"It's her paper thing. She had a library back home too and decided to branch out. Big into encouraging literacy."

"I've tried giving lessons before, but I haven't the knack for it; I'd often get impatient with the kids, and that's not good for anyone. Making sure kids have teachers who aren't evil is important, but I leave it to people who are better qualified for the job."

"Are a lot of schoolteachers... evil?"

"Back before Andoran got its independance from Cheliax, pretty much all of them were, yeah. And once we got our freedom we obviously needed to change that but you need a lot of teachers if you want to put everyone through school like the Chelish did and of course it's not like the kids in the orphanage could learn from their parents instead or anything so someone's got to help them."

"That sure sounds like a really bad problem to have!"

"Someday I hope we'll be able to free Cheliax too so it's fixed for everyone, but I don't know how we'd manage it. Andoran's got Felandriel Morgethai, of course, but that only goes so far when our army is much weaker and we can't go running to Hell for help like they can."

"I'm not caught up on politics on this continent. Uh. Who's Felandriel Morgethai?"

"I guess I should have guessed that from the eternal rose not ringing a bell, my bad. Felandriel Morgethai is the strongest wizard in Avistan and maybe the inner sea. She runs the university in Almas, helped us get our independence from Cheliax, and most people figure she's why they haven't decided to take another swing at us since."

"Wow, good for her."

"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."