Lila watches Conrad testing his armor, smiling with relief.

But then she frowns a bit.

"That's great, except... Can I get something that's even less obvious that it's there, or else something that, er, has skirts?  Er, I could wear skirts over it, but that isn't really done - I mean, it'd look unusual if people saw it."

"Good, very good.  I'll just get that going, Conrad; you can go get some rest."  The ghost-of-armor is pulled back, the platform of making things spins up again, and she turns to Lila.  "Yes, I do think we can get you some wands that aren't drek, and a sword that's good by my standards, and I can absolutely work in some skirts; this, as it is, is really not anywhere near as stand-out to anyone who doesn't very personally know what you look like without it as you'd think, when you're wearing it like you're supposed to, speaking from experience and also having talked to quite a few professionals, but far be it from me to turn down an excuse to add more protection to someone's outfit.  And I can make it different colors, if that would help.  I'm - how did you control the Crown?  I know the rings turn to activate...  I'm going to need to do a bit of fiddly adjusting so as to make the magic items work well with the suit, now that I think about it, but I can certainly do that.  Would probably help if you stuck around a bit longer, though, for testing."

Conrad cannot, in fact, get some rest right away though, because he has Laundry Dishwashing Prestidigitation Wizard Duties to do. Hooray. Bar gives him a list of places and things to clean, and he goes and does that for two hours while Lila and Jane figure out magic items together. After that, he gets a key from Bar to his room.

He goes in to see a room with a bed, desk and chair, and a lockbox. The key opens the lockbox as well. Before he goes back to sleep, he sneaks into his room in Ostenso to recover his explorer's outfit and his greatsword in its leather sheath, and puts them all in the lockbox along with his spellbook. 

Really? This was supposed to be a regular room? You mean that this room, with its piped water and flushing toilet is regular? Amazing. Two hours of Prestidigitation work for this? Then again, the bar is magic, so what did he expect? He thoroughly enjoys the cold water shower. Before sleeping, he Prestidigitates his Ostenso academy uniform robes clean.

Sometime during the same two hours, a credstick is swiped to pay for two rooms, much to the patron's abject bemusement and insistence that "really I hardly think you should take this, but if you're sure," but she waits until Conrad is definitely gone for the night to reveal that she owns a violin that, well-played, can refresh the body and mind, as well as the soul, in much less than eight hours.  She isn't going to bring it with her on the adventure; it's of sentimental value as much as it occasionally comes in handy, but Bar's safe as houses, so she can do a soft solo piece for a two-person audience, mournful but determined to march onwards and make things better.

Assuming Lila wants to listen, that is.

She's definitely going to play, though; she needs to be awake to work on designs like this.

Conrad wakes up in the morning and puts his robes back on. He doesn't know where Jane is sleeping, so he asks Bar. Bar says that they don't give out that kind of information. Conrad reminds them of his agreement with her. Still, Bar is reluctant, but does convey a message to Jane by instantiating a napkin on the desk in Jane's room.

About to prepare spells. Meet at room 3.

He returns to his room and puts the spellbook on his table, opening it to the page for Comprehend Languages. Hm. He doesn't actually know which spells to prepare, since they haven't discussed whether they're going to Lila's world straight away or going shopping over at Ostenso first. Or doing some other thing. He knows that adventuring wizards usually discuss the night before with their team which spells to prepare so that they can formulate tactics. Not that he's going to be doing the heavy lifting in this party, but he might as well be as useful as possible. He taps his foot while waiting for Jane to arrive.

He has three first-circle spell slots, and a bonus one for a Transmutation spell. 

(Lila explains that she controls the Crown by thinking.  It was designed to work well with human minds, specifically - that wasn't Fraddir's doing; it came from another pre-made artifact he modified for it.)

Lila is very happy to hear the violin and enjoy the running water.  Some remaining tension seems to melt out of her.

