From backchannel with Kellan: APPARENTLY SUNHAME! Why is there a Heartstone in territory that isn’t just not Valdemar but actively under another god, he has no idea!!! 

...well, they seem to be - working together or at least not at obvious cross-purposes? - but it's weird, yes.

:It’s the only method we could figure out to power a permanent Gate-terminus, which we wanted to build in Sunhame, and apparently Vkandis allowed it. I’m not sure it actually makes it a worse idea to visit Sunhame than it already was.:

They should figure out how to start a fight between Vkandis and the Star-Eyed Goddess, to get them working at cross-purposes Seldan has no idea how one would do that and also warring gods sounds almost as dangerous as their current situation and might be worse.

Yeah don't do that!!!

…Does Golarion history have examples of that going badly?

Blai does not have an example of that exact thing to hand but he thinks something along the lines of "gods working at cross purposes too much would destroy the world somehow" is a likely candidate for how tight intervention budgets look. Though the Velgarth gods seem different he still has that flinch.

It does seem like the Velgarth gods usually have some way to set it up so their conflicts don't result in destroying the world - the Shadow-Lover god in particular is clearly working at cross-purposes to the others, but mostly in ways that seem to involve letting Their plans play out most of the way and then nudging them a different direction at the last moment. It definitely seems wise not to poke at that equilibrium too hard. 

Yeah. Blai really hopes the Shadow-Lover knows what She's doing.

Vanyel takes a deep breath. :Anyway. I don't think this is a reason to put off shutting down our Heartstone today. We should ask Leareth for his help evacuating Highjorune or at least getting Featherfire and the others out, and - I think we should consider getting Blai out of Haven, if we're not waiting on other spells from him today? The Star-Eyed Goddess clearly has it out for him.: 

:I think I've cast the spells that I meant to cast in Haven specifically today.:

The only thing Seldan can think of that they might still want Blai for is an Owl's Wisdom on Vanyel right before he starts the working, but it seems likely they should actually do that from the north and have one of Leareth's mages Gate Vanyel back immediately, rather than vice versa. He'll pass that along via Kellan. 

:I can't think of anything else: Savil agrees. :And Leareth might find it useful to get your help with, er, whatever he would find helpful for finding Golarion.: 

Also Leareth might like to hear more about Iomedae! 

They've got a whole entourage of Leareth's people here and should be able to get a Gate back north pretty easily. 

Blai should grab his stuff but that doesn't take long, he's not even very unpacked.

Then they can be back in the north again well before lunchtime! Seldan is at some point going to get really tired of spending a lot of time in mildly claustrophobic underground bases, but right now it's mostly reassuring that there are NO freezing rivers nearby.

Leareth is busy for the next candlemark running some sort of calculations related to advising Vanyel on precautions for shutting down the Heartstone, but after that he would in fact like to meet with Blai about Golarion! He'll need to be interruptible again once Vanyel and the others actually get started, but the Heartstone-shutting-down working is planned for later in the afternoon, the Heralds are still working on evacuating. 

They should probably not go snooping around Leareth's secret underground base even if Seldan is quite curious about it. More Acts while they wait? 

More Acts! They will finish it soon, Blai wishes he had commentaries.

Yeah, Seldan still doesn't feel entirely educated on the Iomedaean religion. Though so far he's approved of everything he has learned. Which is impressive! He's a very judgmental person! 

He gets an update a while later that Leareth's people are working with some of the Heralds - junior Heralds who Blai hasn't met, the Senior Circle isn't involved here - to evacuate Highjorune. Brightstar's sister Featherfire is safely out and reunited with her brother, in the base where Jisa is which is a couple hundred miles from here, along with Tashir and all the most key personnel from the Highjorune leadership. Nothing disastrous has happened; maybe the Star-Eyed Goddess isn't going to bother given that it's unlikely to even inconvenience Leareth that much, his mages can all Gate themselves out very quickly if something starts to go wrong. 

