Like this one?

WHAT WAS THAT. 

(Savil is still in her quarters, getting dressed. This doesn't preclude being in contact with the Web but it does mean she wasn't entirely paying attention.) 

:Van did you feel that: 

Vanyel is in the Web-room, putting in some final touches to make sure the weather will stay perfect all day. 

:- oh, you felt it too? I - have no idea, honestly - wasn't an attack or a Gate - I'm trying to pin down the source -: 

After a few more seconds he's fairly sure it came from right around there, in a random patch of orchard near the bank of the river, technically within the guarded festival perimeter being set up but not actually in use or occupied right now. Or at least it wasn't twenty minutes ago when he did his last pass over the area.

Being in the Web-room lets him easily reach out with his Gifts. Is there a mind there? 

Yes, though it's weirdly - harder than an unshielded mind while not being as hard as a fully shielded one, to get a look at? The person there is a man in chainmail with a backpack on his back and a mace at his hip looking around in bewilderment while he takes tentative steps downstream.

Vanyel also has his Farsight on the location as soon as he's able to sense that there's a mind there at all. 

- Well that's deeply alarming!!!! 

Vanyel bounces the image to Savil immediately. :Raise an alarm: he sends tersely, before focusing fully on the scene.

It's - honestly bizarre that the man isn't fully shielded? Enough that Vanyel hesitates for a moment, suspicious of some kind of trick, and then focuses with his mage-sight first to try to sense any artifacts (especially anything that might be reminiscent of a Leareth-made talisman) before boosting his Thoughtsensing to push through the not-shields. 

The armor's magic and the mace is magic. Nothing else on him is.

Thoughts:

What the SHIT was that monster. Was it a regular monster or was it an outsider of some kind intended to disrupt the Constitutional Convention. If there's some major power interfering with the convention probably the archmages will notice but if it's just him there's no way they will. This looks like the material plane but WHAT IF it is actually a locally stable bit of Maelstrom. It's cold and he has an Endure Elements but he has it because he was planning to walk in the summer wearing his mail because it doesn't slow him down any less if he puts it in his bag! What if he has forgotten how Endure Elements works since yesterday and one prepped with summer in mind won't work in the cold - why is he such a dumbass, he has NOT forgotten how it works since yesterday - Guidance, spent instantly on figuring out where he is, and it doesn't work at all - the place looks inhabited and he doesn't have a Share Language or even a Comprehend Language today, because he's a dumbass and was ready for bandits and goblins and not for the specific kind of monster that Plane Shifts you to the Maelstrom. He's never even HEARD of plane shift snakes. What if they're actually all over the place in Menador and there is a spell he was supposed to know about that deals with them at second circle no problem and he slept through it that one time he fell asleep in class, if he missed something that important when he fell asleep in class it was completely within Vicar Rey's rights to torture him about it though it would have been more generous to let him make up the work afterward so he'd know about the Menadorian Plane Shift Dire Snake Thing. Why can't he focus. Should he cast his Endure Elements? What if he needs it to swap out for healing, he's not THAT cold since he does have the mail and all its padding. What if the people he is now approaching mug him for all his stuff and then he doesn't have the Acts of Iomedae! He's only read it all the way through once! He will forget something important and do something evil by accident and fall and freeze to death probably! If he casts the Endure Elements will this let him stop worrying about freezing to death, no, absolutely not, he's not worried about freezing today, he's worried about doing it after accidentally doing an evil act and not having spells any more, which is the wrong thing to worry about, he should be worrying about the possible evil acts he could do instead, only the ones he could do by accident aren't going to be really obvious like murdering somebody, it's going to be some confusing point about something weird, he was GOING to meet with a catechism teacher in Westcrown and that's certainly not happening now unless an archmage shows up. Which they probably won't but what if they did and then they were mad at him for being eaten by a Menadorian Plane Shift Dire Snake Thing. Archmages probably NEVER get eaten by those. Archmages kill the tarrasque and close the entire Worldwound and if they have to bother about Blai specifically for any reason they will think he's pathetic and he will make Iomedae look bad and then he will wake up without spells again when She gets ticked off about that and THEN he'll freeze to death. Oh gods he has to figure out how to try to talk to the people. Is he doing anything threatening looking? Hands well away from the weapon and not in casting position - Guidance - okay NOW not in casting position, but what if they think it's threatening that he's going around armed at all, or like, just that he showed up uninvited, which was really very rude of him, why did he do something so rude, if he only hadn't fallen asleep in class that one time he would have known ALL about the Menadorian Plane Shift Dire Snake Thing. He hopes one of them has a Comprehend Languages even though he hates being the one getting Comprehended because you have to just keep thinking of things to say continuously on very little feedback. Probably none of them have it because they like him expected to be among their own people who already speak whatever they speak in this part of the Material and/or Maelstrom. Maybe he will get lucky and there will be a wizard with a slot free though, or they're already doing some kind of diplomatic something - no actually that would be TERRIBLE if he has landed in the middle of a diplomatic something, he does not in any way know how to not make that worse -

(This all goes by very fast and none of it keeps the man from walking calmly and politely toward the nearest visible group of people with his hands away from his weapon and not in "casting position").

(Despite the speed, Vanyel picks up on a little more of that than he might have otherwise, since it's - well, his mind certainly does that sometimes.) 

Oh no this poor man, is Vanyel's first instinctive thought, quickly pushed aside. His second almost-as-instinctive thought is that he cannot IMAGINE that this person is working for Leareth. And not just because none of his thoughts are about how he's on a secret mission for a mysterious powerful mage in the north. 

- catch onto that thought, remind himself that he really shouldn't be that sure. Maybe Leareth can use compulsions to make someone think they have no idea what's going on. ...Though he can't say this is Leareth's style, especially not when Leareth could surely have waited a few candlemarks and sent someone in with the ice festival crowds. Admittedly not with enchanted weapons or armor, so maybe those are important? They're certainly INCREDIBLY SUSPICIOUS - from what he can sense at a distance, the style isn't exactly reminiscent of Leareth's work, but is instead totally unfamiliar -  

- what could the goal possibly be – even apart from uncharacteristic-for-Leareth lack of any subtlety, that's what he can't figure out - 

(Vanyel is mostly too distracted to focus on the content of the man's thoughts, which in any case he picked up less of than the the general confusion and anxiety, but what he can pick up on doesn't make any sense EITHER...) 

Focus. 

He reaches for Savil's mind again. :He doesn't know where he is or how he got here - he's focused on avoiding a fight - can we get someone out to intercept him before one of the Guards overreacts, I don't think this goes better if we're the ones to start a fight...: 

:On it: 

Kilchas and Sandra are in their rooms and neither is in any shape to respond to an emergency, but the other four Herald-Mages – Nani and Tamara, and Katri and Nubia – are already up and active, working with the rest of the Heralds on site-security duty. Katri is the only one positioned nearby enough to have a chance of intercepting the stranger in the next minute or two. It would be nice if the first person to confront this incredibly suspicious man were Adept-potential, but she's both not sure yet that it warrants an emergency Gate, and also aware that if the man is hostile, a mage Gating in would be making themselves particularly vulnerable... 

Katri is a Mindspeaker and Empath, which might be useful. 

:Go: she sends. :Try not to escalate, we don't know what's going on, but - be on your guard: 

And to Vanyel, :Stay put, I think. Relay to Katri if you notice anything she should know. - I'll make sure Dara's up to date, she can brief Randi -: 

Katri was really looking forward to a party and this is a sudden and jarring mood shift, but she's on Companion-back and can reach the spot Vanyel is bouncing to her within another thirty seconds, before the mysterious man actually reaches the nearest huddle of Guards. 

Blai will see a young woman - who doesn't look particularly Chelish - dressed entirely in white, riding a horse which is also completely white and has oddly large and forward-facing blue eyes. The young woman isn't obviously armed, though she certainly could be carrying weapons under her voluminous white cloak. Like him, she's holding her hands out, relaxed (or as close to it as she can manage) and visibly empty. 

"Do you speak Valdemaran?" she tries, might as well start with that first.  

Time to do the "do you speak any of these languages" dance. "I don't know what you just said to me. I speak Chelish, and also Common Taldane, and also Infernal." He changes languages at each comma and kind of expects anyone who recognizes Infernal to be judgmental that he speaks it but he can't just leave it out.

Katri does not recognize any of those languages! 

...She's inclined to agree with Vanyel's initial impression that this man did not intend to come here on any kind of mission and definitely doesn't want a fight. (Her Empathy is wide open even though what she can pick up, so far, isn't exactly comfortable to be bathed in.) 

:Sorry, I don't think I speak your language: she sends. (She's not reading his mind; it seems a lot ruder to do it face to face, somehow, and she's also not nearly as strong a Thoughtsenser as Vanyel.) :Can you understand me like this? Er, you're in Valdemar right now.: 

Vanyel, safely ensconced in the Web-room, is absolutely still reading the man's mind. It seems likely to be informative. 

Whoa, did she just Telepathic bond him? ...did she just Still, Silent Telepathic Bond him? That's fifth circle even without the metamagic, though if you happen to have that prepared and no slots for anything cheaper that makes sense if it's very urgent to find out who he is and what he's doing here and they didn't want to just gesture him to someplace he could sit and wait for dawn in. IS HIS HOLY SYMBOL CLEARLY VISIBLE oh good it is. Is he going to have to figure out how to compensate her for a fifth or perhaps seventh circle spell. He doesn't have any money on him because the money was all Evil. Hopefully he can sell spells? He has nothing else to sell and what if there's a local norm of Good clerics not charging for any of their spells, then what - if the archmage shows up and finds that Blai has been indentured over this or something and Blai needs to beg a fifth or possibly seventh circle spell's cost off him he's going to be SO irritated -

:I can understand you. I don't know where Valdemar is. I was in Cheliax, which is a country in the continent of Avistan.:

Should he specify the planet. He's not sure he's on his planet, but if he is, it might seem rude to specify? Like it would signify that this wizardess was too alien to be recognizably Golarionite even though she's obviously a human and that is... probably at least mostly a horse... and the spell is... well he's never had a Telepathic Bond on him before so maybe it doesn't feel like anything but wow it really doesn't feel like anything. Unless it's that itch in his ear. Which he is not going to scratch because he's still doing the hands-in-nonthreatening-position thing. What if a bug has climbed into his ear to lay eggs there. It's probably too cold here for bugs. But not for DIRE bugs. But those probably wouldn't fit in his ear. Only probably though. He should specify the planet actually, he doesn't want to be rude but he thinks he's probably just imagining that it might be rude and actually it would be fine in a situation this weird featuring Menadorian Plane Shift Dire Snake Things.

:Which is on the planet Golarion: he adds.

This is somehow still getting more and more baffling! In a fascinating way - the man seems to be thinking about the existence of a very advanced mage-technique to imitate Mindspeech, except that the way he's thinking about it hints that he doesn't know Mindspeech exists, what - something feels off about how the man is thinking about magic, Vanyel kind of suspects he's missing something important, but the thoughts are going by very fast and he's not managing to pin it down. 

(- "because the money was all evil", what does that even mean, Vanyel's first wild guess is money earned through, what, taking unethical mercenary contracts, but that somehow doesn't ring true with the rest -) 

- should he specify the planet???? 

...Aaaand he specified, and Vanyel has certainly never heard of anywhere that calls the world 'Golarion'. Or of a country called Cheliax or a continent called Avistan. He wishes he could ask Leareth if this isn't Leareth's doing, then Leareth should definitely not be given any hints whatsoever about it, and in any case they haven't spoken in - almost two months, actually, it hadn't really sunk in how long it's been... 

Vanyel doesn't relay anything to Katri yet because he has no idea where he would start. 

Um. 

:I don't know of anyone calling our world Golarion: Katri sends. :But, er, I also don't know of there being other worlds with humans and mages. ...We sensed magic when you, um, arrived here, but it wasn't a Gate. Do you know what it was?: She's not at all sure this is the most important first question to be asking but she's not managing to think of a better one. 

:There was a monster with a mirrorlike apparently portal-esque apparatus instead of a face. The rest of it looked like a giant snake. I am not familiar with the monster species.: Because he slept through that class probably and absolutely deserved the entire business with all the broken joints et cetera for it probably except for how, remember, he made that up, and might have actually slept through something else equally embarrassing to not know, maybe the portalsnakes are a new project of Manohar's or something, may Hell be denied a soldier. Should he be praying more. He isn't sure if it's expensive but it can't be VERY expensive or they'd have mentioned that in the letter next to the note about Communes, which they did think to mention without even first knowing whether he was high enough circle for that. Iomedae, here I am, I will continue to do my best for You in the complete absence of additional feedback but thought You might like a look at the place, please forgive me if I am distracting You from important things. What if it was in fact in the letter next to the Communes and he just forgot! What if She dropped something that actually mattered over that! No it can't POSSIBLY be that expensive. EVERY religion encourages prayer and some of them would have a policy of telling people to shut up and leave their gods alone if it were that bad. It is at most a little tiny bit expensive. It was NOT in the letter stop being dumb. What if he re-read the letter though. It's in his bag. His ear has stopped itching but he's still going to slowly lower the not-on-the-side-with-his-mace hand to see if the wizardess is okay with that so he can go back to casting Guidance a lot maybe soon.

Katri is not particularly going off body language to gauge the man's intentions, and doesn't react to him lowering his hand. She's mostly picking up that the poor man is incredibly anxious and - seems to be constantly expecting that he's about to get in trouble for breaking some kind of rule by accident? That's definitely the flavor there, and not fear of, you know, getting caught doing something definitely nefarious on purpose. 

:- We're not going to hurt you: she sends after a moment, because maybe that will help. :I'm not familiar with that monster species either.: It sounds like it could be something out of the Pelagirs? Maybe? 

Savil reaches out to Vanyel with a Mindtouch. :Dara wants a report. Do you have anything.: 

:Um. He - seems to think he might be from another world? Which would - actually explain a lot, if it wasn't impossible, everything else I've picked up from him is incredibly weird. He thinks he got here after he ran into a monster with a - something like a Gate for a face? ...He just started praying to the god he follows, in a - really strange way - I'm pretty sure it's not the Star-Eyed but I almost wonder if it's a different god or goddess who has a pact with his people, whoever they are.: 

Also his thoughts are constantly going in anxiety-spirals to an extent that's frankly exhausting to try to follow. Was he ever that bad??? 

:You absolutely were that bad.: 

Mental nudge. :Any advice for what we should do about him?: 

Vanyel has no idea! This is so incredibly out of context, and deeply suspicious but not in a way that points at how to be usefully paranoid. 

:Um. I think we should invite him inside somewhere warm - and not too close to the main palace, preferably - and ask some more questions. And - wait, one moment -: 

He reaches for Katri again. :Can you sense any compulsions on him.: Vanyel can't, but mage-sight at a distance is a lot blurrier, even with the aid of the Web, and compulsions are very low-power. 

Not that she's noticed so far but she wasn't looking for that specifically! She'll have a closer peek with mage-sight. 

His Ant Haul hasn't worn off yet; he cast it when he set out to get through a few hours of walking at a full league per hour even with the armor and the bag. The mace is magic, the armor is magic. That's it.