She spends several hours getting Lila equipped and acquainted with her new outfit; as requested, and as involved in the design as she was, it does have skirts.  It has many things, in fact, in addition to the aforementioned skirts, not least of which is "a transformation sequence, because if you really insist on having long skirts like this I'm going to make sure that no-one trips you up on them, and the best way to do that is magic fabric," as well as "this sword is also a wand through which you can shoot lasers; so are the boot daggers and the ones hidden up your sleeves."  Additional features include "and this is how you activate the energy-absorptive properties; I've worked in the same sort of warding I use for my own equipment, so I don't think that there's ever going to be incoming fire that it'll miss, but there's certainly no guarantee I'm perfect...oh damn I need to consider the case of 'overheals sometimes can make you explode', dammit Positive Energy Plane, but at least I can probably store that for later...let me just rough out a..." (the next half-hour is spent deep in the weeds of that problem for both Lila and herself, and ends up with yet more runework embroidered in her dress, deep blue embroidery on smooth black fabric as contrasted with the odd threads of white woven through the underlayer and fringing the small bit of gold setting the gem that holds her outfit, "which I can't really do so much of for Conrad; it's hard to muster care for someone that would cheerfully have bullied you in school and is actively promoting torture and slavery, even though I do prefer that everyone gets a chance to live their best life, and the spell that goes into this thread in particular has an emotional component for me," unless Lila has specific colors in mind.)

It seems that she has decided that the best weapon for Lila is, in addition to a general tune-up of her shortsword to the mage-technologist's standards of appropriate sharpness and maintenance requirements, extra-strength sword beams; simple collimated light projected at any angle from the tip at a mentally designated target ("can you think at this crystal like you'd think at the crown for a bit?  Thanks."), powered by her absorption of ambient energy, when it's not a dart gun that shoots "pretty much the best tranquilizer I've yet seen; if it can't get through the armor flick this switch and it'll shoot a pellet that bursts into naptime mist instead, and if that's not effective, taser darts should work on most of the rest; be careful with them, though, too much shock can kill," or something that she describes as containment foam "grenades", which are hardly grenades as much as an air-reactive chemical that goes foomph, stored within a thin-walled, rune-etched (for aim enhancement), glass sphere, "summoned at need but there's always going to be a few in this belt pouch.  And there's med-spray in the opposite; good for emergency wound care, disinfectant and it promotes clotting.  Right, am I missing anything?  Oh; the veil's meant to proof you extra against things that require eye contact to hurt.  And I think that's all, unless you have a specific request.  I'm gonna go lie down and stare into space for a bit, then see what my call for research on Golarion's turned up."

Later, the napkin flutters through the holographic interface she's been browsing Golarion's timeline on, annotated by an entire Internet's help in sorting through the lore, looking for long-running crisis points (Rovagug, where she herself has added "if Unity is divine because of sims, can Rovagug be satiated?", an alien invasion...) and definitively beneficial interventions (an arcane disinfecting spell for Rahadoum, several different societies' public health texts (she has a spell specifically for scanning books, tablets, etc., and makes liberal use of it on every library she passes through on her travels), instructions on how to culture penicillin, several economic papers on why slavery, misogyny, and more generally discrimination are a net harm to economies that practiced them that she intends to yeet at the church of Abadar - though most of these are marked with the yellow warning dot she's assigned to "requires fluent language"), and she flicks the hologram off as she reads the napkin-message, rolling out of the bed she's been laying on for the past little while in a smooth motion as she pulls her equipment from wherever it goes when it's not on her person.

Her loadout is different today; she's loaded not just for bear, but the entire forest, and the result could best be described as both bedazzled and bristling.  This is the bleeding edge of her never-finished work, not the stolid workhorse of a middlingly armored suit that she wears when the only things she finds a reasonable thing to fear are the remnants of disgruntled corporate assassins, and it shows; whether in the incredibly obvious opal-tipped wizard staff, strapped to her back by a seemingly solid metal band, that looks like she could use it as a warhammer and a rifle, the springloaded diamond-edged sword blades slightly recessed in her arms that crackle and glow ominously as she runs a test sequence, the magicproofed inertaic compensator that will not only lighten her load but also defend against hostile gravity manipulation, the nozzles for dispensing chemical attacks built into the frame, the way that the suit itself runs through a rainbow of colors and then fades into the room as she tests the responsivity of the smart camo...

There's that and more to warn off anyone who'd think about fucking with her, and that's mostly only the technology, not the varied magics she's worked into it, from backup runic control engrams, to field fortification magics, to the way that every bit of cloth she wears on the outside of that armor is under her mental control (such as the cape, once again tied 'round her shoulders, still in a pleasing blue, but also including the invisible strings tying shut and anchoring to her person her various and variously manufactured bags of holding), to a defensive array that not only absorbs but consumes and unleashes the force of blows laid against it.  Not to mention the bevy of drones waiting for the signal to shift anawards and wreak havoc of various degrees.  It's best to bring one's A game, she thinks, when you plan to go meddling with gods and horrors.

