In some ways the best victory is a narrow one, where you spent only those things that turn out to have been indispensable. And that is the kind they are going to get here if they get one at all, Blai thinks. There is an appeal to the overwhelming curbstomp - it certainly has some virtues, like probably the effect on morale, and reduced casualties let you enter the next fight with more resources than if you were decimated, and - four Remove Sickness please - he forgets what he was going to think next, on that train of thought. Something about how it's better to barely win in two places at once than to curbstomp in one of them and - no, that only holds if they're of roughly equal importance? Maybe? - he apologizes for the somewhat incoherent prayers. He mentally mumbles through the rest of the spells he's asking for. Then he just kind of recites the poem about the destruction of Hell from the back of the book some twenty times, missing bits here and again because he doesn't have it properly memorized.

At Shavri's question - It is not strictly necessary, probably, for Iomedae, if you are in the process of dying, but it would feel weird. Which doesn't matter. He'll pray lying down tomorrow.

Really if you’re trying to allocate your forces between two fronts you need the numbers, and the facts on the ground, it’s not a question that has a single clear shining answer in the abstract, it’s - you want to be thinking in probabilities, and often which front is more important to win isn’t certain either - and there are the various human foibles to resist, wanting a sure thing is one but clinging too tightly to your various resources when the entire point of having resources is that you can spend them when it matters - really a lot of mistakes come down to someone oversimplifying the situation in their head, slipping toward something more comfortable than uncertainties and bets…. Oh, gods, Seldan is too tired for this right now. He wrote a very good treatise about it once, he thinks. He wonders vaguely if anyone still reads it, no, it’s been six hundred years, his body of work would have been supplanted by some clever young upstart a few centuries ago…

Shavri would like if Blai could do that. If it turns out to be a problem they’ll figure out an accommodation of some kind, but she’s worried that in another five or six days it won’t just be his legs that are too weak to stand, his heart will start struggling to move blood against gravity when he’s upright.

Brightstar wants his summons in a specially prepared Work Room, for some reason he did not convey to Shavri but can be assumed to be important. They’ll need to transport Blai there and back. Is he up for casting that spell very soon, before his Remove Sickness, on the thought that he benefits more from being able to hold perfectly still for the few candlemarks immediately after it.

Yes, he can cast a summons now before his Remove Sickness and his meal, though hopefully they do not expect him to walk.

They are absolutely not expecting him to walk. They’ll carry him just like they did for the Nap Stack, and Shavri is actually negotiating hard for them to literally use a short-range Gate, it's winter. Shavri knows Blai doesn't mind but she's entirely capable of minding enough for both of them. 

Leareth's mages have absurdly good Gate-training (even if they cannot get a Gate up underwater in a fast-moving river in less than twenty seconds) so it's not even very costly, it's going to be responsible for a tiny fraction of the weather-working needed what with all the Gates he's sure they're doing to the Iftel border. Seldan spends three seconds wondering how Karis is doing before concluding he's too tired to ask for a report and there's no point in speculating. He's in favor of a short-range Gate over Blai being hauled through the snow; among other considerations, it should considerably shorten the duration of them being in different rooms. 

Not being in different rooms is good. It still seems kind of mindbogglingly spendy to cast a Gate to go to the next building but, yes, right, they're not a ninth circle spell here.

Yeah it's kind of bizarre to Seldan how in Golarion terms it would be an absurdly expensive spell even from one room to the next, though of course they wouldn't use Gate, they would use - what is it - Dimension Door? Really Velgarth Gates should be thought of as a single spell that can scale arbitrarily on power, up to whatever a given mage can sustain. You can raise a Gate to five hundred miles away, big enough to march an army through, and hold it for half a candlemark, if you really want to and are willing to nearly kill a mage for it. Savil did it when they retook Sunhame, apparently, and nobody could stop talking for months about how impressive it was... 

He hasn't seen Savil in here, unless it was when they were asleep. She's close with Van, so he would have thought - oh, right, with Van down she's the best remaining expert in working through their reduced-functionality Web to report on the border situation. She's probably incredibly busy, that's all. He hopes she's all right, and that they don't regret the decision later to have the senior Heralds spending all their time on the emergency and Savil not getting to see Van much if at all, when there's a good chance he's going to die and decent-but-not-guaranteed odds that they eventually get him back. 

Now that they've decided on this plan, Shavri really doesn't want to make Blai's daily nutrition wait too long on it. She harasses people in Mindspeech until they have confirmation that the room is ready and a mage will Gate him. 

Brightstar wants to know exactly how long the spell takes to cast and how long it will last. 

Six seconds to cast and it should last more than half a minute now that Blai's got the new slot and his Remove Sickness is coming up on an hour. Maybe 35, 36 seconds. Is an elemental suitable? What kind does he want?

He wants a fire elemental if that's possible. He was quite specific about it. 

(A rather important piece of the puzzle here is whether Velgarth and Golarion are adjacent to the same Elemental Plane of Fire, just - distant parts of it, or someone from a school like White Winds would surely have heard of the other world from one of their summons. Anyway, Brightstar gets along by far the best with the fire elementals, he's summoned some of them in preparation. With a less intelligent summoned elemental, he would have needed to resort to more guesswork, but as it is he's hoping that even a very short conversation will be enough for his summoned elemental and Blai's summoned elemental to determine if they come from the same plane. If he's very lucky they might even have some rudimentary form of reckoning. He's set rather a lot of elementals to do preliminary research for him, but Fire is going to be hardest to build a waypoint structure in, and part of what he wants to ask is for permission to attempt to do so in the 'region' Blai's elemental is summoned from. The plane is hostile enough to material-plane residents without the locals being angry with him over it too.) 

