:We can try praying, about the Lesser Restoration quality. I think that is the kind of thing gods can nudge if they want to. I don't know if they'd want to:

:Blai might get a second spell at third circle: Seldan adds. :Then we could keep four Lesser Restorations a day and still have room for one Remove Disease, for whoever's worst off.: 

Or they might get that miracle, the one Shavri mentioned in the abstract without hope in her mindvoice. None of the others in the room right know know about Brightstar's claim, how could they, they were asleep and more or less literally just woke up. Well, they'll know soon how likely it is, he's not going to say anything now. Jisa and Leareth's staff might have concluded in five minutes that Brightstar was missing the hard part of the problem and will be moderately helpful with enough supervision but not gamechanging, and it would take something gamechanging to turn a six-month timeline into less than a week. 

It's really too bad Shelyn can't count any of Vanyel's twenty years of extremely eventful combat-heavy experience as a Herald, when assessing how many cleric levels he's earned. Is praying to Her to bend the rules on that something that ever helps? 

Shelyn is probably capable of elevating Vanyel to eighth circle by pure fiat - Abadar does this with the Pharaoh of Osirion to name a new one when his predecessor dies and Shelyn is not less ancient, to Blai's knowledge - but She'd have to be investing astoundingly heavily in this small group of people surviving. Her expenditures probably make less sense than Iomedaean or Abadaran ones but maybe not that much less sense. Maybe she only clericed Vanyel to make it easier to grab him and bring him to Nirvana, if She's got Yfandes waiting there. Maybe the Star-Eyed massively overpaid for that apology relay and made empowering Vanyel the most sensible route to deliver it. But retroactive credit for his combat experience, no, that's not a thing, if you're a wizard for two decades and then Nethys taps you you're a first circle cleric, it is presumably the same here.

Rude. All they actually need is second circle, to double the– no, it wouldn't even double the Lesser Restorations available, they're counting on Blai using a higher-circle slot to make up the numbers and Vanyel gets fewer spell slots because he's not very Wise. And if it's an unusual and expensive thing to do then it probably won't happen anyway. 

...Maybe they do need to triage and give up on Nayoki. They need Vanyel for his six channels, or at least if they lose him they would need to pull Karis and Joshel both off the Iftel border situation and that might cost hundreds of other lives, so they need Stef, and of course if they lose Blai then no one else lasts through the next day, probably... 

:Thank you for telling us: he sends to Shavri, because it feels like someone should acknowledge it. 

There is probably some tactful delicate way to tell Nayoki they are going to give up on saving her and she needs to tell Brightstar and Jisa anything she knows about Leareth's progress on the Gate.

Seldan is honestly pretty deeply unclear whose call this is, and the final decision should...probably go to some mix of Shavri for the medical considerations, Jisa and Dara and whoever else representing Valdemar, and Leareth's org's other staff, and should not be made by any of the people currently dying and thus presumed to be somewhat impaired. 

...Nayoki might have been coming to some conclusions on her own. She's certainly been very seriously writing something - which is taking some doing, she looks like she's struggling to hold a pen at all - the entire time they've been talking. Maybe she's put together that any information in her head and not in anyone else's head, about Leareth's Gate research, needs to be dredged up and disseminated tonight, her best and probably last opportunity to be clearheaded. 

Shavri's going to be messed up about it but she'll be able to keep going. She kept going after they lost the three Healers. 

Stef and Vanyel are snuggled up very close to each other. Neither of them has said anything. 

Shavri also feels out of things to say. 

(She did the right thing. She was honest even though it's an awful thing to have to be honest about. It should feel more satisfying, she thinks. It should feel like anything at all.) 

....Well, this is awkward. Clearly what they all need is a distraction, in the form of a bunch more people showing up for a meeting! Seldan will Mindspeak Rolan and ask where everyone is, they're ready. 

That does sound better than this awkward silence.

Then Jisa will be there five minutes later! With Dara, and Brightstar, and one of the mages from Leareth's research team, she didn't want to overcrowd the room. 

Jisa is glowing. Jisa is smug. Jisa cannot wait to see everyone's face when she makes the announcement. 

:We can get a Gate to Golarion: she sends. :We can probably do it in two weeks.: 

...Oh no. That would have felt like enormously good news until ten minutes ago. And...it is, still, objectively speaking, enormously good news - until today they didn't know whether the 'replicate Leareth's Gate-research' angle was tractable at all, and then it could have been six months or a year - but. Two weeks is an entire twice as many weeks as one week which is what Shavri thinks they have. 

Vanyel's face starts to light up in surprised joy and then...stops, as he presumably works his way to the same realization. 

