"I think I had better go check in. I will be back soon." He kisses Carissa and heads off to the family's guest suite. 

The family is arranged on the two sofas in the sitting area. Tadesse is with Ekunde's sister and mother. He's resting his head on Ayodele's shoulder. 

Ayodele occasionally pets his hair. She looks a little worried, and sad, but also maybe relieved.

Yewande gets up, crosses the room to her. "He's all right. - Well, not really, but - you know. We've just been trying to be there. He's...less standoffish about it. Said the god who's - also you - thought he should let us love him." She smiles a little, tired and sad. "We're trying. One of us can come get you if he wants to talk to you?" 

"I would appreciate it." 

Leareth looks thoughtfully at the family for a long minute. They look...cozy. Yewande and Berko aren't the same parents that he and Tadesse and Ma'ar all lost, years or centuries or millennia ago, but they are still parents. Maybe that's enough to help. 

In the morning Carissa gets Aroden's amulet and goes looking for Tadesse.

He's finishing breakfast with Ayodele; the rest of the family seems to have already gone out exploring. It does appear to be Tadesse leading, going by his face. He's answering some question Ayodele is asking him, it sounds like it's about magic, and his voice isn't exactly animated but he's maybe a bit more engaged than before.

Ayodele reaches to squeeze his hand, then looks up. "Oh. Morning, Carissa." 

Tadesse turns as well, gives her a questioning look. 

"Hey! I don't want to interrupt if you're busy, but I have something for Tadesse. It was Aroden's."

"We're not busy. Tadesse, go see! That's so neat."

Tadesse gets up, with less obvious enthusiasm but visibly curious. "What does it do?"

"It does Thoughtsensing, more or less - worse range, Golarion doesn't have much with the range Velgarth mages can get, but it can read people even if they're shielded because Aroden did it and made it very powerful."

That gets a flicker of anticipation, then confusion. "You want me to have it?" 

"Yes, I was talking with Leareth last night and noticing that - normally that's what you'd want in order to feel safe around us but you don't even have it, this life, and then I remembered that we have a solution to that problem."

"To feel safe around you," he says, thoughtfully. "I... That would make sense, with - things I read in my notes." Shrug. "I do not remember."

"Well." Thoughtsensing amulet. It looks like absurdly powerful magic because it is.

He holds it between his hands for a moment, looking it over with mage-sight, and actually smiles. Then he puts it on.

His sister is not shielded in the least and is thinking that this is SO COOL and she wants to ask him so much more about Aroden when he's had some space and finds the topic less overwhelming, and she saw that little smile just then and is so pleased about it. 

She has one of Leareth's defensive amulets but Aroden's thing beats it sometimes. She takes it off just in case this isn't one of the times. She's pleased about the smile too, probably it's a mistake to interpret everything he does as progress or lack of progress but it was good to see him pleased about something. 

It's nice feeling pleased about something, or curious - curiosity is the positive emotion it's been easiest for him to feel in the last few years, but this is exceptionally novel and beautiful and - uncomplicated, somehow, he isn't sure why it feels that way.

Carissa is married to Leareth and rescued him and seems to have been the first person to be genuinely concerned about him, which he has mixed feelings about, but it's clear she cares and he doesn't really understand why, how her head works, and he wants to. Which is presumably why she's letting him read her mind. 

He tries going deeper, seeing more of her thoughts and not just the ones flickering at the surface. 

Golarion magic is not as good as real Thoughtsensing for that, though she's trying to help him. He makes her uneasy, in general, because it's so odd to have a Leareth who can't be bothered to do things, but he makes her less uneasy like this. She remembers when Leareth first told her that he thought it'd help him trust her if he read his mind, very apologetically, in that way he has, where - 

- she was tempted at the time to gloss it as 'he has no idea he can just require things, if he wants them', but even at the time she'd been aware that that was a little bit of an error and she has a lot more detail now on what error it was. Leareth doesn't try to meet the expectations of the people around them for their treatment; he has his own standards, and as a result your bargaining position isn't much damaged by being very small, or expecting very little, because he'll go around adhering to his own standards anyway, and it's odd but she'd be hard-pressed to call it an actual mistake, because it's - nice, in a lot of ways, and that doesn't seem like an accident - 

- anyway, he asked to read her mind, and she replied immediately that he had to be sweet about it, because that was the natural countermove, when someone makes a request they're entitled to make but you want to mitigate the status hit of acceding to it - and also because it sounded nice, but that's secondary - 

- Carissa, she thinks in explanation at Tadesse, is Chelish, and Cheliax was a very dangerous place before Leareth conquered it, not the way Velgarth is dangerous, shaped by Asmodeus to make people his, and Carissa was his, and reasonably good at it, and then she decided to do this, instead. She likes it better.

The way she thinks is so odd, and - must have made Leareth uneasy at first, Tadesse thinks, it makes him uneasy now, a little. But it...makes sense, that they'd fit together well. Carissa understands their country, and that's important, and she's also - he's not sure how to think about this - she's not Leareth's shape but she is a shape that can understand Leareth...

She does understand Leareth, she's his now, and she finds him uncomfortable because he's not the same -

He's suddenly very tired again. He'll try his best to push through it, for this, but - "Can we sit down." 

"Of course." She looks for a couch and sits.

He's curious about a lot of things, but mostly the curiosity is vague, not that helpful for directing questions.

"How did Ma'ar make you feel, when you found him?" he says finally. "He is - like us, too, but so young, and even younger when you met."