moves his view-portal along the shoreline, towards what seems to be either north or south, and looks for a quiet place where he can sit and work a few hours without any people or animals interrupting him.

The city does eventually peter out, becoming less dense as he goes. He passes a cluster of hulking metal buildings, mostly empty, and then a final crossroad before the land turns to a scrubby forest, blasted by the wind off the sea.

Further on, he can see it break up into beaches and low-lying wetland. But the strip of forest grows over more rocky ground, and looks quiet enough that he's unlikely to be disturbed. With a bit of looking, he can spot a low butte that seems likely to keep him out of the questing jaws of any wildlife.

He'll choose a spot that'll let him see anything approaching, ideally one that's hard to get to on foot. And then he opens a bigger portal, and leaves the unnamed city behind him.

Now he has time to explore properly. First, he makes a chain of portals several miles up, and looks back down. What does this area look like?

Currently, overcast. But if he looks from below the clouds, he can see a good ways around. The area is mostly low-lying coastal marshes, steep hills, and forests. The absurdly large city has a number of smaller settlements ringing it. A large road is visible from even this height paralleling the coast.

There are many differences between the landscape which surrounds him and Osirion. Some are easy to notice, such as the damp. Others are harder to see immediately, but once seen can't be unseen.

And one big difference is how densely populated the area is. Even in the places where there are not actual clusters of buildings, there are still houses tucked into the woods. It's rare to find any spot which is more than a mile from a house.

Another is the lights. Everywhere is lit up -- not only inside the houses, but the streets are lit up. Walkways are lit up. The carts that travel the roads bring lanterns with them. And all that light reflects off the clouds, and serves to paint everything a pale, undifferentiated grey.

The city is built on a bay. A river runs down from the hills, past one side of the city, and empties out into the ocean. The ocean itself is huge, and home only to a few tiny boats and endless rolling waves. It's somewhat disconcerting, how flat the ocean appears compared to the rumpled landscape which borders it.

There are beaches. A large one, in the bay with the city, but also small ones scattered along the edge of the water. Some are well maintained and full of even white sands. The majority are small and muddy, or are instead gravel beaches, the rocks not yet worn away to sand.

The woods are alive. Even in the rain, birds call to each other in the trees, and the trees shift, sending spatters of raindrops pouring between their outstretched leaves. Beyond and behind that, the carts on the omnipresent streets make a faint and distant sound, entirely unlike anything he has heard, except perhaps the roaring of a great river.

It's really like nothing he'd ever imagined. Why is everything lit in daylight? How many wizards must live here, to keep this civilization going? He'd heard that Tian Xia uses ritual magic to run their civilization and this might just be what that looks like. But he can't take the time to linger, because some of the things he might have to do will take a long time and eventually he'll grow tired and hungry.

The cloud cover is annoying. He wants to find a break in the clouds and make a chain of portals far far up, until the horizon curves and he can see whole continents and figure out where he is from that. (Opening a portal that far up generates a strong wind; it surprised him the first time he did it, but he knows to watch out for it now. If he makes only a small portal to look through, and braces himself and doesn't try to do something silly like stick his head through, he should be fine.)

It would take him hours to get that high up, though, so first he'll spend a little time looking for other cities, in case there's something useful. People probably don't speak other languages a few hundred miles from here, but maybe he can find a temple he can identify, or - something. 

If he spends a little time making a portal-chain along the coast, looking for other cities, what can he find?

If he continues for a few minutes in the direction he initially went, he will reach both the end of the clouds and the outskirts of an even larger city.

This one is visible from a long way away, the settlements becoming increasingly dense until they merge into the outskirts of the city proper. The large road goes through this city, too. But it also splits off to encircle the city at a distance, making it look a bit as though the city is the center of a bullseye.

The sea seems to almost cut the pattern in half, the uninterrupted emptiness of the ocean a stark contrast to the packed streets of the city.

The densest part of the city is full of more tall buildings, but still nothing that he recognizes as a church. There is a large building with white marble columns and many people streaming in and out, but no visible holy symbol.

Eventually, he puts up a portal a few hundred feet away from some kind of adventurer in skintight leather armor, hanging from a pair of mechanical wings. The adventurer looks over in surprise, and starts circling over a thermal off the blackened ground below to get a closer look.

Wait no he didn't mean to be noticed!! He closes the portal hurriedly. Stupid of him, not to look more carefully for fliers. Portals can be seen through both ways; he must have stood out against the background of the sky.

He has to spend a few minutes building the portal-chain again, more carefully to avoid any flying people this time. What is he hoping to find, anyway? Should he try going to that big building, or any other large building? Maybe he was too quick to give up on talking to people. But getting back into a city without anyone seeing his portals would take too much time. If he can't find anything useful in the next twenty minutes, he'll spend the time to look at the whole continent. He isn't sure if he can identify Tian Xia, but he can recognize all the other continents and that's just as good.

He can find a lot of interesting things in the city in the course of twenty minutes! Whether they are useful is perhaps less clear. There is a tall building with a picture that could be a holy symbol, but not one he recognizes. There's a running fight between a group of people who have decorated their armor with bones, and a set of people in bright colors. There's a large park in the center of the city, with a pond in it. There's a large building with a huge window through which he can see a dragon's skeleton.

If none of those capture his attention, and he goes through the process of building a tower of portals high enough to see the continent, he can see that it isn't any continent he recognizes.

It's shaped something like a chair, with a high back, coming down to a seat and then forming a point. Below the bulk of the continent are two small legs. He is situated about a quarter of the way down the edge of the chair.

What is it with Evil-looking adventurers fighting people in cities?! This is seriously concerning! Seeing two fights in the space of two hours suggests they are happening pretty much all the time!!

Ahmose is pretty sure Sothis wasn't like that, or at least if it was the authorities hid the fact very successfully. It makes him want to talk to people even less. What if he talks to the wrong people. What if they treat strangers with magic the way you would if there was a magical fight every hour in your main square.

So: he is on the eastern side of the chair-continent. It might be eastern Casmaron, or eastern Tian Xia. Not eastern Arcadia, there's a bunch of islands there. Eastern Garund, in the far south? Could they have huge cities where no-one speaks the common languages of the Inner Sea? It sounds improbable, but... And wasn't there another continent? He feels like he's forgetting something.

If this is Tian Xia, going north and over the Crown of the World should get him to Avistan, and then he can at least talk to people.

How long would that take? The world is twenty-five thousand miles around and he needs to go half that. A mile every two or three seconds means... uh... ten hours? He'd have to sleep halfway through, or at least rest.

He could go east or west instead of north. He'd see all the continents eventually that way. But if he goes in the wrong direction, it could take twice as long. Also, if he is in the far south of Garund, going north will take him home, and if he's in Casmaron, going north will lead to a sea and then he'll know to head west.

He'd best get started, then, and keep thinking once he's settled into enough of a rhythm.

Going north will take him to a cold and bitter ocean, with visible chunks of ice floating in it. Heading west along the coast leads him around the curve of a great bay, and then further north into areas permanently covered with ice.

The land looks no more familiar.

How far will he press on before resting for the night?

For a few hours, at least! The permanent ice looks promising and he shouldn't lose daylight.

But first, he'll pause to look for better shelter. This place is cold and he'd rather not stay here until dark. Can he find somewhere warm and sheltered to spend the night?

He's willing to go back to the city, but he isn't sure how that would actually help. He can't ask people for shelter for the night because he can't talk to them. He can't even ask for alms, becayse he hasn't found a temple he recognizes.

In Sothis there were homeless men and beggars and the thought of trying to figure out how they live is - intensely distressing. He sometimes dreamed of helping them stop living that way. Funny how it didn't turn out like that.

The area near him is not rife with comfortable outdoor shelters. There are trees with drooping branches that offer some protection from the wind, but they are more-or-less soaked from the day-long drizzle. Luckily, the rain has petered off but the clouds have not, promising a warm night.

With a bit of searching he is eventually able to find a shack in the middle of the woods -- set at the end of a long dirt road, partially overgrown with grass -- which appears to be abandoned. The inside is dusty, although it does contain a simple mattress, and there are no lights or signs of anyone's presence.

He's willing to trespass if it looks disused and he's not harming anyone and he can convince himself no-one should care if he used the mattress for a night.

He'll keep moving north until it gets dark - or until he gets too tired, in case it never gets dark that far north - and then he'll make his portals really really small and unnoticeable if you don't know where to look, and try to get some sleep. It may be a long time coming, with everything that's on his mind.

The forest is not quiet at night. The sounds of animals moving around in the brush, the mating calls of birds, and the (individually) quiet peeping of frogs keep him company as he tries to fall asleep.

Once he does, he is awakened a few hours later by the distant sound of an engine. He doesn't quite fall back asleep before hearing the sound of boots squelching lightly in the mud near the front of the shack.

He makes a handsign to Larry, and gently approaches the door, keys in hand. He inserts them into the lock quietly, and then unlocks it with the minimum amount of noise.

He takes a step back, and then eases open the door to see if the guy the security system picked up is still there.

Damn it, this shack really looked disused! There were weeks of dust on that mattress! 

Ahmose had already decided to avoid contact, and he certainly doesn't want to talk to strangers whose shack he - didn't quite break into, but trespassed on, while groggy with sleep in the middle of the night. When the sound of boots wakes him up he glances through the portal showing him the path leading to the door, and when he sees men walking up it he opens a portal back to the sad lonely rock he came from.

"Huh. Nobody here."

He plays a flashlight around the interior. Notes the disturbed area around the mattress, along with the lack of footprints leading to the door.

"Call Hookwolf. I think he's going to want to hear about this," he tells Larry.

The rock is cold, and quite a bit more windy than the interior of the shack was. But it seems undisturbed, and he can have a few more hours of chilly sleep before dawn.

First he has to find the little portals he left behind the shack and replace them with ones leading to his rock again. And then he's going to sleep under the foreign stars, cold and miserable and hungry.

He is undisturbed until dawn. A pack of coyotes passes relatively close, but they don't climb the butte to get at him. Dawn breaks cold and clear, the clouds having blown away in the night.

Ahmose just wants this all to be over with already. He washes his face and drinks some water and starts moving his portal north again. What does the Crown look like?

Flat, icy, and surprisingly devoid of demons.

Fewer demons does not mean no demons. He does spot a hulking armored figure with curling black horns running across the ice at one point. But there is no sign of a hole into the Abyss, nor of any particular fighting.

Mostly, there's just ice. For hours. Until finally, on the horizon, he sees a glimmer of light.

It is hard to tell what it is, from this distance. It is perhaps a city, or perhaps sunlight reflecting off of a mountain range. Either way, it would not be far from his current course.

Sure, he'll go look at the shiny thing. It might be a few wasted minutes, but this is boring.

As he approaches, the glimmer slowly grows until he can see that it is a huge swirling dome of rainbow color, perhaps five miles across. It is beautiful to look at, especially against the omnipresent snow. The shimmers and eddies of color are entrancing, and make it somewhat difficult to look away and see the other things which surround the dome.

Around it at a distance of a mile or so is a wall, on which soldiers in black uniforms patrol. Outside the wall are a series of low buildings. There is a depression in the land leading from the far side of the dome up past where the wall now stands.

That seems like a military installation or something else he probably shouldn't mess with! It's definitely too small to be the Worldwound...

He's come far enough that people might speak familiar languages here. He'll try making very small unobtrusive portals next to the buildings and see if he can overhear any conversation that way.

Николай is mostly complaining about how boring a posting this is, and how much he is looking forward to seeing Саскылах when they get leave, even though it's a boring tiny town. Anything would be better than this.

But he's doing so in Russian, which is not even slightly related to Osiriani, so Ahmose won't be able to understand any of it.

Prolonged eavesdropping will reveal that everyone here is speaking the same unfamiliar language, sometimes with a few words of something else thrown in.

Useless...

Oh well, the dome was pretty to look at. He resumes making portals towards what is now south.

Doing so takes him (slowly) through gradually less snowy and more forested mountains, with some incredible views. At one point, he passes over a road with two iron tracks laid down on it and a different style of self-moving cart hauling a long chain of wagons up the mountain.

He passes several smaller settlements, but they still speak the same language as the soldiers by the dome.

Continuing further south, things get increasingly mountainous, until he comes across a huge lake nestled in a steep valley with a large city built on its banks. The lake stretches at least a hundred miles from his current vantage point, before vanishing around a curve in the mountains.

This would all be incredibly cool if he wasn't cold and hungry and frankly quite upset by now.

Does the city have any recognizable temples, or written signs in a language he knows?

It has neither. There are two buildings that might be temples:

The larger is a stately building that might be a church, or possibly a castle, but the associated holy symbol is not one he recognizes. And peeking in through a window reveals an elaborately worked statue of a sad tortured man, which is not the most promising sign.

The other plausible-temple has a green crescent and star painted on it, and is otherwise structurally unremarkable, distinguished from the other nearby buildings only by being made with nicer materials.

He'll stay away from the presumably-Evil temple to torture!! He'll go to the other place, and ask a few random people along the way and then also ask someone there, in what is becoming a sadly familiar ritual.

Taldane Osiriani Vudran Kelish? Taldor Absalom Osirion Cheliax Kelesh? Abadar Pharasma Nethys Sarenrae Irori? Look he can make their holy symbols with his hands! (Badly.)

This man has no idea what he's talking about, and is highly confused about how he came to be visiting Russia without speaking the language.

But God instructs that they should give to those in need, and this young man is clearly in need.

