Savil is going to take this opportunity to sneak away, but Tran stays. He'd like for them to at least know whatever Leareth's proxy ends up agreeing to, here. 

They can talk details! Leareth is definitely interested in sending some people to Cheliax, and also the rest of Golarion. He would like to go himself, actually, but that's going to have to wait on figuring out a method of transit between the two worlds that doesn't require crossing Vkandis' shield-barrier. 

Golarion magic can work around it; they're certainly willing to discuss providing Leareth and his people transport. They'd like to know more about them first: what are Leareth faction's goals? Who do they work with in Velgarth? What's of interest in Golarion?

...Wow. There's a lot there to explain and it feels very important to get it right and also nervewracking and Nayoki really wishes Leareth were here for it or at least had given her a script. 

What would Leareth say...? 

She takes a deep breath. "Leareth's overall goals are to promote wealth and progress in this civilization. I suspect you are noticing that Valdemar is much poorer than Cheliax, and with less advanced technology or magic in many cases? Leareth has been working on this for a long time, and founded this organization to help. He has also worked with scholars in Rethwellan," she's just going to elide the part where it was centuries ago, "but in the last decades we have mostly been based in the north, and not in any alliances with other countries. His short-term goals - are going to be very different, obviously, because of Golarion and the opportunities it offers. Leareth wants to explore those opportunities. Also, the gods here in Velgarth are...apparently opposed to change, and this makes it costly and inconvenient for Leareth to operate here. He believes he would be safer and have more freedom of action in Golarion, in addition to being able to learn many things there." 

It's a promising position to be starting from, if they believe any of it, though their reflex is to disbelieve anything anyone says at any time. They play along with it anyway. It seems productive in the long run for Cheliax to enable that, though of course they'll want to learn lots more first. Is Leareth willing to pay them, willing to help with Iftel, willing to commit at minimum to not bothering them in Iftel, even if the barrier goes down, which they hope it will shortly when Vkandis admits he's losing? Is he willing to commit to not interfering with governance in Cheliax? They're not going to get through all these questions right away, of course, but it's some of what's on their minds and what they hope to get out of this eventually. 

The only immediately necessary agreements are the ones so it's safe for them to visit Leareth's territory and conduct further negotiations.

Nayoki is attentive and takes notes and does not make any definite pronouncements on what Leareth is willing to do. She does concede that he's unlikely to want to bother them in Iftel because of the risk to himself and his organization of operating in a hostile god's territory; he might consider trying to help from a distance, by providing supplies or whatnot, if the Chelish leadership can present a strong enough case that Cheliax winning and ending the war sooner will result in less total bloodshed. 

And they can discuss protocols for further negotiations in Leareth's territory, or possible in a neutral area, maybe in the region north of Valdemar but south of the mountain range. 

Leareth drowses in bed for another candlemark, at which point the sedating effect of the painkillers wears off enough that he feels reasonable awake, if not quite alert just yet. Definitely not up for high stakes negotiations yet. 

He might, however, be up for talking to Carissa. Their earlier conversation was very rushed and he wasn't exactly in good condition for it. 

Stretching his legs seems like a good idea, too; it'll help him wake up, and at this point he's been bedridden for days. He assures the still-hovering Healers that he's feeling tolerably well, and then heads over to knock on the door of Carissa's guest room. 

Carissa is using Prestidigitation to curl her hair. It's very engrossing and keeps her from thinking about stupid things that don't matter.

She startles when someone knocks. Is it Cheliax or Leareth. "Come in!" is an odd thing for Carissa-as-presented-to-Cheliax to say to Leareth - it's too authoritative - so it's an odd thing to say, if it's in fact Cheliax - but probably it's Leareth, because Cheliax wouldn't knock -

She goes to the door and opens it.

She has taken off her uniform, which was starting to look grubby even with regular Prestidigitating, and asked for a sparkly low-cut shirt instead; she also asked for makeup. She looks, in her opinion, very pretty and very much not otherwise worth anyone's time.

It's Leareth. "You look better. And you scared me. Can you give me a heads-up before they come to talk to me, so I don't have to wonder when I hear voices?"

"Yes, of course. The cleric is here, but I told him that I needed time to rest. I think we will not speak for another several hours, and presumably he will only want to talk to you after that. I will have someone come over and warn you." 

