The King of Valdemar is a very young man, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, with light brown hair tied back in a knot and sort-of-puppydog brown eyes. He rises from his chair and offers his arm to Fazil. "Thank you for coming." 

In Osirion they also BRIEF YOU ON PROTOCOLS BEFORE SHOVING YOU AT THE PHARAOH.

"You're very welcome, your majesty?" What the fuck does he do with the arm? Does he kiss it? Did anyone else do this?

Vanyel, after a few beats, notices his frozen reaction and also the frantic thoughts he's half-Mindspeaking in Vanyel's direction. :Oh, gods, sorry - just grip his arm for five seconds or so, like this–: he attempts to send a mental image, although he's less good at Mindspeaking the un-Gifted than Yfandes and it comes across hazy. :We're not very formal here: 

He can probably do that!

The King of Valdemar smiles warmly at him and squeezes his forearm in return. "We really appreciate your willingness to come - I heard it was a very difficult spell you had to use. I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you had yesterday, it sounds like things could've gone a lot worse." He releases Fazil's arm. "You don't need to refer to me as 'your Majesty.' Randi will do." 

:He hates the honourifics: Vanyel informs Fazil. :A lot more than Elspeth did - she was Queen when I became a Herald, sorry: 

King Randale gestures at the other chairs around the meeting-table. "Well. Have a seat." 

Then he ducks around Fazil and hugs Vanyel.  

Well, they haven't been set on fire, so it's going better than yesterday. 

He sits down.

"Van, you scared us," Randi is saying. "Please try not to do that again. You do it too much." He releases him and returns to his seat. "So. Let's do some introductions. This is Healer Shavri, my lifebonded and, er, in practice the acting King's Own right now." He sounds sort of apologetic about this; it's unclear if the apology is directed to Fazil or Shavri. 

"We're pleased you could come." Shavri's expression is more tired than pleased. 

"My pleasure to be here," he says. "Just to be clear, I am not properly a diplomat or anything. On I think Van's second day in our world the village he was travelling through was attacked by a dragon and I was one of the people who was sent to try to help. Though it turned out we weren't needed."

"Did Van take care of it?" Randi rolls his eyes a little. "Van, of course you fought a dragon, why am I surprised." 

"Didn't exactly fight it. More of a negotiation. Fazil's friend lent me money to buy animals it could eat." 

"It was very sweet of him! And also very impressive. Most people in our world cannot hold dragons still while they negotiate dinner for them."

"Sounds like Van." 

"Anyway. Introductions. We're running a bit short-staffed right now due to war injuries, but - Keiran is the Lord Marshall's Herald, Joshel is our new Seneschal's Herald, Katha is, er, in charge of spies." 

Keiran is a sturdy-looking blonde woman in her thirties or early forties; Katha is small and mousy and looks calmer than anyone else here. Joshel looks maaaaybe twenty-three and is kind of wide-eyed. 

"All right. So - and if it's all right we're going to have you both under first-stage Truth Spell for the next while - I think we need a summary of everything that happened leading up to, and after, the part where you kidnapped Leareth." He says this very incredulously. "We've heard some things but, er, by less confirmable methods. And I think we're still missing a lot of pieces." 

He glances at Vanyel. "I can give our half of it?"

Vanyel nods. :I would really appreciate that while I, er, collect my thoughts: He's not visibly that tense but his mindvoice definitely is.

"So we met Van trying to reach a peaceful resolution with the dragon. We told him a little bit about our world. It's called Golarion. It's more populous than yours; it's older, we have a catastrophe that destroyed all existing civilizations eight thousand years ago instead of two. - that's, uh, a relevant part of this story, unbelievably - 

- our gods seem to be more legible than yours. They communicate more about their goals. We know more of their will. We can watch people in our afterlives, and we know what we need to do to get there. People get different afterlives based on the forces they pushed the world towards in life. The forces are Law and Chaos, and Good and Evil. I think the system is still - applicable here, somehow, I can read alignments on all of you, but we've confirmed you don't go to our afterlives. Our gods select people who exemplify virtues they care about, and grant them access to some of the powers of a god. The exact way this is managed is an agreement among all the gods about which abilities are offered, and how often, but one in every few hundred people in a country like Osirion has some measure of those powers and can create clean water and keep dying people alive, and someone with a lot of them can cure blindness and deafness, regrow lost limbs, restore people to full health from the brink of death instantaneously, and, uh, raise the dead. 

Van was, uh, interested in that. It doesn't work on people from your world but we didn't verify that until later. It's - expensive. But he's talented, we figured we could find some ethical ways to make money quickly with his abilities."

Randi listens to this in uncertain silence. Nods. "I see. And then?" 

"We went to go try to excavate some treasure from an abandoned buried city. Since my magic offered ways to do that more easily than their world's magic, so we thought we could find things other groups had missed. We were right and we found the Palace. Had some, er, adventures, can tell you about that later, it's - less relevant. We found the crystal ball and I talked to Savil." Pause. "And then, er, I was going to give an update, but I - found her in the middle of a meeting, you all worrying that I'd been kidnapped by Leareth and the other world story was a ruse. Incidentally, I had already–"

He stops. 

"...I should back up and fill in some context." He takes a deep breath. Glances helplessly at Fazil, though it's not like Fazil can actually rescue him here. 

:It'll be okay, I think.:

Vanyel is extremely unconvinced of that! At this point he really does not have the option of continuing to keep it secret, though. 

"In early 791," he says, looking straight ahead, "I - started having lucid dream conversations with Leareth, in the Foresight dream. We told Taver. He told Yfandes and I to keep it secret. So we did. I'm sorry, I know it's a lot to learn all of a sudden, just..."