Михаил tries to convey through gestures that Ahmose ought to come into the mosque where it is warm, and that he will make some soup for him.

The man is inviting him inside. It is probably kindly meant; he'll accept. He's tired, less physically and more of - being alone and adrift and uncertain.

Hot soup will be very welcome, he will try to pantomime his appreciation!!

Михаил smiles at him. The canned stuff they had on hand is not exactly the pinnacle of soups, but it's clearly just what the young man needed.

Once Ahmose has had his fill, Михаил starts trying to solicit some basic information and teach him some Russian words. He taps himself on the chest and gives his name, and then points at Ahmose and adopts a questioning mien.

Ahmose cleans his dish and utensils with the laundry spell. He's a polite guest and it's really the least he can do in return for this man's kindness. He wonders if he's a priest after all, but he has no holy symbol that one Ahmose recognizes. Maybe he's a lay priest, and only the clerics carry symbols? The green maybe-moon crescent and star are encouraging; if he's Desnan then he might be the best person to talk to. Although what kind of northern-Avistani Desnan doesn't know Taldane?

...never mind, he'll give it a rest, this is getting nowhere. Once he makes it home, he'll try to go back and figure out where he actually was, and all the undoubtedly comical but currently mortifying misunderstandings he made on his way.

He taps himself. "Me. Ahmose." No wait that gives the wrong impression - he waves his hands, shakes his head. Tries to sign "do-over" and finds out he has no idea how to sign that. Sigh. Pause.

Taps himself. "Ahmose." And he tries to smile.

Михаил tenses when he cleans the dish, giving him a fearful look. And then he takes a deep breath to calm himself.

He smiles, but can't quite banish the unease from his face. "Ahmose," he repeats.

He doesn't have a map to point at and ask where Ahmose came from, but he did find a pad of paper and some spare pens. He draws a fairly good outline of the continent and then fills in the border of Russia, and points at the center of the southern border where they are.

Through expansive gestures he tries to convey what different areas are called, and see if Ahmose will indicate where he's from.

Ahmose has no idea what the coast of the Shining Ivory Sea looks like! This is... maybe Avistan? If one drew a weird-looking boundary between Avistan and Casmaron, and also between Avistan and the Crown, but Ahmose is no geographer (to put it lightly) and for all he knows this is the orthodox rendering approved by expert cartographers.

He has no idea what the north-eastern third of Avistan is called, but then he has no clear idea of anything in Casmaron north of Kelesh. There's a big lake called... Lake Casmarin? He's going to embarrass himself terribly in front of the maybe-Desnan, isn't he.

Better start with something he knows. Here's a drawing of the Inner Sea (it's very wiggly), the island of Absalom (which is actually Kortos, he's proud of himself for remembering that one), the isthmuses on either side. Here is the great river Sphinx, and Junira, and Sellen on the other side of the sea. Here are the countries bordering it: Osirion, Thuvia, Rahadoum, Cheliax, Andoran, Taldor, Kelesh. 

And separately, a drawing of the five continents and the Crown, with an arrow pointing to the Inner Sea. He tries to indicate his uncertainties with shading.

Михаил peers at the drawings, and then looks up at Ahmose. It doesn't ... look entirely unlike Earth? If he has no sense of scale, and vertically bisected the Americas for some reason, and thought the Atlantic was full of islands.

Since Ahmose indicated that he came from somewhere near the Mediterranean, Михаил tries a little of his rusty Quranic Arabic, but not with much hope.

No, sorry, he doesn't know that language either.

This is all so sad. There should be a universal language that everyone knows. It's probably one of those things that would benefit everyone but doesn't happen because of politics.

Михаил sits back in his chair to think for a moment. Then he mimes getting an idea, and gestures for Ahmose to get up and follow him.

He locks the inner doors of the Mosque (although the outer doors remain unlocked in case anyone needs to shelter in the vestibule), and then leads him down the street, taking the opportunity to point out various new Russian vocabulary words as they walk.

Ahmose isn't going to try to learn a new language; he doesn't expect to stay here long enough to need it. And he doesn't want to waste his time; the man probably wants to offer him a place to sleep, or even work. He tries to indicate polite refusal.

...what no the man is walking away thinking Ahmose will follow him!! Aaah he is so bad at not going along with expectations. Still, he'll muster his courage to tap him on the shoulder and shake his head and - how can he say thank you - he'll bow. And then he'll walk away. If the stranger doesn't make that socially awkward. Um.

Михаил blinks at him in confusion for a moment, but returns his bow and watches him walk away. He mumbles a short prayer, and then goes back into the temple.

Sigh. Well, he got soup, and met a kind man, and rested a little. That's good! He tries to feel good about it.

He finds a place out of sight, portals back to his rock (it's as close as anywhere else he has a portal), and starts extending his portals south again.

Passing south takes him over the huge lake, over more mountains, and then into a desert area. After a few hundred more miles, he comes on another city, bigger than the last one, but a bit smaller than the largest one he's seen here so far.

This one has two large roads running across it like an X, and an odd mixture of tall buildings and low urban sprawl.

As he approaches the city, a faint rumbling noise gets progressively louder.

He tries to get portals into the city unobserved, to decide whether to try to talk to people here. What's this weird noise? Is it going to make it difficult to overhear people?

Well, whatever it is, it gets quieter when he drops down into the city itself. The people here are speaking a mix of languages -- one that sounds a bit like the last place he stopped, and another one that he doesn't recognize.

Ahmose has the sinking feeling that he's going to go through the gestures of trying to make himself understood, without any real hope, and fail and feel terrible about it afterwards, and now he's feeling terrible about it beforehand in anticipation, which is not an improvement.

Sigh. Probably a few hundred miles aren't enough to help. He'll keep on going south, and try to occupy himself by remembering the taste of the soup.

He's not far out of the city when a larger-than-person sized suit of metallic silver armor — styled after a dragon, but clearly made of metal — shoots past his portal and points a hand at him.

It says something unintelligible in the local language in a loud voice.

Aaaah is that a local Authority is he doing something illegal??

Ahmose doesn't close the portal, though he comes close in the first moment. He will talk through it and explain apologetically he does not understand, in as many as several languages. If they do want him to close the portal he will feel very bad about not understanding that right away, but if they want something else it would be rude to just close it.

He really really hopes they're not - hostile, because he is abstractly aware that the world is a big and strange place and some people are not nice or law-abiding or even honest, and some of them even set dog-monstrosities on people in public squares. But his wariness is not enough to immediately override his politeness/awkwardness instinct. He can close the portal with a thought, hopefully that will be enough?

She comes to a stop in front of the portal, and peers through it. Unfortunately, she has to speak a bit loudly over her thrusters, but she does her best to adopt a gentle tone, when she realizes how flustered he is.

She listens to each of his languages, shaking her head after each one. And then she unfolds a small black object from some compartment inside her armor, and holds it out to him, although her flight isn't quite stable enough to put it through an eye-sized portal.

Um. Why does she (it sounds like a she) want him to take it? Because it might do something to him, or - because it would let her find him through it? He can't think of any other options, which of course doesn't prove anything.

Does he trust a stranger to maybe cast a spell on him? In her favor: she asked nicely. Against it: didn't anyone teach you not to accept magic items from mysterious flying women?

He'll temporize and open another, bigger portal so she can drop it through without him touching it.

She finds that acceptable. She drops the object through the portal, and then backs away and drops down to land her suit on the Mongolian steppe.

The squarish black object lights up where it lies on the ground near him, the surface changing to show an image of a fairly average looking woman.

She says something in the same voice as the flying suit, only this time without having to shout over the thrusters. Then she puts a hand to her chest and says "Dragon", before looking at him inquisitively.

Oh, it's like a scrying mirror. He's never seen one, but he thinks it could be an ordinary cheap mirror and not a priceless artifact entrusted to him he'd like to stop thinking about that now please.

This is - more promising than the man who gave him soup, really! Someone with flying armor, and a means of tracking down his portal (unless she just got lucky? no, she had the mirror prepared), and just magic in general, is much more likely to be able to help him.

Which leaves just one question, really. If she wants to talk to him, why not just cast tongues? Isn't that about as cheap as scrying or sending? He's very puzzled, but he's willing to talk to her; hopefully she has something in mind.

He points to himself. "Ahmose," he enunciates clearly (good thing he's had practice!).

She smiles at him, with a perfectly normal number of human teeth. It was surprisingly difficult to get that right when she was putting her avatar together, for some reason.

She switches the phone to show a little cartoon animation. It shows a cartoon version of him and of her avatar emitting speech bubbles with different symbols in them. His are swirly and curving and hers are sharp and geometrical.

Then it shows a him talking to the phone. A fox shows up on the screen, and then his character emits a speech bubble with a fox in it. This repeats with a few different objects, while the cartoon version of her avatar listens.

Finally, the animation shows her speaking swirly curving symbols to him, and him speaking them back.

He's even more mystified why someone who can cast remote illusions can't also cast tongues (and doesn't speak any of his languages in the first place)!

Actually, he'll just try to ask. He sticks out his tongue, points to it, and then to the woman, and tries to mime questioning.

She looks at him in confusion.

Then she demonstratively sticks out her own tongue and points at it, to reassure him that she has  a tongue too.

... which really does justify the time that went into fully modelling it. At the time, she was just being a perfectionist and not thinking about Colin, but in a world of strange capes, preparing for unlikely possibilities really does pay off.

Is the tongues spell maybe called something else in other languages - oh! Whatever language she speaks probably has different words for, well, language and tongue.

This resolves a little bit of his confusion but not, really, why she wouldn't use a translation spell however named. But he can't immediately think of another way to mime it, so he'll go along with the illusion-charades she proposes for now.

He'll name the things she shows him images of. In Taldane, because more people know Taldane than Osirian and he's almost as fluent in it.

It's a somewhat tedious and extended process. She has an adaptive heuristic algorithm that seeks out common morphological derivations and etymologically related words in order to build out vocabulary faster, though, so it is really marvelously fast compared to learning a language the slow way.

After a little bit, the cartoons get more complex, and she extracts basic grammar. And then, finally, she can address him in broken Taldane.

"Hello! Good is to meet you," she tells him. "Is it okay: I send a person to bring you to a government building? With food. And warm."

If she can understand him that well, then surely he can make himself understood?

"I want to go home. To Osirion, in Garund. Do you know where that is?"

She shakes her head.

"I never heard of Osirion," she tells him. "Or Garund."

She shows him a picture of a stylized cauldron.

"Do you have a mark like this on you?" she asks. "Sometimes, people are here and not knowing how and having a mark."

"No? Unless I don't know I do? That would be very weird. And I do know how I got here! Through a portal, like that one. But I had to let it close."

He'll try to draw a little map of the continents in the dirt. Surely the continents can be identified just from their relative locations.

She did not build her phone with a side-facing camera, unfortunately.

"You turn the phone to see, please?" she requests.

Alright, it's reasonably clearly not a trap that will cast a spell on him when he touches it. She could have done that any number of ways by now if she'd wanted to attack him. Although he could make a portal to show her his map without moving her device - no, focus.

She peers at the map. Then she shows a map of the world.

"I think you are from a different planet," she comments. "I don't think I able send you home now. You come to government building, my different artificer looks at your portals, maybe we able send you home."

Oh no he's been so stupid!!

Being on a different planet explains everything so well. The different languages and continents and everything. He opened a planar portal without knowing how to target it, what was he thinking?

Actually - what about the gods? They might have different names and symbols, but can he maybe a get a description across? Presumably if he can't make the portals work reliably the next step will be to buy plane shifts home, so...

"That explains it! I couldn't find any familiar temples. What do you call the god of commerce and cities and travel? We call Him Abadar, he has the symbol of the golden key and the Golden Arches" - he demonstrates.

Dragon adopts a sympathetic look.

"We don't have gods," she tells him. "Only people. Sometimes, people tell other people they are gods, but they are not."

They what?

It's not that Ahmose knows for a fact the gods make Themselves known on every planet. In fact he knows nothing whatsoever about other planets, other than them existing. But - why wouldn't They - he can't answer that either. Maybe They all agreed to make this planet a, a sort of experiment in what happens without any gods, because They wouldn't agree on only some of Them leaving it alone?

"But - you do know about the gods? How do you know about Them, if you don't have clerics and temples? What do you know?"

"I don't know any gods," she tells him patiently. "Because there are no gods. I don't know 'Abadar', and I don't know other gods. I'm sorry."

Sometimes there are downsides to doing everything via telepresence. Ahmose looks like he could do with a hug.

"But then how do you know about the gods? You have a word for Them!"

Dragon makes a face of understanding.

"People say stories," she explains. "People say that there are gods long ago, or that there are gods that don't, uh, touch the planet. But there is no seeing of gods now. But tongue has a word still."

"The gods left? I - don't know what that means. How do you live without clerics? Healing and resurrection, clean water and plant growth, banking... Civilization should collapse without them, but you seem so rich." Ahmose is half puzzled and half disbelieving, and the deeper implications are just starting to sink in.

Dragon goes back to looking confused. The emotional state of her avatar isn't binary, of course. It's a multidimensional gamut of expressions over which she has fine control. But it sure feels binary, bopping between showing confusion and showing compassion.

"People learned to heal by knowing bodies. We don't have 'resurrection', I think, when that word is what I think. Clean water and plant growth we have machines to help with. I don't know why a god you would need for banking?" she replies. "People don't need gods to get to know how to do things. And ... getting to know is sticky. Once a person knows, and shares, then everyone keeps knowing. Each step is hard, but there are many people to get each step."