Katri has absolutely no idea what that is but she's pretty sure it's not a compulsion, and relays this to Vanyel. 

Right. 

Well, either this man is exactly what he seems to be - and what he seems to be makes no sense whatsoever - or he's some kind of plot. If it's a plot then - well, it might be possible to use Mindhealing to twist someone's head around enough that they genuinely thought they were from another planet. It's still not at all obvious what the goal of the plot would be, but of course Leareth - and Vanyel can't think who other than Leareth could pull something like this off - wouldn't want it to be, so that's not actually surprising. 

:I think we should have one of the Mindhealers have a look at him. ...I'd actually prefer Jisa, given her - more varied experience - but I'm worried about putting her at risk.: Though it's probably not exactly what Leareth was steering them toward, Leareth doesn't - or shouldn't - know anything about Jisa's mage-gift, or her lifebond. :- If we put him in the nearest Work Room, those aren't actually shielded against Mindhealing.: As all of them learned a few years ago. :She can have a look without him knowing.: 

:Right. I can pass that along. ...Should we get Randi and Karis out of the city, do you think? Just in case?: 

:Just in case of what?: Vanyel sighs. :I have no idea. I suppose if he's a mage, he could Final Strike - Jisa can check that, too -: He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. :I have no idea. I don't know what we're looking at here. It - smells like a trap, but I don't know what the trap part could possibly be. I think - make sure they're behind shields, and be ready to evacuate, but having them out of the city reduces our options too -: 

:All right.: 

Savil can pass this on to Katri. The nearest Work Room is outside the guarded perimeter, but only about a ten-minute walk. 

Katri is still trying to gauge if her attempt at reassurance is helping at all. It's been less than thirty seconds. 

She smiles at the man, as soothingly as she can manage, and will maybe project reassurance a little too (not too hard, she's worried that in itself might spook him). :Why don't we go inside somewhere warmer before we, er, ask you more questions to try to get this figured out.: 

Reassuring him does not help at all. He's not being anxious at her, it's just happening. Constantly. The content is responsive to what's going on but the amount really is not. She can cause the content to refresh itself unusually quickly if she pushes on it? What if he tracks mud indoors, why did he never get good at Prestidigitation. Is he underdressed. What was that in the corner of his eye, just a squirrel? His hardboiled egg and his roll are going to expire in his bag if he doesn't eat them in the next twenty minutes or so and he can cast another Create Food and Water today and won't go importantly hungry without the bit saved from last night, but what a waste to let any of it shrivel up into nothing. Was his most recent chess game with Grec really fun enough, is there any objective way to be sure. What if the Worldwound isn't really closed and opens up again for no reason like a partially healed cut that prematurely loses its scab. If they try to send him back to Golarion will they accidentally drop him in the ocean and is that a good reason to take his armor off first or is that just asking for a monster ambush.

:Of course, where would you like me to go?:

(It doesn't occur to him at all that someone might be subtly influencing his emotions and only those; if that's a thing in his world it's not subtle or not emotion specific.)

Katri isn't reading his mind and can't particularly tell if the content is changing over faster, just that it's not really helping with his affect. She'll stop trying, in that case, she already has a lot to juggle and this poor man's anxiety levels are not really the top priority to address here. 

:Follow me.: 

She's trying not to appear at all on-edge, they really don't need more of that bouncing around, but she can tell that Savil is alarmed and stressed and it's hard to hide it entirely. 

The man's thoughts continue to be disorienting and exhausting to follow, even if Vanyel can sympathize rather a lot with someone worrying about petty concerns like making a mess even when there are VASTLY bigger concerns that ought to dominate. 

...He's worrying about the food in his bag doing WHAT???

...He's worrying about the WHAT reopening????????

Nevermind. Focus. This man's thoughts are definitely full of tantalizingly baffling details that could conceivably have been put there by a clever Mindhealer to distract the Heralds from whatever he's really here for. Vanyel...isn't sure he really believes that could be what's happening here...but it would be stupid not to check. 

He doesn't relay any of it to Katri. She definitely doesn't need the distraction. 

Katri doesn't try to make conversation while they walk. (She does notice that the man seems to be extremely fit; he's having a lot less difficulty moving at a decent pace through snow while wearing a pack than she would.) 

They arrive at a clearly temporary and hastily-erected fence, and walk along it for a bit before reaching the nearest checkpoint. Katri waves to the Guards and very young Herald stationed there, to indicate that everything is fine, even though she's not at all sure that everything is fine. 

Is his holy symbol still clearly visible? ...not that anyone seems to recognize it, but if they did it would be important. He follows Katri, though not before looking at everybody they're going past to make sure that's also okay with them, he doesn't know if these people have any intrafactional issues and certainly doesn't want to exacerbate them if they have. He lengthens his stride a bit to try to keep up with the horse and not slow it and its rider down. How long will it take to afford a Plane Shift (or two of them) home? Probably long enough that he's going to miss the convention. It didn't sound like Iomedae was going to pick up a ton of Chelish clerics to fill Her seats in the religious delegation but he can't Plane Shift himself remotely in time unless some remarkably bad things happen very quickly. Would he be higher circle if he had run his fort worse? That's a perverse incentive, he wonders if anybody's doing that on purpose so they get to have less overdetermined fights with non-stunned demons more frequently, you'd hope that wouldn't be a way to get promoted but a lot of officers seem to think circles matter more than any other quality for promotion, he got some incredulous letters when he promoted Grec...

Vanyel is starting to feel like he should have been taking notes??? He's pinned down slightly more of what felt odd and off about how the man was thinking about magic, earlier - it feels a little more like White Winds, what he's heard of it from Jisa, than how Valdemar thinks about mage-gift, except that White Winds isn't exactly about having more fights - and he still feels like he's not quite reading it right, something is more off than that, but they still don't know if anything the man thinks about the ""other"" ""world"" is even real... 

Jisa is now hurrying over from the Mindhealers' Collegium as quickly as she can, which will be a lot more quickly once Enara manages to rendezvous with her. She would be more annoyed about being abruptly dragged out of a sesion with a patient, but this does seem like it could be incredibly important. 

(In a corner of her mind that she doesn't look at too closely, she's almost excited. It feels like a long time that they've been waiting for the inevitable escalation.) 

(Nobody they're going past seems inclined to start an argument with Katri over their direction, though a lot of them are more visibly tense than her. Nods of acknowledgement are exchanged. They pass another half-a-dozen of the blue-eyed probably-horses, which watch him closely but don't interfere with their passage.) 

They arrive at one of the standalone Work Rooms, a squat brick building beside a path mostly cleared of snow. Katri ushers the man in ahead of her, and gets to work on a weather-barrier; she's not a powerful mage, but she trained in k'Treva, and the technique doesn't have to have a lot of power thrown at it to quickly warm a small space that has its own walls and everything. 

Inside the room are bare stone walls and a couple of rickety wooden stools. 

:- I'm sorry, I forgot my manners. My name is Katri and I'm a Herald-Mage of Valdemar. What's your name?: 

The Mostly-Horses are unsettling, like some kind of shapeshifter aimed at 'horse' and missed. Wow he does not recognize that spell at all. Maybe it's some not-a-spell bonus thing like channels and domain powers and sorcerer bloodline nonsense. He sits on a stool. It's ambiguous if he's under arrest, this is really not a guest room looking place (though it also doesn't really look like a jail cell, those would normally have a hallway you could observe people from? Maybe it's a teleport trap or it's for calling outsiders most of the time or something?), and it's not that he'd like to be arrested but he would really like to be clear on it, but asking would sound so confrontational. He is hardly about to threaten to leave unless they make it obvious that they want to insist, if that's not the way they operate around here. Especially since, if they don't know the symbol, they might construe it as a weapon just for being pointy and not even because he can cast spells with it, and then if they were arresting him they might take it away. (She's being very tolerant so far. Guidance.)

His name! He has one of those. :I'm Select Blai Artigas and I'm a cleric of Iomedae.: Which is redundant if you know what Select means but they really don't seem to recognize the symbol. Hopefully they can pronounce his name because he just bets if he has to come up with an alternative it will wind up being something inappropriate in their language or something. Is that Herald in the sense that gods have heralds or in the sense that monarchs have heralds or in some other sense that is translating awkwardly. She doesn't have a trumpet but Clarion Call is first circle. Probably that's not even standard issue heraldic equipment and he's overgeneralizing from a book he can't even now remember reading.

Most of that continues to be - not important to address now, before they've confirmed whether they're in the implausible-plot scenario or the impossible-but-would-in-many-ways-make-a-lot-more-sense scenario. But probably the man should know what Heralds are. That seems important. (Also it's only fair for him to know whether or not he's being arrested, but Vanyel...isn't actually sure yet how they're going to decide they're handling that. Safer to wait until Jisa has a chance to look and determine if he's had enormous amounts of Mindhealing done to him.) 

:You should explain what Heralds are: he sends to Katri. 

Fortunately explaining what Heralds are to someone who's never met one before and doesn't have much context on Valdemar is not a completely new situation to be in. 

:Heralds are - it means someone who's Chosen by one of the Companions - you saw my Companion outside, she looks like a white horse, but Companions are magical and intelligent and Choose people who're, er, well-suited to help lead Valdemar, and they help guide and advise us on protecting Valdemar and upholding the laws and generally being trustworthy people.: 

She has no idea if he's going to believe any of that, or find it reassuring even if he does. She doesn't get the sense that he intends to break any laws on purpose but he might be afraid of doing it by accident. 

:...Um, I didn't fully get what you mean by 'cleric', whatever it is I'm not sure we have them here. Could you explain?: 

Okay, the Mostly Horses are called Companions. This rhymes a little bit with how paladins sometimes have their own magical horses and are chosen by paladin-corner gods, but it's not quite like it, since the Mostly Horses Companions are doing the filtering, and he should stop relying on comparisons to Golarion magical traditions. ...if the horses are intelligent is he being rude to the horses? She didn't introduce her horse. Maybe her horse COMPANION is shy and he should not rely on this as a cue for all further encounters with them. Anyway. They're some kind of military branch, which is a little weird if they all have the same powers - maybe there are support personnel she's eliding, that would make sense, like how a paladin order won't generally explain itself with "also we sometimes hire wizards and burglars". And they also have some kind of advisory role, or maybe it's a Heraldocracy outright.

They don't have any clerics? That's weird.

:A cleric is a person empowered by a god, in my case Iomedae, and it is the most common way for gods to empower people - though Iomedae in particular does more paladins. We're good at healing, compared to other kinds of Golarion spellcasters, but can prepare spells that are suitable for other needs too. I'm third circle. - clerics go up to nine, like wizards and sorcerers do. I am not allowed to lie: he thinks; paladins definitely aren't and Iomedae was a paladin in life, so he's at least almost certainly encouraged not to lie and he cannot exactly ask anyone for clarification right now :or do Chaotic or Evil things in general and it's my responsibility to carry out my best understanding of Iomedae's will wherever I find myself but She's Lawful Good so that will not take the form of going around doing crimes or anything.: He himself is probably not Good and has very little idea how long it could take him to get there given how he was working for Asmodeus for twenty years; he's presumably Lawful Neutral now. But Iomedae thought he'd do and he will try to make Her right.

That really gives her a lot more additional questions than answers, but Katri nods anyway. :Thank you.: 

And since she's sort of stuck here waiting for further orders after Jisa sneaks by the Work Room to peek at the guy's mind - she's not entirely sure what for, she didn't get an explanation from Savil, just "Jisa is on her way, keep him in the Work room" - and she needs a further topic of conversation - 

:Can you tell me a bit more about Iomedae?: 

Jisa is almost there! 

She also didn't get more of an explanation than ''this looks like it could be a Leareth plot" but she can fill in the gaps. She doesn't bother to dismount from Enara's back, just gets herself in Sight-range and Looks straight through the wall - she can't get through with anything other than Mindhealing, which makes her feel half-blind, but her Sight is stronger than it was a few years ago, she should be able to get the detail she needs... 

:Iomedae is an ascended god. In life she was a paladin of Aroden, I don't know if He's visited this planet before. - uh, He's dead now. Iomedae is called the Inheritor for this reason. This is her symbol,: the tiny dagger with the gold wire sun behind it. :She has a theocracy on Golarion called Lastwall, but I've never been there. I have Her holy book with me,: two copies actually, he kept thinking of situations where he'd want to leave one somewhere so he Scrivened off a second though it's just sewn together and not really bound properly, :if you would like me to read from it though it's quite long and I'm not sure how well it will translate.:

Blai's mind is very... trellis oriented. Very few things growing in his garden are able to support themselves. There are a handful of vines that are struggling along the ground looking for the trellis without having found it yet but they're underdeveloped. The trellis is - new. He has to have had a previous trellis, some of this growth is old enough that it has to predate this shiny new golden structure, but there was some damage when the old one vanished and he's busily growing new vines to cling very hard to the new one.

The vines are forever growing new superfluous tendrils and underripe fruits that will never be able to wave around trellisward and hook on; he prunes them very swiftly and they all turn into compost.

That's...not not concerning...but Jisa is really quite sure you can't do that with Mindhealing. 

She reaches out. :Van?: And she'll try to describe it in generalities to him rather than bounce her Sight directly, both because Mindhealing Sight takes a lot of training Vanyel doesn't have to interpret and because, even if this man isn't precisely her patient, she still feels like he deserves some degree of privacy. 

:- I don't know what happened to him. Something definitely did but it's - not something magic or Mindhealing could do.: 

Vanyel is no longer reading Select Blai Artigras' mind. He's keyed to the shields on the Work Room (he was the one who last redid them six or seven years ago) and still directly linked into the Web, he could reach his Thoughtsensing through if he wanted, but it would be more effort and he doesn't really expect to get anything new and useful that way, or miss anything critical in the three-or-four-minute window before Jisa confirms what they're dealing with. 

...Huh. 

:Could a god do it, do you think?: 

:- Oh. Maybe? The Tayledras don't look like that - even Moondance doesn't - but not impossible.: Pause. :What else do we know? It'd help to - put it in context - normally I have more to go on than just Sight, you know.: 

:He seems to believe he's probably from another world. If that made any sense whatsoever I'd - be inclined to believe it. Everything he thinks about is incredibly strange. He's the follower of a god I haven't heard of, and was thinking about it in a very odd way. My concern was that - well, we had no reason to think it was possible to travel between worlds, right, or that other worlds existed with people who look human and use magic - and it's a baffling plot if it is one, but 'Leareth having a baffling plot' is definitely not impossible, just weird - and you could make someone believe a lot of strange things with Mindhealing, right, if you didn't care what was ethical...: 

:You probably could. I don't...think...that's compatible with what I'm Seeing? One moment...: 

She'll try to look 'up close', insofar as she can through shields. Her initial impression is that the trellis is not a normal structure for a person to have in their mind, but the growth around it is entirely natural and not directly meddled with - and you would need fine-detail work to alter someone's beliefs about reality, the trellis doesn't look like the kind of thing that could do that, it looks like something that could guide the man's deeper motivation and drives but the rest is all him - 

- but she wants to be quite sure of that, before she tells Vanyel that this definitely can't be Leareth's doing. Can she see any signs of Mindhealing detail-work up close? Or anything that doesn't look like it grew that way naturally, even if she can't pick up the traces of Mindhealing per se? 

