???

???????

?????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

…Vanyel is grateful to his goddess for relaying that message. And will finish praying for the full hour before asking Blai if that’s even a slightly normal thing to happen.

Seldan poked him about two minutes before dawn and told him it might be helpful if he could try to convey to Shelyn, while doing his morning spell prayer, that the Shadow-Lover’s god has his friend Leareth and may not entirely understand how to be nice to the souls in Their possession. Seldan did not include any further detail and Vanyel promptly spent ninety seconds panicking that the Shadowgod made friends with Asmodeus and is bonding with Their new buddy by doing some torture. He managed to convince himself this was probably an overreaction and can manage a calm and dignified prayer that Shelyn keep an eye out for his dead friend, who he's very worried about because none of the gods here are Good or very good at understanding humans and Leareth was scared of gods for very understandable reasons and probably really hates being dead and housed by one of them, if he's having experiences, which Seldan's comment implied although on reflection Vanyel isn't sure how Seldan knows that. 

Also he would like the same spells as yesterday, thank you. He craves a Remove Sickness with the visceral desperation of someone who hasn't managed any solid food in the last twenty candlemarks. 

(Joshel got a similar message, actually via one of Leareth's staff who was updated by Seldan, but he's on the Iftel border and the things he's seen there are honestly a lot more upsetting than "the Evil archmage who was going to invade our kingdom is being interrogated by a clueless god". The Shadow-Lover isn't even that bad, going by the song. He'll include in his prayer that Abadar should perhaps offer to sell the Shadow-Lover god some...guidelines on talking to souls of dead humans...if that's a thing?) 

He asks for Remove Sickness again even though it'll be really annoying to have to get a Gate back and what if Shavri manages to trap him in the room again to cast his stupid orison every minute. ...Maybe today is a good day to insist that he'll do but only it if the Healers' Collegium pays him - or pays the Heralds' Collegium, or whatever makes it the least weird, but that seems like an extremely reasonable way to handle being asked to do something incredibly valuable and also personally unpleasant...

At the end of the hour Vanyel immediately pokes Seldan with Mindspeech and asks him to convey to Blai (who's a lot more work to Mindspeak, since he isn't Gifted) that Shelyn...relayed...an apology...from the Star-Eyed Goddess? Who has apparently been "reflecting" and is now sorry about the whole thing where his lifebonded died twenty years ago? Context, for complicated reasons that's how he ended up with an absurd number of Gifts and ten times the raw power of the average Adept-potential mage, presumably so he could actually kill Leareth. Vanyel normally finds this really upsetting to think about but he's not even upset right now, he's too confused. 

What. 

:Blai, Vanyel says he got a - vision? message? from Shelyn. On behalf of the Star-Eyed Goddess. Who wanted to apologize for murdering his lifebonded decades ago as part of a godplot.: 

:That's really weird.

I guess I don't know a lot about how Shelyn spends Her intervention budget. Maybe it's characteristic for Her. ...or the Star-Eyed might have paid for it:

:That seems really uncharacteristic of the Star-Eyed! ...But so does apologizing so what do I know.: What the fuck. Seldan has so many questions and no way of getting any of them answered, the Star-Eyed does not give him a nice convenient metaphorical letterbox in the blue place. 

Shavri would like everyone's Lesser Restorations upfront please; for all the humans, that is.

(She's worried that the damage gets...stickier? If it's left untreated for too long. Van seemed to either have more total damage or got a slightly weaker casting of it yesterday, and it kind of looks like this morning it's just...like that now. She doesn't say this. She really, really needs to have an honest talk with all her patients about their chances here, but she's going to be a coward and do it AFTER she's had a "full night" of sleep.) 

Lesser Restorations for... all the humans. If she's really sure it's Seldan who should be skipping one and not Blai.

Shavri thiiiinks that makes the most sense but Blai is more of an expert so she's happy to discuss her reasoning with him, after the casting is done on all the non-Blai humans. 