She shows a fast-forward timeline of architecture from Ur to New York.

"People work together, and things get better."

But - but why. Why is the world such that you have to do without the gods, when you could have Their help?

"And people are still Lawful, and Good, without priests to guide them?" The words are slightly different than the ones for plain good and evil, law and chaos, but she might not have heard those yet.

She wrinkles her brow. She is learning the language fast, faster than a human reasonably could, even, but she's pretty sure she's missing a subtlety or two.

"One thing is, priests can guide people without needing gods?" she responds. "Other thing is, some people are Lawful and some are not. Some people are Good and some are not. People are different. But just because some people are not Good and Lawful -- it is not reason to stop trying to Good. It is not reason to stop trying to help people be Good."

"But then how do the priests know to get it right, if they can't ask their gods? And talk to summoned outsiders from their gods' planes. Actually wizards can do that too - you don't have any conjurers either?"

Also - "of course we're Good and Lawful for - the sakes of the things themselves - for ourselves and for others - not because other people are. But it's very very hard to do it alone, and to get it right. If you have priests without gods, how can you be sure which ones are Lawful and Good and which are Neutral?" Or, well, Evil, but he hopes those would be obvious.

She was not expecting this cape recruitment to turn into a debate on moral philosophy and how to determine what is good! Especially not with someone who is apparently a die-hard theist.

"Yes, knowing Good is hard," Dragon agrees. "Which is why we don't do it alone. We listen to other people, and we think about what Good means. We are careful, and ... we try to be kind."

She purses her lips, trying to think how to explain with her limited words.

"And ... we teach small people that they don't know, not for certain. And that we don't know either. That anyone who says they know the one true Good is lying. That the small people must try to know Good themselves, and think about what they do, and about why it would be Good or not-Good."

It's an alluring thought, but Ahmose isn't convinced it would work well. "The Judge isn't human. She thinks some things are Good and Evil and it's not obvious why, like that killing yourself is Evil. And - most people aren't clearly one thing or the other, they make many small decisions that sum up, and actions and intentions and outcomes all matter in some way. It's just so much easier to have spells that estimate someone's judgement, and scry people in afterlives and publish statistically representative population studies of that like our government does."

"I can't really imagine living in - uncertainty, without that, but not all countries in Golarion do it either. If you remember the principles, and everyone tries to be Lawful, and Good or at least Neutral, then I guess that's the best you can do."

"Actually, I'm very surprised that wizards haven't replicated more cleric spells in your world by now! On Golarion, many wizard spells were invented by copying cleric spells. Our wizards can do almost everything clerics can, it's just much more expensive for some things, like healing and raising the dead. But they can definitely summon outsiders and scry the afterlives, don't wizards here know how to do that?" Maybe their wizards publish and cooperate even less than those on Golarion do.

Dragon tilts her head. She is fairly sure that either she's misunderstanding him or he's crazy.

"You said several words that I don't know yet," she tells him. "What is a Judge, and why would she say what is Good and Evil? What is a spell, scrying, and wizard?"

"Afterlives is -- a place you go after living? Some people think there are afterlives, but like gods there is no sign of them. I think people just ... stop, when they are done living."

"When people die, everything they did is judged by a goddess called Pharasma. She decides if she thinks they sum up to Good or Evil, Law or Chaos, and she sends them to the right afterlife. The nine afterlives are the Outer Planes."

"Spells are - like this?" He demonstrates Light, and the laundry spell. "Wizards are people who study magic and use spells without getting them from the gods like clerics do. You can't not have wizards, you're clearly an advanced civilization!"

Dragon runs a quick search against existing mythologies and comes up empty, but she was somewhat expecting that by this point.

"Some people can do things like that — I can make artifacts, like the phone — but studying doesn't get you magic, because it works differently for every person. And we have people who can grant magic to others, but they're not gods, just people," she explains. "And magic is new. Nobody has had magic before fifty years. People don't need magic to be advanced, not when they work together."

She shakes her head.

"I want to talk more about this, but is it okay to bring you to the government building? It is where the government magic people are. My friend Armsmaster can look at you with his artifacts and maybe learn more."

"I suppose arcane magic must have been invented at some point, but - fifty years ago? Who invented it here?" Can people here actually talk to the actual inventor of arcane magic, that would be so amazingly cool. "It doesn't sound like wizard magic, though. Anyone can learn wizard magic if they're smart enough, it's estimated maybe half of all people are."

"...if the law says I can leave again later if I want to, and I'm not - promising you and him anything yet, in return for your time and effort? Then yes." Ahmose is very confused about as many as several things, and consulting with local experts can only help. "Do you want to tell me where to go, or do you have a teleport or something?" Teleports are expensive, but she did say bring you. "Or - do you want me to open a bigger portal, so your suit of armor can come through?"

"As long as you don't," she begins, and then searches for a word. "Break the law, you can leave later. The law is big, but if you don't touch people, take things, or look in secret places without asking, you won't break it. And you can ask if you don't know for certain."

"If you like it better, you can portal," she continues. "The government building is in the middle of the water at the city north of you. If you not like to portal, I can send a ... I don't know the word. A sky boat, to take you."

"Magic here was not invented," she responds to the first part of his comment. "It just started being here, no person knows how. And only very rare people have it -- one person in thousands. Can you teach people to portal?"

He'll agree to not do those things! Except secret places, how can he tell if a place is secret before he looks in it? He can follow signs that say not to go somewhere or open something, but he can't read the local language. Or he can only go to rooms they tell him are fine, how about that.

"Portaling is fine! It would be interesting to see the sky boat, but maybe I can ask to see it later? Should I go now?"

"We call people who get magic without studying it, and are not clerics, and can use it without understanding how it works, sorcerers. There are far far fewer of them than clerics of wizards, I don't know how many but certainly not one in a few thousands. Maybe one in many tens of thousands? I don't think I can teach people to portal if they're not wizards." He also doesn't particularly want to, since he doesn't know enough to negotiate being paid properly and he doesn't know what they'd use them for, but them not being able to learn is a much better excuse.

"Sorcerer spells - can be big and complex, but I've never heard of sorcerer artificers, I thought to enchant items you had to understand what you're doing, it's not just casting a spell to make a magic item." But, well, since they can do it, he's hardly going to argue with reality.

"I can show you the sky boat later," she agrees. "I will tell the government building you are opening a portal. Open it on the top of the building. There will be a person to hello you."

She purses her lips, thinking of how to put this.

"My magic is, I know how to build artifacts out of very small parts. I know what parts do. But other people who look at my artifacts, they can't know them. I try to tell them what all the parts do, they still don't know them. Other people put my parts together, they don't make an artifact. But I know all the parts. I don't know why other people don't know when I tell them."

"My friend Armsmaster, he has magic like mine. I know some of his parts, and he knows some of mine. We can work together to make an artifact, better than on our own. But some of his parts, he tries to tell me and I don't know them."

His excuse of not being able to teach people how to make portals is very convenient; it suggests that perhaps he is bluffing about anyone being able to become 'wizards'. She isn't sure whether to press it, but he's been perfectly cooperative so far.

"How does a person become a wizard?" she asks. "Can I try a thing to see if I am the half of people who can?"

"I can teach you the spellform for Light!" It's the one thing he brought home from Sothis that was purely for himself, something he did because he wanted to and not simply to improve his chances of making a better portal spell. He bought a scroll and learned to read it and he reads it in bed every night, before he goes to sleep, even though he knows it by heart now. He really really wants to start casting cantrips as a proper wizard, but he couldn't justify the price of a spellbook. Next time...

"That would take some time" (an understatement, some people take months to learn it) "so let's go to the government place first."

Ahmose chains little spy-portals until he can see the government building's roof clearly. It's surrounded by a shimmering sphere that screams magic. His portals go through fine, though. He takes the illusion-device, opens a bigger portal, and steps through to the roof.

The roof is mostly covered in dark stone, with a large encircled glyph painted in white near the center. There are a few small structures across the roof, a few of which are making humming noises.

A man in a dark uniform is standing on the roof to meet him. His uniform has various pockets, and a belt with several pouches. When he sees Ahmose arrive, he takes a small object from its place on his chest and speaks into it for a moment. Then he smiles at Ahmose and walks over a door. He taps a item from his belt against a black box beside the door, which beeps, and then he opens the door and gestures invitingly for Ahmose to enter the building with him.

Oh right, they won't understand him. (Again.) It's amazing how quickly one can grow used to being able to talk to people and forget that languages are actually very hard to learn, much more so than a third-circle spell like Tongues.

"Will you translate for me?" he asks Dragon through her phone (illusion-scrying-mirror-device). "Or teach them my language? It would take me much, much longer to learn one of yours." Can everyone here learn languages as quickly as she can? He assumed she was a powerful wizard capable of great feats of cunning, but perhaps everyone on this world is as good at languages as Golarionites are at magic... no, that would mean half the population couldn't learn to speak - never mind. Maybe they're all very good at languages. He certainly hopes so, anyway.

And he heads into the door indicated. When he nears the guard, he smiles back, nods respectfully, taps himself on the chest and clearly enunciates "Ahmose". Politeness is important for a guest!

"I am unusually good at learning languages," Dragon responds. "I made an artifact that helps me. Yes, I will translate."

Then she says something unintelligible.

The man holds a hand to his chest and says "James Barret".

"Officer Barret says 'Welcome to the building'," she translates. "He will lead you to a room for talking in."

Officer Barret waits for the translation to finish, and then waves Ahmose past him. Behind the door is a small room with a long spiral staircase heading down, and a pair of shiny silver metallic doors. Once Ahmose is in the building, he lets the outer door close and walks over to push a button by the metallic doors.

Oh, a language-learning artifact! That sounds even better than Tongues, people wouldn't need magic if they could just spend a few weeks learning all the languages there are, and of course they wouldn't need to spend a spell slot and be limited to a short time. Probably actually knowing the languages (all at the same time) and being able to compare them gives you a lot of insights - anyway, Ahmose will follow Officer Barret!

Barret waits a short moment, and then the doors open to reveal a small room -- perhaps 5 feet by 5 feet. He beckons Ahmose into the room, and then taps the item from his belt to another black box and pushes another button. Now that Ahmose is closer, he can see that the item on Barret's belt is a small picture of his face with some writing below it.

Once Ahmose has entered the room, the doors close and there's a feeling like the floor is dropping out from beneath them. After a few seconds the feeling goes away, but then it feels as though their weight has increased and they're being pressed into the floor.

Then the silver doors open by themselves to reveal a corridor carpeted in fine beige carpet.

Ahmose knows about lifts as a concept; he saw some used for cargo at the docks in Sothis, and heard that the grander and therefore taller palaces and temples use them for people as well. (He has, in general, heard that such places use servants for a lot of things that ordinary people can do for themselves, in this case walking. The only fancy place he personally visited was the Temple of Nethys and it had no lifts because high-status people teleported or flew around.)

This world has very tall buildings, so it makes sense they'd use lifts. He doesn't know how many floors they just went down, so he can't be sure how long it would take to go up from the street to the roof, but the smoothness and convenience are impressive, like all the local artifice.

The carpet is more of the same; the only reason he can think of to put a carpet in a hallway is to flaunt your wealth (because you can afford servants to constantly clean it, and your shoes too) or power (because you have magic or artifice that keeps it clean even without servants). Flaunting wealth and power suggests that not everyone is as rich and powerful, which - makes sense for a governor's residence, really.

He carefully laundry-spells his boots clean before walking out onto the carpet.

Barret doesn't appear to notice, instead leading him down the corridor, around a corner, and into a large room with a long table surrounded by chairs. There is a stack of cups and an artifact of some kind half full of water in one corner of the room. The far wall is taken up by a large viewing screen, which also shows Dragon's face.

A man in blue metallic armor sits at the table. His armor is retracted back from his hands, allowing him to fiddle with an artifact which is opened on a tray in front of him. His helmet comes down to just below his nose, leaving his eyes covered but his mouth (and neatly trimmed beard) visible.

"Thank you for coming in to talk with us, Ahmose," Dragon says from the screen, the phone in his hand going blanks.

She says something to Officer Barret, who nods to her and moves to stand outside the door.

"This is my friend Armsmaster," she continues. "There's an artifact in his helmet that will let me give him translations, so you can just talk normally."

Armsmaster begins to move his mouth, but the motion is silent. A moment later a rough male voice issues from his helmet, out of sync with his words.

"It is good to meet you, Ahmose. Welcome to the PRT ENE. Do you want some water?"

Why is he wearing a helmet that doesn't cover his chin? Normally Ahmose would think "it's magic" and leave it at that, but isn't these people's magic supposed to be only fifty years old and not full of mysterious ancient artifacts? What happens if someone hits him on the chin? Well, presumably it's a magic helmet and it still protects him, but - alright, Ahmose is going to admit he does not understand the constraints of armor enchantments (not even on Golarion) and focus on the actual conversation. At least it's clear why he's wearing a helmet at all; it's translating for him.

He isn't thirsty, but catches himself in time to say - "yes, thank you." Politeness! Progress!

Armsmaster stands and takes two cups from the stack in the corner, filling them both with water. He returns to the table and sets one down in front of Ahmose, before carefully setting the other to the side of his project where he won't knock it over. Upon closer inspection, the cup appears to be made out of waxed paper. He resumes fiddling with the device in front of him.

"The PRT ENE can always use more law-abiding magic users," he continues. "We want to offer you help getting settled to our world, help potentially returning to your own world, money, artifacts, and support in exchange for your help protecting people from Evil magic users and monsters. But Dragon thinks that you will probably have many questions before you can decide. What can we tell you or help with to help you feel comfortable making that decision?"