Then again, the cautious thing would be to simply not do it at all...but if she doesn't, who will?

Her voice echoes out, slightly staticky due to a subtle distortion applied by the freshly magicproofed speaker system.  "Alright, then.  Time to go shopping...then go meddle," and off to Conrad's room she goes.

Lila loves the blue-woven dress!  She twirls, dancing, and runs her hands up and down it, and gives Jane another hug.  "Thank you!  This's the best dress I've worn since -" (there's a brief flash of remembered pain in her eyes) "- since my adventures started!"

She tries her shortsword on the armor, and is happy to see it doesn't get through.

"Should we all be going to Golarion together?  And - oh, any suggestions about shoes?"

She gets an extra-strength hug, as if not just the woman giving it has enfolded her with care, but some vast entity has looked upon her and experienced compassion.  "Shoes, shoes...did I not?  Um.  Right, I'm going to make you some boots; they make it effectively impossible to land on anything but your feet.  As in, you could jump from the top of a mountain to the bottom of the sea, and be perfectly fine, and I know they worked for a thousand feet or more of mineshaft.  Those are also going to be part of Conrad's gear, so I'd figured I'd save the handout and explanation til then, but yeah.  And then I can give you the gravity skates...And you can get some practice in, for that matter, especially if you start playing with the bouncy panels I can work in.  If you want, at least.  I might just start with gliding."

And Lila soon has a pair of genuine mobility boots, possibly not only with the addition of toewiggle-activated gravitic repulsors that allow her to skate across the floor!  Lila has the option of getting an insets in the sole for "bounce high", "accelerate more in complete defiance of friction", "stick to things", or even all three, altered by a somatic command that she can theoretically trigger independently per boot, if she wants.  (She stole clicking the heels to make shoes do things from The Wizard of Oz.)

Conrad stands when Jane enters out of habit, and then sits back down again.

"Let's get to it. Where are we going today, exactly? Are we going to Lila's world, or to Ostenso? It will determine what sort of spells I ought to prepare. Not that I have communal spells yet. Those are second circle at the least. Most of them are only going to affect me. Still, it's a good idea to practice, especially since I'm going to have to work in a squad at the Worldwound. Unless you have objections, I'll prepare Infernal Healing, Shield, Magic Weapon, and Comprehend Languages, which you asked for. It would help me if you could tell me what sort of spells you can cast or abilities you have, so that we don't needlessly overlap."

His magical ink bottle is sitting to the side along with parchment for scribing the Comprehend Languages scroll.

"Hm.  I think that we should plan on spending, at the least, vastly more of today in Golarion than Lila's world; there's something of a question of dependencies in that if we want to resurrect Fraddir we must both have a high-level - excuse me, high-circle - divine caster, and, uh, Fraddir, unless you happen to know that there's someone who can cast True Resurrection...wait, wait, would that even work if nothing of him is on the same plane as the caster?  On the same set of planes as the caster?"  She attempts to pinch the bridge of her nose, only to instead have her armored hand clonk into her armored face because she's armored up.  "Okay, so first we need a priest willing to travel, or...I don't know, wandering oracle?  Or a bard, possibly.  And then we need to see if they can even get divine intervention once they're through here, or if we're going to need to teach me how to do it.  Or possibly hire a druid for Reincarnate.

"...Regardless, I'd plan for more time spent interacting with Golarion than Lila's world, today, for all that we might fetch a few things from there.  Notwithstanding that I have a few thoughts on resolving some longstanding problems your planet presently has.  Still working on pinning down a solution for the Worldwound, but I do have a thought or two about potentially pacifying Rovagug via technological means, and there's an evil pyramid in Osirion that needs to be de-magicked before it starts an alien invasion and when it comes to cognitohazards I'm probably the best we've got.  Not that that says overmuch.  I might've borrowed copies of an organization's guidebooks for how to deal with the sort of stuff like math that attempts to eat your brain and proof that there's a 'missing number' when the representations of numbers are arbitrary anyway, but I lack the very necessary ingrained training to properly execute half of them.  Still.  Most of today is a Golarion day."

"We can seek an audience with Grand High Priestess Aspexia Rugatonn for a True Resurrection. Far be it from me to presume, but I think that she will be happy to perform it for the opportunity to establish churches of Asmodeus in another world. Wandering oracles are hard to track by virtue of them being...wandering."

He kind of ignores Jane's planning, because he doesn't want to spend mental energy on contemplating how you would even do any one of those things.