The trellis might actually be mostly natural? The same way some people have potted plants, this guy has trellised plants. The missing old trellis might be more like the kind of thing that happens if somebody dies, not even somebody you're magically bonded to, just someone who acted as a lens on all your thinking. He does have some skills that don't look homegrown, some weird instincts that appear to have been placed to ornament this garden from without, but they're not really messing with the plants beyond being a thing some can grow on in the course of finding the trellis.

No Mindhealers have ever touched this guy.

That's incredibly fascinating. Jisa doesn't think she's ever seen a mind that - pervasively structured - in a way that wasn't somehow magically imposed. Lifebonds don't look like that. Heralds don't look like that. (Insofar as it reminds her of anything, it reminds her a little of the structure in a Companion's mind. Up close it does look less obviously artificial, more - just the way his mind grew or the way he decided to grow it - but the fact that it's not original to his mind, that it seems to be replacing some previous structure, is weirder - she's seen people with rebuilt-looking minds but not in this particular way and usually with a lot more mess...) 

- the little not-homegrown ornaments are weird but not relevant to what she was supposed to be checking, and neither is the rest. With enormous reluctance, she backs off. 

:I really don't think Leareth had anything to do with this. - at least I think Leareth hasn't done anything to his mind, and I don't see how Leareth could have hauled someone here from another world or why he would do that. I - guess I can't be totally sure without deep-scanning him, but given how unlikely it seems, I'm not comfortable doing it without his consent. And obviously I couldn't do it without him noticing.: 

Vanyel lets out his breath and some of the tension with it, and abruptly feels very very tired. 

:All right. I think we owe the poor man an explanation, then.: 

Sigh. 

:You shouldn't be involved. Just because it's not Leareth's doing doesn't mean it's - safe - just get back to Mindhealers', all right? I'm sure they need you anyway.: 

And he wants to tuck her away somewhere safe. Jisa tries not to feel hurt, and does manage not to retort that she can look after herself just fine; it won't help. 

:All right.:

Pause. 

:I think he's - I don't know for sure, I'm missing a lot of context, but I think he's trustworthy - or, I mean, I think there's something he's loyal to, something he's built himself around, and he won't go against that. I guess I don't know what 'that' is. But it's probably not 'working for Leareth'.:

Sigh. :I guess that's what we have to figure out.: 

Jisa is admittedly not sure what happened to his last trellis. She doubts what happened was him deciding to break with it, though. She - isn't sure that's possible from within the structure of a mind like that. 

She turns Enara back toward the House of Healing, deep in thought.

Vanyel reaches out to Mindspeak Katri, which is a lot easier to do through shields he's keyed to than full Thoughtsensing on someone who's weirdly hard to read to begin with. 

:We checked. He's not working for Leareth. We don't know who he does work for and that might be important, but - he's not under arrest, we just want to understand what's happening and - I guess maybe help him get home, if he wants that?: 

Oh good. Katri just barely manages to keep the visible relief off her face. 

:We do know who he's working for, actually! A goddess called Iomedae. ...The explanation is very confusing, he seems to be claiming She used to be human and served a different god? Who's dead but might have visited our world for some reason? This goddess Iomedae has a kingdom in 'Golarion', like how Vkandis has Karse. - he has Her holy book on him and offered to translate it.: 

(Non-Chelish people are actually really easy to read but it's not that weird that she might have several telepathic bonds up. Maybe that's why the one she had left uncast was still and silent.)

That's...a start, at least. 

:I'm going to come over there. ...Tell him he's not under arrest, I guess. I can explain more once I get there.: 

That's such an awkward thing to just say to someone out of the blue!!! 

:You're, er, not under arrest.: Fidget. :Someone else is coming to explain more.: 

Oh that's very Lawful and polite of them. :Thank you for letting me know.:

He's taking all of this surprisingly well, honestly. Katri is pretty sure she would be freaking out enormously more in his position. 

...Still really awkward to sit here in silence for the next five minutes or however long it takes Vanyel to get here, though, she should - think of something else sensible to ask... She scrabbles for a moment, trying to remember some previous thread she could follow up on.

:What was the name of the god you said was dead, again? And, er, how exactly does a god end up dead...?: 

:His name was Aroden. He attempted to incarnate on Golarion to bring about an Age of Glory and it did not work. It created a portal to the Abyss which stood for a century and a permanent storm which persists still and broke the functioning of prophecy all over the planet in addition to killing him.:

Wow that's horrifying and disturbing???? Possibly Katri should ask more questions about it but she almost doesn't want to know, yet, it feels like she already has more than enough to process. 

:Is there anything more you can tell us about magic in Golarion? It sounds like it works a bit differently from here.: There, a safe topic that definitely won't be upsetting. 

:Sure. The most common kinds of spellcasters there are wizards and clerics. Clerics are like me, though of course different gods prefer different alignments and personalities. We cast from wisdom and ask for our spells in an hour of prayer every morning. Wizards cast from cunning, use books to store the spells they've learned, and learn to cast their spells in schools or apprenticeships. I technically know one wizard spell but it's a zeroth-circle one and I can't use most of its features reliably. There are also sorcerers, who have a hereditary or idiosyncratic magical power - often they're like narrowly scoped wizards, and there's a relatively common kind that sings to cast their spells instead of speaking, but they vary a lot more overall. And there are rarer kinds of casters like druids, and there are casters whose magic is a lesser component of what they do, like paladins, who don't get first circle spells until they're nearly as powerful as I am at third circle but have some non-spell abilities that come in before then. Some magic users learn to create magic items like scrolls and wands and enchanted weapons but I don't know how myself.:

What a fascinating blend of familiar-sounding and bizarre. 

:...Huh, do you mean that 'wizard' magic isn't hereditary? - all the Gifts we know about are something you have to be born with, or at least born with the potential for.: Which is very relevant for Katri in particular, who was a mage in potential only until rather recently. :We have a lot of narrowly scoped Gifts - like Mindspeech, which is how I'm talking to you - but mage-gift is hereditary as well.: 

:It is understood that cunning is hereditary but the spellcasting must be trained. It sounds like you would be considered a sort of sorcerer on Golarion, though I don't know if this is more like a spell or like some other sort of ability. Do you mind if I get out my lunch now, it will expire soon if not eaten.:

Katri has no idea what that means but going off his affect she really doesn't think he's planning anything nefarious. :Um, sure, go ahead.: 

He pulls a roll out of his bag and a table knife and a chunk of rock salt. He cuts the roll in half, revealing that it has butter and an entire hardboiled egg inside, though the egg doesn't seem to have a shell even though it would not retain that shape while cooking/baking without one. He scrapes some salt off the chunk onto the cut halves of the roll on his lap, and then eats it.

That looks really tasty. (Katri may have missed breakfast today; she was planning to grab something at one of the food-vendors' stalls once those were set up.) She tries not to look envious. 

:What's the difference between using Wisdom or using Cunning for doing magic?: The different connotations do sort of come across through Mindspeech, but she's just holding a link for him, not trying to fully read the guy's mind. She has to be missing some nuance or other, since from what she is getting it seems like...both...should be important for literally any skill? 

:Wisdom, cunning, and splendor are the three basic features of how well someone's mind works, and different kinds of magic require different ones - sorcerers normally require splendor. Some people have fairly balanced abilities but the most powerful wizards are going to be the most cunning ones, the ones who are good at math and memorization and making logical leaps between concepts, and this remains true even if they have very poor reflectivity and judgment - Wisdom - and bad communicative skills - Splendor. I can cast spells to enhance Wisdom and Splendor, though not today; clerics don't get the one for Cunning. There are three physical features likewise that also each have an associated spell but as far as I know nobody uses those to put force behind their spellcasting. Do you want the other half of this?:

Why in the world would you divide up the different ways people's minds can work better or worse into exactly three categories– oh, right, if there were exactly three different magical techniques to improve particular elements, that makes a lot of sense actually. Also that's so cool! Katri isn't even sure if Mindhealers can do that, exactly - Jisa mentioned something like that, but maybe it only worked on herself? - and in any case there aren't enough of them to afford recreational use of Mindhealing to make yourself think better. 

- she blinks, confused by the change of topic. :Oh, er, it's fine, I don't need your food.: 

When is Vanyel getting here? If she weren't expecting him any minute she would be considering if she ought to be taking notes or something, but it doesn't feel worth it when she expects to be interrupted soon for him to take over. 

:How many gods do you have in Golarion? And what are they like?: 

If she doesn't want it after all he will eat it. :I don't know an exact number! There are many minor ones and plenty of beings where it matters what your technical definition of 'god' is, and different ones are popular in different regions. Certainly there are dozens. Gods come in all alignments just like people do and also have different areas of concern - Erastil is Lawful Good like Iomedae, for instance, but He's the god of agriculture and hunting and the family, they don't have a lot of overlap beyond the alignment itself.:

Well, it seems rude to eat his food - though it's thoughtful of him to offer - and also she wasn't sure if she should be worried about the thing where it apparently wouldn't be okay to eat anymore in another few minutes?

She nods along. :Huh. - you keep talking about 'alignment' and I'm not sure I actually know what you mean by that?: 

:Does nobody here get alignment detection spells or have any contact with the afterlives?:

:Does no one - what? No, I - I don't think that - I don't think either of those is a technique we have, unless it's a school of magic I don't know about?: 

At this point there's a knock on the Work Room door. Presumably it's Vanyel, but Katri still jumps a little. She ducks her head. :Just a moment.: And she'll go open the door and let him in. 

The man who enters is quite short and very slender; he looks both very fit and like he doesn't quite eat enough. Both his hair and his eyes are silver. He doesn't exactly give off the vibe of an authority figure, but Katri is definitely looking at him like he is one. He's also dressed entirely in white. 

He nods to Blai. :My name is Herald-Mage Vanyel.: 

:Select Blai Artigas.:

Still making eye contact with Blai, Vanyel reaches out to Katri with a private Mindspeech link. :So? I haven't been reading him since you came in here, anything important come up?: 

Okay now she kind of regrets not taking notes. 

:He's been telling me a bit about Golarion. Their magic is really weird - he has magic granted by the goddess Iomedae, but it sounds more like mage-gift than like that one time Karis had a miracle from Vkandis. There's another kind of magic that isn't like Gifts at all, it's not something you're born with, apparently anyone clever enough can learn it and they use books to store their magic in? They have a weird thing where they talk about cleverness - he called it 'Cunning', said it was like being good at math - differently from being wise or being - good at communicating - I think it's those three things because there are different magical techniques to make someone better at one of them? They also have Gifts, or something like it, but he made it sound like they're less important than the book-magic and the god-magic. 

...Er, and the god his goddess used to serve died when He tried to incarnate in the world to do - something, I didn't catch it but it was meant to be good - and it sounded like it went horribly instead. They have a lot of gods, more and less powerful ones. One of them is a god of farming? ...Oh, and we were just talking about 'alignment', which is something both gods and people both have, it's detectable with their magic and...has something to do with afterlives? That's where we were when you came in.: 

That's a lot of things, but so far it does feel like it hangs together? 

...Vanyel is mindful of Jisa's comment and the fact that it's not obviously warranted to read this man's mind constantly, but he's going to do it once more anyway. They have a lot of reasons to be paranoid, and he can apologize later if he decides it was unfair. 

Did she think he was going to poison her. That would be fairly ridiculous since he then ate the food himself but she was looking at it and he would have been fine on half a lunch or no lunch really and it's not like it's not REALLY OBVIOUS when a foreigner is looking hungrily at your food. Maybe it would have been rude. Does he have to figure out the rules about whether it's rude to accept food tonight - does this mean his next casting of Create Food is going to be mostly wastage if they won't take it. Are they telepathy-ing each other now? They look like they are, he shouldn't interrupt them. Unless there was something he was supposed to do besides introduce himself and they're waiting on him for that. Did he do anything besides introduce himself when he first met Katri, that he is not doing now, he can't remember. They're probably just telepathy-ing each other about him and how weird he is and all of the innumerable rude and awkward things he has probably done in the short time he has been on this planet. That is their perfect right but it would be really nice if he knew what the things were so he could stop doing them. Does he smell bad, it's been a bit now since he's gotten prestidigitated by someone who has the entire spell worked out and he was trying to nudge the Endure castings later in the day to be able to eventually skip one and add an extra Ant Haul to make better time without cutting into the Oh Shit Spells. Even though his Oh Shit Spells were manifestly inadequate to the snake thing. Not that he had time to get one off, maybe... no, actually his spell loadout was completely inadequate for nonperson monsters, what was he thinking, it's fucking Menador, was he going to take down even a completely expectable bulette with just his mace and a Divine Favor? He prepped Hold Person and Forbid Action. You can sure tell that clerics do not cast from cunning, just like Jaumandreu used to say. But he was worried about orcs and both spells plus Burst of Radiance would work fine on orcs... and probably he couldn't take a bulette by himself anyway... he is now on another planet and should simply drop context about what the dangers on the road in Menador are, if he gets to Plane Shift home he can ask them to drop him directly in Westcrown. Even if they're off by the maximum error he'll be closer to the city than he was at the time the snake attacked. Unless he lands in the Inner Sea. In which case he will be closer geographically but only until he drowns or is eaten by a sea monster. He doesn't know anything about what spells to prepare for sea monsters.

This poor man is so worried he's being rude. Really, Vanyel feels like it's more rude of them to haul him off to a Work Room with minimal explanation and invasively read his mind. 

...This 'Golarion' world sounds so concerning. Then again, Valdemar might come across just as badly if someone were learning about it only via reading Vanyel's mind while he was having a bad day. 

He pulls over one of the stools and sits down. :I'm sorry for hauling you over here without an explanation. There were, er, some things we had to check, but - you're clearly not here on purpose or intending anything hostile. I admit we still have a lot of questions, but it's not an emergency. Do you have any questions right now?: 

:I think that was perfectly reasonable of you, I plane shifted into your territory with no advance warning whatsoever! That must have looked incredibly suspicious! I would like to know if you have anyone who can plane shift available and how I could earn a casting. A Sending might also do, since I am wanted for a political pet project of an archmage who could conceivably want to spend the spells to come fetch me himself, though I might want to go about that more indirectly rather than interrupt the man himself.:

Are there questions he's supposed to have. None of these people's anything is any of his business. Is it signaling that he finds them uninteresting or something if he doesn't have questions about them besides whether they can send him home. Does this description of the constitutional convention make him sound too important? He doesn't actually know how many delegates there are going to be except that they want up to ten of them to be empowered Iomedaeans. Are they going to hold a seat for him since they bothered to send him a letter so that he is decreasing the Iomedaean political influence by at least ten percent, or is he easily replaceable - there probably are not actually ten Chelish Iomedaeans, but maybe he's selling short the refugee routes and there's plenty who've been living in Andoran and were empowered a decade ago and will come back now - but then why pull him away from the fort - he definitely shouldn't Sending an archmage, he can probably pay Fiducia Boian with the information that this planet exists or something to relay the facts to interested parties.

:It did look incredibly suspicious, but - that wasn't your fault and I don't think it's fair to take it out on you.: 

Select Blai is taking the whole 'being apparently transported to another world' thing remarkably in stride, and attitude about this whole thing is incredibly...convenient? Vanyel isn't sure whether to feel bad for taking advantage of that or suspicious, not that he can think of any useful direction to point that suspicion. 