"I can also have some food brought up," Dragon chimes in. "If you've been in the woods since yesterday, I think you are hungry."

Alright, Ahmose gives up, he has no idea what waxed paper cups are supposed to be flaunting. He's going to leave all that to more splendid people and just focus on what's actually important here, i.e. trading for their help to get him home and for his accommodations in the meantime.

Armsmaster's request is not unexpected! It's deeply terrifying, but Ahmose has been trying to prepare mentally for this possibility. He tried not to think about the encounter in which he cut off a monster's foot, because it was distressing and hopefully useless to think about, but realistically it was always going to come up and so now of course they want him to do it again.

"I would appreciate some food," he says on autopilot. "And I can help you - move people around?"

This is why he was so afraid of selling his portals back home. They were valuable enough for the true wizards to get involved, and when they replicated his spell it would be out of his hands. He could sell transportation and irrigation and a year later everyone would be using his spell to kill people. This world has no wizards - supposedly - but he's not sure what that implies.

"Do you think you would be able to copy my portals and use them yourself?" he asks. "Not just you personally, but anyone working with you, or someone else who sees me use them." He's sure they will try, and he's already using portals openly so maybe it's too late, but as long as they're still negotiating for it he might as well ask.

The question he really needs answered before accepting the offer is "how can I trust your word not to copy my spell if you don't know about Law?" but just asking that is probably poor negotiation tactics (and impolite). Besides, what if an Evil wizard does it? Ahmose doesn't want to go anywhere near Evil wizards but that won't stop them from coming after him.

He reminds himself he doesn't have to make a deal with them. He can make his own planar portals, so he can try going home the way he got here. Except no, if he can't target them he won't be any luckier the second time. But he can - go to another plane, Axis or Heaven or another Good afterlife, and trade with them or just ask for help? It's something to try, certainly, he just needs to avoid stupidly falling into the river this time.

Armsmaster frowns.

"While there are magic users who have the ability to copy other people's magic, they are very rare," he answers. "And their powers usually have strict limits. The group that would be most able to do something like that would be the Yangban. Dragon tells me that she intercepted you just outside the northern border of their territory, actually."

He pauses for a moment, his screwdriver hovering over the device he's working on.

"And while I would like to examine your magic, to see if I can get any ideas of how it brought you here, I have not previously been able to entirely duplicate anyone else's magic. I have only been able to get inspirations for some related artifacts. Does that answer your question?"

He folds the device up, making a few small adjustments as it clicks together, until he is left with a small lumpy shape on a short loop of flesh-tone wire.

That would be very convenient if true - but - "if a few wizards have learned to copy other people's spells, does that mean they're the most powerful ones, because they know many spells?" In a world where spells aren't widely shared or sold, one's library might be more important than one's spell circles.

"I think my spell could be very dangerous in the wrong hands, and we should be very careful the wrong people can't see or study it. That makes sense in my world. I don't know if it does in yours, but if there are some wizards here who can copy spells, that seems" - frightening - "important." This might also be a useful argument for not using his spell too much, or near Evil mages at all if he can help it.

"How exactly would you want me to use my portals, to help you fight the Evil mages and monsters?" This is the one million pounds question.

"I think there may be a translation issue," Dragon interjects. "I have 'wizard' and 'magic user' down as meaning two different things. You said that being a 'wizard' is learnable. Our kind of magic user can't learn to do new things. They can learn to use what they have better, but not learn to use someone else's magic just by seeing it. The Yangban have a magic user who can copy someone's magic across a group of people, which they use to share abilities."

"And even then, they aren't the strongest," Armsmaster continues. "That would be the Triumvirate, the leaders of our organization of magic users. Some people's magic is just much more effective than others."

He folds his hands in front of him.

"The primary thing we would want you for would be to transport large groups of magic users to and from battles with the monsters that are trying to destroy civilization. Other than that, your help with rapid deployment around the city would make us much more efficient. Direct combat would not be required, although clearly your portals are useful for that and would make you one of the more dangerous magic users in the city." 

Aaaaah. Finally talking about it is - maybe no more stressful than constantly fantasizing about it? But still, aaaaaah!

Obviously he'll refuse direct combat, but - 

He made that deicision long ago, but it was when he thought his spell would be copied by others who would use it in direct combat and he would bear the moral weight of that and not even see any heroic combat.

When Ahmose was a little boy, he dreamed of heroically fighting monsters, as little boys do. And then he grew up and discovered that fighting people (evil! mages!) is (probably!) a really! bad! idea! but he still has to remind himself about it occasionally. Inside of every sane adult wizard is a crazy naive little boy who thinks he'll grow up to take on Geb. (And win and be feted and adored, la la la la la, he's not listening.)

Ahmose's mantra, which he thinks has served him admirably well since he discovered the portal spell and cut off a crocodile's tail in a spirit of scientific inquiry (and spent an hour shaking) and did NOT immediately start stealthily killing evil Gebite mages through tiny portals - ahem. Ahmose's mantra, which he repeats to himself now, is:

Killing is not a substitute for Splendor.

Because, really, would he want it to be? (Remember: evil! mages!) No? Good.

He refocuses back on Armsmaster. His habit of tinkering with something to keep his hands busy and to avoid eye contact - actually, his magic helmet that gives him an excuse to do that - are so relatable. His own hands always fidget in the laundry-spell pattern when he loses focus.

"I can help you with transport. I would want to hear why" - not 'why you're fighting the monsters that want to destroy civilization', obviously, that sounds sort of like the Worldwound, and he'd heard they were using teleports for supply so it makes sense he could help there, but there was a fight earlier in the city itself, so - "why you're fighting in the city? I mean - who's fighting you, and why, and when is it going to be fixed, and - why neither side has won yet, I guess?"

"And about the monsters that are trying to end civilization, we have something like that ourselves and I don't need any persuasion to help you fight them but I guess I'd like to know more about them. Ours come from a rift to the Abyss - the Chaotic Evil afterlife Outer Plane - so maybe it's... a clue to how to reach other worlds from here?" He ends the sentence a lot less confidently than he started it, because while technically going through a planar rift would let him open a planar portal back to Golarion, he does not want to go through a planar rift into the Abyss. (Now that he thinks about it, he also really hopes they don't want him to transport their troops there!!)

And - "I want the things you listed, obviously. I would like to" - convince you to help me get home quickly, and not keep me here because I'm useful - "um. I think if you make contact with my world, and maybe other worlds and planes, that could be enormously useful to everyone involved? Trade between worlds is probably very very profitable, each side has not just things but technology the others don't, like magic and - like clerics! So - maybe you should think of this as very important for you to do quickly? And not, um, just as helping me personally."

"Also, if it's possible, I'd like a way to talk to other people. Who are not artificers or wearing magic armor, I mean. I don't know if it's possible, because Dragon actually learned my language, but if there's someone who could make a translation" spell "artifact, I would be very grateful. ...And of course I'll try to learn the language if I have enough time here," he really hopes he won't, "but it will probably, um. Take me a long time." Because he isn't Real Wizard levels of cunning, like Dragon obviously is.

Armsmaster nods, and hands him the device that he finished assembling a moment ago.

"I anticipated that you would need a translation artifact, and prepared one myself. It goes in your ear, with the loop around your earlobe, so it shouldn't fall off. It is yours as a gesture of good will."

Also it contains a tracking device, so that they don't need to rely on Dragon's jurry-rigged graviton field stress meter if the powerful young mover decides to go gallivanting to the other side of the world again.

Armsmaster reaches into a pocket built into the side of his armor and pulls up a thin, rolled up mat with a cord trailing from it.

"The power it uses should last three days between being refilled, but just to be safe, you should probably refill it while you sleep by putting it on this mat and plugging the cord into an electrical outlet."

He pauses for a moment. "Ah, Dragon says she hasn't translated 'electricity' yet. You should plug this cord into one of the holes in the wall that have a matching shape in order to get the power the artifact uses."

He carefully folds his hands again.

"As for explaining the gang presence in the city and the Endbringers, I can certainly do that. I will start with the Endbringers, which are a larger problem. If you have any information on where they come from, that could be very helpful, but I think they are not like your monsters. Dragon, would you --"

Her image disappears from the monitor, replaced by pictures of the three Endbringers captured from their most recent battles.

"These are the three Endbringers. We don't know where they came from or what they want, but every approximately three months, one of them attacks a city and does not stop until the magic users of the world band together to drive them off. Being able to get people there quickly could help save many lives, as could being able to efficiently remove the wounded. How do they compare to your monsters from the Abyss?"

They are incredibly generous!! Maybe it's just - being richer, taking only an hour to make a permanent translation artifact - or maybe it's because they really value his goodwill?

He carefully inserts the device in his ear. He is now wearing a unique magic artifact which means he is Officially A Wizard Adventurer Rich Person - never mind. It's still very cool.

"I am - not at all an expert on the Worldwound," he admits. "It's on another continent and I haven't studied it. People go to fight it from all over the world, and I think the countries next to it have armies there?"

"So - there's a planar rift into the Abyss. Like a very very big, permanent portal that no-one can close. It wasn't always there, it was opened a century ago. And the demons, which live in the Abyss, come through and attack people. There are very many demons, of many kinds, and some of them are very dangerous and only a powerful wizard could fight them, but none of them are so dangerous that all the mages have to band together to fight it. ...although banding together is probably a good idea anyway if you can!"

"The Abyss itself is - one of the nine afterlife planes. After people die they are judged and sent to one according to their alignment. The Abyss is Chaotic Evil, and the people who go there become demons, and become very very chaotic and evil, and then they attack mortals when they can."

"Single huge monsters attacking whole cities, which you can drive off but not kill, is - I know we have stories of them, I think Ulunat was like that? It was a colossal beetle and its carapace is still in Sothis thousands of years later, it covers a big part of the city and protects it from attacks and magic. And there are others, more recent, I could try to recall details but I don't really - know a lot about it. None of them have come to Osirion, not in the past century anyway."

Something else is nagging him. "They attack a city every three months. And - you don't know which city, so you can't prepare to stop them, and have to get there quickly?" And no-one can kill them between attacks, which is - really much more terrifying in its implications.

"My portals only go a mile distant, every few seconds. So I open them in chains - one through the other, two open at once - and it takes me a day to go around the world. I can't take you quickly to a city unless I already have a portal in every city. And it would take me a long time to open so many portals." And he'd need a way to keep track of them, and anyone who found the far end of one could - probably do something through it?

Even if he did it wouldn't leave him enough power to open planar portals; he had to close all his regular ones to open the one that led him here. This is really discouraging; Ahmose really would like to help fighting huge civilization-threatening monsters (from a safe distance), but - not if it means he has to give up on going home!

Armsmaster frowns.

"Hmm. That is unfortunate. It's possible we could find a workaround, however. Even if not, you could still create shifting portals between a remote site and the battlefield, which would help with civilian evacuation and keeping medics and wounded away from the confrontation," he suggests. "Many magics come with restrictions, but they are all still useful in an emergency."

That sounds reasonable! "I'm willing to commit to helping against the city-attacking monsters, and other big emergencies. And - small ones, if they're in this city or somewhere else I already have a portal and can reach in time?" Ahmose does NOT want to imply that 'small' emergencies which are, in fact, still emergencies where people's lives are at risk, are somehow below him and not worth his time. It's just that - he needs time to work on getting home. And maybe for other less important things? All the emergencies in the world sound like a very-full-time job!

"I would still like to understand - why you can't attack the monsters yourselves, when a city isn't at stake and you can prepare? Is it because you can't kill them no matter what, only make them run away, and that's... pretty useless when they're already somewhere you don't care about, isn't it." Immortal monsters are terrifiying! "How do you drive them off, then?"

"Oh! And if you have a different magic that opens a portal, I can open mine through it without going the long way, I don't know if that helps." Are they limited to teleports? "And" - he stops himself before suggesting that whatever these monsters are like, a portal can probably cut through one, and also he has dreamed up this incredible, incredibly untested technique that might keep a monster pinned in place -

Ahmose has a feeling that in his excitement he might be arguing for the wrong side in what is supposed to be a non-Abadaran negotiation. He needs to remember to ask for the things he wants from them, too.

"Can you help me reach my world, and what would that entail? I will be trying myself, too, but - the reason I say 'trying' is that my planar portals are currently... untargeted. Because I can't see where I'm opening them, but I found - a sort of workaround for that, which lets the spell complete - unguided, sort of."

"There have been proposals to attack the monsters in between attacks on cities," Armsmaster agrees. "But the monsters retreat to various difficult-to-reach places between attacks. Behemoth retreats underground, where we can't reach him. Leviathan retreats to the bottom of the ocean, where people would be crushed by the pressure and have difficulty moving even if they could survive there. The Simurgh flies up to orbit. She is theoretically the most accessible, but she has future-telling magic that makes it extremely hard to hit her at long ranges. And up in orbit, she has plenty of room to dodge."

He shakes his head.

"For better or worse, the only time we can fight them is when they come to us. I am working on a magic halberd that I think will be able to hurt them more than we've managed so far, though. Hopefully with enough help, new magic users, and hard work we'll be able to kill them eventually."

"As for sending you home, I want to be clear that I can't promise anything. We haven't seen a magic exactly like yours. But of course every magic user is unique, so that's not surprising. With that said, Dragon and I are very good at what we do. What it would look like is — you would use your magic in one of my scanners, so I can get an idea of what your magic does. Then we would see whether I could build an artifact that can tell how your portals are targeted, or manipulate or strengthen them somehow. What is possible depends on how exactly they work."