"I'll prepare the spells I mentioned earlier, then. I'll swap out Mending for Mage Hand. I ask that you remain quiet for the rest of the hour; it makes things easier for me."

The first part of spell preparation is concentration. You must have a clear and free mind in order to hold the manifold in your head. He's done this every day for half a decade now, and it still takes effort. He breathes deeply, and his eyes glaze over. He sits in the chair for over ten minutes before touching his spellbook.

Energy flows from his fingertips to the diagrams on the Comprehend Languages page in his spellbook. The ink on the page reacts, and sprouts hooks and spikes made of energy. It's invisible to the naked eye, but it would show up to magical sensors. Wizards can't Detect Magic to see what they're doing when preparing or casting spells, so they train to develop a sense of the presence and shape of magic independent of all other senses. He channels more energy, and a sheet of magic begins to appear. He carefully twists and turns his hands, sometimes pausing to examine the shape of the manifold using his senses. He moves the manifold back and forth, using the hooks created by the ink to stabilize and pin down certain parts of it while he worked on another. It takes ten minutes before he finishes. The manifold is exhibiting visible strain. He examines the manifold one more time, and then dispels the scaffold created by the magical ink. The manifold suddenly shifts into a different state. More stable, but not fully stable – metastable. He examines the manifold again, then cups the finished spell into his chest, absorbing its energy. He continues to hold the shape of the spell in his mind to prevent it from destabilizing.

He does the same for Infernal Healing, Shield, and Magic Weapon, with the last preparation taking the least time. The process is largely the same, but the particular way the manifold is manipulated and the final shapes of the spells are different. The one commonality is that there is a "hole" running through all three spells in some way.

Finally, he prepares Mage Hand. It takes less than five minutes for that one, and the manifold is noticeably "hole-less". Despite that, it shares certain common motifs with the shape of Magic Weapon. The whole process takes an hour.

He closes his spellbook and sighs. "It's done. I will now scribe Comprehend Languages for you."

He attaches the nib to his dip pen and starts to draw the diagrams on the parchment. It's similar to the diagram on his spellbook, but somehow less compressed. There are particular reductions and refactorings in the spellbook diagram which are absent on the scroll diagram. Conrad has only scribed scrolls a few times before, given how expensive scroll supplies are. Unlike with his spellbook, scrolls have to be written in a mostly-standardized way, to enable other wizards to use them. He often puzzles over some particular aspect of the diagram, pausing for over a minute each time before continuing. It would be disastrous to make a mistake. It would not only waste magical ink, but also have to be painstakingly scraped away (while ensuring none of the neighboring lines are disturbed). Fortunately, he doesn't embarrass himself this time. The ink visibly emits magic, though faintly. Near the end of the process, he moves his hand over the scroll, and the manifold for Comprehend Languages manifests. He guides the spell down to gingerly settle in the middle of the scroll. The manifold is held caged by the lattice the ink has created, and its aura dampens somewhat. He takes a deeper sigh and rolls it up. The scribing takes up half an hour.

"One scroll of Comprehend Languages."

"Mm.  That's Lila's call to make, I think; insofar as it belongs to anyone in this party at present, it's her kingdom, not ours.  Even if it would be my diamonds, I'm certainly not going to compel her to agree to that.  Though I have to admit, it's better to have some options than no options."

She lets out a breath.  "Honestly, the biggest worry I have at the moment is scrying, no matter which world we go to, but you can hardly do anything about that as you are.  Do you happen to know if you can scry into an antimagic field?  I'm reasonably confident the answer is 'no', but I dare not be certain without consulting a second opinion.  And I suppose I could check the sourcebooks, as well, couldn't I...  ...Guess I'll be wearing an extra cloak, then.  ...but then I can't do live translation, or at least I cannot benefit therefrom...and it's hardly proof against gods, anyway; that's called out in the text.  Feh.  May as well go boldly, I guess."

She watches the process, very intently staring directly at the manifold and scaffolding.

