Leareth is in bed in an infirmary room. He looks pale and ashen and ill, and not especially conscious. 

Laborda takes his hand and casts Cure Serious Wounds and then Lesser Restoration. He can do more if that doesn't seem to handle it.

Leareth instantly looks quite a bit better, both at a glance and to Healing-Sight. After a moment he opens his eyes. 

He was barely aware of the cleric entering the room, lost in a haze of pain and exhaustion and drugs. Now he feels...okay? Not great, definitely not in perfect health or ready for anything strenuous, but his headache is gone, and the vague generalized malaise and sheer physical misery that's been with him since the Void incident has vanished with it. He's also not hungry or thirsty. 

He sits up, and finds to his relief that the soreness of bruises, lingering from his capture and various incidents since, is gone as well. He's tired, still, but only in the way he would be tired the day after a session of heavy casting. 

- he's very drugged, though. The Healers must have been giving him massive doses of poppy-syrup in an attempt to keep him comfortable before. Without any pain for the medicine to counter, it leaves him mostly feeling drunk, vaguely euphoric but not in a way he likes much, and quite hazy. 

He lays back against the pillows, and tries to focus on the Asmodean cleric's face. "Thank you. ...I apologize, I am - still feeling the effects of the painkillers they gave me." 

"Of course. There are more costly spells we can try, if you think there are remaining injuries beyond the - pain-killers." That last word is said with confusion and slight distaste.

"- No, I do not think there are any remaining injuries. I am...a little tired and weak, still? But that will resolve perfectly fine on its own, with rest." 

Leareth's Healers are confused about the cleric's confusion! 

"I don't know what I can do about the medication, that's not something that has come up in my training," he says apologetically.

Why would you try to make someone not be in pain with drugs. What a stupid idea. Pain is communication - patients being blocked from feeling pain would make it harder to treat them. Maybe if they're too immature to endure it? But this man is supposedly ancient and powerful.

"- That is all right, it will wear off in a few candlemarks." Leareth hasn't failed to notice the confusion. "My Healers gave me the drugs because I was unable to sleep restfully without that, and here where we do not have instant healing magic - and what we do have draws on the patient's own strength as well as the Healer - rest is critical for recovery. And I am sure they think it would do me good to sleep for a time before we embark on our very important upcoming conversation." 

"Of course. I'll withdraw so you can sleep, then. I am eager for us to learn more about each other."

"And I too. Please do feel free to ask my staff for anything that you might need, in the meantime." 

Ebet ushers Laborda out. 

Malduoni follows. 

...Now seems like as good a time as any to try again on Detect Thoughts. And it'll be informative, whether Leareth's people react to that level of magic, blurred as it is by being cast as a Still and Silent spell by an invisible and polymorphed wizard. 

Does this try get through on Laborda. 

It does.

Laborda is still as mystified by Leareth, but content to wait for the man to sleep and recover; there's no point coming across as rude, or for that matter as hurried. He is curious, abstractly, about what you learn about Healing when there are no clerics around. Perhaps Cheliax, which is working hard to acquire the relevant sorcerous geneline, will be able to offload much of the work from clerics in the next generation. Healing isn't a good use of Asmodeus's power anyway. 

He doesn't know what to make of these people yet but they seem richer and more competent than Valdemar, which is promising.

After thirty seconds of hasty Mindspeech back-and-forth, Ebet eagerly hands off babysitting Laborda to another mage. "This is Lorin. She can show you around a little, if you would like - we have some books that might be of interest, if your translation magic covers those...?" 

"I would be delighted."

Lorin makes polite small talk - asking about music and entertainment in Cheliax, mostly - while she escorts Laborda to one of the libraries. It's explicitly not a secure library; anyone who works in Leareth's organization at all is allowed here. 

"My friend Hilda wrote this treatise!" she says proudly, pulling one book from the shelf. "Healing research. Maybe something you would find interesting? Oh, and can we get you anything - tea, wine, some food...?" 