He spreads his hands.

"Even if I can't do anything to get you home directly, I could provide you with a golem to enter untargeted portals and tell you about what's on the other side. That's straightforward. So I really do think we can help each other a great deal."

That does sound very hard to deal with! These monsters seem almost - themed, are they the elemental equivalents of demon lords or something and where is the Monster of Fire - never mind, he's sure these people know all that can be learned about them already and don't need to waste time with his uninformed speculation.

Ahmose almost suggests that maybe the Monster of Air, the Simurgh, can't dodge a portal slicing it in two even if it foresees it's coming, because portals as far as he knows open instantaneously. Then he realizes that the other thing you can do if you see a portal coming, after you've maybe dodged it, is reach back through it and twist the head off the idiot wizard who just opened it.

...he'll keep his mouth firmly shut. Monster-baiting should be left to professionals! These people don't even have insurance!!

(But how can Armsmaster hit it with a magic halberd if it just dodges everything - no stop that!)

Ahem.

Scouting portals without going through himself and getting trapped on the far side again sounds like a wonderful idea! This is - basically all he wants, right, at least in the near term.

He still feels that he should ask a million more questions and get an extremely detailed contract and then pay a local professional to read that contract for him. Except he doesn't know which local people to trust, just like he can't just trust Dragon and Armsmaster. And he doesn't know what terrible consequences the contract should prevent, or for that matter what penalties to stipulate or who to name arbiter.

Ultimately there are two kinds of deals. Ones made with trustworthy people - anyone Good or Abadaran, basically - where you can pay them to look out for your interests, even if you're not sure what your own interests are, because everyone wants to do well by everyone else. And all the other ones, where you can try to outsmart the other side - which he couldn't do even at home, and it would be ridiculous to try here - or, well, you can just give up.

Ahmose really really doesn't want to try to outsmart an alien. Not least because he's very certain he'll fail! But he suspects he's not allowed to to just give up and give portals to the first people he talks to on an alien world, about whom he knows for certain only that they asked nicely.

What are his options?

He can try to deal with someone else, or get someone else's opinion of Armsmaster. But how can he learn to trust someone else, if he can't trust Armsmaster (and Dragon)? They are clearly powerful, plausibly part of the local government (or other power structure), polite and friendly, and have very useful abilities; they put some effort into tracking him and extending an invitation, and even gifted him with a translation artifact. It seems like a hard to beat combination. 

Unless they're lying, and there are clerics on this world who could help him with more familiar magic and with contacting Golarion or the afterlives. But he couldn't find any temples. Anyway, he can keep looking and talking to people, even if he agrees to this deal.

Maybe he should focus on what, exactly, the risks are if they don't deal with him fairly.

If they can duplicate his portal-spell after all (whether they know it yet or not), and use it without his permission, then - they can probably enchant or dominate him and force his cooperation so they can observe his spell in Armsmaster's device. The same if he tries to walk away without making a deal at all.

If they can't duplicate his spell, but want to use it in ways he won't endorse with full knowledge, then - again, they can enchant or hurt him to force his cooperation. But then it won't matter if he agreed to a deal or not. 

Did he just prove that he should always make deals as if his counterparty is fair, because if they're not then it doesn't matter what he agrees to, as long as the deal has a clause saying "void if you turn out to be unfair"? Maybe! Who knows! God, he's only been away from Osirion for a day and he's already missing the one thing that made it a halfway decent place to live in.

"I provisionally agree." He thinks that's the right word? He hasn't ever actually worked for someone before! "We should draft the contract. But there's so much I don't know about this world, so, um, I'd like it to be for a short period at first - like a few months - so I can renegotiate at the end of the period with more knowledge. And also in case we make contact with my world and I want to stop working for you and go home."

Armsmaster nods. "We're glad to have you provisionally onboard. Since we contract with a lot of different magic users, we have a department of law-workers who help with drawing things up. I can send for one who will tailor one of our standard contracts with your ..."

His armor beeps.

"Excuse me, I have to go," he says, standing quickly. "Dragon, will you ...?"

"Yes, of course," she agrees. Armsmaster is already stepping out the conference door.

"I've paged Mr. O'Brien to come up and talk about the contract with you," she tells Ahmose. "He should be here in a few minutes. In the meantime, I can answer any additional questions you have."

She sees how overwhelmed Ahmose looks, and adopts a gentler tone.

"Or we can just wait in silence for a few minutes and give you time to think," she offers. "I know things have been happening pretty fast."

On the one hand, yes, she is absolutely right! On the other hand, Ahmose isn't sure he'll be any calmer if he's left alone with his thoughts right now. ...wait, there actually is something he can maybe do about that. "Could I have something to eat? And maybe you could tell me about things I will definitely need to know, but that" - aren't terribly important, but that would be rude to ask for - "that I don't need to make any decisions about? Such as - what smaller problems do you have, short of the city-threatening monsters? What happened with the people who were fighting earlier?" (Oops, that is not a calming-down topic, but he can't unask it, can he.)

"Certainly," she agrees. "I can ask Mr. O'Brien to bring something from the kitchen, since it's on his way."

She replaces her image with a picture of the evil magic users he fought earlier being restrained and loaded into a van.

"With your assistance, the Wards managed to capture the Undersiders with no casualties themselves. They're currently awaiting trial," she explains, before switching back to her normal avatar.

"As for things you will definitely need to know ..."

She has her avatar adopt a thinking expression for a moment.

"You should probably know a little bit about how the local countries are organized. How they select their leaders, how laws are made and enforced, and so on. Does that sound like the right kind of thing?"

Oh! Oh. Good. That is good, isn't it?

"Yes, please. That sounds useful."

She shows a map of North America, with Brockton Bay highlighted.

"This region up North is Canada, the country where I live. This region below it is the United States. Canada and the U.S. are long-time allies — we actually share the PRT, the organization that handles magic users for our governments. I'll focus on the U.S. for now, because that's where you are."

She draws state (and province) lines on the map.

"The U.S. is made up of many states. It originally started as an alliance of states — hence the name — but the federal government has slowly gained power over time. Laws vary from state to state, but people are permitted to travel freely between states, and contracts made in one state are still enforceable in other states. Each state has its own police force and government, but the whole U.S. shares a military, and various other central services."

"Each state, and the U.S. as a whole, use a form of government called a representative democracy. This means that every once in a while — usually every two, four, or six years, depending on the exact part of the government — every adult in the country is given the opportunity to say who they want as their representative in government. Whichever representative from a given district gets the most support wins."

"The different parts of government are the Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary. Congress is in charge of making the laws, and everyone can select representatives for it. The executive branch is headed by the President, who people choose, but the President is in charge of appointing the other members of the branch. The executive branch is in charge of enforcing the laws. The judiciary is not chosen by the people — to prevent the appearance of being swayed by anything other than the law. Instead, they are appointed by the President, but the Congress must agree with the appointment. Judges are in charge of arbitrating disputes about what the law, or a contract, says."

She pauses and smiles at him.

"Does that make sense so far? Canada does it a little differently, so I fully recognize that the U.S. has a strange-looking system from the outside."

This is unsurprisingly very complex! Governance is very hard even if everything goes well and everyone is competent and well-meaning. The wisest people in Sothis are in charge of making laws, they have Abadar to keep them scrupulously honest, and they are still - very very far from perfect.

"I have so many questions but - I know people spend years studying how to govern, I should just - ask about the simplest things that everyone needs to know. The things I might encounter."

Like the police, people who go catch thieves and other criminals on behalf of society-at-general, which is such a brilliant Lawful innovation! It seems obvious that everyone would want to pay into an insurance fund to run it; Ahmose isn't sure why they don't have it in Sothis.

"How do people learn what the law says so they can follow it? Who is trusted to explain the law and to say if something would be legal and what a contract means, other than judges? Or do people pay judges to consult them? What are the most common crimes - or, well, the ones I might need to know about, not tax fraud - what are common punishments, how much crime is there really? What are - the general principles that apply to all laws, like that meaning to do harm is worse than accidentally doing harm?" Ahmose can go on in this vein for a while but valiantly tries to remember to let Dragon answer.

"Those are all great questions! Let me see ..."

She taps her finger on her chin.

"Most people learn what laws exist just by growing up, and learning over time. But there are study guides for people moving to the country for the first time, and dedicated schools for people who want to study the law as a profession. People who do that are called 'lawyers' — I previously translated that as 'law-worker'. There is an organization called the 'bar' that is in charge of certifying whether someone can be a lawyer. They give a law license to anyone who passes a difficult examination to prove they know the law well, and then that license will be revoked if the lawyer breaks the bar's standards. So a lawyer with a law license can be trusted to do certain things that the bar monitors."

"For example, lawyers are not allowed to tell you anything you say in confidence to them to anyone else — except in some very narrow cases, such as a child being in imminent danger. So if you were concerned that something you did might have been illegal, you can ask a lawyer. And they would be able to give you advice, but not share any evidence about what you did with anyone else. If they did, the bar would revoke their license and they wouldn't be allowed to be a lawyer any more."

"Some of these rules only apply if you're paying the lawyer, or they agree to be your lawyer. The PRT's lawyer, Mr. O'Brien, isn't allowed to misrepresent what the law is, but he is allowed to share anything you say during contract negotiations with the rest of the PRT, because the PRT is paying him, not you. Usually, you would work through the first draft of the contract with him, and then he would give you a copy. You would take that copy and pay your own lawyer to examine it and make sure it is in your interests. If you want to wait and hire your own lawyer before talking to Mr. O'Brien, that's fine too. But I expect you to have so many general things to work out that it's worth talking to Mr. O'Brien on your own, just to hammer down the general details of the agreement."

She pauses and has her avatar take a sip of water.

"As for your other questions — I'm not really sure to convey the level of crime. Crimes are committed every day, but most people don't expect to have a crime happen to them in any given year? Some of the most common crimes are muggings, and it's wise to be careful when walking alone in dangerous areas. It also varies a lot depending on where you are — some cities are safer than others, and the crimes committed in cities are fairly different than the ones committed in the countryside."

"As for general principles — there are a lot of them. When a judge makes a decision using a general principle, they write it up and it becomes part of the history of laws that future judges use to make decisions. Some of the most important to you are: Many things which are normally forbidden are permitted in the course of saving a life or preventing a greater harm. For example, it's normally illegal to punch people. But if you punch someone in order to prevent them from killing you or someone else, that's permitted. You might still need to prove to a judge that they were trying to kill someone, but if they were, punching them isn't a crime. Likewise, it's normally illegal to break into a building you don't own. But if you do it to pull someone out of a fire, that's allowed."

"Another general principle is, as you point out, intent. It is more serious to deliberately plan to do harm than to do it unplanned, which is in turn more serious than doing it because you were out of your right mind or by accident. Accidentally breaking the law is still a crime, but the punishment might be lighter if you can prove that you didn't mean to."

"The last point which I think is likely to be important to you is that we have an adversarial justice system — when a crime is committed, the judge doesn't do the investigation and then hand down a ruling. Instead, both sides are given a chance to find evidence and question witnesses. Then they publicly present their evidence to a judge, and make an argument for why the accused is or is not guilty. The judge rules on what the law says and how it applies to the situation. For small crimes, they hand down the judgement directly. For large crimes, a panel of members of the public decide which argument is more correct. You are technically allowed to make your own argument, but everyone has the right to have a lawyer help assemble and present their argument. If someone can't pay, the government pays for a lawyer for them," Dragon explains.

"The purpose of doing it like that is to prevent judges from having too much power to decide things unilaterally. By having both sides represented by a skilled professional, it is more likely that we'll be able to figure out the truth. By doing the whole process in public, it becomes harder to conceal bias or corruption. By involving regular people in deciding the largest matters, there's an opportunity for common sense to deal with complicated cases instead of rigidly applying laws to a situation that might not have been considered. It's not a perfect system, but it does result in better outcomes than many other systems."

That sounds so nice and Lawful! Contracts and licenses and professional obligations. They don't have a god to decleric Law-breakers but they coordinate to do it themselves!! Ahmose is ashamed of himself for assuming they must be less advanced than Osirion, in some ways, just because they don't have Abadar.

Just look at their technological achievements! A wiser person than Ahmose would have taken one look at their huge towers, built without magic out of stone and steel, and immediately deduced they must have lawyers.

To consult a lawyer he'll need to pay them, by getting a bank loan against his expected future salary from the PRT, but he's now much more confident that this place also has banks that make loans.

"I don't understand about - regular people deciding whose argument is more correct in court. If you have trained lawyers and judges, who are also judged by their peers, what's better than that - I think it might not have translated correctly, who are these 'regular' people?"

"I should make sure to emphasize that not all cases go before a jury — a group of regular people. Most cases are decided by a judge. Jury trials are reserved for the most complicated, serious, or sensitive crimes," Dragon begins.

"But for those crimes, a jury really is just regular people. We don't use actual lots anymore, but we do the equivalent of drawing lots from the whole adult population, to select twelve people to serve on the jury. There are a few different justifications for doing this. The most important one, in my opinion, is to prevent there from being a ruling class separate from the average people. Judges are appointed to their position by the leader of the executive branch. In a large country, what do you think people's reaction would be if the distant leader — who only some of the people wanted in power — appointed a judge from the big city, where the best law-schools are, who ended up sentencing a popular local person to death?"

She shakes her head.

