"I can disguise a person's alignment but I have to cast the spell at the same time every day, it lasts almost a day exactly."

"I will try some things to see if that shifts it, and if not probably my best option is to have you cast that, although it would be inconvenient." 

He nods. There's a bit of silence. 

"Please just -"

"In that case it sounds like we should do more magic research while we're here and - Hagan - should sound out his contact on work in Rahadoum, and you can talk to the pharaoh about returning to your world, and look into getting to neutral, and in a couple days we'll know more about what makes sense to do first."

"Thank you," he says, very quietly.

"That sounds like a plan."

Before heading back to the magical researchers, Leareth rings for one of the servants, and asks if they know what sorts of charitable ventures exist in the area and accept donations, or who he should go about asking to find out. 

"I don't know very much about that, sorry, I bet Prince Merenre would and I can ask him for you if you'd like, and let you know later today."

"I would appreciate that very much, thank you." 

He heads back to do more magic research; he expects the pharaoh will come looking for him again at some point and it doesn't make sense to seek him out before that, his questions can wait until tonight. 

The magic researchers are interested in the thing where he refills spell slots; could he make an artifact to do it with his magic? Can his kind of artifact be refilled with their kind of magic, someone wants to try to design a spell to do it. There are local magic spells that rip some of someone's magical energy away from them, and they're curious if those have any effect on him and whether he can replicate them. 

They brought a bag that contains an extradimensional space, like Mahdi's, in case he wants to check it out and notice things about it. The one rule about bags of extradimensional space is that you shouldn't make them interact with other extradimensional spaces; don't try putting one bag inside another one or one bag inside a Portable Hole or anything.

Those are all fascinating research directions and Leareth would be interested in pursuing them! Although he'd want to be very careful about the magic-energy-ripping spell being tested on him, and to at least watch it being demonstrated on a local person first.

Leareth is honestly a bit tempted to ask if he can put a bag inside another bag and see what happens with mage-sight, but he shouldn't actually. What's a Portable Hole? 

A different kind of extradimensional space. You lay it out on the ground and then there's a hole, there, where you laid it out. 

What happens is that both bags are destroyed and everything for ten feet around sucked into the Astral Plane, so yeah, he shouldn't actually. 

Fascinating! Is there a theoretical explanation for why this happens? 

There is; it has to do with what's going on in the other planes with an extradimensional object, and they can get into it in depth, with charts (it varies significantly by extradimensional object and with the exact character of the interaction). It seems like their study of the other planes they have in common with Velgarth is significantly more advanced because they can safely visit them more easily. (It comes up at one point that there are massive arcane energy ripples in the elemental planes. Unexplained, but lots of things are unexplained even on this plane.)

Leareth thinks he has an explanation for that, actually. If he's right, it's Velgarth's fault; they had a Cataclysm a long time ago, from an ill-advised magical weapon that a very powerful mage used in a war, combined with a few other things going wrong - including permanent Gates, which have a link to the Void, he's not sure if that's as directly accessible from here or has ever been discovered but from the Velgarth end all the other known planes can be reached through it. Anyway, the weapon caused spells to unravel, in a chain-reaction which hit most of the continent, the destruction was worst in the material plane and Velgarth's mind-spirit plane, but it would certainly have bled through to the elemental planes enough to be noticeable. 

- wait a second there are permanent Gates in his world?

...To clarify, he isn't sure that their 'Gate' spell is at all the same thing as what Velgarth mages call Gates. He can demonstrate one, for them. They're usually between two points in the material plane; they can be used directly to elemental planes but it's usually not a good idea. They can be made permanent, though! ...Usually they're not left literally open all the time, since it can be risky to do major magic near an active Gate, but they have a power source and can be activated by even the weakest mage with minimal training, and at some points in history there were Gate-designs that didn't need a mage at all. 

(He hasn't publicized those, it makes security a lot harder.) 

- wow. So, the only way to move arbitrary numbers of people between two destinations in Golarion is a teleportation circle, which is a ninth-circle spell, and requires two ninth-circle casters (one at each end) to place if the ends are more than a hundred miles apart. You could charge an astonishing amount of money for doing that between cities on major shipping routes, not to mention the military implications of being able to land your troops wherever you want.

And you, could, say, buy a storefront in Absalom and put one end there and one end in random unclaimed wilderness that was about to become very valuable because of being right next to downtown Absalom.

Axis is connected by lots of portals everywhere, so even though it's massive no parts of it are ever too far away, but what they're doing can't be done here. If this could be done here it'd be very very very important. 

Wow. Vanyel must not have thought of that implication; he's been Gating their party places when Mahdi is low on teleports, but that's a teleportable number of people anyway. 

Long-range Gates are tiring, he wouldn't want to do one every day, and permanent Gates take months of multiple strong mages' time to make - assuming the techniques could even be adapted to work here, smaller spells behave mostly the same but the land's magic could be subtly different. 

Anyway, he can see that this is groundbreaking and in the future he would very much like to import some more Velgarth mages and use their advantages here to improve trade (and incidentally earn a lot of gold), but for now, actually, he would really appreciate if they kept this quiet? The military implications are huge and he would prefer to keep them in reserve for now. 

The pharaoh required silence of all of them, yes. 

He's appreciative of that. And happy to demonstrate some Gates for them, and explain all the known theory behind it, and speculate on why this kind of thing might be cheaper with Velgarth magic than their magic. 

The pharaoh comes by in the evening once they've wrapped up all their magic experiments for the day. 

Leareth greets him politely. "I had a very productive day with your researchers." 

"Oh good! I heard you asked about how to do the most good around here. To fix your alignment, or for some other reason?"

"The former is why the idea occurred to me, however, as soon as I thought of it, I wondered if your world - this country in particular, given its god - might have more ways to solve problems by throwing a lot of money at them than mine, where it is very hard to do that in a scalable way at all. Although, if there are places that could use a lot of skilled logistics clerks or something more than they could use money, I have many of those. I suppose they would need to learn the language to be useful, but nonetheless."