And he leaves.

Leareth heads off to look for the rest of the group. 

(Vanyel has been having a slightly better day, although he's still pretty out of it and has limited tolerance for being around other people even if the thing they're doing is 'playing beautiful music'; he ran out of stamina in the early afternoon and has been half-napping in his room ever since.) 

He is keeping Vanyel company. Fy is attempting to scrub the floors because it was stressing Hagan out having servants in here doing that. Fazil came by as well, and is reading a book. Mahdi is still in the palace libraries.

Fy attempting to scrub a floor is...mostly cute, although Hagan's weirdly capable magic snake is in general kind of alarming.

"Vanyel, how are you feeling?"  

Shrug and noncommittal sound. 

"Listened to some music." 

"I worked more with the researchers. Discovered that our Gates are more revolutionary here than I realized, and also we should keep that fact quiet since it could provide a key advantage in Cheliax if they are not aware of it. Also I spoke with the pharaoh, and - among other things he said that Abadar found it trivial to - attune a focus? - to Velgarth, and so probably Fazil could use his plane-shift spell to travel there. I think. I am still unsure I fully understand how your magic works." 

"Many spells require a specific material you can use as a spell focus. With Plane Shift, you need it to travel there. If Abadar can, uh, just give me one, then I can go there with that, and I can take the rest of you. - note that it's nearly impossible to target where in Velgarth we'll land. Usually I just go with Mahdi who can subsequently teleport us to the intended destination but if there are a lot of dangerous areas in your world then we should maybe give thought to more precautions."

"There are very few places where I would be in real danger if I landed there suddenly, since I would go in shielded and could immediately Gate out, but - there are some."

"Would being invisible help, we can also do invisibility cheaply enough."

"Yes! It would definitely provide additional safety, especially if your type of invisibility does not show up as a spell to mage-sight, which I ought to check. I can do illusions to hide myself but they are extra visible to mage-sight." 

"We can ask Mahdi to check that when he gets back tonight, then. If we want to be very paranoid we can Fly and Air Bubble, go invisible, depart from above the ground, which as I suspected after the Elemental Plane of Water adventure will apparently land us in similar conditions in the other plane, and Mahdi can prepare a teleport to trigger immediately when we arrive in the destination plane."

Leareth nods, slowly. Smiles. "This may be one of the first times in my memory that someone else has proposed a solution more paranoid than what I was going to suggest. I like it. Unless it is trading off steeply against other spells you might need later, but if Mahdi can teleport us straight to somewhere he hasn't visited before but I have, and hit that precisely, then we should be arriving somewhere safe." 

"We do a lot of raiding trapped tombs and recovering bodies of other people who were less careful than we are, it's some of the better pay that isn't doing crimes or starting wars. Mahdi can quote you the figures on Teleport mischance but it definitely works precisely most of the time, and when it doesn't work precisely it tends to land in a visually, geographically and magically similar area, which...might also be fine, assuming you have several of those northern bunkers we saw when we spied on you, and in the very rare cases you fed it input that doesn't work at all - place was destroyed, or something - it will give us all a bit of backlash that I can trivially fix."

"I do have several, yes. And landing anywhere in the north should not be a problem anyway; like I said, I would have to be very unlucky with even a completely random arrival point before it would be a problem." 

"It is usually within five hundred miles of the target when the target's on this plane but I don't want to count on Velgarth working similarly. Mahdi's Teleport range is just short of a thousand miles."

"Hmm. We could, if we were very unlucky, land further than a thousand miles from the north. The continent is quite large. If that happened and we did not find out before he tried the teleport, would it fail and give us backlash or try to put us somewhere similar?" 

"Probably somewhere similar. Might fail if there wasn't anywhere sufficiently similar."

"If we had Fly, would there be time for me to use magic to check our location? It would not be that accurate, but I could figure it out to within a few hundred miles in - a minute, maybe." 

"I don't know what kind of threats there are in Velgarth but there should be a couple minutes, easily, with the metamagic rod Fly'll last eighteen."

"All right. I feel comfortable with this plan, then." 

"I assume I'm staying behind." 

"We have to leave some people back because Mahdi can only teleport himself and three others. It might make sense for it to be just him, me, and Leareth, honestly - not because you're royalty, Hagan, because we're burning a lot of spells per-person on this -"

"Van and I can stay home and plan your funerals if you don't come back, yeah."