"It was fucky. Is that what it's always like?" Alyssa asks Val.

"Ours is more persistent," says Val. "And much worse. Anyway, I felt like I needed the skills I've practiced as a mage to pull that off but I guess either I didn't or Alyssa's been practicing similar skills somehow. I - expect my wife would instinctively try to throw that off and I don't think I have any reason to think she would do a worse job than Alyssa? No one expects it to be a good idea to let magic do anything to their mind and anyone alive in Sathend today is descended from someone who fought it off at its full strength at least briefly."

"There's a lot of luck to it. …you know, I don't usually say this, but it would have been really convenient if your baby had vomited on you recently."

"I wouldn’t have come here covered in vomit."

"Yes, that makes sense. We don't actually have to do a Scry, it'd just be useful if you wanted to get a short message to someone telling them you're all right. We could cut straight to investigating conjuration feasability or discussing what founding a settlement in this region would look like."

"I don't think founding a settlement makes much sense if you're already here - we don't have that many people looking to emigrate, it's just that we have nowhere to put them when they do want to. And you'll have institutions that were already designed around the local conditions, and are used to meeting new adults that no local people got to see grow up. Right?"

"We get new people here all the time, yeah. If most of you want to stay you probably don't really want to found a settlement."

"Yeah. So what are the options for places that could absorb, say, as many as a thousand people over the next few decades? As an upper bound, we probably won't actually have that many people looking to emigrate."

"Absalom definitely can, it's got hundreds of thousands of people. Almas and Augustana are fairly big cities in Andoran, which I've mentioned you might like, they're a democracy and slavery is illegal. Almas is where Morgethai works, so if we go there to buy a Gate you'll see it. —Observe it."

She pauses. "I'm not actually sure how helpful it is for me to name places here? City names aren't enough for me to teleport by even though I can view maps."

"I was thinking you could describe their climates and systems of government and then we'd know what to tell people who are thinking about whether moving somewhere else would be worth doing."

"There's a lot, do you want some paper?"

"I don’t think I can draw that well - oh, we write with string."

"Well, we do have string."

The young man who's been observing can go get some.

Alyssa will take notes since she's physically capable of doing that while watching Zoriana's hands.

"Absalom is probably the biggest city in the world. It's a major trade hub and very diverse. It's probably the most likely human-friendly polity outside this area to have anyone who speaks this language, and this area isn't the densest. You won't be able to influence the Council but they take a fairly light hand unless there's a siege. It's somewhat warmer than here."

"Taldor and Kelesh are both empires with some large cities. They both tend to get into conflicts you probably don't want to be involved in and they're both at least plausibly falling apart very slowly. Taldor's a bit warmer than here and Kelesh has a lot of hot desert."

"On the south side of the Inner Sea there's Osirion, which has Sothis, and Rahadoum, which has Azir. Also a lot of hot desert. I'm not best placed to appreciate their virtues, it's illegal for me to visit Rahadoum or preach in Osirion, but they do have some. Osirion's pharaoh has some kind of close relationship with Abadar and Abadar really wants states to be consistent and predictable. You two probably want to talk to Jyronn Imikar about trade and he's from Osirion and likes it, feel free to ask him questions. Rahadoum bans clerics and worship of gods. You'd want to figure out whether they'd count Val as a cleric – I'd bet against it but I wouldn't want to move there without knowing. I think they're a bit of a republic but one assumes they can't be fully representative, if they were presumably people would vote for the church of Erastil to be legal so they can get cheap healing and improved crop yields."

"I've already mentioned Andoran earlier. They are also warmer than here. – the north isn't necessarily all horrible but conditions there aren't all that conducive to high human populations. You could go to Neroysan in Mendev, it's large, but Mendev borders the Worldwound and you haven't struck me as interested in war."

"I'm skipping some places that aren't really habitable to humans. Highhelm is a lovely place to visit if you can manage it, but there's something off about the air and you want to live somewhere you don't need magic to survive."

"There's also some places which won't let you leave, which you shouldn't visit but should take note of. The most significant of these is Nidal. It's run by Zon-Kuthon, who wants the world to be full of darkness and pain and misery. Nidal and Zon-Kuthon would probably very much appreciate access to your magic and should not get it. In terms of climate it's shrouded in eternal shadow. You can ask Bevaluu for more details, but if she doesn't want to talk about it I'd rather you not push. The second most significant is Cheliax, which has a close relationship with Asmodeus, god of tyranny and slavery and torture and such."