"Thank you, that was very interesting to observe.  ...It's odd; I've a primary experience of magic being, geometric like this as well, but at the same time, there's so many differences between the way you and I approach it...I mostly assemble spells as...functions that I invoke, perhaps in the inverse of the way gods bestow magic upon followers, rather than discrete entities that I build and then release.  And...hmm.  Those were all first circle spells, weren't they?  Do you know if second-circle spells have two holes, or is it simply that the hole in them is...Well, actually, how do you target things with these?  I've several competing hypotheses at the moment, and frankly I'm still wondering how spell components come into it at all...especially since there's...oh, but your metamagic isn't a separate reserve; it modifies the underlying generative function!  Although I do wonder how in the absolute fuck you can have component pouches and foci perform the same damn function as far as uncosted material components go.  Hm.  I shall have to ask other cosmologies' wizards about this the next time I meet any, especially the ones with separate metamagic pools if they aren't just winging it.  Because most of them are sorcerers, and you try getting something academic out of a sorcerer.  It'd probably be a very interesting divergence, nonetheless.  And then there's the way sorcerers, who do an almost entirely different thing, get the exact same base spell list, controlling for origins...and however the hell you have some spells that cast as different circles in an entirely profession-dependent way in general, even if they're learned through the same worldly sources of lore!  I suppose it's funky soul shit affecting the way storage-and-release goes, which...is not exactly something I find myself possessed of great knowledge about, but figure is the most likely [Watsonian: pertaining-to-the-perspective-of-fictional-characters] explanation."

She'd also set up several devices, fixed in place by entirely technological means, to record the process from as many angles as she possibly can through several distinct magic-to-photon renders, and she busies herself taking them down and piping that data into her computer as she talks shop.  (Not that it's particularly obvious that those are cameras-for-magic, except from context; they're just, boxy things that she puts up before he begins.)

"...how the fuck am I supposed to use this, anyway?  Amazingly enough, it's never really come up before."  She's looking intently at the scroll; if Conrad is still feeling out magic, he can feel her feeling the scroll in both rolled and unrolled states, a soft pulse of magic almost working like sonar.

Meanwhile, Lila sits in her chair in her beautiful new dress, staring out the window at the stars and fireworks, thinking.

Her story has taken a huge twist.  You could almost say she's in a new story at the moment, or at least the buildup for one.  There's a new torture-god almost as evil as the ancient Milcom, there're all the machines Jane is using... and then Jane herself, who clearly has a lot of secrets she's not talking about.  And then there's this resurrection magic, which blows past so many of the limits of previous stories.

But then there's also the Crown of Maranon, and Barvid - that story is still going on as well.  Or at least the story hook is... maybe she could almost say the old story ended when she stepped into Milliways?

(Lila blinks back a tear at that.)

No, she's still here, and she can get back to Maranon.  Think of it as a series of tales; arcs started in one installment can be finished in the next one.  There's no reason to cry when one concludes, unless you're too childish to wait for the storyteller to tell the next one.  And Jane and even Conrad are happy to fix Maranon, so she should just keep playing her part well, like she has been.

So then, how should she as Queen handle all the new questions this new story is posing?  Lila shakes her head at this thought.  So many of them - like Jane's machines - she doesn't understand well enough.  If someone wants them in Maranon, she doesn't know what to say.  Maybe she should ask Jane.

But... This god of evil and torture, Asmodeus, is going to want to play with Maranon if he can.  And Conrad is going to try to let him.  It'd be ill repayment if she closes the door between Golarion and her own world right afterwards, but... she can't let Asmodeus build temples in Maranon.  She'll try to delay there as long as she can, to see if there's some other option.  Maybe Asmodeus has enemies in Golarion too?

And they're going to Asmodeus's country next.  Jane's given them enough armor that they might be fine, but she wouldn't guarantee any armor against a god.  If Asmodeus takes an interest in them...

Well, she knows what to do if you're about to be captured by Milcom or his follower Nimrod.  She stands up and whispers the Litany of Enos.

The woman calling herself Jane subconsciously mirrors Lila's gesture at the whispered litany, her hand resting against her chest about where Lila might have seen the flash of a silver pendant peek out of her shirt over the course of yesterday's work.  Lila might or might not be able to tell why, but...something comes over her, in that moment, a feeling of deep compassion, of care, of protectiveness against those that would harm what the source of this feeling has embraced.

"Asmodeus' clergy aren't our only option for resurrections, just the closest option.  I do, in fact, somewhat want to talk theology with this Aspexia Rugatonn person, I've had an interesting thought come to me...but I don't think that that should be the only cleric we ask for resurrection assistance.  If nothing else, clergy of Abadar, who I believe are based in Osirion where I need to stop and defuse an apocalypse anyway, because it's not high fantasy kitchen sink without Space Cthulhu I fucking guess," she interjects in a mutter, "are firm believers in exchanging money for goods and services, even if my reading suggests that the local culture there has a misogyny problem.  And that doesn't even mention the Good gods.  It's possible you'll run into one of their worshippers even in Cheliax; I know worship of Iomedae is permitted at the present time."