'A political pet project of an archmage'???? ...Well, presumably not all of them are like Urtho and determined to avoid involvement in politics. Some of them are Leareth  really more of them are Leareth than you would initially think Blai is from another planet and presumably all sorts of things are different and also, unless there's a lot he's never told Vanyel, Leareth is definitely not running around it as various important historical figures. Vanyel should really focus and stop worrying about Leareth. 

:I don't recognize what technique you mean by 'plane shift': he admits. :If you think your world is in another plane, I have no idea how we could get you home. ...If you think it's in this plane but around one of the stars very far away, I have even less idea, actually. I'm sorry. I don't know if it's possible with our magic.: 

Leareth would know, or be able to figure it out, probably within a week. Vanyel absolutely cannot and should not ask him about it. Though he finds himself half-looking forward to the possibility of having the dream tonight - it's been a while, but someone appearing from another world probably counts as new information even if Vanyel has no intention of sharing it - 

Well, that's kind of weird, but maybe they just never invented tuning forks or something. :I think my world is in this plane but on another planet, but plane shifting twice, once to perhaps Axis or Heaven and then back to the Material but aiming for my planet, would do the job. Failing that if you can do a Sending, or if you have a scroll of it or a wand I might make use of, I can let someone on my planet know what's going on and pass the information along in case I am worth the archmage's time to retrieve.: What if he is not. What if he Sends the Fiducia and the Fiducia writes the archmage and the archmage is like "meh". Then he would NEVER get to finish his chess by mail game with Commandant Terzíc. Wow that was a dumb thing to focus on even for him. There is probably some important political goal to be accomplished for the forces of Good at the convention and if he doesn't meet his catechism instructor there he will never find out what it is, let alone do it.

:...I think your world's magic is very different from ours. We don't have a communication-spell that works across planes or arbitrary distances.: Actually it's entirely possible that Leareth does, especially if it turns out he DOES know there are other populated worlds. :We - can try to figure something out, obviously, with your help, but - I doubt we can figure it out today, or this week. I'm sorry.: 

And he's going to back off and stop reading the poor man's mind now, though maybe after he's finished explaining that, in case Blai reacts very badly to it or something. 

Well, then he guesses he lives here now until he either kills enough monsters to hit fourth circle or the archmage notices he's missing without prompting and decides to care about that. Unless something weird happens, which is always very possible, and happened only just this morning. What if it's a different time zone here and he will be exhausted and having flashbacks to seminary until he readjusts, that would suck. You fall asleep in class ONE time. He won't be late to the convention until a month out but that's not enough time to do much of anything if you have this impoverished a starting point, he doesn't even have a tuning fork on him. :Well, that's regrettable but I suppose I'll just have to find a way to make myself useful here.:

He's really remarkably - easygoing - for someone whose mind is running in circles that much. Vanyel tucks away his Thoughtsensing, with a faint feeling of relief. 

:We don't need anything from you right now and we're not - going to demand you work before we give you food, or anything.: Though maybe his magic can straight-up create food? Vanyel isn't sure he could possibly have caught that right, but magic directly granted by a god might have a lot of capabilities that mages don't? :But I'm sure you could be very useful here, if you wanted. What kinds of magic can you do?: 

:Clerics are, compared to other Golarion spellcasters, best at healing, followed by enhancement type spells, but we can do a lot of things - summonses, divinations, today I prepared Create Food and Water which I was planning to exchange for hospitality at a random farmhouse when I was done walking for the day, direct combat magic but we're not as squishy in weapons fighting as a wizard is either. I'd need to vet any situation I was doing combat in, of course, but I'm not constitutionally averse and Iomedae isn't a pacifistic sort. Tomorrow I can prepare Comprehend Languages and Share Language so you don't need to spend telepathy usage on me.:

What a strange mix. And, well, there might be fighting soon, but there isn't now, and either way Vanyel would be very reluctant to drag this man into a war with Leareth. 

:Mindspeech isn't especially tiring, but it does limit you to talking to Mindspeakers, so if you can do translation with magic: (!!!!????) :then that's a good idea. We don't have a shortage of food but - hmm, I don't know how it works, if it can create any kind of food including something exotic from your world, then - well, we do have an ice festival on today, I'm sure you could earn some coin.: 

He should really ask about the Healing but - it probably can't help Randi, Velgarth Healing certainly can't, and some part of him is reluctant to go ahead and confirm that. 

:I can specify the type of food, but it does always come out undersalted, so it's usually more impressive to people who are hungry than as a novelty. If I get a look at what kinds of food there are here I can try to guess at something that might be exotic. How common are Mindspeakers? Comprehend Languages will last a bit under an hour for me and let me understand and read whatever is said or written in any language, and Share Language will let me cause one person to speak a language I know as well as I do for a full day.:

Nod. :Mindspeakers are rare in general, but there's not exactly a shortage here in Haven – this is the capital city of Valdemar. Most of our Mindspeakers are in pretty high demand, but - it's not like you arriving here isn't also important - we might as well assign a Gifted Herald-trainee to follow you around and translate, that's not especially costly for us: if anything, it would make some trainee's day, :and works at least as well as having you give someone the language. Though being able to understand what everyone is saying is - certainly something I'd find reassuring in your place - even if it's only for a candlemark.: 

:I can prepare it several times, albeit not enough to cover the whole day, but if you're going to assign me someone to escort me and translate for me and they're already telepathic then I suppose I don't need Share Language, though I don't know what I do need the second-circle slots for in that case.:

:What are your options? ...I would like to hear more about the Healing you can do in particular, in case it complements our Healing-Gift rather than being redundant with it.: Pause. :Though, er, also it might not be a bad idea to prepare some defensive combat spells, if you have those. Just - just in case. We aren't currently at war but - it's possible a war could start soon, and we wouldn't have a lot of warning.: 

They're not at war, but Vanyel is aware that, however much it wasn't deliberate on Vanyel's part to grab someone from another world with otherworldly god-magic, it's something that Leareth could take as a threat. And he doesn't know what Leareth is thinking, they haven't been talking in a while. 

:There are a tremendous number of spells. War against who or what? That affects which ones will work well.:

...Oops, now Vanyel has to think about what's a good idea, given that nearly all of the details are...a state secret...and he likes this man, so far, but (whatever Jisa's impression of his mind might have been) doesn't actually have enormous reason to trust him. 

That being said, it's all much more in the open than it was even just a year ago. And - it feels unfair to this man, to ask him to make himself useful with his god-magic when that might bring him to Leareth's attention, and not even warn him. 

- what would Leareth be likely to actually do, if he received word from his spies of a man with suspiciously impossible powers in Haven? (Leareth wouldn't be fooled by the fact that 'making food appear from thin air' doesn't seem like a big spell. It's an impossible spell by all the known laws of magic.) 

He takes a deep breath. :There's a very powerful - archmage, I suppose you could say - based to the far north, who we have reason to think may be planning an invasion. Not necessarily imminently, but - we believe he has spies in Haven, and even though we know we didn't bring you here on purpose, it's possible he could learn about it and see it as an - escalation on our part. I don't know exactly what I expect to happen, though.: 

:Okay, but, what kind of invasion. Legions of the undead, armies of demons, called fire elementals, normal human or other mortal person soldiers... Would it be more convenient for your deescalation efforts if I were somewhere else? I wouldn't object at all to being relocated somewhere less provocative, though I don't have a better way of getting away than walking.:

:I don't know what 'undead' are, we might not have that? He has a lot of mages. It seems likely he has mages who can Gate directly to Haven even if that's not feasible for a full invasion. I don't know if summoning demons is something he makes a habit of, but that is used in combat here - though come to think of it I have no idea if they're the same as your demons or not. I know he makes a habit of using compulsions - mind-controlling magic, he could stop people from fighting back or - probably make them do whatever he wanted them to do, honestly.: 

Sigh. :...And we should consider moving you somewhere less visible, I suppose, or at least only asking you to do magic in private. It trades off against your magic being useful to us, but - we don't need that, it's not like we were counting on it, and I - don't want to ask you to put yourself in danger.: 

:Most magic doesn't benefit enormously from being cast in public, but the effects, if I did a lot of healing or something, would probably be noticeable. Do you have truth magic? Clerics can prepare Zone of Truth and it might be useful for filtering out spies. If you've already got as much of that as you can use probably what I'd want is things that make enchantments easier to throw off, Owl's Widsom and Resistance and Protection from Evil...:

:Heralds have truth magic, that's not in short supply.: They...haven't historically gone around using it on random people to root out spies, rather than specifically in the courts, and - it would upset a lot of people but honestly it might be worth considering anyway. Not Blai's problem, though. 

:I'm not sure what defines 'enchantments' in your kind of magic, I don't think we use that category, but that sounds like a good idea.: 

:Enchantments are a school of magic; Golarion casters learn to identify spells by whether they're enchantments or transmutations, divinations, abjurations, evocations, necromancy, or conjurations. The overwhelming majority of mind control is enchantment but the things I thought of will mostly work on other things that could also be described as mind control.:

Vanyel would love to sit here asking questions about the categories of Golarion magic for the next day, but - not the priority. 

:That makes sense. I think you should prepare that tomorrow, probably. ...Can you tell me more about your Healing, though? What kinds of injuries or other problems is your magic especially good for?: 

:Positive energy channeling, which I can do as a thirty foot radius burst twice a day or by replacing a prepared spell with an equivalent-strength cure spell as many times as I have spells I care to exchange, is excellent at acute injuries but mostly if they're recent, it's useless at infections. I need to prepare specifically for disease and it's a third circle spell, I can only do that once a day and it doesn't always work. Also at third circle I can cure blindness or deafness as long as the organs are still present and just don't work. Second circle I have Lesser Restoration, it's good at a wide range of conditions but there are things it can't touch. And as an orison that I can do as many times per day as I like, on days when I have it at all which don't include today, I can stabilize dying people so they stop getting worse.:

:Huh. That does sound usefully complementary to our kind of Healing.: Probably not useful for Randi, unless "Lesser Restoration" is more powerful than it sounds like. :Is it more tiring if there are more people in the radius when you do the channeling one? And - does it not matter what someone is dying of, for the one you can do unlimited times?: 

:It's not tiring at all, none of my magic is. It... might matter if they were dying of something very weird and it does not work if they are already dead.:

:None of your magic is tiring - is that because the power comes from your god, not from you directly?: 

:I don't think it's tiring for sorcerers and wizards either, though they rely on sleep to be able to do it more than we do.:

:That's an interesting difference.: Vanyel is mildly jealous. :What - limits how much magic someone can do, then, if it's not getting tired?: 

:There's sort of limited - space for it, which refills at dawn for clerics, or with sleep for arcane casters.:

That doesn't really leave Vanyel un-confused, but now isn't the time to go into depth on the alien magic of another world, however fascinating it is. He's...feeling pretty confident at this point that Select Blai Artigas is unlikely to get up to anything nefarious, and he's very sure he isn't a spy for Leareth. It's not urgent on the level of candlemarks to figure everything else out - it would be different if they had a way to get the poor man home, but they don't - and in the meantime he's neglecting his responsibilities for maintaining security at the the ice festival, which he's not sure would be possible to call off at this point even if it were a lot more warranted. 

He ducks his head. :I have a lot more questions, but - is it all right if it waits until later today? It seems like there are decisions we shouldn't be making hastily anyway. Do you need anything else right now? Er, we can offer you a proper room to stay in, and I'll work on assigning a trainee to shadow you like I mentioned before.:  

:I don't think I have any other immediate needs, thank you. I expect to be able to answer questions whenever you'd care to ask them.:

Nod. :Katri can show you to, er, somewhere more comfortable than a Work Room, and translate for you until we find that trainee.: 

To Katri, privately, :- I'll try to make that happen as soon as possible. You should write up what you learned from him as soon as possible, while it's fresh. Randi's going to want a report.: Vanyel has his own note-taking to do, but that can wait until he's parked somewhere he can usefully watch the festival proceedings with mage-sight. 

He smiles at Blai. There's tiredness behind the smile, but it's genuine. :I'm sorry we don't have an easy way to get you back to your world, and I'm sorry things here are - complicated - but we can figure something out.: 

Katri is kind of tired of the emotional radiation but she bobs her head. ...Maybe she should just stop using her Empathy even passively, if they've decided they trust the man now? Only she also sort of wants to know if he's confused by something but reluctant to ask. 

He does not seem obviously confused by anything more than the background "wow this sure isn't my planet" confusion, which is mostly manifesting as anxiety more than anything else. :Thank you: he tells both of them, and he's up and ready to follow Herald Katri.

(Vanyel heads out.) 

Katri leads him out of the Work Room back into the snow – though the sky is still perfectly clear blue, with barely a breeze, and now that the sun is higher in the sky it doesn't feel terribly cold. 

...She pauses. :Do you want to head to a guest room now, or, er, would you rather see some of the ice festival?: There is maaaaybe some desire on her part not to have to miss half the morning because she's glued to him. :I don't think you would stand out too much, lots of people traveled in for it. ...I guess the chainmail might stand out, and you probably couldn't take the mace in, I think they're searching people for weapons. Um, it's up to you, we could leave it somewhere safe but if you'd rather not we don't have to...: 

:It's not standard to go around armed here even out of doors?:

:....No? I mean, the Guard will be armed - and normally it wouldn't be odd to wear a dagger if you wanted, they're just being paranoid about security 'cause the Queen of Karse and her daughter are here - but I don't normally go around armed in the middle of the city, just out on circuit.: Admittedly she's a mage, so it's not like she's ever really unarmed, but it's not like she felt differently before she was a mage. 

:I don't wish to alarm anyone but seeing as I did just get attacked by a monster I'd as soon skip the festival.:

:...That's fair.: Katri is a grown adult and can cope with doing her duty as a Herald even if it means missing some of the festivities. It'll probably only be for a candlemark or two, and the Ice Festival will go all day and late into the night, it's fine. :All right, let's go to the guest rooms, then.: 

They're already outside the Festival perimeter, and mostly passing crowds of people going in the opposite direction, bundled up warmly and clearly excited. Some Herald-Trainees in Greys wave to Katri, and glance at Blai with curiosity, but nobody asks any questions. 

He will... nod at them? At a wild guess of how you should interact with curious-looking strangers??

This does not exactly sate their curiosity but there's no sign that anyone thinks it's a socially inappropriate move! 

They follow a meandering path, paved and mostly cleared of snow, past an orchard and a glass-roofed greenhouse and a stable and a large field with a few Herald-less Companions milling in it, and eventually end up at a long, low stone building. The style of architecture is clearly foreign, but otherwise it probably won't feel especially unfamiliar to Blai. 

Katri leads him in. (It was a long enough walk that her Companion was able to pass a message to another Herald who could check which rooms in the guest wing were free, assign them one, and let the servants know.) 

:Here we are! The privy and bathing-room are at the end of the hall, and - this is your room, looks like.: 

The interior walls are also plain stone, but softened by a few tapestries, and there's a worn rug on the floor. The room is equipped with a narrow bed, a small writing-desk in the corner with a stool tucked underneath, a washstand and basin by the window (glass, with curtains tied back), and a cozy, if elderly and visibly patched, armchair in front of the fireplace, which is unlit but already stacked with wood over a little teepee of kindling. 

