Then from Leareth's point of view that's probably just the standard duration of a hug! 

...His review is that being hugged (at least while panicking about something unrelated, technically he doesn't know what hugs would be like if he was calm though it's unclear why he would seek out hugs if he were calm) is that they're - disorienting, but in a way where he's now specifically disoriented about having just been hugged and that's a very here-and-now thing. 

:Thank you: he says. :...I think maybe it is not a good time for me to talk about - high level questions related to gods and Their values - I am sorry, I normally can - have conversations - without being upset for no reason, but I seem to be impaired in a way that makes that difficult.: 

:That's totally fine. I could sing some more, if you'd like?:

:...I think I would like that.: 

So she will sing some more. Here's a nice love ballad - here's one about seven brothers seeking their fortunes - here's one about flowers -

The songs are not upsetting and they're sometimes interesting, though Leareth avoids asking questions that might lead to too interesting a followup conversation because APPARENTLY THAT'S BAD RIGHT NOW. 

It's definitely better than being alone, however odd and confusing it is to be feeling that way given what his past characteristic responses. 

Vanyel spends three candlemarks in the Web-room and staggers out to get some lunch. 

The House of Healing is well within his Mindspeech range. :Aziza? How is - everything?:

:I'm running out of repertoire!:

:...I can send Stef to take over, maybe? Except I think he'd wanted to beg a spot on the next Gate to the border to go bother all the Heralds and get material for his ballad. He might settle for asking you questions about being recruited to come, but he doesn't speak the language - I suppose Leareth might be willing to translate -: 

:Maybe he would, I'd love to meet Stef:

Stef can be summoned to the House of Healing! 

(He wasn’t quite feeling up for a Border trip, actually, wandering around in winter is going to be physically grueling even with an Endure Elements taking care of the cold part, and he didn’t get any of the Restorations today and suspects the one yesterday had a chance to wear off a bit. He’s hoping he can cadge a bit more of the good expensive healing magic before he has to do anything hard.)

He has a huge repertoire of songs in Valdemaran and Rethwellani, though he’s absolutely too proud to embarrass himself by playing when his hands aren’t in tip-top shape.

And if neither of them mind being incidentally mindread then Leareth is happy to translate the words for Aziza! And to relay Stef’s questions and Aziza’s answers between songs, at least for a while, that does start to feel slightly overwhelming even though his Gifts are working fine and he continues not to be actually tired.

So what was it like, being recruited to come to another world? Stef wants a word-picture of - who was she with, where, who came to ask about it and what did they say and what was she thinking when she answered yes?

"I was in the church, near some of the private rooms we have for spiritual counseling in case anybody came by in need of that, and there was one of our acolytes restocking the shop nearby so I wouldn't be all by myself there, and then a runner in Abadaran acolyte clothes burst in with a leaflet about the disaster relief work and all the Raises they needed - I think I still have it, here, would you like it? - and I said, I'm only first circle, and he said, well, they mostly want a Shelynite to catechize the one they have, so I grabbed a copy of the Melodies and my brother as a chaperone and came to the place where everyone was waiting, though they put me in back of the line in case the gate came down before everyone could get through."

Leareth relays the answer back to Stef. 

:- Has there been much opportunity to talk to Vanyel about the Shelynite religion?: he adds to Aziza directly. :I am sure he has questions - I am not sure if he even knew there was a holy book, though it is hardly surprising there is - but things have been very hectic... It seems important.: 

(Leareth is adding fewer extraneous uncertainty-qualifiers at this point, because it was getting kind of tedious and it hasn't happened yet that he said something everyone else clearly found insane due to the inability to internally sanity-check it properly.) 

"We talked about Shelyn a little! But I don't think he has Comprehend Languages today and he seemed to have a lot on his plate, so it can wait till he has time to sit with me and have me read it to him or till there's enough spells that he can spend one on looking through it for a few minutes."

:You might suggest he prepare it tomorrow: Leareth says. :I think he would probably know the spell exists, surely Select Artigas has used it, but it might not occur to him as useful when he has Mindspeech to avoid the spoken language barrier. …I think learning about his god is important but would be easy to delay with the emergency.: 

Stef can’t read the leaflet but would be delighted to get her translation of what it says!

Aziza will read (and in places sing) the Melodies as long as they're into that.

---

It continues to be an emergency, and it's an uphill battle to set aside any time for anything that isn't the emergency, but Joshel is fairly sure it's a mistake to lose track of the bigger picture. 

(The mandatory daily candlemark of prayer is really, really helpful. It forces him to stop and think.) 

It bothers him that, so far, their interaction with Golarion has been almost solely in the direction of Valdemar paying for things (well, complicatedly, mostly Leareth is covering it because Valdemar cannot afford it, but if anything that bothers Joshel even more.) It's of course incredibly valuable to them to have the option, but it's not a sustainable state of affairs, and there's got to be something that can go the other direction, something that Valdemar can sell to parties in Golarion. 

(Joshel may have been existing in a state of chronic lowkey panic about the state of Valdemar's treasury since...well, honestly since the annexation of the north and the other preparations the anticipated war with Leareth. War is really expensive and it hasn't been that many years since the war with Karse ended.) 

Joshel tells Herald Siri, who's been in charge of the long-range Mindspeech relay logistics coordination, that he would like to talk to Cicerone Raad about interworld trade as soon as they can reasonably be in the same physical location. 

Raad is of course available like he's being paid to be available for the duration. "Fiducia, what can I help you with?"

This is by far not the worst Joshel has felt in the last almost-three-weeks, but he had five candlemarks of sleep last night and he looks like someone who could badly use a Lesser Restoration. 

