Over the years, Naima's number of obligations has drifted up. Way, way up. She has her tapping and reincarnation route, obviously. She has the time that she spends training students to create remedies. She has to resurrect people. She has to take meetings, although most of her meetings happen simultaneous with the tapping, because her time is too valuable to justify the tradeoff any other way. And she has to help rebuild Cheliax, obviously, which means interviews and budgeting and digging up dead nobles and a dozen other things. She has to vet hires for the school system she's starting up in the Junira river valley - in the sense that she actually doesn't have to do that one at all, but it's really very upsetting to her that they've done so much for Sothis, and for Cheliax, and for Korvosa, and comparatively nothing at all for the Junira.
At the point in their assault on Asmodeus where they lost the original timelapse demiplane - the one they stole from the four Pharaohs of the ascension - Naima's schedule had reached the point of absolutely depending on spending only one out of every two or three days on the material. All of her paperwork and analysis was done in the demiplane. All of her reading was done in the demiplane. All of her writing was done in the demiplane. All of her discussions with Catherine about the logistics of restoring Cheliax took place in the demiplane. She occasionally took the time to relax with her children on the material - much less time than she wanted, but some. Her husband, though? Demiplane. Always. But for all that it was a constraint, it was a vast improvement over the previous state of things, when Naima had had only the same twenty-four hours as everyone else. She had, actually, been quite relaxed, compared to how things were before.
Then the demiplane broke. (She broke it, specifically. The others are kind enough not to bring it up very often, but it was Naima's suggestion to start the attempted genocide of all pit fiends from inside the demiplane, which drew Hell's attention and got the whole thing disjoined.) The paperwork and analysis had to be passed on to her secretaries and to key hospital staff. She had to stop reading books without using her book-reading spell. She had to stop writing almost anything. She had to stop changing her clothes or taking baths, just had someone else prestidigitate the dirt away and illusion her clothes to look different, letting the real clothes - all her beautiful clothes! - languish in her oversized closet.
She tried very hard not to miss her weekly beach combing appointment with her children, every Sunday afternoon. Her husband, though - they talked to each other over the telepathic bond, rather constantly. But for months, and months, and months, they only very rarely had the time to do anything else. When he finally finished his work on the new demiplane - quite recently, really, he claims that he's still working out the bugs - Naima outright wept. Then she didn't leave it for three subjective days, and forbade him from leaving it, either.
Things are better, now. But they are the kind of better where she's still trying to take very seriously the importance of spending actual, real, face-to-face physically present time with her husband on a regular basis. She has a debt to pay down. And, obviously, now that she's putting effort into her marriage again, she feels that these obligations become more important the more stressed out Elie is.
She's pretty sure Elie is going to be very, very, very stressed today. So, of course, she ambushes him the moment he sets foot in the demiplane.
"How was it?"