Katri lights it with a little burst of magic. It only seems polite, and besides, she's been a mage for a short enough time that it still feels very cool every time. 

:This is lovely, thank you.: He had years in command of his fort to accumulate things for it, and this room is not nicer than his suite in #11. But this is a random guest room they had available on short notice, so that's very impressive. He sets his backpack on the desk.

:Do you, er, need anything else? Is there anything specific you want to ask about Valdemar, or should I just give you a summary of what I think might be relevant?: 

Katri was instructed to shadow him until someone else takes over, but honestly in his position she might want some time by herself in her room rather than having a stranger awkwardly hovering and trying to be helpful.

:...I could just go do some work nearby, if you'd rather - get settled in: she adds hesitantly. There's shielding on the building, but the regular guest-rooms in this wing aren't shielded on the interior dividing walls; she could park herself nearby and still keep her Empathy open, which ought to cover both "Blai has a problem he needs help with" and "Blai surprises them all by turning out to be up to something nefarious after all." 

:I'd appreciate a summary, I wouldn't expect to know what would be most important to know about the place.:

:That makes sense. Right.: 

Katri glances around, then goes to pull out the stool and sit, so Blai can have the more comfortable chair. 

:Valdemar was founded about eight hundred years ago. The story is that a baron from a place called the Eastern Empire fled with his people - the Eastern Empire wasn't a very pleasant place, probably still isn't, they use a lot of mind-control magic to force everyone to be loyal to the Emperor and they're always trying to conquer their neighbors. Anyway, Baron Valdemar managed to get away and kept fleeing west until they found land to settle where no one else lived yet, because it was just-cleared Pelagirs. Oh, right, er, the Pelagirs is what we call the land that was damaged by magic in a war between some very powerful mages two thousand years ago, it's slowly being repaired by some people who call themselves the Tayledras and serve the Star-Eyed Goddess - the whole western half of Valdemar would've been Pelagirs when Haven was founded.: 

She swings her legs. :Anyway, the history says that at the end of his life Baron Valdemar was - scared that even if his son was a good ruler, eventually the kingdom might end up - awful the way the Eastern Empire was. So he prayed to every god whose name he had ever heard for a way to keep that from happening. ...Maybe also did a big magical working, I don't think he wrote down very clearly what he was doing but he was an Adept mage. He did get a miracle, the first Companions walked out of the Grove and Chose his heir and his herald, which is why everyone who's Chosen is called a Herald now. Obviously Valdemar is a lot bigger now: and significantly moreso than when she was born, even, now that they've annexed Lineas-Baires and the Lake Evendim region and the north, :- but it's still the law that the monarch needs to be Chosen, because Heralds can - be trusted to not be corrupt and put the Kingdom first. Heralds aren't all of the government, there aren't enough of us - there's a Council in Haven, and a lot of local governance is done by the noble landholders - but Heralds do have the final say in a lot of things, and - I think that's what makes us different from a lot of our neighbors, that Heralds can always be trusted.: 

It's a lot more complicated than that, of course. Katri doesn't feel like getting into it right now. 

:...Er, any questions so far?: 

:Every god he'd ever heard of? Are there no well-known Evil gods here? What does Adept mean, is that what you have as a power marker in place of circles? How many people make Adept? Heralds sound similar to paladins, but I don't know how much overlap there is, should I summarize paladins for a comparison?:

Blink blink. :...No, what? I've never heard of there being evil gods.: Unless you ask Leareth, in which case it's most or all of them, but that's hardly the mainstream opinion. :I'm sure he wouldn't have prayed to god if They only had a reputation for doing bad miracles or something, but I've never heard of any gods like that.: Presumably if They ever existed, They would have quickly stopped being relevant after everyone caught on? But also it feels like the...wrong category of thing...to apply to gods in the first place. 

:Er, Adepts are the most powerful degree of mage-potential, yes.: Except for Vanyel, but they don't have a word for whatever Vanyel is. :It's based on how much power you can channel, the cutoff is whether you're strong enough to pull node-energy directly - I'm higher end of Master-potential but I can only safely use ley-lines. I think in Valdemar it's been - you know, I'm not sure what it was before the war, we lost a lot of people, but right now there are eight active Herald-Mages and only two of them are Adept-potential. 

...Sure, what are paladins?: 

:On Golarion gods come in all alignments including the Evil alignments. It's a problem.

Paladins are empowered by gods - but a specific god, who has to be Lawful Good or Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral. The paladins themselves are always Lawful Good and will lose their powers if they commit even one evil act, even if it's not enough to change their alignment. They cast spells, when they're strong enough, and they become immune to fear and they have a healing power, but even a brand new paladin can detect evil without the spell whenever they like, and they can hit evil targets with particular force. Some of them wind up with magical horses, though some of them have a weapon bond instead.:

Wow! That does sound like a problem! Katri looks so concerned! Also confused. 

:Um, you have to have Adept-potential to train as an Adept but I do think someone has to have that training to really count. Some schools of magic count it differently - there's one where someone only counts as an Adept if they can perform a particular spell that gives them a lot of extra power, which can take people decades of training even if they had what we would call Adept-potential all along.: Brightstar wouldn't shut up about it. 

:And that's interesting. I can see why Heralds remind you of that, but I don't know if it's really the same. Heralds are just chosen by our Companions, and I don't think we have any reason to expect the god - or gods - who did the miracle in the first place are still involved in that? Er, and Heralds can sometimes do bad things. Sometimes it's trainees getting up to mischief, and - misjudging how serious it is.: She was never one of the trainees who got up to any mischief, serious or not, but there's maybe, maybe, a very faint wistfulness there.  

:You'd get a real earful from your Companion afterward, of course, you wouldn't do it twice. But adult Heralds can still - make mistakes - too, do something in the heat of the moment that you would've known was wrong if you stopped to think. If a Herald ever does something really, really evil, they can be repudiated by their Companion. That's...Which doesn't affect your Gifts - our Gifts don't come from our Companions, though there is a theory that being Chosen makes potential Gifts more likely to awaken in the first place - but, er, the Herald usually doesn't. Survive it. - it's very rare, it's only happened a handful of times in our history.:  

And, again. Complicated. Apparently moreso than anyone knew even just ten years ago. 

(She's noting to herself that she's still pretty confused about 'alignment' and how it's apparently so important in Golarion, but it seems easiest for Blai to wrap up explaining Valdemar and answering his questions before she gets distracted asking him more questions about his world.) 

:The thing it takes is specifically training, not field experience, fighting monsters or wars or anything...? I... suppose having the death penalty for particularly severe Evil acts by Heralds would probably be functionally similar to having paladins fall... is it not confusing to be guided by a nebulous mass of anonymous gods? Do they not have importantly different teachings and emphasis?:

Calling it the "death penalty" is kind of oof even if it's not really wrong. Katri winces slightly and then decides not to dwell on it. 

:I mean, field experience definitely matters but you wouldn't usually say someone wasn't a real Adept if they were new to it, just that they were inexperienced.: 

And she frowns at him. :...I don't think it's confusing at all? We're not here to serve the gods, we're here for Valdemar. And, I mean, in Valdemar anyone can practice any religion they want, that's one of our laws that's never changed, but - honestly I think Heralds in particular tend not to have much time for that.: 

:...you don't have time for practicing a religion?:

:I guess I don't mean that literally, just - for a lot of Heralds it's not a priority?:

She tries to actually think about it for a moment, and then shrugs helplessly. :I feel like for some people, they - put their religion in the spot where duty goes, how they judge what's important and what's right is all wrapped up in what they think their god wants.: The Tayledras are like that and it's a little bit creepy. :And I think that's the thing Heralds - don't really have space for? We learn about ethics in our training to be a Herald, not from a god's teachings, and our first duty is to the Kingdom and its people. I guess I do know Heralds who try to make time to attend services with one of the temples, but I think they mostly don't - use their religion's lessons to decide how to prioritize their work, or go to a priest about a thorny question related to their duties as a Herald, that would be weird.: 

:I am so confused about how your gods operate their churches here. Priests ought to be - capable of understanding things like that and contextualizing their advice appropriately. I have not been anywhere near specialized in spiritual counseling in my career but that part doesn't even seem complicated.:

:I don't think the priests would necessarily give bad advice! Just, it's easier to explain to another Herald who has all the same context, especially when you trained together and spend all your time working together? I mean, it might actually be good if we got outside advice more often, Heralds can be - kind of insular - but I guess it feels like more work. And normally you'd go to your Companion first, anyway, and they might ask the Groveborn if they weren't sure. The Companions do get hunches about things, they sort of all have Foresight, and some people think Foresight always comes from a god or gods, but that's disputed.: 

She peers at him. :...Also I think I'm confused. Do gods in your world directly lead churches and give Their priests instructions on what to say? Because, um, I don't think that's exactly how it works here? I mean, a lot of temples were originally founded because someone got a vision from their god centuries ago, and then sometimes a god will intervene if Their church is really off track - like with Queen Karis and the war with Karse, there was a corrupt high priest who'd staged a coup and Vkandis gave Karis a miracle for a night that convinced everyone He disapproved of that - but that's not common.: 

The story she's heard that sounds most like getting direct instructions from a god is with the Tayledras, but even then, Brightstar just claimed that the shamans could seek advice from - whatever it was he called the dead spirit priests? Not the Star-Eyed directly. And Katri is never sure how much Brightstar is just being a typical eighteen-year-old male and exaggerating for effect. 

:Gods on Golarion are generally much lighter touches than 'directly leading' the churches, but they choose the priests, and can reject them if they go astray - instead of a miracle in the event of a corrupt schismatic they'd just remove the priest's powers. I guess I have very little idea how churches would turn out without this feature, if they had to steer solely by visions, which I think is more expensive...:

:...Huh, right, it being normal for priests to always have god-magic probably would make things go differently. Especially if it's easy to check that it's really god-magic and not someone using unrelated magic to fake it. ...I mean, I think it's stupid to use mage-gift to fake miracles from Vkandis, that's just asking to be set on fire, but it's apparently not even the first time in Karse's history that someone's done that.: 

:Some gods even have specific spells only their followers get. ...He can set people on fire but not give them cleric circles? That's bewildering.:

Well, Katri finds it bewildering to imagine gods directly micromanaging access to magic for what must be hundreds of people - not even granting Gifts and letting the priests go from there, it sounds like, but handing over individual spells on request! It gives her a bizarre mental image, possibly inspired by Select Blai's egg-filled bread roll earlier, of his god carefully packing and handing over a lunch-bag every morning, making sure to include his favourite snacks. And then doing it again and again for all the priests. Obviously gods aren't subject to human constraints like "wanting to scream after spending too long doing something unbearably tedious", but it still feels like surely They would never have time for anything else! 

:I think it's not trivial to set people on fire, it's - what did you call it - expensive. ...It seems a lot simpler than giving individual priests magic every day, though? I mean, I would think the way gods use magic would be totally different from how humans do.: 

:Well, cleric spells are different from wizard spells, even when there's spells with the same name and effect it's possible to distinguish them, but - when I said 'expensive' I meant in what's called an intervention budget. Gods at least on Golarion often work at cross-purposes and too much of their concentrated attention is potentially destructive, there's something like a treaty among them to limit that. It restricts actions but it also restricts the flow of information. Choosing a new cleric is information - about who is suitable for a given god and what was on their mind at the exact moment of the choice; I think when the latter information isn't useful people tend to be picked in their sleep instead, or just at the moment of dawn when they can start preparing spells - but since clerics mostly all work the same way, it's not very detailed information. I guess the ones active here just don't have that equilibrium at all, or they're not the kind of entity that can choose clerics in spite of being otherwise godlike, but it's strange to me.:

:Huh. Your gods sound really...organized?: She frowns. :How do you even know They have something like treaties? That doesn't seem like something They could communicate via choosing particular people as priests.:  

:Some of them are Chaotic and I don't know the details of how the treaty is enforced. When Iomedae was a mortal, intervention budget was a research area of hers. She was a paladin in life, of Aroden, who is now, uh, dead of trying to move to Golarion to bring about the Age of Glory and caused several other problems in the process. There are spells that get more information from gods, mostly yes-or-no questions. I'm not powerful enough to cast Commune, but if I could there would be training on how to do it most efficiently or I'd refer my questions to people who were trained that way, and I imagine the spell is used sparingly.:

:Oh! That's neat! I bet Queen Karis would've really liked to have a spell to ask Vkandis yes-or-no questions when they were planning to take back the country from the corrupt priest, even if they had to be sparing with it.: 

:I imagine that's the kind of situation where it's worth it, yes. There's a chapter of the Acts that's almost entirely about this, and then bits and pieces throughout the rest of the book, but I don't know if it's worth your time since you don't have Communes with your gods and they don't seem interested in directing your operations here.:

Nod. :It would be interesting to hear more about the Acts, but I guess we got distracted from talking about Valdemar. Do you want to know more about that? Or about how magic works here, since it sounds like it's different?: 

:I'd very much like to know more about magic here, it seems possibly more likely than gods to come up in a situation where it would be tactically unwise to pause and ask.:

That seems like a very sensible priority to Katri! 

:Right. So more or less all of our magic is most like what you were calling 'sorcerers' – people have to be born with it. Specifically, you have to be born with potential for a Gift, and the Gift might or might not awaken, usually between age twelve and fourteen or so but it can be earlier or later. Gift-potential runs in families, but it can look like it skips generations since not all potential Gifts awaken. We don't fully know what makes a Gift become active, though we think that probably exposure to it helps – so if someone is around active Mindspeakers and has potential Mindspeech, it's more likely to awaken later - it would explain why Gifts seem to awaken more often in the royal family.: 

Pause to think. :Right, so when a Gift awakens, usually the person with it doesn't know how to use it except instinctively, and you need training to learn control. Practice seems to strengthen a Gift, especially as it's first awakening, but it levels out pretty quickly and the only improvement after that is in efficiency and finesse. All the Gifts can appear more or less powerful between different people – for example, I have moderately strong Mindspeech, so I could speak to you like this from half a mile off and could manage ten or twenty miles with another Gifted Herald. Really weak Mindspeakers need to be in the same room or even touching someone, and strong Mindspeakers like Vanyel can manage hundreds of miles.

:There are a lot of Gifts. Mage-gift is the most general, you can learn to do all sorts of things with the right training, including putting spells into artifacts. The other Gifts usually do one thing but with better efficiency and undetectably to mage-sight, and some of them you can't imitate with mage-gift at all. - many but not all of the Gifts come with a receptive or sensing component, and an active component, like how Mindspeech lets me read thoughts and also project to communicate with people.: 

Does Blai have questions so far? 