Gating seems to Blai worse than teleporting for most emergency purposes involving only a few people. You have to be able to physically move to your gate, you have to undo the gate afterwards, people can follow you if they're quick. But it's what they've got, he supposes.

It has a lot of downsides! A lot more downsides at the Valdemaran level of training with Gates, where you need an actual doorway. Someone who can do unscaffolded Gates can put the threshold horizontally underneath themselves so they drop through, so it's not an unworkable escape plan if all your mages are at that skill level - just a pretty costly and wasteful one - but getting all the Heralds and Companions on-site out safely would be a lot more challenging. 

About a candlemark later, Leareth is ready to meet with Blai!

He would like to closely examine all of Blai's magic items, in case he can find some kind of unique structure present in Golarion magic and not present in any Velgarth magic that could be used to target a search-spell. He would also like the most detailed explanation Blai can provide on all the different planes accessible from Golarion, and their relations to each other insofar as this is known.  

Also it would be valuable to have context on whether there are locations on the planet in the Material plane where it would be a really, really bad idea to land via blind Gate, such that he shouldn't do that and should only try to travel there once he can separately do interworld scrying. 

Blai has two magic items (the armor and the mace). Three if you count the spellbook page seized from some unfortunate wizard-school washout for his use in learning Prestidigitation for internal political project reasons.

Blai was taught this here diagram of the planar relationships, he can draw it - Material wrapped in the Elemental Planes, and the overlapping planes sandwiched like so with the First World in the middle, and all of this surrounded by the Outer Planes with the Astral pervading it all. He assumes this is grievously oversimplified, he's not sure where you'd draw the River of Souls in this arrangement, Plane Shift will get you between any two without it being more complicated to get to more distant ones or anything, and of course there's umpteen demiplanes that powerful people make (or that are temporary Rope Tricks or just Bags of Holding or Magnificent Mansions or something).

Here is Blai's terrible map of Golarion. He is trying to get to this city on this coast. The closest incredibly bad idea landing spot is Nidal, which borders Cheliax and is ruled by an evil god. Blai would not be welcome in Rahadoum because he's a cleric and he wouldn't want to intrude. Landing in the ocean would suck but probably Leareth doesn't need to be told that. You don't want to land in the middle of the Worldwound, it's closed but still has most of the demons who already came across before that. Best not to land in Geb. Or Razmiran. If we're being pickier still he'd also rather not spend extended periods of time in Belkzen, Ustalav, or literally any forest even the ones within Cheliax's borders. Or the Mana Wastes because he doesn't know how they'd affect an attempt to gate out again. Cheliax is fine, Absalom and Galt and Andoran and Isger and Osirion and Katapesh and Thuvia and Taldor and Molthune and Mendev are fine, the River Kingdoms are maybe dicey but in the sense that they're at any given time likely an active war zone and not in the sense that either side of any such wars is going to be hostile to clerics of Iomedae on sight, he's not sure about any of the other places he's remembered to label and is probably forgetting to label some of them, please do not actually trust this map with anything important.

He knows almost nothing about things that aren't in Avistan or the Inner Sea area but assumes all the other continents have a comparable density of badness.

It sounds like there are a lot of places where it would be a disaster! Not just for Blai but for a highly prepared mage planning to stay exactly long enough to scry the surrounding region and then get out. Leareth thinks he should probably figure out interworld scrying in parallel and scope out a safe place to arrive, or - if it turns out to be easier to research - figure out a version of the comms spell, though this will be difficult because no one in Golarion is a Velgarth mage and the variants that can reach un-Gifted people are much more difficult. Interworld Mindspeech is probably just not possible. 

He's curious about properties of the Elemental Planes. Velgarth has Elemental Planes too, and if they're the same ones then that's a strong hint on how to route a Gate to Golarion. He's also curious to hear more about the Astral Plane in case it's a different word for the Void, which is what Gates by default route through.