:Okay. If I die last, I can get a Gentle Repose cast on everyone except myself; it takes the same slot as a Lesser Restoration but we cannot make two weeks and may as well not try too aggressively to make it one and a half. That will reduce the cost of getting most of us up again if that still makes sense to do at that time. I will need to tell you what I told Leareth about where it is safe to land, and who to speak to. Do you want to see a summons - a weak one can displace a Remove Sickness instead of a Lesser Restoration and Leareth had thought it would be useful. I'm not sure I can draw even up to my usual poor standard while this shaky, can a Mindspeaker just extract map information from my mind for me to label and comment on -:

Blai is so so so incredibly good and the best Herald and Seldan loves him and– that's enough being sentimental, focus. :I can bounce map information to whoever is the most skilled at drawing maps.: 

:- That's definitely going to be Brightstar. And, yes, we'd like to see a summons. ...Does the first-circle version summon something intelligent enough to talk or answer questions in Mindspeech? - if not is it as intelligent as an animal, Featherfire has Animal Mindspeech and could still get something, Brightstar thought he could learn something useful that way.: 

Brightstar is looking like he really wants to say something, but at Jisa's quelling look he keeps it to himself. He has pen and paper and can work on taking down a map. 

:First circle summonses are as smart as animals. Second-circle ones include some intelligent options: Here for Brightstar is an annotated bad map of Golarion with areas marked anywhere from "basically fine for strange adventurers to land in and you'll be able to find a friendly church" to "just don't actually go at all if you can't be sure you won't land here". With less detail farther from the Avistan/Inner Sea area, but he assumes the other continents probably have comparable density of places not to land.

It's seeming increasingly plausible that, if they're not going to make it anyway, it might be worth using the second-circle slots on summonses instead of Lesser Restorations. But if they've got an Animal Mindspeaker, then it's possible a first-circle summons is good enough, depending on what they're actually trying to learn, Seldan is not an expert in planar navigation magic and has no idea what Brightstar would be questioning the summoned creature about. 

Jisa watches the map take shape on the paper. 

:Er, can we get some - visual senses of what places look like? I don't know, architecture style and what the plants look like and how people dress and things like that? Brightstar thinks he can aim a scrying search-spell for, um particularly dense arrangements of spell-construction elements that Blai's magic items have, and we thought that should hopefully be more likely to find cities, but it could take a lot of scrying attempts to figure out the spatial arrangement between them and line it up with a map, and Brightstar says it's going to be more tiring than scrying in the same world.: 

Blai grew up in Dekarium, a city on this Chelish lake here, and can provide a visual of that. He has... seen woodcuts... and adventurers who were from various places but dressed for the Worldwound... if they want to aim for Sothis it's got a giant Rovagug-spawn beetle shell in it which is understood to repel magic, if that would be paradoxically easy to find?

Well, they probably can't search for it directly unless Brightstar can figure out something very weird and clever, but that seems like a solid unmistakeable way to be sure that they're in a specific city! They should also get a list of other unique-on-the-planet easy-to-recognize geographical features, like, if there's only one city at the top of a giant mountain in a desert or something and it's either safe or definitely note safe? Is Sothis is safe to land in? 

On that note, can Blai think of any easy-to-condense-down-to-a-short-paragraph pieces of cultural translation advice that might help the Heralds start off on a good foot with whoever they contact? He's not worried about the language barrier specifically, they have a lot of Mindspeakers available, more just...well, Blai hasn't failed to notice Velgarth's lack of much solid shared understanding of Law.

They have no idea how Brightstar reads but if he landed on Evil and isn't Lawful then that seems...bad...for getting diplomatic relations off the ground. Jisa is Good but also Chaotic, is that an issue? Should they be trying to send someone who specifically reads Good or Lawful? Would it help to send Joshel specifically in his capacity both as a Herald and representative of Valdemar and also as a cleric of Abadar? 

Sothis is safe and has a high concentration of Abadarans. Absalom is safe and has the Starstone (although you do not want to land within, like, a couple blocks or something, of the Starstone, since it's in a famously lethal dungeon). Blai can't actually think of other safe+unique combinations like that, not that he's sure of, there could easily be duplicates of anything that comes to mind over on Tian Xia. People who aren't paladins or something don't go around Detecting Evil all the time, and by itself it doesn't mean that much. Joshel specifically might be useful if they aim for Sothis which is the capital of an Abadaran theocracy, but Abadarans will trade with anyone, that's the point of them, that's why they're so good to have around. Plus the Churches within and without Osirion are organizationally separate and Blai doesn't know how interfaces between Cicerones and Fiducias goes in practice. Besides, they have a lie detection spell.

Blai recommends explaining themselves as an adventuring party from another planet interested in making contact with both of the Church of Abadar and any representative of the archmage party (he's not sure which member will be most famous in Sothis, as two of them are Osirian and the group got its start there, and he's even less sure about their relative fame in Absalom) to alert a) the party, to a Chelish Constitutional Convention invited delegate being dead and on another planet and psychologically dependent on his new Paladin Horse From Space, b) the church, to diamond arbitrage opportunities and any resurrections that the archmage party doesn't feel like picking up. If they find Iomedaeans or Sarenrites or Shelynites first they can deliver appropriately modified messages, but it's Abadarans who Blai knows will find this the most interesting thing that has happened all week.

Seldan will relay that! Sothis is starting to sound like the most sensible place to aim, if the most magical thing in Absalom is also a hazard to land too close to, and given the Abadaran theocracy and the fact that the archmage party started there.