:I think that's very different from every kind of sorcery I'm aware of - they still have inherited bloodlines that affect the nature of their powers, but they increase in circle like every other kind of spellcaster on Golarion, there's no - brief initial training period followed by leveling out at a predetermined cap of power. Also sorcerers have a hard time learning new spells in any way other than by gaining circles, while wizards can as long as there are still spells of the circles they can cast that they haven't picked up yet... would this mean that a very young mage could be just as dangerous as a venerable experienced one, at least in principle if not in strategic knowhow and repertoire?:

:Depends on the situation, but sometimes! A very young inexperienced mage with Adept-potential could be more dangerous in direct face-to-face combat than a weakly Gifted mage with any amount of training, for sure. Though they'd be vulnerable – most people can do some amount of magic instinctively with no training, but that's way more likely to be setting things on fire than something more controlled like shielding. An experienced mage would have options like hiding themselves with magic and casting at a distance with a lower-power but precisely targeted attack, so a weaker but experienced mage could still take out an untrained Adept-potential mage if they were very clever about it.: 

Aaaaand she doesn't love talking about blood-magic but she really should, given that Leareth's army is the main possible threat that could come up soon. :I don't know if your world uses blood-magic? Here, er, a mage who's willing to be unethical can - kill someone, and use the life-energies released to power their magic. It's...bad for you...and I think it's much harder to control, but even weakly Gifted mages or inexperienced mages can use it to boost offensive spells and be pretty scary. It was a problem in the war with Karse, they were sending out weakly Gifted teenagers loaded up with blood-magic to throw fireballs around.: 

:There are some relatively obscure rituals that are rumored to involve human sacrifice but it's not standard for any ordinary spells.:

Nod. :That's a major difference, then. I think blood-magic can be used for any kind of magic as long as power matters more than finesse.: 

What else seems like it could be different. 

:...Our mages don't have a limited number of spells, and they don't come in - when you said 'circles' it seemed like you meant sort of steps in power? For us, a given mage-technique can sort of be ordered by how hard it is, which is a mix of the minimum power it takes to cast at all and how much detail and complexity goes into it, but usually you can put more or less oomph into the same spell – a Master-potential mage can cast the same shield-technique as an Adept, it would just be weaker and stand up to fewer attacks. Mages are usually limited by using up their energy reserves and getting tired – or for Adepts, they can draw on node-energy and keep casting a lot longer, but eventually it gives you backlash and you get a horrible headache. If you really push too hard, especially with a technique like Gates where the spell is stable once cast but drawing energy from a link continuously as long as you're holding it, you can drain yourself unconscious. It's a lot harder to give yourself really dangerous backlash with other Gifts, but the limitation is the same – if I Mindspeak too much at distances that are long-range for me, I get tired and then I get a headache and eventually - it's a bit like when you try to lift a really heavy weight too many times in a row, it's doable when you're fresh but at some point your muscles just won't anymore. Practice does help with endurance – my range hasn't extended since I graduated into Whites but I can manage a much longer conversation at my maximum range now.: 

Pause. 

:...It's also possible to - sort of choose to burn all your life-energies at once? It's called a Final Strike. Even the very weakest mage could take out this whole building in a fireball, if they were willing to die for it. An Adept's Final Strike leaves a crater half a mile across.: 

Vanyel, they think, would take out all of Haven. Katri doesn't say that, though. 

:I don't think it's normal for any magic use to knock the caster unconscious unless they do something like center a fireball on their own position and as far as I'm aware no one on Golarion is specifically rigged to explode but that does seem important to know!:

:Right, it seems like your magic is limited by something else, even for casters who use their own power rather than getting it from a god.: 

:Right. I have an incompletely learned version of a wizard spell, if that matters to anything.:

:I guess it might be neat to see if they look different to mage-sight, at some point. ...Or if they don't show up at all, like how Fetching doesn't look like anything to mage-sight.: Shrug. :I'm not really a researcher, though, Vanyel would be able to learn more that way. I'm sure he'll want to ask you about it later.: 

:At his convenience, of course. Mage-sight is your technique for seeing magic and it can't see Fetching? That's so strange.:

:...You know, I never thought about it before but it really is strange! Especially because you can shield against it with mage-work - though I think that technique took a lot of research to develop, and it's hard enough that I haven't learned it.: 

:If mage-sight is specific to other mage techniques I'd be surprised if anything I can do showed up.:

:It's not only mage-techniques, natural sources of magic - like living things, or ley-lines - show up too! And - wow, I'm just realizing I never noticed how weird this was - you can use mage-energy for other Gifts, we think it's all the same kind of energy. I don't know why other Gifts don't show up, I– hmm. I've heard of it being possible to make artifacts that also don't show up as magical, because the energy signature is, er, sort of only pointed inward? Maybe it's like that. And other Gifts don't leave anything behind, you can't make a Mindspeech set-spell - even Healing-Gift doesn't leave magic behind, the patient is healed but it's still just their body...: 

Katri is thoroughly nerdsniped and has completely forgotten that the goal of the conversation is to answer Blai's questions. 

:I suppose I should prepare Detect Magic in the morning to see if it has the same limitations.:

:Ooh, that does sound like a good idea. Unless it trades off against some defensive spell you could have instead just in case, that might be more important?: 

:No, it's a zeroth-circle spell and I can have four of them available for unlimited castings each day.:

Nod. :It might be good to have even as defensive magic, if you can't directly see magic otherwise? I would feel really helpless without mage-sight, if I couldn't see what was going on. Though I guess it helps less if your magic works totally different from ours and you can't tell what any of the spells you see are going to do.: 

:With Golarion magic I can tell a moderate amount about what kind of magic I'm looking at, but it's not fast, I have to concentrate for a little while.:

:Is it something where you get faster with more practice and familiarity? Or is that just how the spell works? - that is a way that experienced mages are meaningfully more powerful and dangerous than inexperienced mages, if you get good enough you can figure out what another mage is doing fast enough to counter their offensive spells in real time. Van can do it.: 

:It's how the spell works. There might be someone with a trick for it but it wouldn't be the sort of thing they could trivially teach everyone they met. Counterspells are a thing on Golarion but usually not tactically worthwhile compared to getting off a spell of your own unless the situation is asymmetrical. I can prepare Dispel Magic in my third circle slot tomorrow, though.:

:Oh, huh, does that - am I picking up right that it counters arbitrary other spells? That's - really powerful - that's not a thing here, you can either shield and deflect it or if you're really good like Van you can interfere with the spell-structure as they're building it and make it collapse on them - that's the part that takes a lot of experience, you have to be able to figure it out and react in a fraction of a second. And, yeah, if you're fast enough to do that it might make more sense just to try to hit them with a levinbolt so they lose it.: 

:I do not have a spell that does levinbolts. That's more of a wizard thing. I can do Dispel Magic but I can only do it once.:

...All right, the thing where he has a limited number of spells per day and that's it is, in fact, really limiting. Katri can imagine someone like Vanyel getting a lot of mileage out of being able to vanish an arbitrary spell even if it was only once a day - he could take out someone's shield-talisman, for example - but it helps that he could still be fighting normally the rest of the time. Really it sounds like it would be most useful in something other than a fight. If you were sneaking into a place and needed to take down a shield, for example. 

:What are the options for spells you can do unlimited times? Almost anything a Velgarth mage can do, they can just do again if it doesn't work the first time, so I think being able to dispel magic would mostly work if it was something complicated that would take a while to redo and you could run away or get backup in the meantime.: 

:The orisons I have today are Spark, Light, Guidance, and Create Water. The last two I usually have, Light I often have but not as reliably, Spark I only have today because I was at some risk of needing to camp out. Sometimes I take Detect Magic, or Virtue, or Resistance, or Stabilize. There's also Mending, which I didn't usually have because I was at a fortress with a lot of spellcasters and could delegate the mending, but it's also an orison.:

Katri listens attentively. (She's not sure whether helping Select Blai game out how to handle himself in a fight with a Velgarth mage should be her top priority, but it makes sense for it to be important to him, and it feels like it's actually a pretty fruitful way to hone in on the differences between their magic. Vanyel didn't give her very precise instructions.) 

:Mmm. Some of those sound pretty self-evident - though creating water is weird, I don't think you can do that with any Gift unless the thing it does is transport water from somewhere else - but I'm not sure what Guidance or Virtue do?: 

:Guidance makes you a little bit better at almost anything, so long as the thing begins before the spell wears off. I cast it a lot. Would you like one?:

Katri blinks at him. :...I'm curious but I feel like I should think of a difficult thing to try doing to test it properly? Also that's another thing I don't know if any of our magic could do even in principle. Maybe Mindhealing but I think it'd have to be - specific, the Mindhealer would have to know someone and what they usually got stuck on, there's not a Mindhealing technique you can just toss at anyone that does that.: 

She considers it. :I guess I could ask my Companion to give me a math problem and try solving it, or something? How long does it last?: 

:Just a minute if you don't use it, but it can work on things that take longer than that.:

Why??? That's even weirder! It would make sense if it only worked once, you can set spells with a trigger to fire, and it would make sense if it only lasted a fixed duration, but it's bizarre for it to be triggered by a certain action but the trigger exists for less time than the rest of the spell does! 

Katri is game to try it, though, and then receive instructions from her Companion for the sort of slightly complicated math problem where she tends to always get herself confused, and see if the spell helps? 

Guidance!

There's a subtle feeling to it, an affordance to be just slightly better at - something. It would be pretty easy to spend by accident but since she's paying attention she can apply it to the math problem.

It's pretty subtle - it doesn't make it effortless, it doesn't really make Katri feel like she's suddenly better at math - but she does feel a little sharper than usual, a little more like her intuitions are working rather than just getting her turned in circles. It's not gamechanging or anything, but she can definitely imagine ending up using it all the time if it were a motion she had right there and could do unlimited times. 

She solves the math problem, and grins briefly. :That's neat! Do you use it often?: 

:Usually hundreds of times per day.:

:Wow. That must be really useful.: Katri isn't sure she would want to use it that many times, but - dozens for sure. And probably it would be even more tempting if she didn't already have the option right there of just wordlessly asking her Companion for help or advice. :...Do rulers and people who make a lot of important decisions get someone with god-magic to follow them around and cast it for them hundreds of times a day? I feel like maybe politics would go better if we had that here.: 

:There's more powerful magic available for people at that level of wealth and power! I guess a lot of it would cooperate with Guidance, but I don't actually know of it being a commonplace to have a cleric follow a king around and tap them with Guidance constantly.:

:I guess if there's more powerful magic then probably some of it would be more convenient.: Katri is pretty curious about the more powerful magic now! But it's probably not relevant right now, if Blai doesn't have it anyway. :What does Virtue do?: 

:It's a bit of a misnomer, it just makes them a trifle healthier for a minute even if they weren't injured before.:

:That is confusingly named! What sort of healthier? Does it make someone old more like a young person, or make them stronger or fitter, or...? If someone is injured, do the injuries heal a bit and then come back after a minute?: 

:Virtue in particular doesn't heal injuries and definitely doesn't restore youth or increase strength. It increases - robustness? A little bit, and temporarily. I'd mostly want it if I were going to do something that would definitely hurt me, like if I were going to have to - charge into a burning building, it would be plausibly worth the moment to cast a Virtue if I didn't have something more specialized for fire prepared.:

:Huh, if it makes you a bit harder to injure that does seem useful even if it's temporary! We don't have anything like–: 

And then Katri cuts off abruptly, her shoulders tensing, because she's just been interrupted by a sudden wordless mental burst of alarm from her Companion. 

:What's wrong?:

:I don't know - something is wrong at the Ice Festival - my Companion thinks we're safe here, we should stay put for the moment - 

- some kind of attack, there's - a monster, came from under the ice -: 

:May I help? Or would I be in the way -:

:I don't know -:

Focus. Is she a Herald or now. :Do you have any magic right now that would be useful for fighting a monster?: 

(Half a mile off, Vanyel is asking himself the same question, while clinging bareback to Yfandes as they rush toward the scene -) 

Savil is drawing on Vanyel's energy to weave a shield, trying to stabilize the ice under the Queen and her daughter's feet as they run toward the bank, but it's too late - 

- ice shattering, a flash of sinewy black flesh and eyes like yellow globes over a too-long jaw - 

:Yes. And the mace.: He's up now and has it in his hand. He casts a Guidance on himself.

:Then let's go.: Katri is already at the door of the guest-room. It's going to take them at least five minutes to get there anyway, which is plenty of time to turn around and take shelter if someone tells her to absolutely not bring Blai near the scene.

(For example, because the monster could have been sent by Leareth to go after him - but that doesn't make sense, she's pretty sure Leareth would want to capture the man alive, in which case he could have sent a mage to the guest rooms instead -) 

- one of the guards braces to throw Arven toward the shore, but he's a fraction of a second too slow - and dies for it, as the creature's tail whips up from the star-shaped hole in the ice and severs his head from his shoulders in a single swipe -

- and that's it, the monster's jaws close on Arven's ankle and the dark water closes over her head and she's gone. 

:I'm going in: Savil sends to Vanyel, and dives after her. 

Vanyel is also coming to the conclusion that this doesn't make any sense as a Leareth plot targeting Select Blai. For one thing, even Leareth surely couldn't have arranged it this fast, he has spies but Vanyel would have expected it to take several days for him to learn of their visitor.

But Leareth could have known days ago that the Queen and her daughter would be here, and it definitely looks like the monster is after them. 

And even if he can't get there fast enough to help in a fight, Select Blai also has Healing - 

:Katri: he sends. :Get here as fast as you can.: 

One he has a sense of direction from Katri he's running flat-out.

The direction is mostly back the way they came, anyway. Blai is faster than Katri, and is already fifty yards ahead of her by the time her Companion catches up and pauses for just barely long enough for Katri to pull herself onto his back.

- and then, to Katri's surprise, he pauses again when they catch up with Blai a few seconds later. :Get on: he sends, addressing both of them. 

He is not great at horses but they do have them at the Worldwound, tremendous numbers of them for the patrols. He gets on.

Companions are much easier to ride than horses! Or can be with some effort on their part, at least; they have to go more slowly than if Katri were riding alone, but it's still going to get Blai there a lot faster than he could run on foot. 

Katri is getting confused mental updates from her Companion and relaying them to Blai in fragments, but it's all happening very fast and it seems like even the Companions are having trouble keeping track. The monster still has the Queen's daughter; they think she's still alive, she had a very high-quality protective talisman, it just didn't protect her against falling through an enormous hole in the ice. Savil is in the water and Vanyel is co-casting with her from the shore. Some of the Queen's personal Guards are dead and more are injured; they're definitely not effectively able to fight the creature, but they're trying anyway. Vanyel thinks it's resistant to magic - Savil is trying to trap it or distract it enough to get Arven free so Vanyel can Fetch her out of the water - 

They reach the riverbank. There's an enormous hole in the ice and a lot of terrified people are screaming. 

Vanyel is in a snowbank near the water. It sorts of looks like he fell like that, maybe while in a hurry trying to reach the site; Yfandes is nearby and clearly not able to bear weight on one leg. 

He's apparently in trance, and doesn't open his eyes when they approach, but does reach out with Mindspeech. :If we get her out, you can heal injuries, right? - I don't know if you can fight underwater, or - is there anything you can cast at a distance to help Savil out, she's - about thirty yards from here, that way and down -: 

:I have one Air Bubble, touch range. Prayer will work when I'm forty feet away and it'll also impair the monster. I have both my channel healings left.:

Vanyel is thinking quickly, and then Mindspeaking at the speed of thought. :Savil thinks she can distract it and get Arven free if she has a little more of an edge – or if she's willing to risk being injured. But she's not sure she can lure it to within forty feet of us. ...I hate to ask you to take risks for us, you don't even know us, but - if you can swim and have a way to breathe underwater and can get within forty feet, that might be enough.: 

:I can't swim and don't have time to get out of my armor anyway but if you can toss me a rope I can breathe underwater for five minutes.: He casts Endure Elements on himself so he won't be shocked into nonfunctionality under the water, now that the Companion is running instead of him doing it. Lights up his holy symbol too, it might be dark down there.