"In a system like that, people might loose respect for the law, or feel as though it wasn't really fair. So instead, twelve random members of the community are chosen. Normal, everyday people. The lawyers present the evidence on both sides, walking them through what they've been able to discover about what happened. The judge explains at each step what the law is, and why it is that way. And then the jury deliberates, and talks it over until they can come to a decision. It's not always perfect — there have been cases where the jury makes a decision which is, with the benefit of hindsight and what we learn later, clearly wrong — but it involves people directly in the justice that applies to them."

"It means that when you do something, you know you won't be judged for it by a distant figure you have little in common with — you'll be judged for it by the people you live near and interact with every day. This provides a very important property to the law: predictability. Earlier, I called this common sense. What it means is, if you encounter some weird corner case of the law where you don't know what the law is, or maybe no law has been written for that specific case, you can still make a good guess at how it would come out at trial, just by knowing how the people around you would react. And this isn't always perfect — you should probably consult a lawyer if you know you're going to be getting into a strange situation like that — but it's much better than forcing people to memorize all of the laws, having them be too afraid to act, or letting there be exceptions to the law."

A short man in a suit knocks at the conference room door, and then pushes it open as Dragon finishes her explanation.

"Doing my job for me, are you?" he jokes. He smiles widely as he turns to face Ahmose. "Hello, I'm Daniel O'Brien. I work for the PRT contracts department."

He holds out a bundle wrapped in wax paper. "I brought you a hamburger from the cafeteria. I didn't know if you're lactose intolerant, so I left off the cheese. But there's some ketchup packets in there if you want."

Food, what food, there is an argument here. Which makes no sense. Ahmose doesn't think he's more cunning (let alone wiser) than a whole alien civilization, but - there's a kind of makes-no-sense that leads him to assume he doesn't understand something about the situation. And there's another kind, where one sentence directly contradicts another and leads him to assume he doesn't understand the words.

Usually this happens when people play complex games of splendor where the meanings of words shift beyond what he can follow, but - surely that can't be the case for a basic explanation of how law works in a foreign country? Nobody is cruel enough to run a court system on splendour instead of cunning and wisdom.

He'd suspect Dragon of messing with him not explaining in the simplest, most direct way she can. But now O'Brien is here, and he's not allowed to misrepresent the law, so.

"You're worried that judges are sometimes wrong, or corrupt, or that the common people don't understand or trust their judgements. That makes sense. But if you let common people judge instead, isn't that even worse? Isn't the whole point of selecting, training, and monitoring judges to make them better than - random people who don't even have to fear losing their jobs if they make a wrong judgement? If the random people are better, why do you have judges at all?"

"If someone is popular in a city, random people from that city aren't going to convict him. That's what being popular means. Or even just rich and powerful, so people seek his favor. Or if someone is hated locally, or is an enemy of powerful people, he'll be convicted no matter what. A judge from the capital who answers only to the ruler can afford to be impartial and judge fairly. In Osirion, when powerful locals are suspected or accused, the capital sends an investigator and a judge, and this helps people trust the law. I don't understand how it could work the other way around."

"You get predictability when judges educated in the same school and held to the same standard judge everyone, not when every town chooses men by lot to judge every case to its local standards."

Daniel blinks.

"Well, that's quite a topic to walk in on," he says, moving to sit on the other side of the table from Ahmose. "You were talking about ... jury trials?"

Dragon nods.

Daniel folds his hands in front of him and adopts an earnest expression. He is, in fact, fairly Splended. His voice is smooth and easy to listen to.

"I'm not sure what Dragon has told you so far," he begins. "But in my view, having only a jury would be worse. That would be no better than mob justice. The reason to prefer jury trials is because having both a Judge and a jury lets each one cover the faults in the other."

He purses his lips and looks thoughtful.

"Did Dragon explain to you that we have an adversarial justice system? The prosecution and the defense both work for their side? I think a lot of things in our government are like that. A man who is not opposed may do anything he likes, regardless of the truth. But when there are two equal opposing forces, it is truth that tips the balance in favor of one or the other. The jury makes the final determination of guilt or innocence, but it is the Judge who oversees the whole process. The Judge instructs the jury on the law, but they also prevent the prosecution and defense from making any unlawful arguments, and ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak. And if things are obviously not being done according to the law — such as the jury obviously hating the defendant — they can declare a mistrial, and stop the whole thing."

He smiles and shakes his head.

"I could go into a lot more detail on the process of jury trials, if you wanted, but it's unlikely to be relevant to you. The vast majority of crimes or civil cases are resolved well before they reach trial. It's quite common for the evidence to be so overwhelming that the guilty party agrees they have no possible way to win, and to avoid the whole thing in exchange for a lighter sentence. For contracts, things only get that far if mediation has failed, and even then they don't usually warrant a jury."

He sets a briefcase on the table, and opens it to reveal assorted papers. He takes out a notebook and pen, and lays it on the table in front of him.

"Anyway, it's certainly true that jury trials are not the only approach. Other countries have other systems. You could argue that the fact that the United States uses jury trials is a historical accident dating back to early Viking influences on English common law. But it's what we have, and it works well enough that there have been no serious attempts to change it for a few hundred years."

"It's good that there's a judge overseeing the jury, but I still don't understand how the jury helps anything. If the judge privately disagrees with the jury's verdict, but not in a way that legally lets him overturn it, is the judge actually wrong most of the time?"

"And - the vast majority of people... Admit their guilt, in exchange for lighter sentences? The vast majority of people who are accused are guilty? I don't understand, that can't be what you meant." Maybe the vast majority of accused people are either clearly guilty or clearly innocent but - that doesn't really sound much more plausible!

Daniel pinches the bridge of his nose.

"There's two reasons for that," he explains. "One is that in the last several decades, we've become increasingly good at figuring out crimes. The proliferation of security cameras alone means that we often have actual pictures of people in the act of committing a crime. That's before you add things like fingerprinting and DNA evidence, which make committing a crime without leaving evidence of your identity behind much harder. People mostly don't plan crimes. Anyone who could successfully plan a crime could just as easily figure out a way to make more in expectation legally. So most crimes are committed by people who are some combination of desperate, stupid, or acting on impulse, none of which are conducive to not getting caught."

"The second reason is that our system is pretty heavily weighted in favor of finding people innocent. When the United States was founded, one of our founding ideals was that it is better for several guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to be sentenced to death. That's why the standard for whether a jury can find someone guilty is 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Meaning that someone is only found guilty if there's no way a reasonable person could doubt their guilt. But prosecutors know that, so they only bother bringing charges against people who they are reasonably confident they can get a conviction for. Bringing a case to trial is expensive. "

He leans back in his chair.

"It's different for civil cases — in those cases, it's not the government bringing the case, and the required standard of evidence is different. For contract law, the standard of evidence in most cases is 'more likely than not', which means a lot more cases end up actually going to trial, proportionally."

He gives Ahmose a considering look for a moment.

"Look, I'm not going to pretend that our system is perfect. There are always people advocating to change the justice system. Often in opposing directions. But what we have is better than the previous systems. Before the United States was independent, this area was a colony of Great Britain. About a hundred years before the U.S. declared independence, the justice system worked like this: if you saw someone committing a crime, you yelled at the top of your lungs, and then everyone within earshot would come and help you drag the criminal in front of a Judge. The Judge would listen to everyone's arguments, and then sentence the criminal — often without allowing them to speak in their defense, and often knowing that if they displeased the crowd they could be lynched as easily as the criminal could be."

"So when you are judging how effective and fair our justice system is, compare it to that. Life is immeasurably safer now than it was then. We have actual police, and actual courts, and a justice system that is accountable, and that makes all its decisions in public. You're wondering how safe our system is, and how you can trust it? Well, when we're done here, you can go to the public library down the street, and you can look up the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program. A public database that anyone can check, which details what crimes are most common, where they're committed, and what the eventual outcomes are. If you have questions about a case, you can go look up the transcript, and read exactly what was said during the trial."

"Anyone can do that," he emphasizes, spreading his hands as though to gesture at an invisible crowd. "If our justice system were consistently unfair in a way that people disapproved of, do you know how you'd be able to tell? Well, firstly the politicians who let it happen wouldn't be reelected. But if that didn't fix it for some reason? There would be parades in the street, and people demanding change. That has happened, many times, and it has resulted in a lot of changes and embellishments to our system over time."

"Do juries sometimes reach the wrong conclusion, or rule contrary to the law? Do judges or lawyers occasionally get bribed, despite all the precautions? Yes, of course. But when that happens, it's a scandal. People all over the country hear about it; it's big news."

"Our system isn't perfect, but it does work," he concludes, folding his hands again. "Mostly, people don't commit crimes. When they do, we mostly have very clear evidence of what happened. Even when we don't, a lot of crimes are unplanned and people genuinely regret them. When they don't, mostly the jury isn't biased one way or the other. When they are, usually the judge can declare a mistrial. When they can't, in the tiny fraction of cases where it comes to that? At least what the jury decides is public, and they can't hide that they subverted the law. It becomes a topic of public discussion, and the people can decide whether it was warranted, or whether we need to add another nuance to the justice system to do even better next time."

Dragon presses her lips together. Now is not the time to bring up the Canary trial.

"Maybe," she says instead, "you could tell us how you would expect justice to work in your world, Ahmose? That might help point out anything we're taking for granted in our explanations, which might help explain more clearly."

Something clicks for Ahmose. "We don't have police. So - that probably explains a lot of the difference. Where I'm from, criminal suits often fail and that's probably because the accusers aren't professionals and aren't impartial and may be willing to accuse someone even with a low chance of winning the case. I don't know how many criminal defendants in Osirion are found guilty, but not almost all of them." 

"So - your police are like... a first stage of judgement, really, because they don't persecute the cases where they're not reasonably sure of winning? And then the judges act as a final check on them, but they're less necessary than in Osirion where there are only the judges. And the jury is another check on the judges, I guess, but I still don't understand how that helps, I'm sorry."

"In contract suits, there's no police, so the judge is really important. And there's also no jury, because - it's important for the judge to get it right? - I'm sorry, I don't understand that part. In Osirion many people think almost everything can and should be solved with private contracts and insurance and so on, and so contracts are as important and as - strong - as laws. I've heard other countries think laws are more important than countries, though."

"How justice works in Osirion is - someone accuses someone else, and brings them before a judge. Or an agreed-on mediator, for contracts. The judge hears both sides and makes a ruling. If there's evidence or witnesses, one of the sides needs to bring it up, and the judge can call in people to testify if he thinks it's important."

"Everyone has the right to testify they're innocent under a truth spell, and that's very very strong evidence because only powerful mages can beat the spell. If they are in fact innocent, the accuser has to pay for the spell, and there's insurance and some state funds and charities and so on, that pay for the truth spells and for other legal help. Or I guess your friends help you, a lot of the time."

"If one of the sides thinks the judge is wrong about a question of law they can pay to consult more senior judges, which probably requires traveling to some city if you're not in one already. And then if they turn out to be right, the state repays them and probably also rewards them, and censures the original judge."

"So - probably most of the difference is that we have truth spells, and you have police - not that they replace each other, both would be best - and also you have juries, which I don't understand."

"Truth spells would certainly help a lot," Dragon agrees. "Although then you do have to trust the people with truth spells that they aren't faking it, which seems like it would be hard."

"I should also point out that you can have jury trials in contracts cases, they're just less common. Usually, contracts disputes that make it past mediation hinge more on technicalities and precise wording than on questions of fact, and the expense of getting a jury together is not worth it compared to just getting a ruling from the Judge. But that's just a tendency, not a rule," Mr. O'Brien points out.

"...I think I'm not going to understand juries and will just - ignore them for now, and I guess try to come back to this in a few days." Once he does understand anything else at all at all about this new culture and its laws.

"So now we need to work out my contract. A contract proposal, which I won't immediately decide about." That's frankly less because he thinks he'll know better in a day, and more to prevent him from feeling pressured and anxious and agonizing over trivia. "And anything else I don't know about because I'm a foreigner, I guess."

He'll repeat the gist of what they were discussing before Armsmaster left. He'll provide transport, including to and during Endbringer battles, and possibly also to other emergencies. In general he's willing to sell portals-as-transport whenever he's free, so it's mostly a matter of scheduling and possibly paying him in advance to prioritize their requests. In return Armsmaster (and maybe Dragon or other people?) will help him contact his world, and provide some advice or help he needs as a foreigner like the translation artifact they already gave him, details to be determined.

...Oh, and money. To pay for all the normal things he'll need to buy, like food and lodgings.

And it should be binding for only a month or so, with a view to renegotiating then, because they expect to learn more by then and the situation will change significantly if they succeed in contacting his world. Or any other world, really.

"That won't look much like our standard employment contracts," Mr. O'Brien remarks. "But I can see why you'd want something different."

He takes careful notes.

"Okay -- I think I know what I want to draft up, but I have a few more clarifying questions, if that's alright."

He asks about a number of details, such as whether Ahmose intends to do business under any other names, whether food and lodging provided 'in kind' is an acceptable component of his reimbursement, whether he wants to be paid a retainer, per-portal, or per-hour, how much it would cost to buy exclusivity, et cetera, et cetera.

Ahmose doesn't see a reason he'd use a different name even if he does do other business. He's willing not to do it for the next month, anyway.

Being paid in kind is probably fine; he's a bit curious why they'd want to do it when they're going to also pay him money anyway, but not strongly enough to spend time belaboring the point.

