:Not literally, I mean, what's Randi going to do other than shout at him?: 

:'Fandes!: He turns to the others. "I don't actually want to burn all my bridges back home!" 

"I'm with her! Assuming that it's not one of those situations where the answer is 'take your family hostage' or something."

"What? No, Randi would never do that!" 

:Vanyel is his top advisor, honestly, Randi is going to listen to Van's arguments about this place being worth exploring. And, Van - he's going to be sympathetic to the real reason, you should just tell him: 

"It's really not the top strategic priority for Valdemar to help me resurrect my..." he trails off. 

:No, but Valdemar isn't in desperate straits anymore, there's a little bit of slack, and Randi is your friend. Also maybe we can make it up to him by, I don't know, buying him some relatively cheap but useful magic artifacts, or sending some adventurers over who're happy to fight monsters for us since it apparently gives them stronger magic: 

"If you won a war for them they should be paying you really really well! 

- also, maybe we're thinking about this wrong. The most valuable resource we control right now is that we - suspect we know how to go between the worlds and no one else does. We can figure out where the worlds have mismatches in prices of goods - diamonds are probably cheaper in Velgarth, if they can't do resurrections - and arbitrage -

- are there people in Velgarth who'd pay a ridiculous amount of money for access to Golarion -"

Leareth would. For sure. (And might personally want to do Vanyel a favour by paying generously for it.) Also they almost certainly shouldn't give him a free ride to another world. 

"Probably? Although I think Randi might not like doing that - sending people here because they've got a lot of gold, rather than because they can be trusted with the resources of an entire other world." 

"I mean, there's a pretty good correlation between being willing to spend lots of resources to get to another world and being trusthworthy with the resources in the other world. The way you accumulate resources is by being trustworthy with them, in the sense of being competent to turn them into more resources, to notice where they're best conserved and where they're best expended -"

"Maybe here? And, I mean, on average that seems true-ish, but in my world a lot of people have resources because their ancestors owned land and such, it's not that correlated." 

"There's a lot of randomness and some selection for bad qualities. But - selling things that you have to distribute usually works out better than most other ways of distributing them even in light of all the ways who has money is unfair. And we could also bring worthy people across, if your King wanted."

"It seems worth asking." 

"Well, the crystal ball's right here."

...Wow, for some reason this is a very stressful conversation to have. "I should. Um. Maybe prepare a script or something." 

"Oh scryable contact person for His Majesty, holiest of holies, son of such and such and the other thing -"

Mahdi elbows him. "It doesn't have to be now, yeah, you can Gate yourself back anytime so long as we make sure no one else can find the crystal ball."

"And it doesn't have to happen at all, if you'd rather stay here and pave roads. We're happy to have you."

"Thank you. That means a lot. I'm, er, going to spend some time thinking about what to say."

"Maybe in the meantime we can have a guess at what the Pharaoh of Numbers is gonna try to spring on us."

"Right, we should. Er, do we know literally anything else about his life?" 

Mahdi reads. 

"The Pharaoh of Numbers was an astronomer as well as an architect and is thought also to have been a numerologist specializing in sacred geometry. His passion was his study of the distant planet Aucturn. It is said that Aucturn inspired the magic that fueled the pharaohs' binding pact and its influence infuses the design of much of the architecture that comprises the pyramids left behind by the Four Pharaohs of Ascension. The Pharaoh of Numbers was said to have constructed some of Tumen's greatest centers of learning and study."

"...Do you know anything else about Aucturn?" 

"It's mentioned in my book on other worlds, one second." He digs around for it in the cargo bag, which is difficult to dig through by sight or feel because it's an extradimensional space five cubic feet in size. 

"Aucturn orbits our same sun but it's the farthest out. Astronomers - report different things, when they look for it in the sky - and scries fail. Gravity is twice as strong, the atmosphere's not breathable -" he skims for something a bit more useful -

:That's very weird. Er, how do you even get there? Oh, is that the sort of place the god was trying to go when they traveled through the void - I assume that's not the same thing as our Void, which is totally different - and then came back as a torture-god for some reason?: