"Why is it like that - especially if he doesn't even like it -"

"It's traditional. People expect it and it has - theological significance - and it's not good for your lawfulness to be throwing away customs left and right because they're personally inconvenient. And it's good for everyone else to abide by them. He's not very impaired in doing his job, just in all the little tinkering in peoples' lives he liked."

"What is there even left of a Timothy without that though?"

"The pharaoh is meant to be Abadar's embodiment in our world, not - the person they were before that."

"Why would he sign up for that. - I guess I know why."

"That's so depressing! Should our Timothy like, hug you or something -"

- he suppresses a giggle, a little. "Sure."

Hug. "Is he good at it?"

"He is of course spectacularly good at it."

"That's good, at least. - how expensive and how high bandwidth is dimensional transit and what does that cost scale with?"

"Gates are very expensive and would be permanent, Plane Shifts are much cheaper and can do eight creatures each. We could sustainably arrange maybe twenty a day."

"Is the cost of magic mostly the cost of components or labor?"

"Labor, for mid-level spells; components, for permanent and powerful ones."

"What kind of components? And how big are the gates, that turns out to matter if you're trying to move around as many people as Amentans sometimes do."

"Twenty feet in diameter. And gemstones, most everything is gemstones."

"Do synthetic ones work?"

"Not for any means of synthesis we've come up with."

<What have you tried?>

"Conjuring them doesn't work. Transmuting them from other materials doesn't work. Trying to get them to crystallize from a liquid they're in, the way salt crystals form in water, doesn't work and we don't know why."

<Have you tried squishing coal really hard?>

"....no." He writes this down. 

<It's more complicated than that but there are other ways to do it too.>

"That'd be wonderful. We'll have you, by the way, if you're still figuring where you want to go - I bet the Dwarves can make a better offer but we could use as many of Ismat as we can get -"

<Wasn't the treason going to be an issue?>

"Mostly for you. I'm willing to take the hit to me."