"You have some horrible-sounding gods on this planet. How sure are you that they like slavery and tyranny and misery and not just things that go together with those things?"

"So, the gods get to choose who they do and don't give magic to, and they also can design beings that live in their domains and can be summoned and will sometimes answer questions. And gods tend to have books they at least allegedly endorse. Asmodeus has the Asmodean Disciplines, for instance. If you ask people whose power at least appears to come from Asmodeus whether the Asmodean Disciplines reflect Asmodeus's will they will tend to say yes. If you summon imps, which are beings Asmodeus designed, they will say yes. In places like Absalom or Korvosa or, obviously, Cheliax, you can just buy copies of the Disciplines. And occasionally people get visions from gods, though it seems to not be great for the person or for the god so it doesn't happen very much."

"I personally have less evidence regarding Zon-Kuthon because his church is less expansionist, but I'd guess the situation is similar."

"And for evidence that probably won't convince you at all: fifth-circle clerics like myself can ask gods yes-or-no questions. It's somewhat expensive, but if you trust a god to not lie to you it can be informative."

"That's plenty convincing. At least I'm sure you're not making an honest mistake."

"Thank you. – If you do decide me lying is a significant risk and you want to take a tour of areas I don't recommend, please do be careful about it."

"Honestly, I’m reconsidering the whole idea of opening diplomatic relations and even if we want to do that it’s seeming like something I should let the government handle."

"Does that also suggest you want to lie low, not hire an archmage to Gate you home, and figure out what you can get done while holding onto enough magic to plane shift two people yourself?"

(Alyssa's looking disappointed but just keeps taking notes.)

"Do I want to, yeah, but - assuming this is true, you've been honest with me. And you've paid for us to be able to talk. I think the worst case here is that I tell Alyssa a bunch of things to pass on and send her home with the string and maybe some other things and then I spend the rest of my magic helping you and then kill myself. I'll get home fine that way, in a few days it'd just be a funny story I didn't happen to remember - but I don't actually know how much attention it will get us if we do talk to an archmage, or what the best-case scenario looks like."

That's a lot of statements and questions and she's going to try to go through them in order.

"Your resurrections don't keep your memories? Ours usually do, but I'm not sure if we can usefully take advantage of that if you'd want to be resurrected at home."

"For our teleporters, it's easier to teleport people if the people are in a bag with extra space on the inside. Do you think that would work for you? The air in those goes bad in minutes, but for teleportation purposes that's usually a long time."

"You should definitely send Alyssa home with notes on all the major friendly gods. If a lot of people in your demiplane pray to one you might get a cleric to cover some healing, but you can't easily pray to someone you know nothing about. You should also send her with some tuning forks, in case you want to visit again and hire transit back at more reasonable cost, or start a trade route. Maybe also send her with a spellbook, or some seeds if your climate matches anywhere you can buy seeds for."

"You can't hire an archmage without getting the attention of the archmage. An archmage paying attention to you can do lots of things. Now, I think that Felandriel Morgethai is an upstanding woman who has no interest in razing your villages, and Nefreti Clepati wouldn't do it on purpose and would pay for repairs if she did. But you've never visited their schools or met anyone who's met them."

"I would say that the best case scenario of working with an archmage looks like you slowly buying more and more permanent demiplane expansions from them. And likely other spells, but it doesn't sound like you need those the way you need a stable demiplane expansion."

"I don't know if a bag would work. I want to test it but if it doesn't work I want to be sure that wouldn't be a disaster first. I think maybe I want to send you to my world with - I'd be the strategic choice but I don't want to leave Alyssa behind - so you could talk to our government."

"I'm honored. It may be relevant to note that if I'm present and someone can attune a fork I would expect to be able to do a return trip to pick up you or Alyssa under my own power within a fortnight. Even if we can't attune a fork I could take someone back to the Material to save on transit costs. Attuning a fork isn't complicated, you strike the right thing and it starts vibrating, but the right thing is probably your magic source so I'd rather delegate."