He's supposed to be in a different border town in a candlemark and he's too tired to do anything other than get straight to the point. :I've barely had a chance to think about this at all, but - you've been here for almost a day and seen some more of our world and how we do things. I'd like your advice on what if anything Valdemar has that would be worth a lot more in Golarion, that we could trade to bring in revenue? ...Other than diamonds, I mean, I am definitely getting the sense that for anyone who isn't going to be Raised in the next week it might make more sense for Leareth's people to sell the diamonds in Golarion now and plan on using those funds later to pay whoever it is that does no-diamond Resurrections, but that's not my decision, Valdemar isn't providing any of the diamonds here.:  

"Gates," says Raad immediately. "We have teleporters but they are fifth circle wizards and generally that's the most reliably valuable thing a wizard of that circle can do. Gates are higher capacity and do not seem talked about in a way that would imply the miss chance teleportation has, though I don't know what maximum range they command or what you need to know about the destination. I have also heard mentions of weather-working, which for us is seventh circle. Magical artifacts of many kinds also command a great deal of coin though I don't know enough about the range available to say which of yours would work best. The telepathy appears to have a range competitive with some uses of Sending and Scrying and more generous usage limits. It's possible that your Healers would be competitive with Remove Disease castings and even if that does not work out in practice Arch-Healer Naima might want to retain a couple to attempt to study the way their power works for her own research."

Hngggg why are those also all things that Leareth's organization is vastly better placed to provide than Valdemar is. It's probably unproductive to spend as much time as he does being insecure that Leareth's people (it's not just Leareth himself! this was true during the entire period he was dead!) are better at things than Valdemar, but it sure keeps coming up. 

:If Arch-Healer Naima is interested in studying Healing then I'm certain we have some people who would be delighted to work with her: he says. Having good Healing training is maybe the one area where Valdemar is furthest ahead of its neighbors. 

What else... :I'm not sure how many Gate-capable mages we can spare just yet, but we're overrepresented on other Gifts - especially long-range Mindspeech, having hundreds of miles of range is very rare elsewhere but we've got dozens of people who can handle it. We also have more Farseers and Fetchers than most places - Farsight is sort of like scrying as its own Gift, but it's not a spell so it's not detectable with mage-sight, and it takes special shielding to block. Fetching is - actually sort of like teleportation just for objects, some Fetchers can move people but not more than a mile and they'll give themselves backlash, but for small objects we have a dozen Fetchers who can handle a range of a hundred miles, and four who also have strong Farsight and can use it to find and target an item they've never seen from a place they've never been with just a description. It's also not detectable with mage-sight and tricky to shield out.: 

He can offer some quick descriptions of Projective Empathy and Bardic Gift too, both of which tend to be unusually common and unusually strong in Valdemar. :- oh, and Mindhealing, I think of it as rare but it's apparently even rarer elsewhere.: Leareth's organization has fewer Mindhealers than Valdemar does! :It's like our kind of Healing for minds - sorry, I'm not an expert in the details. It also has some terrifying combat applications, as a way to incapacitate an enemy almost instantly without physically harming them. Also not detectable to mage-sight, or possible for anyone except another Mindhealer to reverse.: 

"Using undetectable scrying - which you'd want to check against Golarion techniques and not just your own, before scrying anyone who might object, and then still not trust your undetectability against any particularly powerful targets - would set you up to take sides in whatever conflict requires such a thing. You may wish to do so but should bear it in mind as a risk. Osirion contains some treasure-filled tombs not all of which have already been excavated, usually because of their being full of traps or otherwise hard to access, and a Farseer-Fetcher might have particular success in removing valuable items from them, though of course the items, also, may be trapped. A long-range Mindspeaker parked on Absalom could communicate about shipping across the entire Inner Sea and make a tremendous amount in fees routing ships around bad weather and monster activity and alerting interests in port to their delays and losses earlier. There are probably entertainment uses for Projective Empathy and Bardic gifts but I am not immediately aware of practical ones - they may still command some novelty value from the right buyer, of course. A Fetcher who could extract a person without having to be on site and especially if they could route around spells like Dimensional Lock would have the taking sides in a conflict issue again but could resolve kidnappings and hostage situations and perhaps find funding that way. Mindhealers might find an untapped market in any major city. Many of your Gifted could find valued places on an adventuring team although at higher circles they would need to adjust their tactics to compensate for the lesser durability of their Velgarth party members."

:...We probably want to avoid anything that would come across as taking sides in any conflicts, unfortunately. Thank you for that warning.: 

Why does Joshel need to have an entire important job that keeps him stuck here, going to park himself in Absalom and Mindspeech-relay shipping notices sounds amazing and so much less stressful than the last several years as a Herald. Also he doesn't quiiiiiite actually have the ideal range for this. Treven has an enormous range but he's even less free to wander off to another world. 

Vanyel might actually be a great person to park in Absalom, honestly, he's got the Mindspeech range and also the Farsight range to personally check on every ship within a 200-mile radius, he could do some Gates without hurting himself and could certainly do weather-working for the area and make artifacts to sell, there’s got to be a temple of Shelyn he could attend, and - in many ways it would be a very badly needed holiday for him. ...The problem being that Vanyel is not currently dispensable, and parking him in Absalom is unlikely to ever be the most useful thing he could be doing, for Valdemar's interests or in general. 

Tantras, however, would be a pretty good person to send! 300 mile range even on an average day, experienced, can handle the diplomacy aspect, and not currently playing a critical and irreplaceable role in Valdemar's government; the main cost is going to be making Dara sad. :I'll need to check, but I think we could send someone to Absalom for Mindspeech relay work with the next Gate. That sounds like the simplest to set up. - simpler with the help of your church, if you're willing to accept a percentage of what he earns for some time period in exchange for helping us set it up, I wouldn't have the faintest idea who he needs to talk to.: