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An adventuring party recruited from Osirion teleports into Azir on the 8th of Desnus. Rahadoum's recruiting contact in Osirion wrote ahead to note they were expected. Couple of guys he's known a long time - a wizard, a ranger - and a new guy, sorcerer, probably to replace the cleric they usually travel with. They spend two days in Azir getting oriented and head out to the front. The ranger wears an unusually high quality amulet of Nondetection; the sorcerer wears a headband for intelligence, which is a bit unusual as sorcerers usually don't need it to cast, but some variants do; they are otherwise unremarkable. Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, no reading, which could mean neutral or 'hiding it'. They work quickly and effectively, manage resources reasonably well, get recommended to higher-ups for a closer look on that account.
"And it is very unlikely that anything bad will happen to you in the next few decades because you are extremely capable and also chosen by Abadar as pharaoh. I - think perhaps that felt important to me."
Leareth closes his eyes. He's so inexplicably tired. Maybe not inexplicably. Letting himself experience all his emotions fully is - a lot.
He leans in and holds him. "It's very unlikely that anything bad will happen to me. I can look out for myself even against your world's gods, as long as Abadar's helping."
"Mmm."
Leareth is relaxed and comfortable and warm, and this is Abadar's divine realm where nothing Abadar doesn't approve of will happen, to either of them, and he's leaning into the feeling-safe because it takes the pressure off the part of him that hurts -
- and the result is that, quite suddenly and without exactly meaning to, he falls asleep.
Huh. He just lets him sleep on his shoulder, for a little while - he has a Ring of Sustenance and probably won't be asleep very long -
- though he talked to Abadar a bunch recently and probably it's exhausting to be murdered -
- if he doesn't wake up after a little while he will move him over to the bed in the other room, but he's not in a particular hurry about it.
Leareth in fact wakes up less than ten minutes later. He's briefly disoriented, and goes still until he remembers where he is. "- Oh. Sorry about that."
"I was not even sure it was possible to take naps with the Ring of Sustenance, but I suppose it has been an exhausting couple of days." He disentangles himself a little, stretches. "All right, we have both done copious talking about our emotions - did you have other plans for what to do while we are in Aktun?" It also seems plausible the pharaoh has other work to do that he can't justify abandoning for longer, but Leareth is currently not sad and he suspects once he's alone again he will be sad, so he's not in a hurry for Khemet to leave.
He counts them off on his fingers. "We could ride the trolleys all around the whole of Aktun and people-watch. We could go to the theatre. We could go to the museum of measurement, or the museum of light; the other ones are closed today, most museums close on Moonday to give their staff a day off since they don't get weekends. We could pay for flight and go explore other districts of Axis. We could get lunch. We can probably do at most three of those, I told Aroden we'd be back in the evening."
"Ah, I am quite curious about the museum of measurement! And then perhaps lunch."
Then they can go see the museum of measurement! It has all kinds of elaborate inventions - some the state-of-the-art, some that are very old but represent an important step forward at the time - for measuring distance, or temperature, or pressure, or the mass of small particles, or the wavelength of light, or the speed of light, or the distance to the Sun, or units of time, or electric current. There's a whole room full of clocks that were once three hundred years ago all set to the same time but have varying precision.
Leareth is delighted! Some of the inventions are commonplace in Velgarth, some are completely new even to him, some he invented the equivalents to at some point in the last two thousand years. He muses on whether the speed of light is the same in Velgarth as here. That's one he hasn't managed to measure, though he did suspect light had a speed and was in some ways analogous to sound, with a wavelength and different 'pitches'; this certainly isn't widely-known by Velgarth scholars.
Electricity is fascinating and Leareth asks Khemet how it's used in Golarion.
Khemet isn't a scientist but he thinks the speed of light in a vacuum is one of those things that's the same across all the planes, which suggests it'd probably be the same in Velgarth? He doesn't have a guess why, though.
(One of the staff members at the museum overhears them and pulls out a table of the elements and wants to know if Leareth thinks it matches Velgarth.)
Oh, that's brilliant! Velgarth alchemists have isolated some elements but never came up with that kind of categorization. Leareth peers at it for a while. He doesn't see any obvious mismatches, at least?
After a couple of hours at the museum Leareth is pretty ready for lunch.
If it matches then they've got pretty much the same speed of light, a significantly different one would mean different elements would be stable, the staff member says.
They can get lunch at one of several dozen restaurants within a few blocks; Khemet picks one out that does palm-sized miniature pizzas and orders a dozen different ones for them to share.
It's a very good food concept, Leareth decides, even if it still seems very weird to him that you can teleport into the afterlife and get lunch at a restaurant there. He makes pleasant conversation with Khemet about goings-on in both their countries and some of Aroden's upcoming plans for Cheliax.
Khemet seems more relaxed here; maybe it's the lack of guards and servants or the fact that no one knows or particularly cares who he is.
His relaxation level is sort of contagious, Leareth thinks, because he too feels lighter and looser than usual. It's nice. He appreciates it.
"I think I would like to return to the apartment for a bit," he says when they're done. "And then perhaps do another thing if there is time afterward."
"Sounds good." And they can head back on over to the big tall building and go up to the rooms he rented.
Leareth flops onto the couch. It's not a very characteristic-for-Leareth motion but he feels like it, right now, and it's not like he intrinsically cares about being dignified when there's no one around whose opinions it'll affect.
He sits down next to Leareth's head on the couch and runs his hand through Leareth's hair and reveals from a pocket that he sneakily bought some souvenirs at the museum of measurement.
Leareth is also startled about Khemet touching his hair! And separately surprised that it's very pleasant. He oohs appreciatively at the souvenirs. He's visibly a lot happier than he was this morning.
Leareth can tell that this was Khemet's aim and that he's pleased about it working, which is really nice, actually.
He unflops after a while. Maybe they can ride the trolleys and people-watch for a bit until it's a reasonable time to go back to the material plane and see Aroden?