"Is name and species a standard specification or just an example of disambiguating constraints, and anything sufficiently disambiguating works? If I named any random specific person on any continent in this world, and they actually exist and I didn't make them up, someone could cast [Sending] to message them?"

"Just an example. You could indeed Sending any such person if you knew them to exist and had someone to cast the spell. - you don't get feedback if it fails, so if they turned out not to exist this wouldn't be useful information."

"Would 'the dragon somewhere in the High Passes' work, if we didn't know the name? If there's no reply we can't confirm they don't exist, but if they do exist they would still be able to reply, right?"

"I have never tried to Send someone with such a thin description, I'm mostly accustomed to it as a military logistics tool. Purveyors of the spell in Axis may be able to tell you more if you wanted to bankroll an attempt to buy it. If the dragon wishes to reply - without having any time in which to deliberate about whether to do so - then they would be able to."

"Axis is...?"

"The world with which it would be possible to make such a trade. I can summon outsiders from there, and they can bring sufficiently compact trade goods between here and Axis."

"So your world has contact with other worlds already, or did you acquire the ability after coming here? Do they not have the ability to return you to Golarion—or is it a matter of cost?"

"My world has contact with other worlds, yes. Trading with Axis is phenomenally expensive for complicated reasons, and the Plane Shifts necessary to get me home would be even more astronomically costly than one Sending; my previous trading has not been on my own behalf. I can actually myself cast a spell which might successfully send me home but might also just kill me and I don't have nearly that much urgency about not being on this plane any more."

"Can you estimate how expensive a Sending would be, and a Plane Shift compared to that? Why are multiple needed, and can it take only you, or any person?"

"Plane Shift is a circle higher, so about an order of magnitude more expensive per casting, and at least three would be needed because someone would have to come here from Axis to collect me, transport us to Golarion, and then return home to Axis. In theory anyone could go along. I haven't tried to bargain for spellcasting from Axis before, only for books, which I'd expect to be drastically cheaper, but per book amortizing the cost of the negotiations themselves across all such books it was -" Yea much. "- in diamonds."

"Understood. Is that exchange rate of diamonds from your world, from Chandrar, from Izril's public markets, or somewhere else?"

"From Chandrar."

"We can probably secure better rates. A [Sending] should be well within budget but it's not for me to decide. Is the summoning teachable, or how hard or rare would it be for anyone else to acquire it?"

"It's not acquirable by study alone, even if you got a wizard, which I'm not. The Golarion equivalent of levelling requires life-threatening combat or comparable stakes faced and overcome, and Planar Inquiry, the spell I use for this, is third circle."

"So it would require a third-circle cleric in your world's type of class? How advanced is that, in terms of our levels, how long as a full-time combatant to get there? I suppose you may not know if it's acquirable through our type of [Cleric] class."

"I don't know how to render it in terms of local levels because local levels do not have the same attrition rate. I spent twenty Golarion years - it's fewer in local years - at a dangerous border posting to reach third circle. I am... not sure if you can mimic Planar Inquiry as I cast it with only a local [Cleric] class."

Nod.

"What's the ratio of Golarion years to our years?"

"Golarion years are 365 days. The days seem about the same."

"512 here, so... around 15 of our years, then. Are you willing to perform the summonings to commission a [Sending] if Manus pays for it? You said, subject to restrictions of conduct?"

"If you are prepared to pay for it, and - it's not solely about conduct, exactly. Outsiders of Axis are perfectly Lawful and they are operating within the constraints of certain treaties about intervention among mortals. Intervention includes the transmission of information. Doing the summoning at all will have a cost, to pay the individual for its time. The information that the service I seek is not available would have a cost, should that be the case. I will not perform the spell if you cannot accept the possibility that the outsider in question will appear, hear what I have to say, take some diamonds, and leave without helping you any further. Also, Planar Inquiry takes up a slot that I would otherwise be using on healing the blind and deaf and should in and of itself command approximately that rate, again even if nothing comes of it."

"Understood. This is ordinary protocol, in Golarion?"

"It's not common. On Golarion the things I have contemplated trading with Axis for would be far simpler to get in other ways."

"But an average interplanar trader from Golarion would not be surprised by your description just now?"

"Well, I don't think they'd be surprised this was as far as I got on my own. I may be missing components of the state of the art, not having previously been an interplanar trader at all."

"Alright. I've got enough here that I'm going to make a report and check on that wand. Is there anything you want to add before we take a break?"