"I'd love some tea!" He takes the book about Healing research. "Cheliax would be very eager to learn how Healing is done in your world; we've desired for a long time that Healing be more widely accessible and easier to train people in. Of course, we don't have your Gifts, but maybe some Gifted people would be willing to show us how it's done and we could see whether our magic can emulate any of it."

"That seems like a very promising avenue for collaborating! And I'm sure that our worlds will find many more than that in short order."

Lorin leaves him to peruse the book, and Mindspeaks someone to ask for tea to be brought over. A tray arrives in only a couple of minutes. 

Malduoni goes on reading Laborda's mind as he looks at the Healing treatise, which is apparently about diagnosing various kinds of tumour and understanding which are more or less likely to spread from where they first grew. 

That's of interest; Golarion magic doesn't actually treat cancer very effectively. You can hack off the body part and do a Regenerate, pretty much, and even that doesn't always work.

Laborda is of course not particularly a Healer, but he reads the book nonetheless; the foundations of Law are the places where people have shared interests they wish to protect, and knowledge of the mortal body is valuable, if not especially to him. He looks for other cues in the books, too: hand-scribed or plate-printed? How consistent is the spelling? How much research went into the books, and who was it conducted on? Dying people? Prisoners? Cheliax, if inclined to conduct medical research, would do it on prisoners, but it'd be good to have a sense of how the locals will feel about that before proposing it as a collaboration. Also some Chelish people are Leareth's prisoners right now and he wants to extract them for questioning; if there are complaints to be had about Leareth's treatment of prisoners that might be useful, as long as it can be made without seeming transparently hypocritical. ...actually, that doesn't seem too hard. Cheliax tortures prisoners to death because they'll go to Hell and be fine, but it seems awful to them, for the same conduct to occur in a world without an afterlife; it's the difference between deporting people and destroying their souls on the spot. 

This particular book appears to be hand-scribed, though the spelling is very consistent - it's written in Rethwellani, in the scholarly dialect that's stayed fairly constant for the past 500 years. 

The research is very extensive, taking place over fifteen years, and extremely well documented; there are a lot of tables, painstakingly hand-written, and a surprising amount of advanced statistics was used. The early-stage research was conducted mostly on animals - some on mice, selected because they're easy to work with, and some on pigs, selected because under Healing-Sight they're among the most similar to humans. Velgarth Healers with the right advanced training can induce tumours on purpose, it seems, and this particular researcher did so freely in order to study the later effects. 

The Healer in question began studying humans only once the basics had been thoroughly explored in animals. The subjects were various people with identified tumours (Velgarth Healers can often See cancer well before it causes symptoms), but it looks like they came from a wide geographical region. The Healer approached them - or their existing Healer teams, in other institutions - and offered to give their insights, which might or might not help with the patient's treatment, in exchange for collecting information on the patient and their disease course. There is no mention of deliberately causing cancer in human patients. 

It's engaging reading and Labordo is perfectly content to sit there reading and looking approachable if anyone wants to talk about Healing or Asmodeanism. He hopes the Chelish prisoners have conducted themselves respectably and not given a bad impression.

It's not exactly up to Malduoni whether anyone is going to choose to approach him. (And, apparently, Leareth's people are shy about doing this.) He's learning more about Leareth from this than he is about Cheliax. Mostly because he knows plenty already about Asmodeus' Cheliax.

It's not useless, and he lingers for a while, but slips out with five minutes to go on his Invisibility and Polymorph. He's hoping to find a not-very-secured room where magic is being practiced anyway, where he can find a closet or something and cast Rope Trick, unseen. And then lurk there to prepare the spell slots he left empty, and plan. 

Nayoki is not bottlenecked on waiting for any drugs to wear off! 

She waits for the Gate to come down, and then politely introduces herself to the watching Heralds and the other Chelish diplomats. 

Hulien would be delighted to finish working out the details needed for Cheliax to send more people to Leareth (and vice versa). The Heralds can hang around if they want, maybe they'll learn something.