"- each of those towns, then."

"Yup. I'm thinking that even if we can fill your channel radius at all three - which I'm not sure of, I've never needed to figure it out before - they'll be able to fill it with more severe cases with more patients to choose from here." Which is kind of weird for him to be pointing out to a cleric of triage.

"All right. Forgive me if it's obvious, I don't know how not having Stabilize or any unlimitedly repeatable healing orison would tend to affect these things."

"Ah. In general, any place big enough for you to seriously consider visiting will have mundane healers available, who aren't as good at that as magic would be, but they're passable. I might call you out to someplace that doesn't have a healer while you're here - that's part of my role, bringing healing to places too small to get it another way - but only if there's enough of a problem for it to be worth your time."

"The small places don't have - anyone riding circuit or anything?"

"Some of us do that, yep."

He doesn't understand this allocation system but doesn't know how to ask. "All right."

"We don't have a central hierarchy, remember? We just go where we feel like, and if we notice a problem we're suited to solve we do, or if we're not suited to solve it we'll tell people until someone takes it on. Personally, I like to go as many different places as I can and check the cities for news pretty often too, I find out about more people needing powerful spells that way than I would if I just visited the same handful of villages every year or two. It probably helps that I have the luck domain, too."

"I don't think a central hierarchy is the only way to do something other than going where you feel like but I understand that this is your approach."

"Do you have any particular approaches in mind?"

"I don't have the lay of the land and will accept your recommendations."

"No, I mean - I can figure out for myself how I would do it, if you have a clever idea I wouldn't want to miss out on it just because you aren't sure it's better. Maybe it will be."

"I'm imagining here very small villages? I don't know how common clerics are on Oerth, maybe they're rarer than I imagine, or distributed differently. In a very small village if you find, say, some six people injured, it would seem more prudent to bring them to me, to pack in a radius in a larger town, rather than me to them."

"If it's just six people I'd probably heal them myself, I'd rather use a Mass Cure Moderate than two Teleports unless they wanted to stay for more than the channel. The case where I'd ask you to come would be a bigger disaster, a town fire or a landslide or something."

"That clarifies the matter, yes."

"Most of what I do in tiny little villages is more like diplmacy than anything else, really. Of course I still heal people, but that's not really the point, it's more about putting them at ease - do something for grandma's bad hip, stay for dinner, tell them stories around the fire before bed, maybe help chop some wood or mend a plow before I move on in the morning, and then when the son wants to move to the city and study to be a wizard or the neighboring gnomes want to settle upriver it's not so scary, they have at least one example of the outside world being good."

"...I don't think I've observed effects like that but my experience has of course been skewed."

He nods. "Most people haven't been anyplace that small unless they grew up that way. Places big enough to get the occasional trader are different, even before they're big enough to be likely to have a healer."

"I grew up in a small city, but a city."

"I was a farm kid, someplace big enough that we had a yearly trader and an herbalist we could get to. No regular clerics, but we had - I don't even think he was actually a cleric of Fharlanghn, but a traveling cleric of some sort, come through when I was nine or ten, and explain a little bit about how we work, and then when I got restless a few years later that helped me figure out what I needed to do about it."

Nod nod.

"It's hard to imagine a world where the god chooses you. I'd like to hear about it sometime, if you don't mind telling me. We've got people to heal now, though."

Healing people is so much better than that conversation is going to be.

It's not happening right now, at least. They head back to the temple, over to the healing wing this time, and have to wait while carts are brought around for the patients and attending healers to get themselves loaded into. Then it's off to the mage's guild, a tall building clearly made with Stone Shape. Raafi goes to check in, giving Blai the option of coming with him or staying to help get the first batch of patients into wheelchairs to be brought to the auditorium. They have to make a few trips with the wheelchairs, but they're pretty quick about it, and only a portion of them need them in the first place; it doesn't take all that long for everyone to be arranged to fill the center pedestal and in the upper and lower viewing galleries and catwalk.

Wheelchairs are unfamiliar but not hard to get the hang of. He helps position everybody, eyeballs the radius to be sure, and when it's time, channels.