:I'm not entirely sure of this, but - you have the extra life-force thing, right? That we think is because you're a cleric and clerics get stronger like that. Seldan isn't, his peak life-force is...still only a bit more than half as bright as yours? But he has an absurd amount of the - whatever goes into higher Endurance. The way Randi looked weaker even after Lesser Restorations, Seldan looks way, way stronger. Stronger than you, you're - still in vaguely human range on the underlying function - for Seldan I think that may be almost the entire reason why his life-force is so much brighter than, say, Vanyel's. He's weakening at the same rate as you, but it's proportionally much less for him. ...Also I'm confused by this but I think there's something where you lose more of the - total capacity to hold onto life-force - than anyone else does in between Lesser Restorations. Does that make sense?: 

Puzzling that out for a moment, yes, that makes sense - an Endurance poison will take a bit longer to kill a strong adventurer than a random peasant, but, maybe not like, twice as long, even though it would take more than twice as much hitting Blai with a sword to kill him than a random peasant? So if this is modeled as an Endurance poison it's going to be taking "larger chunks" out of Blai's, uh, swordability. ...he apologizes for his muddled thinking here, he would normally put the concepts in better order. He will cast the Lesser Restoration on himself.

He is not really clear on why Stef is so high in triage priority but it seems a bit late to ask unless Seldan happens to know.

Oh did no one explain! Seldan must have been too out of it or busy Mindspeech-harassing trainees to notice Blai being confused before. It’s because Van and Stef are lifebonded, which is a bit like a Companion-bond but between humans and, you know, romantic, and if anything it might be a little worse for someone to lose. Vanyel survived a dead lifebonded partner for over a decade, it sounds like, but he had Yfandes then, and he’s already in a bad way even with Stef still alive. It would be pretty shocking if he hung on with TWO broken soul bonds and NO living soul bonded people to stick around for.

(It’s really weird that Vanyel has been lifebonded twice,  honestly, but the weirdness is mostly in the fact that he survived the first one’s death for…how long, exactly—. wait, and how old is Stef - he looks really young, well under twenty - Seldan is abruptly forming a THEORY about bonds and reincarnation and a meddling Shadow-Lover. The Groveborn Companion route would have been faster but it’s probably really expensive and also Stef would be the WORST Companion, can you imagine.)

Blai's not sure how much variety there is in Companions, he's met only a handful! It does kind of lend credibility to the idea that the Star-Eyed could have come around to being sorry if She already participated in or at least did not block a plan to give Vanyel's lifebonded... back... after a while?? Anyway that does perfectly explain the triage priority. Hopefully the -

- Seldan, how long ago was the last Nap Stack, you can't actually just do them all the time, you need to wait like a week, and Vanyel wasn't there and Stef and Nayoki weren't either but -

Oh no Seldan should have remembered that because Companions are supposed to remember everything but he FORGOT because he is really not at his best right now. 

...It feels like weeks ago but that's mostly because it's been. Very eventful. And also Seldan thinks that visiting the Shadow-Lover really messes with his timesense, maybe. He remembers figuring out how long it had been since...something...to make a point, what was the point, oh it was that he didn't get why Vkandis had waited three days to try to murder Leareth, which isn't relevant but does mean he knows it was three days from the gryphon-earthquake-attack until the Dream Feast day, which was also the day Vkandis exploded Iftel. When was the Nap Stack, was it the same day as the Endure Elements or as Remove Blindness, he thinks it was the same day as Endure Elements. Which - this is the second dawn they've spent in this horrible room, so that's - 

- four days? Ugh. Not even close to a week. Ugh!!! It's probably still the right call, the Healers are the ones who need it badly and a few of them did squeeze into the last Nap Stack but, like, as an afterthought when there happened to be room to spare, they definitely weren't the highest priority. Seldan is frustrated because he hates realizing he made a tactical decision on partial or partially-wrong information but - this honestly might be the right call even if it was only Shavri who could benefit from it, she's astonishingly talented as a Healer and also has a decent head for strategy when she's not staggering around half delirious with exhaustion– wait shit was Shavri in the last Nap Stack??? That would in fact have really been a good reason to wait three days - assuming anyone is still alive in three days - and he's mostly remembering some backchannel gossip where some Companions were discussing whether or not to hold open a spot for her - 

:Shavri were you in the last Nap Stack?: he sends at her rather than try any harder to remember. 

:...No, I passed on it last time.: She remembers kind of regretting it after seeing just how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed everyone else was that evening. 

...Okay. Good. That's a relief. Shavri will at least benefit, and so will Van and Stef and Nayoki - if the Healers carry them to the room they set up for it, he still thinks they should do a specially set up room and not try to make the entire staff of the Healers' Collegium rotate through sleeping on bedrolls on the floor of this room. 

