"I certainly think so. Where do you hail from? Vudra? Tian Xia? Arcadia?"

"It's called Scythia but we're pretty sure nobody's heard of it."

"Huh, I kind of figured there'd at least be some neighbor of yours we'd be able to place, especially since you don't act like you're from the darklands. Is Scythia on an isolated island?"

"It is not."

"Huh, maybe it's on another planet like Castrovel then."

"I can't rule that out. We dunno how we got here."

"My condolences on getting separated from your home, then, though I'm at least glad I got to meet you."

"You too."

In that case Sosiel will be happy to return to talking about artwork for as long as Iskander seems interested since he has rather a shortage of such conversational partners.

He has to do networking for Ky but maybe Sosiel can swing by the library later and they can talk, uh, coats of arms, apparently he needs to design a coat of arms.

He'd be delighted to!

Anyone else look like they need chatting up?

The spiky haired girl from earlier has a couple of books on her, but she's currently in the process of being run off after having finally annoyed one too many people. Nobody else seems to have anything notably detectable by Kybele's domain. If he's looking for visually striking people, there are a couple that might qualify like those people with assorted vaguely demonic looking traits hanging out near the edge of the party or someone slightly shorter than Nurah among those speaking with Seelah, but there's nobody unknown to them that screams rich or important or dangerous.

He'll drift over to Seelah. He's not sure if the vaguely demonic people are neathers or, like, demons, and if they are, like, demons, he doesn't want to be right next to them.

They're perfectly happy to avoid him too, just like they are almost everyone else.

The group in question is pretty far into their cups, judging by the flushed faces and, well, all the beer, but either Seelah's been pacing herself any time he wasn't watching or she has a pretty astonishing tolerance for alcohol.

"Iskander! it's good to see you again. How are you enjoying the celebration?"

"It's pretty decent! I bet Ky's having more fun than me but I'm not unimpressed."

"Well, if there's one thing that Mendev does right it's definitely party. Iskander, this is the league of the inspiring cart! We've got Elan, Jannah, and the little guy over here is Curl; they're good friends of mine. League, this is Iskandar; I ended up in the caves under Kenabres with him and his sister a few days back."'

"I keep telling you Seelah, I'm part of the houndhearts, not the league of the cart." Despite his complaints, Elan can't help but smile a bit when responding. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"These sound like highly exclusive clubs." Do they do handshakes here?

Not usually, but they'll figure out what he wants... relatively quickly if he offers, at least for how tipsy they are.

"Oh yes, nothing but the cream of the crop of the crop crusaders here. Well, us and Elan, at least."

"Hey! Curl..."

"He's definitely got you there."

"Not you too, Jannah! Augh, truly I am assailed on all sides. "

"Ky says it's the done thing to go crusading with a party of adventurers while the army does army things, which kind are you guys?"

"Well, I'm stuck with the army for the foreseeable future," Curl offers, "But these clowns have their choice of it."

"We've mostly been doing independant patrols along the wardstone like, but I'm not sure that's practical if we're going to be operating inside the barrier," Jannah responds, choosing not to address the poke. "Without it zapping them, we'd have a tough time with succubi or worse yet vrocks. It might be a time for a return to normal army operations, and I mean there's no better time than the start of a crusade to shake things up."

"Normal armies good against vrocks?"

"Well, if you've got clerics or paladins at least. Normal attacks don't do much unless they're helpless and you can go for a coup de grace, but if you've got blessed arrows you can kill them while they're still flying."

"Oh, cool. I'll make sure Ky knows she needs to go heavy on the archer units."

"Hey, I'm beginning to feel ganged up on here. What's wrong with a nice longsword or two? Elan, back me up here."