The pricing question is the most important one, and also the one he has no idea how to answer. At home he'd pay an Abadaran to figure it out for him, and also noone would propose something other than asking an Abadaran... noone from the government, anyway. This is another reason to ask for a month-long contract; even if he's underpaid by a lot (knowingly or otherwise), he should be able to figure it out by then and ask for more. A month sounds like about the right amount of time to mentally prepare to ask for more money.

If they don't have any preferences of their own, he'd probably like to be paid per-hour? It seems like the simplest and most legible. Paying per-portal probably creates weird incentives about going places in the fewest jumps. Except that if they want him to maintain standing portals to far-away cities, so he can get there quickly, they'll need to pay extra for that because it comes out of his power budget.

Exclusivity is impossible hard to price when he doesn't yet know what else he might be doing with his portals in his off time. If someone else offers him a lot more money per portal, he can live with delaying that by a month, but he at least wants to be able to go places for himself. Or, like, if he makes a portal to help someone who really needs it, not for money but because he wants to, that's kind of doing it for himself, but if "exclusivity" only forbids selling portals for money that sounds like a recipe for trouble...

Being paid per-hour is fine. Here's what he would propose for rates — higher for Endbringer battles, because of the danger, but otherwise equivalent to a government contractor of thus-and-such a level. And of course if Armsmaster, Dragon, or anyone they bring in to help find his world need to study his portals in order to do that, that time should be uncompensated. ... Working more than this many hours in a month entitles him to these other benefits ... Cost of any tinkertech he requests held from his pay, exact prices depending on the tinker's availability and materials ... Then of course there's the need for a visa sponsorship — he can work for up to four weeks on a provisional visa, but then he'll need to file this form with the social security administration. The PRT can help with that, of course ...

Mr. O'Brien has been doing contract negotiation quite possibly as long as Ahmose has been alive, and can fairly easily lead things around with a bit more discussion to a solution that seems fair to Ahmose and that he'll be able to justify to the director without too much trouble.

"... and all of this only to last one month from signing by default, but if you end up liking this arrangement you can extend it by sending a letter to our office, or of course come in person for a renegotiation," Mr. O'Brien finishes. "I think that all seems pretty reasonable. Was there anything else you wanted to ask for, clarify, or discuss? Otherwise I can get this written up as a proper contract and give you a copy to look over with your own lawyer, or sign right away, as you like."

Mr O'Brien is a very helpful professional! The 'visa' thing sounds important for him to understand, but if a month-long contract isn't going to affect it either way then he probably doesn't have to learn all about it right this moment. Ahmose doesn't have anything else he wants to ask about the contract.

He does kind of need to know how to find and/or choose his own lawyer? He's not sure if this a question he should be asking O'Brian or Dragon or neither, except he really has no-one else to ask, so.

"How can I find my own lawyer? Is there - somewhere they advertise in the city, or a local registry or something? And somewhere to sleep, I guess, until we sign this. And somewhere to get a small loan of money, or I guess sell a few portals quickly, if you know who'd pay for them?" Ahmose is willing to sell them a few portals at the proposed rate, if he can get enough money for a few hours' work to pay a couple of days' food and lodgings and to hire a lawyer. He has no idea how much anything costs in 'dollars' but presumably the pay rate of a not-the-most-junior government contractor is enough for a small family to live on.

"Lawyers advertise in a variety of places, but probably the two easiest things for you to do are either take a recommendation from me, or to go to the public library and ask to look at a copy of the phonebook — it's a large yellow book that lists people available for hire by profession. It will list numbers that you can use to contact their office using a phone, and also their physical address so that you can go in person," Mr. O'Brien explains. "Different lawyers specialize in different things, so you might have to try a few before you find one who is willing to review the contract with you. Some of them may also be willing to be paid in a week or two, instead of in advance. You'd need to talk it over with them."

"As for my recommendation, I would suggest going to Peters, Willbright, and Edmonds. They're a law firm I've worked with before, and they're located just a few blocks away. I can write down their address for you," he continues, jotting an address on a scrap of notepaper and sliding it over.

"As for a loan — you strike me as an honest young man, Ahmose, and I'm a very good judge of character. If you promise to pay me back in a month, I'm willing to personally lend you $1000, which should be enough to hire a lawyer and pay for room and board for a few days at least," Dragon offers.

Also, it will keep Ahmose from trying to sell his powers and running afoul of NEPEA-5 laws or, even worse, drawing attention from the city's gangs. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and it's refreshing to be able to get on top of a dangerous parahuman situation before it gets messy.

Ooh, public library! That's something only the biggest cities like Sothis had in Golarion, and even then the libraries were owned by a temple, not by the government. These people's civilization is really cool, for all its lack of Abadarans.

And that's very nice of her! They offered him $50 per hour, so it should be safe to promise to repay twenty hours' work in a month.

He'll look at the registry of lawyers, to see if any specialize in something surprisingly relevant like contracts with aliens, and if that predictably fails he'll go see the ones O'Brien recommended.

That raises a new problem, though. "This artifact doesn't let me read. Can you help me find someone I can pay for a few hours to follow me around and read things out to me, like the lawyers' registry?"

"Oh! Of course. I'm sorry, I didn't think of that," Mr. O'Brien responds. "Hmm. Nearly everyone can read, so it's not a common thing to have someone on hand for. The librarians may be willing to help, but there should be ..."

He turns to look at Dragon's screen. "Dragon, is there anything like a public TTY service, only in reverse?"

Dragon looks thoughtful. "Not to my knowledge, but perhaps there should be. Let me see ..."

Her avatar turns away from the screen and taps some virtual buttons.

"There's a temp agency you could hire from," she suggests. "They send people to do various odd jobs — you'd probably need to pay $10-$15 an hour, and probably for a minimum period of time."

She considers offering to book someone herself, because she could do it much faster, but now that Ahmose has basic necessities taken care of, she gets the sense that he needs some self-actualization where he actually tackles a problem in an unfamiliar context successfully. If he feels safe and comfortable in his new environment, he's less likely to lash out or flee.

She makes a decision, and his phone chimes.

"I've sent the number for the agency to your phone," she tells him. "You can call them and ask what their rate would be and for someone to come meet you here while Mr. O'Brien is drafting the contract," she suggests.

That sounds like a good idea! Also he feels socially exhausted and this is really challenging. He takes refuge in eating the hamburger Mr O'Brien brought him, since they're done talking.

...It's - interesting? The parts aren't very novel, but the combination is unusual. Why put meat in between pieces of bread, is it just to hold it? He experiments with Prestidigitating a few different tastes onto the bread, but he's too hungry to linger over it.

He calls the agency and tells them he'd like someone to follow him around the city, for the rest of the day but probably for a few days (he'll agree to three days if that's their minimum period), to read out or write down anything he needs, and gets their address since it's faster for him to come to them than vice versa. 

And then... he's done here, for now? 

"I'm not done with the contract yet," Mr. O'Brien notes, looking up from where he's scribbling notes. "It will probably be an hour and a half or so. If you'd like to leave and come back instead of waiting, I can ask Trooper Barret to escort you to get the money Dragon offered, and then out to the lobby."

"Do note that $1000 is a lot to carry in cash all at once. It is not likely that someone will attempt to steal it, but it would be reasonable to be cautious, keep it in an inner pocket, and not let people know you have that much on you," Dragon points out.

Ahmose definitely has a secure inner pocket in his robe! It's so secure it's a bit of a bother even for him to get to. It's also spellbook-sized, which is entirely because that's standard on robes bought in this one shop in Sothis - ahem.

He doesn't have much to do until the contract's done, but in the spirit of not wasting any time, he'll at least go meet his temp worker! If they'll kindly give him a map of the city and point out where the address is that he got, and give him an window with a view of the sky, he'll chain-portal from there.

Finally being able to openly portal places is so relaxing. It dissolves away tension in places he didn't even know he had. It turns out that constantly looking out for anyone who might see him, metaphorically or otherwise, was really bad for him, actually!

Dragon considers for a moment — a few milliseconds — whether to comment, and decides not to. She lets her avatar play out the 'visibly considering whether to comment' animation for a few seconds while she re-designs a thermal shunt, and Mr. O'Brien takes his cue from that.

The city matches up fairly well with the map they provide, although there are one or two blocks that no longer have the indicated buildings. Regardless, nothing prevents him from counting streets and making his way to the temp office.

Then he'll do that! (Wow, look at all those people looking at him stepping out from a portal. Does it count as rude gawking if he's doing it back to people gawking at him?)

Anyway, he tries to find the relevant office. Since he can't read signs, they promised someone would be waiting at the entrance; can he find them, or manage to be conspicuous enough himself that they'll flag him down?

Opening a portal onto the street is plenty conspicuous, actually!

When Janice was assigned to work with someone who couldn't read, she didn't really know what to expect, but this wasn't it. A bit of nervousness stirs in her stomach, but whether it's because he might be dangerous, or because he might be a hero she's not sure. Villains don't just walk around in downtown like that, right?

"Ah, Mr. Ahmose?" she calls, waving at him. "I'm Janice Brooks — you spoke to my boss Peter on the phone."

When he steps a little closer she asks "Or is it just Ahmose? Is that a cape name?"

'Is that an adventurer name?' the translation artifact has her say.

"It's - just my name? I don't know what an adventurer name is but I am not an adventurer." Ahmose is very definite about this.

"As you can see, I can't speak English. This translation-artifact lets me speak, but I'll need you to read and write for me, and probably explain some words that don't translate well." He'll hand over the agreed-on payment. (Ahmose wrote down the ten digits in English and Common on a bit of paper, and Trooper Barret helped him prepare the right amount of tokens. He's proud of himself for thinking ahead! It will probably be a lot faster to ask Janice to help him with small change for the next while, though.)

"I have the next hour free, I'm waiting for, um, some papers. Is there anything you want to ask me, or - to figure out how to best work together?" He isn't actually paying her for anything but reading or writing and explanations of what things mean, which seems straightforward, but she might also be confused and need to adjust a little before starting.

And Ahmose also has a very  important question for her, which is - how can he work with a woman? Is that legal here? Would it, uh, reflect on his character? Did Dragon set him up for some sort of personality test?

"Error: Irreducible vocabulary conflict on cape/adventurer/mage," the translation artifact informs them.

Janice scratches her head. "Uh, right."

Apparently when she was considering the hero/villain cape dichotomy, she somehow overlooked the third possibility: in denial. Although he does have the right skin for it.

"I ... don't have any real questions already prepared," she says. "I often do assistance work with people who need some additional help navigating the city or doing daily tasks. I guess your situation is probably pretty different from theirs, though?"

She glances around at the people watching them.

"Look, let's find somewhere a little less public, and then you can tell me more about your situation, and maybe that will give me more idea of what I should ask? I mean, if that's okay with you."

That's a good idea which is suspiciously not okay for Ahmose!

"There's something I need to ask you first. In my home country, it's not" - well, no, it's not illegal, but - "normal, or - customary, for a man and an unrelated woman to be alone. Is that, um. Normal here?" He's blushing.

Her eyebrows jump.

"Oh! No, I mean, it's pretty normal? Like, I wouldn't go off somewhere with a random man, but it's not the same when you're employing me. I mean, if you tried threatening me and doing ... that ... the boss has your phone number, and the police would know where I went, and since you're a mage the PRT would get involved and you'd get caught for sure," she babbles. "But I'm not — I mean, you've definitely only hired me to help you navigate the city and read things. I'm not that kind of woman."

Oh no, this is terrible! At least she understands the problem and he doesn't have to be terribly embarrassed by being the only one who thinks a man and a woman alone are - at risk.

"I didn't mean to imply you are that kind of woman!! And - I wouldn't ever do anything like that! I'm just, at home people think men and women shouldn't be alone because, um, that might happen, so when you said we should find a private place I um, I didn't think you were offering me that!!! I just - wanted to know if anyone else might think so, and speak badly of you for having been alone with me. Because at home people would do that."

With his portals he can in fact get them everywhere they need to be without ever being alone, or at least without ever being out of sight of random strangers on the street, but - that might not, actually, stop people from speculating whether they were ever alone during the day.

That explanation calms her down a bit.

"Oh, no, people wouldn't judge me just for being alone with you," she reassures. "Well, maybe the really fussy old woman who lives in the apartment across from me would if she knew, but it's not like she would find out. It's ..."

She frowns and thinks for a moment. "I think it sounds like where you're from people worry about the ... appearance of the thing instead of the thing itself? And we definitely do also worry about not having a, uh, reputation, but I don't think anyone would just ... never go anywhere without a chaperone about it. That sounds a bit extreme. If the other girls in the office started a rumor about me, it would be because I ... kept coming out of the printer closet with my hair mussed up, or something like that, not because I didn't want to make a client explain their situation on the street with people listening."

She forces herself to stop rambling, and nervously smooths down her slacks.

"People definitely worry about the thing!! And also about the appearance! Which is supposed to be because of the thing, but it - kind of takes on a life of its own? Um. Anyway, it's - the threat is really to your reputation, not mine. I'm a stranger here anyway. So if you're sure it's alright, and it's - normal here, or at least common, then... I guess we can do that?"

He did hire her as a local guide but, well, he'd be less worried if she'd laughed off the whole thing instead of worrying about it herself! 

"How about we go somewhere we won't be overheard but where other people can see us from far away, or can definitely hear you if you scream, or whatever is... considered appropriate here? I mean, I'm not actually going to tell you any secrets." He thinks so, anyway.

"And then I'd like to go eat before we go back to get my papers," because one hamburger was not enough after all, "and then I need to get a lawyer."