:All right.: A lot of people nearby already have ropes ready in hand - Arven wasn't the only one who fell through the ice - and Vanyel can Mindspeak the nearest person and have a rope for Blai in seconds. He pushes across a mental sense of direction. :That way. - if you don't think you can swim that direction on purpose, I can give you a push with magic. Should be over in less than five minutes: one way or another :but we'll make sure to pull you back before that. I'm going to Fetch Arven out as soon as it lets go of her, she may need Healing.: 

When they arrive, Blai casts the Air Bubble, lashes the rope around his waist, and jumps in. He sinks like he's wearing forty pounds of armor, because he's wearing forty pounds of armor, but that's fine. The symbol shines. The water's not too cold, with the Endure up, and he can breathe no problem, and he spends the Guidance on swimming toward the action less incompetently. He casts his Prayer.

Savil senses the unfamiliar magic, of course - she's not caught off guard by it, Vanyel warned her that Select Blai was going to attempt to get close enough to cast a spell from his world that might help, but she does have a flicker of attention to spare to notice that the structure of it is really very odd - 

- and it feels like something, too, entirely apart from what's visible to mage-sight. She just...has the sourceless knowledge that things will be a little more likely to go her way and less likely to go well for the monster she's fighting? 

It's all she needs. She still has Vanyel's power to draw on; she casts an incredibly bright mage-light to distract the creature, then pours power into a fireball near its tail - the magic can't get through its hide but the heat ought to bother it - and then she smashes its head with a blunt hammer of mage-energies, trusting that Arven's shield-talisman - she's close enough now to sense that it's intact - will protect her enough that the force won't kill her outright, and Blai's Healing will be able to handle anything else, at least well enough to give the Healers a chance to work - 

The monster is indeed disoriented enough by all of that to loosen its jaws around Arven's ankle! 

:NOW: she snaps to Vanyel in Mindspeech. 

And he Fetches out one small child to safety, along with a fountain of freezing water that sprays all over him. 

She's not obviously bleeding, though her winter clothes are torn as well as drenched and her face is bruised all across one side. She's not moving, or breathing, but Healing-Sight can still sense the faint thrum of her life-force, and one of the Healers is there before Vanyel even has time to get a link. 

:The child is safe: he sends to Blai. It's been maybe thirty seconds. :She's half-drowned but I don't know if your Healing does anything for that - we'll know more in a moment -: 

The monster is very upset to have lost its tasty prey, and the mage closest to it is scary and also very well shielded! 

It heads straight for Blai, moving remarkably fast. 

SHIT. 

Savil tries to throw a shield ahead of it to block its passage, but distance-casting underwater is very difficult even with the web and Vanyel's copious power. The shield isn't going to hold up to much. 

Blai's got a plus one cold iron mace. He can whack it in the face.

It doesn't like that at all! It also doesn't seem to be very damaged by it, but Blai was able to injure it at least a little; there's a thin trail of blueish-black blood in the water, now. 

The long snakelike coils of its body lash as it whips its head back and forth, and then it comes at him again, but with less precision than before. Among other distractions, Savil now has its tail in a force-net. 

Her Mindspeech is tense but focused. :Can you hold it off for half a minute, do you think? Don't want it to get away but - hasn't got much endurance - if we tire it out and buy a little time I can trap it.: 

I don't have a lot of maneuverability but I can hit it and expect to be able to tolerate a couple bites. Do what you need to do.: Thwack.

Savil fireballs its tail again, just to keep it distracted, and then starts working on a larger force-net. She doesn't dare drop her own shields in case it decides she's an easier target, but - she has it where she wants it, right now. 

After the second lunge also gets a cold iron mace to the face rather than a tasty morsel, the creature dives and then tries to come at Blai's feet from below instead. 

He's actually top-heavy so he can pull off the specific maneuver of "be aimed downward" all right.

The creature is clearly injured at this point, leaking more dark blood into the water, but it seems more driven into a frenzy than incapacitated. It snaps at him again without success, then pulls back out of the reach of his mace and flings itself violently against the half-formed force-net Savil has pinning its tail. 

Savil is right that it doesn't have a lot of endurance, and is already tiring, but it's apparently enraged enough to tear itself free of the force-net and execute its preferred maneuver, of coming at its prey from both directions at once with its teeth and the bladed tip of its tail. 

Savil is briefly disoriented by the spell shattering and backlashing on her, though she's already working on reforming it. She doesn't have a chance to try to shield Blai. 

He wasn't really expecting her to. He can tank a hit or two and hit right back.

:Sorry! Think I've - almost got it -: Savil is just going to trust Blai to handle himself, though, and focus her full attention on weaving a net that will actually hold the thing. At which point maybe she can risk getting close enough to hit it with a lethal blow - from a safe distance, the moving water attenuates her magic too much and the creature's resistant hide does the rest. 

The monster does manage to pin Blai a second time where he can't defend from both directions at once, but it's not hitting as hard now, and its third try is slow enough that Blai can probably dodge.

It shakes its head dizzily, and then seems to decide that perhaps this tempting prey is also too tough a target, and tries to eel away. 

TOO SLOW! 

The cords of mage-force are more than sturdy enough to hold up against its tired flailing, and Savil yanks them tight, pinning the monster's endless muscular coils into a squirming bundle that hangs in the water. 

:Got it! - are you all right?: 

:I'm still up. A channel will have me good as new.:

Wow, he's tough. Savil is suitably impressed. Her shields could probably have taken that many hits, but only if she had been focusing most of her energy on that and not the force-net. 

:Good. - Worried it'll break free if I stop focusing on the force-net so I can kill it. Do you have a good angle to hit it a few more times?: 

:I can't swim well but if you can pull it closer to me I can coup de grace it.:

:I can get you closer: She starts shoving him through the water in little bursts of force; it requires a lot less of her concentration than shaping another force-net to pull him, and he's clearly sturdy enough to handle it. :Is that a spell or something, or do you just think you can take it down now that it can't dodge you?: 

:It would be a rare monster that wasn't pretty easy to kill once it was helpless!: Here it is. Bash bash bash.

It has an extremely tough skull! It's not immune to a cold iron mace to the face, though, and eventually it stops struggling and hangs limp in the water.  

At which point Savil cuts off the mental connection to the force-net – the magic will erode away fast in the moving water, but it should last a few minutes if it's not under strain – and she doesn't need more than ten seconds to get herself close enough, carefully aim a force-dagger, and nearly sever the monster's head from its neck. 

:There.: She pulls Van into the link. :You can pull him out now.: And maybe she'll grab onto Blai's ankle and hitch a ride. She could swim to the surface, but she is in fact pretty tired and cold by this point, and the air in the bubble she's holding around her own head is getting stale. 

Vanyel can pull them out. He wants to fish out the dead monster too, in a minute - they might be able to learn something from its body about who sent it - but that can wait until the people are safe. 

Blai hauls himself out onto the ice once he surfaces and offers Savil a hand up the rest of the way.

The ice creaks in protest. Savil grabs onto Blai's hand and slithers herself on hands and knees to the actual riverbank, then flops over onto her back in a snowdrift and tries to catch her breath. A moment later her clothes start gently steaming. 

:How's Arven?: she sends to Vanyel, still including Blai in the link. 

Arven is lying on Vanyel's cloak, her small body wrapped in a second cloak in Guard-blue, and surrounded by Healers; not much of her is visible except for a shock of wet black hair. 

Vanyel is on hands and knees, eyes closed and one hand pinching the bridge of his nose; the reaction-headache from pushing his Fetching past its limits, which Yfandes was able to cushion him from for the last several minutes – an ability he hadn't known she had – is now making its appearance in force.  

Mindspeech hurts a lot. :Alive: Vanyel manages. :Banged up, nothing critical. Not sure if Healing fixes drowning?: 

:We should get everyone else who's injured within range, if we have time for that.: 

:I can heal the child individually first if there's not time to gather a channel's worth. It does work on drowning.:

:If it's less expensive to heal her individually you should definitely do that.: The Healers don't seem panicked but they do seem worried, and it would be awful if Arven died because they hesitated too long to expend Select Blai's Healing magic.

(Of course, it would also be awful if people end up dying because they didn't hesitate long enough, but - Arven's death would in fact cost Valdemar more than the deaths of some of Karis' personal Guard, who signed up for that line of duty.) 

She'll tell the Healers to make space for Blai. And separately relay orders to the nearest three Heralds that they can Heal anyone with injuries if they're brought here in the next couple of minutes. 

:I can do both.: He finds the kid and burns a Forbid Action on a Cure Light Wounds, a kid isn't going to need a Cure Moderate.

Arven wakes up unhurt but still soaked to the skin in cold river water, the last thing she remembers is being dragged underwater by a terrifying monster with huge teeth, and she predictably starts shrieking in terror. 

Oh noooooo poor Arven. At any other moment Vanyel would be right there comforting her, but right now he doesn't really feel capable of moving. 

Oh gods everyone is going to think he scared her somehow

(Arven probably would be scared of a man she doesn't recognize wearing armor and holding a mace, but her eyes are squeezed shut and Savil is pretty sure she's not paying enough attention to have noticed.) 

They should get the poor girl inside, ideally to wherever her mother is. Savil doesn't think she can manage a Gate right now, even short-range, but surely someone can... 

Karis is in the House of Healing, though it's been determined that she isn't particularly injured, just shaken. Katri is right here and isn't tired and is entirely capable of raising a Gate on the nearest door-shaped object! 

(There are some decorative archways with winter-themed wreathes and holly on them, and someone can uproot one from fifty yards downstream and run it over rather than move Arven there.) 

...Katri is pretty freaked out about the last several minutes and also self-conscious because, like, fifty people are watching her, and she can Gate - and doing it across the Palace grounds won't even exhaust her too badly - but she's really slow at it if it's not on the permanent Gate-terminus or another threshold she uses regularly, which means she can be self-conscious about how everyone is watching her be incompetent at magic for an entire twenty seconds. 

Whoa, is that a fucking Gate.

No one else is acting like this is a particularly big deal! Arven is gently scooped up and carried through. Katri follows before taking it down; a lot of Karis' mages were injured in the attempted rescue, and it seems good for them to have as many guards as possible in case this was only part one of an assassination plot. 

Injured people are being carried over to within thirty feet of Blai. (The ones who are still alive. It's too late for several of the Guards.)

Vanyel is aware that he should be trying to think about...something...but his head hurts and he's going to just. Keep sitting here for the moment. He has no idea if Blai's channel-Healing will fix backlash but he vaguely hopes it might at least help a little. 

Savil is definitely feeling exposed and aware that it's probably not a good idea for any of them to still be sitting out here in the open, but it would be a lot harder logistically speaking to get everyone with serious injuries in range if they move to somewhere shielded. It can wait a couple more minutes. Hopefully. 

:All right, that's everyone: she tells Blai. 

He grips his still-lit holy symbol and channels.

It was pretty hard for bystanders to see exactly what happened before, with the Healers crowded around Arven; this time it's a lot more obvious that someone just Healed over a dozen people, at once, without touching them.

(There are a lot of bystanders at this point. The Guard is trying to keep the crowds back, but now that the danger is apparently over, people are curious.) 

Channeling does not help very much with backlash, which means that Vanyel had better pull himself together and cope with the headache. He's not incapacitated, or even that badly drained, it's really just his Fetching-Gift that was pushed too hard. He's not going to be able to use it at all for the next several days, probably, but once he gets some willowbark and can think more clearly, it shouldn't interfere too much with mage-work. 

Also they really shouldn't be out here in public. It's - not clear what could or should have been done differently at any point - but it's seeping into his awareness now that their plan of keeping Blai's unusual magic from coming to anyone's attention is, well. Pretty thoroughly ruined. 

:We should get inside: he tells Blai, tiredly. 

:All right.: He'll follow Vanyel.

Savil is feeling a lot better after a few minutes of catching her breath. :I'll stay and drag that thing out of the water. - Van, if we co-cast the pastwatching spell before nightfall, we can probably follow it back most of a week. It had a strong magical signature, there'll be lots of residue.: 

:Right. All right.: Vanyel is not thinking nearly that far ahead. :Just. Need to get Blai somewhere less visible: he adds, privately just to Savil. :- Leareth's spies might already have heard about this, it'll be all over the city soon -: 

:Van.: Savil answers him privately as well, her mindvoice tight. :This - you know Leareth is the only explanation that makes sense.: 

Trudge trudge trudge through the snow. :I'm not sure it makes sense for Leareth either. It's - not his style.: 

:Maybe you don't really know the man.: 

Pause.

:Makes a lot more sense if it was only the first step. Destabilize our alliance with Karse and throw Haven into chaos right before he drops an army on us. And - if that's what it was, he's not going to like that our visitor messed things up for him.: 

Yfandes catches up. :Van, don't be an idiot. Both of you get on.: 

Vanyel is distracted, still trying to pin down what part of Savil's analysis feels off – though it's not like he can argue with the conclusion that it's highly unfortunate if Leareth is about to find out about Blai's intervention. 

He blinks dully at Yfandes. :But - your hock -: 

:Made sure I was within thirty feet. Obviously. Get on.: This times she includes Blai in her Mindspeech as well. 

It's not much less conspicuous for a man in clearly foreign armor to be seen riding pillion with a Herald, but at least it'll be faster to reach somewhere shielded and private. Vanyel can help Blai up, if he wants help. 

Vanyel looks a little like if Blai takes a hand up he'll pull Vanyel down into the snow instead but between the two of them they can get Blai on the Companion.

Then they can be back at the Palace in only a couple of minutes! Vanyel doesn't lead them back to the guest wing; he heads straight for the Heralds' meeting wing. 

:It's more shielded here: he explains. :And I think we owe you a little more of an explanation.: He hasn't actually heard word, but almost certainly the Senior Circle will be meeting about this, right? 

Indeed, Dara is also converging on the meeting-wing; they catch up with her as she's swinging herself down from Rolan's back. 

"Van! Are you all right?" 

:You should Mindspeak, Blai doesn't speak Valdemaran. I'm fine. Wasn't injured and I'd be fine even if I had been.: He manages a brief smile in Blai's direction. :And a lot of people are fine who'd be dead otherwise. Select Blai, this is Herald Dara, the Monarch's Own - the King's second-in-command, more or less.: 

Dara looks about twenty, but she also looks calm, like this isn't anywhere close to the first emergency she's dealt with. :Select Blai. A pleasure, and - thank you.: 

:You're welcome, I'm glad I could help.:

Vanyel looks seriously at her. :I think we owe Blai more of an explanation. Of - what we're worried about. He put himself at risk to help us, and not just from whatever that creature was.: 

...Dara nods. :Whoever sent it will have been watching to see if it worked.: 

Vanyel hesitates. 