Lila sighs with a smile as Jane comes in midway through the litany.

"Good.  We do need to talk to other gods - but I'm surprised Asmodeus is even permitting people to worship other gods?  Our tyranny-god didn't.

"And, uh, what's going on in Osirion?"

"Cheliax isn't directly administered by him, or it probably wouldn't be permitted.  I'm certain his actual area of rule in Hell doesn't allow the average soul to - well.  The average soul that has the misfortune of ending up in that particular afterlife is tortured and twisted into building material, as I understand it.  But of those souls that Asmodeus and his underlings graciously permit to retain enough ability to act that what they think matters to any extent to the world around them...They certainly wouldn't be allowed to do anything but worship him.  He has an ego a mile wide.

"So, Osirion.  Some many thousand years ago, there was this guy.  And this guy got hit by an evil space empire's psychic weapon's aftershocks, and instead of immediately succumbing to the...memetic hazard, he retained enough functional lucidity to study the thing while he walled himself off.

"Except that in studying what would later come to be called the Aucturn Enigma, he let his very ability to reason be infected with space mindviruses and tied into the notes he was making of his studies.  Somehow.  So eventually he fell into the same state others exposed to these mindquakes had, feigned full recovery, murdered the religious order that until then he'd been a member of, and proceeded to do shit intended to bring about the invasion of Golarion by the Dominion of the Black, a polity mostly consisting of evil space monsters that Asmodeus would love if they were subservient to him because their philosophy is remarkably similar: grind all else that is to dust beneath your boot, because you are meant to rule and everything else that is exists to serve you.

"The means of this invasion is brought about through a ritual-inscribed pyramid in a demiplane that every so many years aligns to point at the planet Aucturn, and the 111th alignment, when that ritual has accumulated a critical mass of power, enough to make it actually work, is coming up in 4718 AR.  So if someone can drain the capacitor now, and ideally sabotage the working itself...Apocalypse prevented!  Hopefully without being the down-to-the-wire sort of thing that's how it's normally meant to be resolved.  Of course now I've jinxed it, but that's at least the plan."

"Yeah... the story's never as simple as that.  Or if it is, that means there's an even bigger story coming up."

"I'm sure I'm going to have to deal with my worst enemy, politics, at some point in the course of this excursion, and that's not even counting the chance of seeing something worse enough than my expectations are already braced for that I cannot remain myself while avoiding acting to fucking stop it.  Cheliax being a country heavily predisposed to use negative stimulus to the point of self-parody in its practice of behavioral and cultural engineering is already bad enough, not to mention the bit where it's on some level optimizing for production of tortured souls."  She sighs. 

"Frankly, I expect the worse issues to be in Osirion and Numeria, because Osirion is a country you can negotiate with in good faith and thus not one I feel justified in arbitrarily doing shit to without some sort of negotiation breakdown, and Numeria's just...full of fractally nested problems built around a core of bullshittium tech that no-one has a snowball's chance in hell of actually understanding anytime this century without an uplift package, that they're still fucking poking.  I mean, I imagine there's probably a few people capable of picking up gravitic engineering from having the example in front of them, but I really doubt that the way Numeria works isn't basically [cargo-culting: replicating superficial elements of something while lacking fundamental understanding of why they work] it."

"...You're a storyteller, huh?"

"Yes I am!  And I try to observe stories around me, too.  The whole world - all the worlds - are a story if you look at it the right way.

"And I hope I can deal with politics?  I know I'm going to have to if my story ends well."

Conrad walks into the room halfway through the conversation.

"Sadly, my great country of Cheliax still has the Abyss-damned problem of politics." He was about to complain about nobles, except, well, a noble is in front of him right now. Not exactly the best thing to say.

"I'm sure everyone does - I suppose even Barvid has some politics to deal with."

"Yes I am! And I try to observe stories around me, too. The whole world - all the worlds - are a story if you look at it the right way.

"So they are, so they are.  Some even moreso than others, I think.  I've been places from books I've read, even."

Then Conrad comes in, she shakes her head minutely, and there's much discussion of politics.

"Well, if you're volunteering to deal with the politics...want to come with me while I defuse an eldritch magic pyramid?  ...Huh, now that I think about it, this guy might be able to give you some targeted advice; the Ruby Prince deals with a lot of elementals."