"Oh I was imagining that we'd ask to borrow something of his and see if it works to find his future self via discern location."

"Oh, sure, that might work too. I'm very curious how some of these interactions work - say I do acquire Heart's Edge, is it my divine-bonded weapon? Or just a very nice sword which I should probably give to Cansellarion so I can continue making mine defending?"

"My tuning forks worked to get into my demiplanes in the other world. But I think a divine bond is more personal than that -"

"I'd expect so. Tuning forks are nonmagical, right, just - fit into the spell to direct it the right way -" Her hand brushes the sword. "I had no plans to do a miracle about it if it happened but losing the sword would be - a lot worse than losing an arm, and not purely in the sense it takes much longer to fix. - the closer analogy for you is maybe Curiosity, and I doubt you can cast spells through the other Alfirin's Curiosity. If he's still alive and well at all."

"Yes, that would be the closer analogy and I expect I wouldn't be able to. But by the same token I think discern location should work with objects from this time on their owners in the other, though probably not vice versa."

"My plans for this week were to go around recruiting our retired wizards with the promise of future spells, I was going to hit up Mengkare, we can also try Parmoneryx and ask for some of his things for a Discern Location. I was also contemplating some old-fashioned adventuring, if there are any famous trapped demiplanes and so on uncovered in the intervening centuries. - Church of Abadar's happy to sell us diamonds and happy to purchase interworld access but they say that even if you invent a way to do it at ninth circle more than half of the fair split of what they're willing to pay goes to Korva as the first to get it repeatable. Which is still good, she needs it too, but it means we're not really getting enough to finance the war."

"Have you ever done old-fashioned adventuring before? I haven't. We'd need a cleric and a burglar."

"Oh, well, I'll place an ad for burglars in Absalom, I bet there are lots of them longing to work for me. Narthoc actually asked if we had any fights he could get into, Aroden's agreed to push him to ninth to cover for us when we leave but it's much cheaper if he's earned it."

"I don't actually have any ties to the church of Norgorber."

"You know, you don't really have to disarm traps if you can simply tell them not to affect you because you are too important to be affected by them, who cares if anyone knows how to disarm them? - I'll see what I can put together. Anything else I should know?"

"Just all of this." She hands over a transcript of her conversation with Mirabelle's daughter.

Then Iomedae will go find Korva, for whom she has good news.

She's hanging out, preparing items for transfer over and waiting for someone to tell her when they're going to want her to come back next.

"I talked to the Church of Abadar about how much they'd pay for some cross-world transits. They quoted me about two hundred thousand Absalom pounds, and figured the Church on the other side will pay the same before adjusting for currency changes in a complicated way I couldn't entirely follow. But - probably not less. And most of that's yours, of course, as you could've sold it to them and no one could develop an imitation without you."

- wow, okay. That's - enough to pay for quite a lot of things on the list that Regill and Dorgelinda put together.

"The Church of Abadar wants to pay me to take them across?"

"No, though you can if you want to. But you'll get a majority share of what they pay us to take them across, because it'd be unfair, if we accepted their pay to take them across, when the only reason they're negotiating with us and not you is that you came to us first."

She looks kind of confused about this.

"So - the Church of Abadar is going to pay you, to use the transit method that you're planning to develop, but then you'd like to split that payment with us?"

" - yes? When negotiating the deal I asked them to figure out what your fair share was - that is, how much value we were adding, over you just having showed up there yourself - and they told me, and that makes your share about a hundred twenty thousand pounds, so that share is yours."

Korva doesn't really understand any of that, actually, given that it sounds like she's not actually doing anything for the Abadarans, but - she's a little worried that that's going to come off as an offer to be generous and forego what Iomedae has declared her fair share, and actually she can't really afford to be generous on that scale, right now. Maybe she can ask Marit about it later, or something. Right now -

"Well, that's very generous of you. Thank you. You expect to receive that from the Abadarans once you have a functional alternate transit method, then?"

"Or we can get less money but get it as an advance, if you need it more now."

" - maybe. I should talk to the people who've run the numbers more recently, first. Any idea how much difference it would be?"

"Usually they just base it on how sure we are we'll pay eventually, so - maybe four parts in five?"

" - all right, for that I do want to talk to some people about now versus later. Thank you. Any idea when I should come back next, then?"

"Does a couple more days work? Our plans, too, are in a fair bit of flux."

"Honestly, right now it doesn't cost much of anything but the time it takes to be over here. Two days works fine for me."