:...It's not certain that anyone sent it. It could have just come out of the Pelagirs.: 

:And evaded the Web? And gone straight for the Queen and her heir?: 

Shrug. :It's resistant to magic, and moving water would blur it anyway. ...It would admittedly be an awfully big coincidence, who it went after.: 

:That kind of coincidence just doesn't happen.: 

Dara shakes her head, more in confusion then negation.

A moment late she reaches out again to Vanyel, privately. :...It's also a pretty big coincidence that he arrived here when he did. In our favor, or apparently, but...I'm not sure I like it.: 

Vanyel hadn't failed to notice that either, but he just shakes his head. 

:Right.: Dara addresses Blai again. :We're calling a meeting with the senior Heralds. Everyone who can make it should be here shortly. I'm sure you understand that - some of it is private - but Vanyel is right. You didn't have to do what you did, for us, and - if drawing attention to yourself to save our people put you in danger then you do deserve to know why.: 

:I don't actually think I need very much of an explanation in exchange for fighting a monster to rescue a child!:

Dara blinks, and then smiles at him. :You sound a lot like a Herald.: 

Vanyel doesn't smile. :Maybe not. But I would hate to be stuck in another world, in a confusing situation, and missing as much context as you are. ...And it's very possible that we could use more of your help, but we don't have enough context on your magic to know what to ask for, necessarily.: 

They reach a meeting room. 

Tran is there ahead of them. :I'm Herald Tantras. You must be Select Blai. It sounds like you handled yourself well out there.: 

:And here's Treven, he's the King's heir and - will be standing in for him here.: There's a brief hesitation in there, as though she's not sure what to say. 

Treven looks even younger than Herald Dara. He nods to Blai. 

:Good morning.:

:Right.: Vanyel is going to head for a chair. He's in a particularly impatient mood, mostly because of the headache. 

:Let's not wait for the others - I assume we'll need to discuss plans and Blai doesn't need to sit in on that, but we should figure out what is relevant to him. Blai, you already know that we were anticipating a potential war with a powerful mage based north of Valdemar. The larger context is that I was more or less destined to fight him. The circumstances of my Gifts awakening: only the very slightest hitch in his mindvoice, :meant that I'm unusually powerful, the events were - suspicious for various gods having intervened to set it up that way - and, anyway, twenty years ago I started having a recurring Foresight dream of trying to stop his invasion: 

:A while later, it became a lucid dream, and - we were both in it. To his surprise as much as mine. I'm still not sure if it was the same god-intervention or a separate one with a different goal. We've spoken fairly regularly since then. I learned that he's immortal and nearly two thousand years old - we're fairly sure it's a setup that lets him take over the bodies of his descendants when he's killed, which has apparently been frequently because our world's gods don't like him. He claims to be working to improve the world for everyone, and that the gods are the problem because they prevent civilization from advancing. I don't know if that's his real motive. The plan he has - that he claims to have - for what to do about it is fairly horrifying. I don't think the details are relevant, except that the first step is invading Valdemar.: 

:...I wouldn't have expected him to attack without warning. He's not willing to back down from his objective here, but he seemed willing to explore if we could - come to some agreement that didn't involve a war - and he didn't seem in a hurry. But he does have the capabilities to send an attack like this and I don't know of anyone else who would. If it was him, he's likely already aware that it didn't work, and would want to get rid of the obstacle. And, of course, there's the possibility that this was meant to be the first step before an invasion. I don't know - I'm incredibly confused about all of this, it's not out of character for him to be willing to kill a child but it's an unusually baffling plot for him - but I am afraid that we might be in exactly the situation I was trying to avoid by - being careful, before.: 

Pause. 

:- I'm sorry. Whatever really happened here, this isn't your war, and I wish we could have avoided dragging you into it.: 

:...are the local gods in fact preventing civilization from advancing?:

Vanyel looks startled, in a faintly approving way.

(Tran looks startled in a way that isn't approving at all.) 

Vanyel seems to be choosing his words carefully, and carefully not-looking at Tran. 

:He made some compelling arguments. It's difficult for me to assess, not having personally been around for two thousand years. I don't know to what extent he could have - heavily selected what evidence he showed me. I know he's - better at arguments than me, in general - and I'm not sure that correlates with being right. ...And I don't know what the alternative looks like, right, maybe in a world with no gods at all people would still be plenty capable of - wasting resources on pointless wars and never building anything new that lasts.: 

Shrug. :My read is that he believes what he's saying, and - has some justification - I don't actually know if that adds up to him being right.: 

:A lot of the 'evidence' he's given you was projects he tried. Maybe the gods have a good reason to oppose his projects, even the ones that aren't horrible except for giving him more resources to do horrible things later.: 

Vanyel glances at Tran, his expression mild. It seems like maybe, perhaps, there might be some kind of history there. 

:Okay. Uh, thank you for explaining. I doubt that I would be very useful on the offensive against an archmage especially in a command structure that isn't accustomed to third-circle clerics as a standard phenomenon, and would want to do slightly more research than this to do so anyway, but if you want me out of the way, or put to use for healing purposes, I don't need any more information than I have right now for that.:

Nod. :Your Healing is absurdly powerful compared to ours in some circumstances, so - that offer is appreciated.: 

Vanyel is finding that he isn't sure he wants Blai anywhere near Haven when they find out what happens next. He's - having trouble entirely pinning down why? Because he doesn't want to put Blai in danger, is part of it, and because it would be devastating for everyone involved if Leareth got his hands on Blai and figured out a way to use his powers against Valdemar, but he thinks that's not all of it...

A quiet thought in the back of his mind: they've been given more than enough reason to trust the man, but much less reason to trust his god. 

Leareth's paranoia must be rubbing off on him. Am I really thinking that? But - Dara isn't wrong that the timing here is incredibly suspicious, even if so far the coincidence seems to have been in Valdemar's favor. 

Dara smiles at Blai. :I think that's all. Do you need anything else in the next couple of candlemarks?: 

:I'm not certain I can find my way back to the room I was lent.:

:- I never managed to send that trainee over to you, sorry. We did assign someone but then it - sort of got dropped in all the confusion. I'll have him come over and meet you to walk you back to the guest wing.: 

To Yfandes, :- find out where Ravan's gotten to?: 

:All the trainees were told to return to their quarters and stay there. I'll tell his Companion we need him after all. In the meantime, why don't I stay with Blai and start heading that way?: 

:Yfandes will walk with you until the trainee we assigned catches up: Vanyel relays. 

(Should they be sending Blai back to the guest quarters? It's not like it's public knowledge where he's staying, but it's hardly a secret either, and he's not not conspicuous walking around the Palace grounds.) 

:- Here, borrow my cloak.: He passes it over. :It'll make you stand out less, and you're not dressed for the weather -: Actually, are Blai's clothes still wet? He suddenly feels terrible for having failed to think about that at all sooner. 

:I have Endure Elements up and it will last till this time tomorrow, but for the sake of being inconspicuous...: Cloak.

Then Vanyel will walk him back out to where Yfandes is waiting for him. 

The weather is already turning for the worse; no one is making it a priority to stay on top of their weather-magic efforts, and the magic being thrown around doesn't help either. The wind is picking up, bank of clouds is scudding in from the north, and the temperature is already dropping. 

Under Endure Elements it feels like a pleasantly brisk spring day, just warm enough that he's not fussed about the evaporating lakewater.

Trainee Ravan catches up with them halfway. He's a skinny fourteen-year-old whose only qualifications for this duty are that, one, he's a strong Mindspeaker - strong enough not to get tired even if he has to spend all day holding a link to someone un-Gifted, which isn't trivial - and, two, according to Shallan he's reasonably level-headed for a youngster and at all capable of tact. 

He bobs his head nervously. :I'm Trainee Ravan. Herald-Mage Vanyel said I'm to stay with you and help you with anything you need. And walk you back to the guest wing, I guess.: 

:Thank you, Trainee Ravan.: Blai will follow where he leads.

Trainee Ravan is not very chatty. He leads Blai back to the building without saying anything. :Er, do you remember which room is yours?: 

:I think so.: Is it this one? It is, hooray.

Trainee Ravan will...awkwardly hover by the door trying to hold open a Mindspeech link without actually reading surface thoughts, in case Blai thinks of any questions? 

Blai is going to take off his armor, since he's just sitting around and the padding will take forever to dry if it's not wrung out and hung up - he'll wring it out in the privy, seems politest - and then he pulls out the Acts from his bag which he left in here and study it, occasionally looking ceilingward in private prayer.

It would be rude to interrupt and Ravan doesn't. He can play word-games with his Companion via Mindspeech to avoid getting too bored. 

A candlemark or so later, unbeknownst to Blai, Jisa slips into the building, parks herself in an adjacent unused room, and opens her Othersenses. 

(There was a contentious debate on whether to read the poor man's mind again. Vanyel was against, but not unwilling to be convinced. Jisa, once summoned into the meeting she technically had no reason to be invited to so they could ask about it, was also against, but only mildly; she doesn't have the sense that Blai would consider it a horrifying betrayal, to check his intentions and reaction to the recent events before they take costly measures to ensure his safety.) 

He is praying. In a remarkably businesslike way. Iomedae, I do not know if I will ever be able to return to Golarion and I am uncatechized and novice to Your teachings, and there is absolutely nothing in this book about showing up in a place where your entire faith is unknown, because Aroden was known across the whole world. I think I am solid on Law all things considered but grievously unpracticed in Good. I think these people among whom I have landed are Good, but I know that I landed among them at what was most likely random, since I doubt that altering my trajectory rated Your notice, and so I am committing to little while operating openly and honestly. Tomorrow I am going to want an Aura Sight maybe or at least a Detect Evil. I am confused about their gods, who seem to work all but anonymously and in a group, like a school of fish. If this place is divinely governed by a Good coalition please help me to see that and cooperate with them, and more urgently if it is an Evil coalition or one readily turned toward Evil aims please let me see that, before I am too promised to act on it. The strength and the danger of Law is that it commits, when it does, without leaving any unspoken line of retreat. Please help me remember that in such a strange land I may need to speak some lines of retreat. Maybe I will copy the bit about resigning on grounds of conscience from the Lastwall handbook except that I am not sure any of the things I have are a conscience. Is imagining what You would have of me a conscience? I hope it's close enough. If ever I can go home please help me to meet Your Church in a condition such that they will have me, and if I never can please help me guess so that I can arrive in Heaven to be advised from there rather than falling short...

That's bizarrely...touching? Jisa, lately, is deeply unsure how to feel about people who are genuinely committed to serving gods, but this particular god - goddess - seems like She must be unusually...comprehensible, or something. Which she supposes makes sense, if the claim is that in this other world it's possible for people to become gods. 

(Did Leareth ever consider doing it that way?) 

She is really very sure, within about five seconds, that he's not up to anything nefarious and will behave himself - will behave with as much honor and the-strange-concept-of-Lawfulness as he can - wherever he is. She doesn't need to watch his mind for long. ...She watches it a little longer anyway, just because it's kind of inspiring, and today has been a remarkably horrible day and she feels like she could use that. 

(Would Leareth get along with this goddess any better than the local gods?) 

...She shuts away her Othersenses and quietly leaves the building and goes to report back to the Senior Circle. 

They leave Blai alone for another candlemark after that; there's more to argue about, and Savil needs to talk to Brightstar, who's been helping take about the dead monster's body to learn what they can from it, in the process pinning down the remnants of its magical signature in preparation to concert-cast the pastwatching spell.

She would actually much rather save her energy for the pastwatching spell, but it's not obvious that getting Blai out of Haven is less time-sensitive. 

She arrives at his guest room. 

:If you're willing, we think it would be a good idea to - at least temporarily - relocate you to somewhere out of Haven, where we're pretty sure the mage we're fighting can't operate. We may ask for your help once we - know more of what we need help with.: 

:All right. Where am I going?:

:The place is called k’Treva Vale. It’s in the Pelagirs, but the Vale itself is magically protected. More importantly, it’s deep in the territory of the Star-Eyed Goddess and we believe the mage we’re fighting has no way to reach you there. The Tayledras are our allies.:

Oh, that's a specific god with an identifying title! :What can you tell me about the Star-Eyed Goddess?:

:She works closely with the Tayledras people and another group, the Shin'a'in, who guard some - very dangerous old artifacts - which we learned are buried underground in a place called the Dhorisha Plains. She made a - sort of magical pact - with the original tribes that eventually split into those two groups, shortly after a war between two powerful mages - er, our immortal mage was one of them but it's debatable how much it was actually his fault - caused the disaster we call the Cataclysm. She helped them survive in exchange for the Tayledras working to repair the damaged land and the Shin'a'in mounting guard duty. She chooses warriors among the Shin'a'in - a little like Heralds, but honestly not very much - and some of them become sort of spirit guides after they die. She also gave the Tayledras a powerful kind of magic called Heartstones, which they use to anchor the protective magic on the Vales. We built one in Haven, so - apparently She approves of Valdemar at least that much.:

It's apparent to someone paying attention that Savil's feelings about the Star-Eyed Goddess are much more characterized by "vague unease" than "worship." 

Well, his association with ancestral pacts obliging an ethnicity to follow a specific god in a damaged world that is hostile to human life is.......... Nidal. He updates his mental image of the archmage up north to something more like Geb without the undead-specifically obsession. And probably not specifically being a ghost. :But you don't have a known alignment for Her, or - a philosophy beyond wanting the damaged land repaired?:

:I don't know how we would possibly know Her 'alignment'. She seems fine?: The overtones are that Savil mostly doesn't see this as particularly relevant to her. :The Tayledras are - somewhat like Heralds, in the part where they do live dangerous lives in Her service, but with a lot more nice little luxuries, thanks to Her magic.: 

:What does Her magic do exactly?:

Savil is in kind of a hurry, honestly. She wasn't expecting a pile of questions, though in hindsight obviously he has them. :Let's start heading to the permanent Gate-terminus while I answer your questions. Ravan, thank you, you can head back to the trainees' wing: 

She starts walking. 

:Right, so I don't know how your world's magic works, but here it's very difficult to tie any kind of mage-artifact or set-spell to a power source that renews itself. There are a few other techniques, very advanced magic we don't have, but - the thing Heartstones do is to provide something like a node, linked into the local ley-lines and fed by them, that - provides a scaffolding to anchor arbitrarily complex spells. The Vales are protected by very powerful shields, permanent weather-barriers - it's always summer inside - and they have remarkably sophisticated wards, they can watch the whole area for dangerous Pelagirs beasties. ...I suspect there's more, they trust me pretty far in k'Treva but I wouldn't expect they trust me with all their secrets. I do know that it gives you a way to contact Her directly, if you're desperate, but I wouldn't recommend it.: 

Blai follows her agreeably. :Understood.:

:Any other questions? They have plenty of Mindspeakers there, you'll be able to communicate, and I'm sure they'll be happy to answer your questions about magic and gods. Better than I can, for the second one.: 

:I'm ready.:

Then Savil won't bother with any chitchat while they trek the rest of the way through the Palace grounds to the wing where the permanent Gate-terminus is built. She shoos away some servants, not that it probably matters much if there's one more rumor spreading about Blai when he's about to be safely elsewhere, but she would still rather their destination wasn't observed.