Leareth thanks the King and the Elves presenting the food, courteously, and eats quietly, still listening in on everyone's thoughts. 

The Elves are practicing their Tantaran obsessively with each other except for two who've gotten engrossed in discussing the logistics of gene editing to get Gifts and two who are considering whether there's a way to ask if Urtho's skin is in fact diseased. He made it sound like Golarion had good magical healing? And yet his skin is still like that?

...Maybe he'll nudge Ma'ar to mention the fact that humans age and (almost all of them) eventually die of it, since Elves apparently...don't? 

This is not the most positive topic, but Ma'ar can slip it in when talking about recent historical events in Golarion. 

They do what?

"It sounds like whatever Power created your people had a much better design philosophy!" Leareth says emphatically. "- Humans on Velgarth were not, as far as I know, designed at all, or if they were it was not by any extant god. In Golarion people die but their souls move on to various afterlife planes; in Velgarth, people are - mostly lost." 

The Elves are so appalled. Lost how. Can they be found. How long does this whole process take. Someone must've created them, everything that exists was created unless it came about naturally, and people obviously aren't the kind of thing that happens when a river digs its way into a canyon for long enough. That someone is in their opinion very irresponsible and should get a talking-to.

Nobody fully understands the history of life on Velgarth, but it might, in fact, be the sort of thing that arises over a long time, not too dissimilar from a river digging into a canyon? Golarion humans were created, though, which is very confusing and odd - to find the same two species in two entirely distinct worlds - and made him wonder if Velgarth's humans might have had a similar source and just been left there. 

The dead humans in Velgarth do still exist in some form, maybe a retrievable one, he's done a lot of work on the problem; right now some of them can be resurrected by Golarion divine magic, there's an agreement between the gods on it, but it's expensive and until recently they were still working through raising the war dead. 

They had a war? The Elves are very sympathetic; they had a war, once, three hundred Years ago, and it was very terrible.

(There've been a lot of wars. Leareth isn't going to dwell on it.) 

"Yes - a god of one of the Evil afterlives, Asmodeus, had conquered a country after the god who had previously held dominion there was believed dead. - He was not in fact dead, but he had been reborn as a human and spent a century gathering his forces in secret to fight back. And then I found out about Golarion, and helped. It - went better than it could have. But war is always a very awful thing." 

Urtho shivers slightly, averting his eyes. 

There are multiple Evil gods? That's terrible! They only had the one so the good gods fought him and then reformed him.

"In Golarion, yes, there are many. And they are - not the kinds of beings that can be reformed, I think, though some can at least be negotiated with and will keep to their formal agreements with other gods." Sigh. "In Velgarth the gods are - more cryptic and mysterious, than that, they mostly cannot even be communicated with."

That sounds kind of fun and romantic aside from the thing where everyone eventually shrivels up and dies! And then doesn't come back! 

"Do you have souls?" an Elf asks. "And are they stored somewhere on death, even if they're not given another body or a virtual one?"

"...I am not sure what you mean by a virtual body - I suppose you could say that is what Golarion dead in their afterlives have. In Velgarth they sort of - sit around, in the spirit world. Sometimes the gods put them into new bodies - as infants for humans, so they do not remember much if anything, but in some special cases they give them other, magical bodies and keep some of their memory and personality intact." 

Elves are very very skeptical that that's a good plan but it's at least retrievable, if the gods can be convinced to reconsider it. They start talking rapidly about this among each other, still in Tantaran as much as they can.

Leareth is feeling quite a lot of appreciation toward the Elves, right now, who are - so straightforwardly taking this problem seriously, it's incredibly refreshing. 

He's happy to answer any questions that come up. 

They have lots more questions! Is there anything wrong aside from the dying? What are peoples' lives like? What is their art and their music like? Do they all speak Tantaran? Why do they look sort of like Elves? Are any of these particular ones at immediate risk of the randomly dying? Mandos doesn't seem to have a copy of their souls though he could make a new body just fine.

Leareth glances at the other two. "No, we are all in good health - Urtho is elderly, but mages live a long time. And we are going to be very careful and minimize any risk of accidental death here. If anything does happen to us, it is - very likely still retrievable by our gods back home, I have precautions in place, it would simply be expensive."

Without interference from the Velgarth gods, and with Urtho to help, it was a lot easier figuring out a new Void-artifact that could catch him from anywhere, in theory, and that Abadar could use to reclaim his soul. 

Somewhat relieved, the Elves will go back to mostly pestering for Tantaran vocabulary. They are fascinated and maybe slightly appalled that no one seems to have curated the language for the beauty of its words and the consonance of new additions with existing grammatical rules, at all, and just let it drift completely randomly! No Elf society has ever tried that!

Leareth isn't sure any human society has ever tried not that, it's a fascinating sort of species difference. He knows a number of other languages, though, from his more-recent version of Velgarth, as well as Taldane, from Golarion. He would be happy to share those with them and see if any are prettier according to Elf sensibilities? 

- yes. They want to learn all of the languages he speaks. Immediately. It's very important for, um, the ending death mission. They'll need to be able to communicate with the locals for that.

...Aww. Leareth isn't trying to steer the conversation too hard, just now; he's content to follow what they're interested in. He shares an amused glance with Urtho, and then launches into vocabulary lessons from Valdemaran and Rethwellani and Hardornen and Shin'a'in and the far northern dialect he speaks. 

It's unclear whether Elves sleep but these Elves don't seem inclined to because they are too busy learning all five of those at once.

Humans who have Rings of Sustenance don't need a lot of sleep, but many hours of nonstop conversation is draining, and eventually Leareth politely asks if they can be excused to get some rest - oh, and they would appreciate a room to stay in for tonight, possibly tomorrow night as well but he hasn't decided yet.