Why is she wearing that. How did she even get a shirt like that on short notice, in an underground bunker. Surely it wouldn't have justified a Gate, and if it had he would presumably know about that - did someone just have the garment - do his female researchers dress like that in their off-time and he's somehow failed to ever notice - 

(Leareth is visibly slightly disconcerted, in his reaction to Carissa's new look.) 

"Do you need me to feed you lines or do you mostly have the idea."

"I think I can manage, but talking it over would not hurt? My thought was that I would not bring it up until they ask, or mention the other prisoners, because obviously I have much more interesting things on my mind - and then I will be slightly annoyed and impatient, and - my inclination is to just state my intention, rather than ask politely, but I ought run that by you. And I will complain a little about your treatment of me before we were captured by the Star-Eyed." 

"Yep! You'll be fine. You can say it was my idea, in Valdemar, because Valdemar doesn't execute pregnant people. ...if that's true, but I bet it is, they seem like exactly the kind of Good country that'd do that incentives be damned -"

"I am not sure it has come up much - they rarely execute people at all - but it is plausible. And - I think it almost has to have been your idea, given the geas and also the fact that I was - not exactly in any condition to be enthusiastically seeking it out. Though they also do not have context on how ill I was, and I would - I was, in fact - pretending to be sicker than I really was in order to put off being questioned again." 

"And it's more awkward for them so they're much less likely to make a fuss about it, if it was my idea."

She looks thoughtfully, almost appraisingly at him, but doesn't say anything else.

"...What?" Leareth says after a few seconds of silence. 

"Just trying to figure out if you're actually too Good to ever get anything done or if I jumped to conclusions because the first thing we talked about was Hell which all Good people are deeply unreasonable about."

"I do have to say that being accused of 'being too Good to ever get anything done' is not something that has ever happened to me before. It is a claim that is often true of the Heralds, but - you have presumably noticed I am different from them in a number of ways." 

"...honestly my impression of the Heralds was not that they were too Good to get anything done it's that they were too incompetent to get anything done, and also Good, which I guess is why they loosened my set command when I was rude to them about it? But you - you actually have real goals, the kind of goals you have to only care about one thing, to achieve, and you care about cows, so I don't see how -"

"Valdemar has not invested in their Heralds being skilled at interacting with Chelish norms, because why would they, and they are very under-resourced and have much less in the way of functional institutions to fall back on. I think that individually, some of them are quite competent. ...Also I - think that you are oversimplifying something, in - saying that you can only care about one thing in order to achieve goals. At the very least, there are plenty of things I care about and have also sacrificed working on, in order to achieve the goal that I think is most important. I care about cows but I am not, in fact, currently putting more than negligible resources toward saving all of them. But - sometimes you solve a problem, and then can move on to a different subgoal of the overall project?" 

"...I don't know that you do? Not a problem like - wanting to keep being alive - you can't have solved that, you can only have not failed at it yet."

"I have solved it thoroughly enough that it does not particularly make sense to keep throwing all of my resources at very tiny marginal improvements in the odds? My method of staying alive is not ideal and has - costs I disprefer - but after a few centuries of study failed to turn up a better alternative, I doubt millennia of working on it would either."

He shakes his head. "There are things I care about and goals I have, and limited resources, and it is on me to make the most efficient use of myself and my resources, to achieve as much as I can while I continue to exist. I do not think it is very complicated, really." 

"When we were in Iftel - if that'd been me, even if I were thousands of years old, and had spent those thousands of years caring about other things - I would've dropped the other things, if I thought that the situation had changed enough that now I might get myself killed. And you didn't, you just kept - caring about all the other things. And I don't - see how you could've known it'd work out -

- a couple of weeks ago I cared a lot about not having my soldiers think I was a stupid whore, you know. And now -" vague gesture - "because you only get to care about one thing, really, and that isn't a good choice of one -"

"I was not sure it would work out! Though - I did suspect it would, somehow - it was hardly the first time I had been in a very bad spot, and once that has happened enough times and I found my way through it, it is...harder to be as afraid."

Leareth shrugs slightly. "And - there is the question of, why do I even care about continuing to exist. And, most strongly, I want to exist so that I can achieve my goals. Giving that up would - in a sense, not be meaningfully saving 'my' life. But I suppose I have - had more luxury and more luck than you, there. I cannot say what would have happened to me had I been born and grown up in Cheliax." 

"I'd rather have grown up in Cheliax than anywhere else, even if occasionally epic adventurers are born other places." - headshake. "Sorry. Not the time. Is there anything you need to know for the negotiations."