Okay. - also Blai thinks basically everyone was in there for just two hours last time but that's not actually necessary, if you'd benefit from sixteen hours of sleep you can take four, if you want to be in the Nap Stack start to finish you can do that too.

Seldan feels like most people would have trouble staying asleep for sixteen hours straight no matter how behind on sleep they were, but...being horribly ill is probably different, he'll make sure Shavri knows that Van and Stef and Nayoki will continue getting the Nap Stack efficient-rest-benefit as long as they're in it and there's probably no reason to wake them and kick them out after two hours. 

(And he'll separately poke Gemma out in the hall and ask her to make sure Shavri stays asleep as long as possible, regardless of whether she asks to be woken after two candlemarks because she's anxious about leaving her patients for too long. She would, he knows her type, and he thinks Gemma will agree that she needs the rest more than she realizes and so he's going to meddle.) 

...And he's making a mental note that he really, really needs to meddle to schedule some sort of strategy-meeting tonight. He's going to feel like shit but that's inevitable. Van and Stef and Nayoki will be at their most functional, Shavri should hopefully be functional, and...they need a longer-term plan. And to demand some honesty from Shavri about what their prognosis really is. Seldan is pretty sure he's been failing to look at the bigger picture, and - they need to. 

But that's later. For now: flop time? 

Flop time. Cozy furry Companion to lean on.

This entire situation sucks immensely but Seldan is still so very glad that he has the best Herald. 

They have a new fancy pillow by early afternoon. 

(It's even more tasteless than the last one, but that does not, strictly speaking, matter for this, and Lady Treesa was delighted to use up all of her weird expensive fabrics and ribbons and beads on something that would HELP SAVE THE KINGDOM and also specifically help her son get a nap. After this she's going to work on crafting a nicer bird for Vanyel, too. In Shavri's mind it's an excellent way to keep her busy and feeling like she's helping, so that she doesn't try to finagle her way into the House of Healing to fuss over Vanyel in person and be in the way.) 

There's a room set up for it too! Which means they're going to need to move Blai over there long enough to cast it. 

She thinks Blai might still be able to walk that far, it's about the same distance as he walked two days ago to reach Leareth, but he hasn't even been as far as the door since then, and everyone has been getting weaker, Lesser Restoration can either target the "Endurance" problem or the physical weakness and the latter isn't going to be what kills them first. Shavri does not really feel like finding out the hard way that Blai can't quite manage it anymore, and also it's only been three candlemarks since his Remove Sickness meal break and the exertion made him throw up last time. So he's getting carried by four trainees on a litter instead. 

Seldan does noooooot liiiike having Blai out of sight even for less than five minutes, even though they're at no point separated by shielding and can be in Mindspeech contact the whole time. He's feeling very protective lately!

Blai doesn't like it either but Nap Stack has a long casting time and he is going to need all his stamina for that.

He assesses the pillow for sufficient fanciness, and then he sets about waving it through the air.

...Seldan is going to distract himself by finding another Companion in easy Mindspeech range and harassing them to poke Enara and get an update on what Jisa is up to lately. It occurred to him because he was mulling on inviting her to their strategy discussion tonight, which was the point at which he realized he doesn't have the slightest idea what she's been doing since she rescued Leareth from the north. 

Working with a team of Leareth's researchers on trying to catch up to where Leareth had gotten on his Gate-to-Golarion research agenda and then execute on it themselves. 

It's...not going incredibly well. No one else made it out alive from the base Leareth was in, and they lost all his extant notes, so all they have to go on is a few snippets of notes that other people took when he pulled them in to talk through pieces of the problem. 

She'll come to the meeting. It's not like stepping away from the work for a few candlemarks is going to make any appreciable difference. It's– they can probably get there, Jisa thinks, eventually. The difficulty level isn't impossible. They have Blai's stuff to study and use for search-spell targeting. They just...are going to need to re-develop a lot more of the techniques involved than Leareth would have. It's going to take them multiple months, she thinks, or even years, unless they get absurdly lucky. 

Well, that's not the best news but it's not actually worse than Seldan expected, given that he hadn't been sure if anyone was getting down to work on any part of their problem. 

He...feels like he had another question for Jisa, but he can't remember it right now and that was a lot of Mindspeech. Hopefully it'll come back to him before tonight. 

He can fill Blai in on the small update once Blai is back from casting the spell.