"Select Blai Artigas."

"Cool. Nice to meet you, Select. Shall we get this in writing at the desk and get on the road?"

"If that's the custom, certainly."

"New to the Guild?" Shit is that too casual. "Client contracts have to be ratified by the Guild for the [Guildmistress]' skills to take effect. Dunno what they all are it stops any funny business from either side."

He'll scamper them over to the desk if Blai doesn't object.

"I'm new to the entire planet."

"Cool." He doesn't quite understand the concept of a planet but he grasps the gist of it. "Uh, what I mean is, it must be a big change for you?" He didn't know there were different 'planets'.

The receptionist is the same one as yesterday.

"Hey, Selys."

        "Dross! You found yourself a friend?"

"He's hiring me as a translator for the day, paying me the lesser of the revenues of the two mass healings he's doing today."

He glances at Blai to confirm.

Nod nod.

        "No sewers for you today!"

Dross grins brightly.

        "Alright, here we go." She's frighteningly fast at penning up a contract. It's basically what Dross said, with some standard-looking wording about reasonable effort to translate accurate to intent, not manipulating the sales of the healings to disproportionate their price, disbursement of payment within a day, et cetera. "Looks good?"

Blai spent most of his life as a cleric of the god of contracts that you really really should not sign. He reads it very carefully. But it looks fine, and he writes his name.

Dross is very restrainedly gleeful about signing because this is his first time signing a real adventurer contract with a client, which he has practiced probably an impractical number of times. He usually takes the kind of open-request stuff where you scrawl your name on a sign-up sheet and show up wherever it says on the flyer, which is incredibly lame and barely a step up grabbing a tear-off slip off a job ad at city hall.

"So what have you got so far, Select?" he asks once they're done.

"I have been asked not to channel again in this building so I need to rent some kind of space - it doesn't have to be a building, and in fact unless the room is very large a building can be worse than an open field. And then I need to figure out how to alert people to the option, and figure out some kind of pricing structure, and how to get them all into the sphere - it's spherical, not circular, but that won't matter until I'm at the point of having a specially built room for it."

"—Sorry, just to rewind a bit, your channeling affects everyone in a sphere? Is it weaker the more people it affects and what's the biggest injury it can heal?"

"It affects everyone in a sphere, equally, regardless of how many people there are. In a high traffic temple on Golarion there would be architecture specific to this. The exact quality of the healing can vary outside of my control but even at its least effective it will allow someone on the brink of death to await further care without danger of succumbing. I cannot replace completely missing body parts, though."

Oh no this is like being back in school all again. He's not going to fuck this up because he's scared of math. but what if he does because he's bad at it

"How large is the sphere? How exactly does it vary, sorry, I just want to know like—is any wound that's not imminently fatal going to be fully healed? Does it make a difference if it's an internal or external damage, the depth of a wound, if it's bone or muscle. Are there injuries you shouldn't heal. How familiar are you with healing potions."

The way the human talks seems like people with his class are common where he's from, and healing potions are... probably not worth it, under those conditions.

"Thirty feet - I should mention, actually, that last night the... local convention of improved ability... impinged... on me? And it claimed to have enhanced my channeling. Nonspecifically. But speaking to how it works under more familiar circumstances - it will not always fully heal a severe wound, especially a wound that has managed to achieve severity on someone who is very hard to hurt in the first place. It doesn't matter if the damage is to skin, bone, muscle, or organ, as long as all the tissue is there. Foreign objects tend to leave the wound if they're present or it would be incredibly dangerous to use positive energy healing in combat. I am aware of healing potions as they are made on Golarion but do not know much of the local type."

should mention, actually, that last night the... local convention of improved ability... impinged... on me?

?????

"Do you mean... you leveled, or some other thing?"

That's such an incredibly weird-ass thing to say.

"Someone who's very hard to hurt in the first place, as in someone with [Enhanced Toughness] or [Ironskin]? Should I explain healing potions here to you. The effects and the... economics?" Which is something Dross is painfully aware of.

"If it's called leveling. The thing that happened to me last night does not happen on Golarion, people get more powerful without... notice. And no, I don't mean any specific ability or spell, just the generic improved durability of adventurers? Is that not normal here? I'm strong enough to demonstrate if you want to try giving me a small cut... yes please explain the potions."

"What, so you don't get told when you level?" Dross is immediately distracted by this new fact. "You just wake up in the morning with new skills? How do you find out what they're called? Does that mean you didn't know your level before yesterday?"

"I know my circle, third, which is the most powerful kind of spell I can cast. New spell slots of lower circles come in gradually though the jump to a new circle is often more dramatic. Martial types often don't even know that and have to go by approximately what circle of spellcaster they're worthwhile party members for."

That is not at all how spellcasting works in this setting but Dross doesn't know about about it to register confusion.

"Geez, I'd hate that. Uh, I don't think adventurers get more durable, just, randomly? I guess I'm only Level 4 so I wouldn't know, but I'd think I'd have heard... but most martial types get [Thick Skin] or [Enhanced Toughness], or even [Enhanced Strength] makes you a little tougher, I've heard, and skills get a bit better with each level, so maybe your people do get durability from skills and you just don't know because the world doesn't tell you?"

"I can't rule it out. But a leading theory is that it happens because the sorts of people who get tougher are also the same sorts of people who get a lot of magical healing, so there's some speculation that the healing causes the durability."

"...Well, our magical healing doesn't do that so if that's true you're going to be even more fabulously rich than you're already going to be?

"Uh, sorry. I was going to talk about healing potions."

"Yes, do."

"Right."

Dross isn't really prepared to give a lecture on the spot, but he tries to collect his ideas in something resembling a useful order.

"So. Healing potions. There are different grades but the most common stuff is a gold for a standard potion—uh, 'potion' beung the unit of volume most potions are sold at. Twelve ounces. The stuff a hunter brings on a hunt so they don't die if they get gored by something, y'know?"

"Drinking a whole healing potion will usually heal you from most injuries. Properly made potions will deal with, like, dirt or gravel in your cuts? But not an arrowhead or fang. It depends on the size and material. If you do get a foreign object healed inside you, you fix that with a solution potion. Broken bones need to set correctly before healing or it's going to heal wrong. Potions don't fix missing parts.

"Potions are expensive. The important thing is you don't drink the potion if you can. It wastes most of the effect. You want to apply a small fraction to the injury directly. But that only really works well for superficial injuries: cuts, scrapes, stab wounds. For a muscle injuries, there are special absorbent potions you rub in with a leather cloth. For a broken leg you basically have to drink at least half a healing potion or it's not going to work.

"What that means is healing a shallow cut costs coppers in potion, a rough sprain costs silver, and broken bones cost up to a gold. And I guess you want to be charging a fixed point on that scale which will exactly fill up your channel radius? As a wild guess, something like five to ten silver? A selective price policy might be hard to enforce, or do you have a good system from home...?

"I can talk more about who you'll get and how I got to that number, if you want."

"I'm afraid I don't have a good system to import but your reasoning makes sense to me."