“Thank you, but I think I will be fine.”

Parmida frowns and squeezes her husband's hand. Maybe we can come back for dinner?

I think that is a good idea. He suggests it. 

Leareth agrees, absently. He nods to both of them and follows the servant to the offered room.

“I’m staying. I can make diamonds just as well here as there.”

(Nayoki wants to stay as well.)

Comfortable rooms can be arranged for all of them!

Leareth tells the servants he would like to be left alone because he has a headache (he doesn’t yet but he will soon), and once he’s alone he stretches out on the bed, tries to get comfortable - it’s hard, he’s not physically uncomfortable but some part of him is scared to close his eyes even though that’s really unhelpful.

He reaches for Abadar, and then reaches past the usual cleric interface.

It feels exactly like it did the last time, the sense of falling headfirst into something big and fast-moving and magic. 

:Leareth: Fondness, and something that might be worry.

Leareth wants Abadar to know that he’s grateful Abadar was able to prevent the Star-Eyed from grabbing him. Though he doesn’t think he can really blame Abadar for not catching it before it happened.

Shuffling - 

Abadar broadly endorses the decision procedure that led to not catching it before it happened, things this bad happen an acceptable percentage of the time and are recoverable and it's an advantageous position to be in, having been reasonable and been betrayed about it, all the other Lawful gods are with Him on retaliation. But Khemet is upset and while he hasn't come up with an articulation of his upsetness that actually points at anything, usually there is something, and it might point at a change of decision procedure? Abadar considers it more likely than not though probably it won't change along a dimension legible to Leareth anyway.

Huh. Leareth...didn’t realize Khemet was upset and does not blame Khemet for this at all and - maybe does feel a bit less safe, here, as a result, but in a way he suspects is calibrated - he hadn’t even recognized until afterward how relaxed and uncareful he had become in the pharoah’s palace until afterward.

He shuffles for a while and then shares a Khemet thought rather than try to figure out a god thought on the topic which Leareth could parse -

Khemet speaking to a man Leareth hasn't met - "...and if I'm better at getting people to let down their guard around me than I am at keeping them safe that's awful."

"That feels like putting it a little strongly! You're a cleric with True Resurrection, drowning in diamonds, a god expended a lot of resources to murder someone in your palace despite reasonable precautions, you fixed it."

"I didn't. I raised him, I didn't fix it. They were Vanyel's friends, they were Savil's friends, there was trust there you can't throw ninth-circle spells at. They were probably decent human beings, just expected - if Abadar told me to kill someone I'd probably do it, because I'd expect He had a damned good reason, because I'd expect that the - real heuristic that 'don't stab your allies in the back with a smuggled superweapon and cause an international incident' is an approximation of doesn't make sense to me and does make sense to Him and I should listen - okay, I don't know if I would do that, but -"

The man hugs him and murmurs sympathetically. He goes on.

"Valdemar's mad at me for killing Moondance and Starwind, which I'm actually kind of frustrated about, what the fuck did they expect me to do? And Leareth felt safe here and now he doesn't, and that was valuable, it was important to me, I worked hard on it, and I feel like shit about having worked hard on it if he's worse off for it, that's not what I thought I was doing. They seemed uncomfortable -"

"The murderers did?"

"Yeah. I should've - I don't know what I should've done. I told Abadar to figure out what He should've done but He seems pleased with Himself, He gets to steal fifteen world-destroying superweapons and nothing got spent that anyone would've spent money on, so nothing got spent - that's uncharitable -"

- caveat, Khemet is wrong about some things and is communicating here with weird complicated human intent that Abadar's on shaky ground with -

Now Leareth - feels bad, in some obscure way, he feels like something was damaged here that he hadn’t realized existed or could be damaged, he can’t put his finger on what. And - he’s confused about why Khemet would have tried so hard to get him to feel safe, here - he fully believes Khemet actually thought it was safe in his palace, he wasn’t - being manipulative to fool Leareth into actions he wouldn’t otherwise endorse... But why throw so much effort at that in particular, why is he so bothered about it now?

Abadar doesn't really get it. Humans are very confusing. But it points to a change in decision procedure, maybe, if he can identify one.

That makes sense. 

