<Maybe.>

Mhalir feels conflicted. And confused. And so tired. 

...And he keeps thinking about three million souls once in Hell, gone forever, and imagining some probably-impossible hypothetical where all of them were backed up on metal chips somewhere far, far away, in the hands of a different god... It's very distracting. 

<Anyway. I am very worried that they will be betrayed, and - I do not want this to happen, if their claims about Melkor is true then the harms he can cause are immense and - not even for any larger goal, right, it seems...much more wasteful and horrific if he tortures people not even to use them...> 

It seems awfully likely that everyone is wrong about His goals but the thing he's doing does seem - 

- making the orcs doesn't bother me because the orcs think they were worth it. I don't know if the - prisoners who all wanted to die - are an intermediate stage of that or some other project. But they do seem...like more of a loss, I guess...

We should start by figuring out the other Velgarth faction and what they want. How far away are we, could I do a Sending to Ma'ar and ask if he knows what Urtho is doing?

<We are quite far but - I think not far enough to make a Sending not worth trying? It would have a higher failure chance, though I am still not quite sure how that scales with distance, we do not have enough data points to graph the relationship there.> 

Nod. On Golarion the conventional wisdom is that Sending and scrying have some failure chance across planes but none within the Material Plane. But this is because no one had tried going unfathomably many lightyears away, where they turn out to have some failure chance after all.

She tries one. "Encountered Urtho pursuing us with unfamiliar Void craft and two other mages, later making contact with local aliens to ask their aid in pursuit. We're confused."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this does not work. 

Mhalir sighs. <I am not sure how many times it is worth trying. I suppose if it felt very important we could leave and come back - or send the ship and stay in the shuttle, but then we would not be able to hyperspace jump out if something went wrong, which I dislike.> 

Me too. 

Seems likely that Urtho is going to Endorë, now. If he's figured out how to Gate between planets, and - he got here somehow, so -

<He did. And...> Mhalir shivers. <He is going to find out we were here. If he gets descriptions he will recognize you. I...am not sure if that is dangerous to us? Urtho is - not someone who wants to hurt people, but I have no idea why he is here, so... I am confused.> 

Yeah. I can't think how with Velgarth magic you'd find a shielded ship a million miles out from the planet but I also can't think how you'd do the other things he's doing. Maybe I underestimated Urtho.

<Maybe. ...I would expect Ma'ar to be the one who would experiment with it, honestly.> 

...I would kind of have expected him to tell us if he were experimenting with it. I guess if he didn't trust us it'd be quite reasonable not to mention it.

<I think he trusts us. I...also thought Urtho trusted us, honestly? So I am definitely missing something here.> 

We could Sending Urtho to ask but - right now he doesn't know it's us, right. I guess he'll figure it out soon enough.

<I imagine he will, yes.> 

Mhalir paces. 

<...Whatever we might think of Urtho's ethics> he says to Carissa finally, <he is not on the side of people being tortured. He would ally with us in preventing Melkor from betraying these people. ...I think. I am fairly confident of it, but I suppose not certain.> 

That's my read on him too.

.... we could head back over to Endorë, presuming they went there, and try to see what they're up to? In case it's any more informative than here? Though Endorë doesn't have an internet yet so it'll be harder -

<Sure, we could do that. I am not sure what more to do from here, it feels - risky to intervene in the situation or even approach it more closely when we are still this confused.> 

Yes. Perhaps once Urtho has figured out we're here he'll explain himself.

<Perhaps.> 

And Mhalir asks his pilot to plan another hyperspace jump, back to the star system they recently left. 

The Void-vessel hangs still in the Void, or as close to 'still' as is meaningful there, while Leareth scans the wards. 

"- I think this is the other nearby stable point? Urtho, come look." 

Urtho peers at it. "I think so? I am not sure." 

Sigh. "Now I need to prepare for another blind Gate. This will be a while." 

And this time he is not going to jump through and will instead poke his head across and make sure he's not a hundred feet in the air or about to fall into an ocean or something. 

Leareth casts his next Lesser Restoration before trying it; he's still a bit tired from the Gate out. 

Eventually, though, there's a Gate, and Leareth leans to peek past its opaque milky threshold. 

Over the ocean on another habitable-looking planet, larger than Valinor, with only one sun in the sky.

Leareth grumbles internally for a moment, and then anchors himself on Ma'ar's arm and leans out further so he can cast a scrying spell and get a clear mental image of the nearest land. 

Coastal fishing villages, thataways.

He selects a spot in between two villages, hopefully remote enough that they won't startle any of the locals; he's not that worried about their safety, now that he's met Elves elsewhere, but he does want to approach cautiously. 

After that he takes down the Gate and sits and casts his second-last Recharge Innate Reserves. Holding an interplanar Gate for the minute or two needed to cast a different tricky long-range spell is exhausting. It continues to be quite irritating that no one else is as good at either technique as he is, even if this is easily explainable by his being more than ten times Urtho and Ma'ar's ages combined. 

The area is in fact remote enough there are no locals around to be startled. Some seagulls are startled, and squawk about it.