"Oh, well if you want to get some food anyway, we could just get a table at a restaurant?" she suggests. "That's out of the street but still public. There's an Italian place on the corner that's pretty good."

"Alright - I'm confused because, um, you suggested going somewhere less public? Maybe that was a bad translation." Which is exactly the kind of thing he needs her to help him with! But at least the immediate crisis seems to have been averted.

(He's having to work through some belated anxiety and mortification. Sometimes even if he knows intellectually there's a big problem, the somatic emotions take a few rounds to kick in.)

He'll take her recommendation for the restaraunt. She can read him the menu as her first task as personal assistant! Ahmose has never had a personal assistant before and is feeling a little giddy about it.

"I just suggested that because it seems like a bad idea to talk about your personal business in the middle of the sidewalk after you had attracted a bunch of attention by arriving via magic!" she explains. "Usually people don't want to spread their business around in public, even if it's not secret per se."

She reads him the menu. There are several variations on the theme of pasta with various sauces, the possibility of a personal pizza, or some seafood. It's a little pricey for Earth food, but still cheaper than an equivalent amount and quality of food in Golarion, if he uses the wage he was offered as a conversion factor.

He doesn't really want to distract himself with culinary experiments right now. Pizza it is; you can't go too far wrong with 'flatbread, with stuff on top'.

"So. I'm from a different world. Which is - very different. So there's a lot I don't know or understand yet about America, not just the language. Customs, like - the thing, before. So besides reading things out - and writing them down - I'll need to ask you to explain some things. And please let me know if you think the translation artifact might have gotten something wrong."

"For the next few days I expect to mostly be - arranging things for the next month. My work contract, a lawyer to consult about it, lodgings, probably a bank account. Maybe other things I haven't thought of yet. And then I'll probably start working but I don't expect to need your help on the job. Do you, um, have any questions?" He doesn't like how he worded that but he can't figure out how to put it less, uh - brusquely.

She nods along with his explanation.

"So you just need help sort of getting all the basics set up, that makes sense. Are you also going to want help, like, going to the DMV for a driver's license? I guess I don't really know how that works for people from other worlds instead of, like, New York. Probably the PRT takes care of it?"

As they're talking, a waiter comes and deposits a glass of ice water in front of each of them, and asserts that the pizza should be ready in a few minutes, before gliding away.

Oooh, ice water! It's not actually hot enough to need it (he assumes it's local winter); it's probably a display of their wealth.

After asking a clarifying question, Ahmose reassures her he is not going to get a driver's license, for several reasons!

"I don't know what other things I will need to do, but there will probably be some? I guess a driver's license is not a bad example of the kind of thing I'll need help with." The local 'cars' are frankly terrifying when seen up close. Man was meant to teleport or fly - slowly! - not hurtle along at breath-stealing speeds constantly risking a crash!

Does Janice have any other questions?

She taps her lip.

"I don't think so. Or, well, no, I have tons of questions about what your world is like and how you got here. But I don't think I have any questions I need to know to do my job. Reading bank account policy paperwork to people or whatever isn't exactly something that normally comes up, but it's not like it's hard," she explains. "If we're waiting for the food anyway, though ... maybe you could explain what getting a lawyer would be like on your world, and so on, and I can point out what is different here so that you know what to expect?"

"My world has - there's a god called Abadar. He's the god of mutually beneficial trade, and law and contracts. And cities and travel. His clerics often also work as bankers and judges and other professions where it's very important for people to be honest and impartial and follow laws and agreements. And they're very highly trusted by everyone else."

"So at home if I had a draft contract I would ask an Abadaran, and I'd trust him to know whether he was right. Not just about the contract, but about - if he was qualified to help me or if I should go to someone else. What questions about the contract I should be asking. How much was fair to pay him, and so on. Any one Abadaran is just a man, but the church as a whole is - competent, about anything to do with laws and contracts and money."

"Here I can get a list of lawyers and talk to them one by one but there seems to be no - organization about it? I need a lawyer to help me make correct decisions, but I need to make a correct decision myself first when I choose a lawyer. At home, the choosing is just another thing that you'd pay someone for."

"And at home the government is run by Abadarans, so if I was offered a government job I could trust them about it, but the PRT - doesn't seem to be that way? Maybe it's because the justice system here is adversarial and a lot of other things seem to kind of be adversarial as well, even when they don't need to be. ...I still don't understand why juries but that's probably not important right now."

"That sounds ... different," Janice agrees. "It's true lawyers specialize in different things — like, you wouldn't go to a divorce lawyer about suing someone for personal injury — but I'm pretty sure you could walk into any lawyer's office and ask for a referral? I think lawyers do referrals. And they would send you to someone they know of who does specialize in whatever. Sometimes lawyers also work in big law firms with multiple people, and you can just always work with that one firm, and they put whoever the relevant specialist is on it each time you come to them."

She sips her ice water.

"I don't really know if the government is better in, like, Europe or whatever," she continues. "But I think Americans generally don't really trust the government? And that's not because they're untrustworthy, exactly, but it's because the British empire was really awful and we had to overthrow it. So the government we have now is, uh, designed around people not trusting it? Both just because people don't, right, and in the sense of ... the government is designed so that people could notice if it were going bad and needed overthrowing again, which means you can't be relying on the government to get things right."

"We also had to overthrow the Keleshites! They're, um, an overseas empire that conquered Osirion many centuries ago. But we managed to do that because we trusted the people who did the overthrowing, and then they became the new government. Maybe that's part of why we do trust them so much?" Ahmose really isn't sure why the Abadarans aren't helping to run any other countries.

"Some people already tried to explain American government to me, but I appreciate also hearing some common people's take on it!" Civics is turning out to be a surprisingly interesting (and socially and emotionally safe) topic of conversation!

"The government is a mess," Janice comments. "But it's better than everywhere else, except maybe Canada. They have a Prime Minister instead of a President, though."

"It's not like people didn't trust George Washington — he was the leader of the revolutionary army. They offered to make him king, even. But he refused because he didn't want the country to have to deal with overthrowing a bad king ever again. And just because one king is good doesn't mean the next one would be, you know? Washington became the first president — pretty much unanimously — and then voluntarily stepped down so that there could be a peaceful transition of power. That's where the tradition of presidents serving at most eight years comes from."

The waiter chooses that moment to deliver Ahmose's pizza. It is, as promised, a flat bread covered with a red sauce and a layer of melted cheese, with little flat circles of sausage.

Ahmose feels he doesn't understands her logic. "Doesn't that work for presidents as well? Just because one is good, you don't know if the next one will be. So once you have a good king - uh, president, you'd want to keep him longer. Changing the leader every eight years sounds like you'd have to end up with a bad one sooner rather than later. In Osirion if you have a really good king, you hope for him to live and rule for a long time!"

The little circles of sausage are nnnot good enough to distract him from having an Intellectual Argument.

Janice thinks about that one for a moment. "I guess? But with a king, the next king is just the previous king's son, right? And there's no reason to expect them to be any better or worse than some other person. But we choose our presidents. The candidates go on TV and make speeches and debate each other and so on, so you can make an informed decision."

"There have been bad presidents — like Clinton — but you also know you're not going to be stuck with them for more than four years. The first time they screw something up badly enough, they're not going to get reelected."

"The king can have many sons and choose the best one. Or I guess he can name someone else his heir, the law doesn't have to say his son inherits? Or you could elect the next one but - let a good one serve for a lot longer than eight years."

"I guess if it works better than other countries, I can't really argue with that? I'm just - not wise enough to understand why it works like that yet. Or how elections work at all, really, it feels like - the same thing as the juries, where you want random common people to decide on the most important issues instead of leaving them to professionals, and I don't understand how that works either." To be precise, he doesn't see how it avoids immediately exploding into a horrible mess that needs a revolt to set it straight again, but he's too polite to say that. "Anyway, I probably won't understand it anytime soon, so I should just focus on the things I actually need to interact with. Normal obvious things, like lawyers."

"Right, yes," she agrees. "Anyway, it sounds like the first thing will be finding a lawyer? Unless you already have one in mind. I don't know an employment lawyer off the top of my head, but we can probably find one in the yellow pages."

"Yes, I was advised to go to the public library and look in the yellow phone book for lawyers. I just need to pick up my draft contract to show the lawyer first. And I got the name of a lawyer I could go to from the PRT, but I'm not sure if your adversarial systems mean I shouldn't take that kind of advice from my prospective employers, so I wanted to get a different lawyer just in case."

Once they're done eating, they can briefly go back to the PRT HQ for Ahmose's contract, and then to the library.

Ahmose's has decided to place his portals on unused walls. This avoids blocking the road, and reduces the chance someone will touch them by accident (although he is very careful about not letting open portals out of his sight, just in case, and tries to close them as soon as he doesn't need them anymore).

Janice can be treated to a view of the Protectorate HQ roof! (He doesn't want to portal back through a window; he didn't think to ask permission for that before leaving.) It's not a terribly interesting roof but there's a pretty forcefield bubble around it.

There's also a twitchy guard who was not expecting them!

"Put your hands on your head and don't move!" he tells them, freeing his weapon but not actually aiming it at them. Then he grabs a radio with his off hand and speaks quietly into it.

"I, um, I think maybe the ferry terminal would be a better place?" Janice suggests, her voice a bit squeaky with nervousness.

He wasn't told not to come back here! This is where he went last time!

He puts his hands on his head, because following orders from lawful authority is a habit deeper than thinking. And doesn't move (much).

...he wasn't told not to speak, though?

"I'm Ahmose? Um. I'm supposed to pick up my contract from Mr. O'Brien? I'm sorry if I wasn't supposed to come here!" On second thoughts probably most people don't go through the roof.

Trooper Hammonds relays this into his radio. After a minute he relaxes.

"Yes, sorry Ahmose, but people are not supposed to come in via the roof unless they're expected," Trooper Hammonds explains. "This time it's alright — if you wait in that box by the door, Mr. O'Brien is on his way up. In the future, just check in with the guard at the bridge terminal, please."

Oh no, he messed up again. He's not sure how big of a deal this is, but he apologizes very sincerely, just in case. And goes to wait in the box by the door.

Janice can come with him, or if she'd rather stay on her side of the portal he'll pick her up soon.

She'll follow the (implicit) directions of the guy with a gun and stay near the cape who (probably) will help protect her.

A few minutes later, the door opens and Mr. O'Brien sticks his head out.

"Hello! I have it all drafted up," he says, smiling and handing a bundle of paper to Ahmose. "When you are ready to sign, come by the ferry terminal. I also put a copy of my business card in there, in case you need to call me with any questions."

Ahmose is unaware of alien implicit directions! To be honest, he misses them half the time at home; here it's not useful even to worry about it. (Which won't stop him from worrying, but it's a diffuse worry that's not spiking right now.)

He thanks Mr. O'Brien, takes the papers, uses the city map to find an unused bit of wall behind the city library to make a portal, and steps through with Janice. Can she help him find a list of contract lawyers in the city which seem open to cold calls?

She lets out a deep breath. Yes, she can certainly do that. She leads him around to the library's side entrance, nodding to some young men sitting on the steps.

Inside, the library is packed with books. It looks a great deal like the temple of Nethys, only with less religious imagery and fewer poorly concealed scorch marks. She leads him past the main desk and into a section of low shelves and tables which she calls the reference section.

There, she finds the phonebook and copies out the relevant section of lawyers.

"We're not supposed to use phones in the main area, so that people can focus," she explains. "But we can step out on the steps and call them."

The library-temple of Nethys is different from an American public library in two immediately obvious ways. One is that it's very tall, even by the standards of Brockton Bay. 

The other is that it's designed for mages, which means doing at every step the opposite of ADA rules in a country that has barely invented the elevator. The higher shelves require mage hand to access; the higher floors require teleportation or flight (or a friendly summon or shapeshifting or...) and the secret depositories, which are most of them, require more exotic spells than these. Floors past the second aren't indexed (divination exists for a reason); floors past the fourth aren't numbered.

Day and night, it's full of wizards ostentatiously wizarding.

Ahmose knows, intellectually, that tens of thousands of books are fabulously valuable and that providing them free of charge to the public is an incredible Good. It turns out he doesn't really feel it when the library patrons he sees treat the books as normal.

...he'll step out and call a random lawyer from the list! This only his second phone-call, both of them made to people he hadn't talked to before to buy a service, which continues to be anxiety-inducing but less so than talking to them face to face would be! Ahmose continues to appreciate cheap remote communications.

A young man in a pure white bodysuit lunges from beside the door and attempts to knock out Ahmose's lights.

Another man in a blue tiger mask leaps down from a window of the building on the other side of the street, and launches an air-blade at the same moment.

Janice screams and steps backwards.

Ahmose is completely unprepared to deal with surprise short-range physical assault! He is hit, stunned, and helpless against whatever the air-blade might do.

It gives him a deep cut across his torso, and also takes Alabaster's arm off just above the elbow, not that he seems to mind.

Alabaster capitalizes on their success by getting a (new) arm around Ahmose's throat and putting him in an inexpert choke hold as Stormtiger runs across the street.

Aaaah what is this?! Assault on the very footsteps of the city library! That man's cut-off arm is still lying on the ground!!

He can't make a portal to separate himself from the grapple, but if they don't move him for a round or two he'll make a portal under the both of them back to the roof of the Protectorate building and hope the fall damage isn't too bad. He still doesn't have a portal to the proper entrance but this is probably worth bothering the rooftop guard a second time, this is what guards are for.

He'd start shouting for help, but the choke-hold is at least good enough to make him conserve his air.