- He wishes he could understand why the Star-Eyed was willing to burn this much interworld goodwill when he wasn't even planning on going back to Velgarth, and he would have expected that to be apparent in their Foresight, the noise disappearing. But it's not like he even understands why She objects so strongly to his existence. He has guesses, that's all. He wonders if Abadar has more insight there. 

Some gods - some Golarion gods, too, ones He doesn't get along with - care about people growing up surrounded by people to whom they have duties, and who have duties to them, people who know them and will engage in shaping them into a worthy adult community member. About people having things that matter deeply to them in common with one another, and simple choices ahead for their lives. They dislike worlds where everyone meets one another as a stranger. The Star-Eyed is a god like this. Even when Leareth didn't make things blurry for her She didn't like what She was seeing. And - 

- Abadar is obviously with Leareth here, but - 

- Her trades are ones many humans would make, if offered them? The Tayledras have lives that are joyful and close-to-the-thing-humans-are-shaped-for and many other human lives compare badly, by the standards of the people living them. Abadar thinks cities will be better but in the material world he's hard-pressed to argue that they are better. Many people would choose to be Tayledras if you put it to them. And that matters. 

But so does the fact She doesn't let them pick, and so does the casualness with which She uses them towards non-shared ends when convenient, the thing Abadar explained a while ago He wouldn't do to Khemet, because then it'd be a bad deal, to be His...

Interesting. That fits, Leareth thinks. It vaguely matches with some shapes of human philosophies he's heard about or read about - cultures the body he took was born into, sometimes - that believe that...people are actually better off with a smaller number of clear, culturally-embedded choices? That the world Leareth has always wanted to build, that has opportunities to learn and create and build and trade, and the combinatorial explosion of possible choices and futures that gives people, is actually worse for their wellbeing than one with clear roles and duties and traditions.

Leareth does wonder how much his own philosophy here is shaped by the fact that he has never been someone who fit into any of those tight-knit local traditionalist cultures, and - he does think that everyone will be better off for a world that has bustling shiny cities and trade between dozens of countries, because in the world that doesn't have that, maybe people are closer with their families and communities but also most of them spend their entire lives working tirelessly in the fields just to stay alive. He thinks the Tayledras are kind of cheating here because they have such a high rate of mages, and so much magic granted to them directly by the Star-Eyed, nowhere else in the world can have that kind of material luxury and also have the thing the Star-Eyed likes, here. And it would be one thing if She wanted to offer everyone that, but She seems uninterested in even trying.

He's not sure. He also thinks cities in Velgarth are often pretty unpleasant for many of their inhabitants, and he thinks that could be different - was different, to an extent, in Urtho's time, he has only a few snippets of memories but Tantara as a whole had much closer to the Tayledras level of luxury, with their permanent Gate network for transport and their permanent light-spells and heat-spells and shields...

He's grateful Abadar is with him on this. He never, ever thought a god would be aligned with him on what the best kind of world might look like, and - he almost can't convey how it feels, knowing that, except that he's very happy about it. 

Abadar - something in the genre of 'pats him affectionately'. 

Abadar is going to avenge this, proportionately and sensibly and with a consensus of the other actors affected and in a way that hurts the Star-Eyed very badly.

Leareth appreciates that. He thinks. He - wants to apologize, a little, for failing to be on good terms with any of the gods of his home world, which must be irritating for Abadar who would presumably like to be able to operate there more easily. 

The Foresight dream with Vanyel was not enemy action, Abadar'd assumed Leareth realized.

Huh. Does Abadar mean the dream itself, a straightforward enough vision of Vanyel fighting a destined enemy, or the part where they were able to speak? He had assumed the former was enemy action, and suspected that the latter might be a different Power working with a different goal, one not clearly aimed at harming him, but he never understood what it was aimed at.  

He means the latter.  Valdemar's god is exceptionally hard for Abadar to communicate with but he is - broadly in favor of some things Leareth wants and was hoping Leareth and Vanyel could come up with something better than Leareth's original plan. Which Abadar would have opposed too, honestly, if He'd seen it bearing down on His country.

That is really reasonable on Abadar's part, it was a horrible plan and Leareth's only justification was that so many things were background horrible anyway, maybe not so acutely but in a way that added up over centuries and centuries of nothing. ever. changing. And he still put off actually making it his plan for almost a millennium. He's so glad that Golarion changes everything and now he has better options that justify spending another thousand years exploring to see what he can do with them.