Blai doesn't speak Ignan. It's possible to more or less mentally direct a summon to fight, but he'll have to like, nod, to confirm to it that he agrees with whatever let's-sit-and-talk proposition is offered to it via Mindspeech.

That understood: "Summon Monster."

(The advance setup was mostly laying out various focus-artifacts that will let a dozen of Leareth’s mages watch the casting from outside the room and…write down everything they can measure? Brightstar did not really follow it. He would just project his mind to follow the magical link from the elemental’s summoning construct-body to its real form back home. He has no idea how they plan to do it with math, but it’s admittedly safer, and he can spend the summons on a very fast conversation instead.)

The elemental will be summoned into a stone room with very magically shielded walls, full of very magical (but very not-Golarion-style) artifacts, and also three humans: Blai (on a litter on the floor, they’ll scoop him up when they’re done), and a young man and woman both glowing with absurd quantities of magical energy from the White Winds Adept spell. (Jisa is here for Mindhealing Sight, in case that’s helpful for learning anything, and also as another White Winds-trained Adept. The Adept spell apparently makes them look very interesting and compelling to elemental denizens, at least of the elemental planes as known in Velgarth.)

Also half a dozen other fire elementals, in the mage-energy-construct bodies that Velgarth summonings use.

(Being with his summoned fire-elemental allies is cozy. None of them are mad at him.) 

:Welcome: he sends. :I am not your summoner but I am a mage from a world not the one you are usually summoned to. These are my summoned allies from the Elemental Plane of Fire adjacent to this world. I wish to learn if they are the same Plane of Fire and if so the relative positions. I do not know your traditions but here it is traditional to offer a gift of mage-energy in exchange for aid. The aid I ask is to answer some questions about your home and hear a proposal.: 

Mindspeech is very fast - at the speed of thought, and Brighstar planned this out exactly. It takes four seconds to deliver. Blai was included in the Mindspeech, and Brightstar taps him with a mental touch to confirm that he’s said his piece and Blai can now…complete whatever contract or agreement is traditional for his world’s spellcasters when they summon elemental denizens? He’s curious to see how it works.

Blai gives the elemental a shaky nod, when it turns his way, and then it turns its attention back to Brightstar, and then to the other fire elementals.

The summoning paradigm is completely different, so Blai's elemental cannot meaningfully accept mage-energy. It sniffs the other elementals.

Aww but that’s such a straightforward way to make friends, what is the elemental actually getting out of this summons if it can’t take presents home  Clearly this other thing is the tradition there and Brightstar will accept that. (His elementals are very particular about their own traditions.)

:Our summoning and thus the construct bodies are different, but apart from that, do you recognize their kind?: he asks Blai’s summon.

(His elementals were instructed in advance to be friendly and try to find out if they share a language with the new arrival.)

Awwww cute.

Summoned minds are always really weird to Mindhealing-Sight, like only part of the information is where she can see it, which makes sense given that the rest is in another plane.

Allowing for that, and for possible differences in summoning technique: does Blai’s summon show up at all? And do they look even vaguely similar enough in that they could be related kinds of energy from the same sort of place?

Blai's elemental tries saying something, which amounts to: "Hey! Hey you! Ignan! Ignan, yeah?"

Its mind is projected here the same way its body is. It's got a simple, almost childlike mind, a radially symmetrical garden of flames, but she can see most of it.

Energetically speaking, fire as understood by Golarion magic is one thing - one kind of energy, one kind of damage, one class of spell. The elemental is made of that.

That is a completely different language and his elementals don’t understand it, which could just mean they’re from very, very far away. Leareth’s people are taking measurements of some kind on the magical link, seeing if they can get an “angle” and “bearing” and some other math words Brightstar didn’t understand at all, which could let them get an approximate “direction” if it’s the same Elemental Plane of Fire, or could disconfirm that if the results they get are nonsensical enough.

…They look like the same kind of thing to Brightstar, modulo the fascinating differences in summoning technique and that his are cleverer, he picked them out carefully. It could be that it’s convergent and they’re from two completely different Elemental Planes of Fire with almost identical properties but not contiguous? That seems bizarre though.

Less than twenty seconds left.

:What is your home like?: Brightstar asks. :Do you like it there?:

He’s trying to get something off Blai’s elemental with Thoughtsensing, that he can bounce to his allies and see what they make of it.

It's hot! And bright! It's mostly purple! There are bigger elementals there! And ifrits!

Bounce to his elementals, do they recognize -

Jisa knows this one!!! King Valdemar as in the founder of Valdemar is supposed to have summoned one once to fight some bloodpath mages threatening the newly founded city! It’s admittedly one of the many “King Valdemar did blah” stories that are at this point very hard to confirm, but she’s pretty sure that ifrit exist in their Elemental Plane of Fire and are at least sometimes summonable and just, like, probably you shouldn’t, unless you’re literally King Valdemar, because they’re a lot more powerful than you and you as a squishy human probably can’t offer them anything they want.

If they’re very powerful and especially if they’re long-lived they might travel further and maybe Brightstar could— there are probably safer ways.

:I am grateful for your help: he tells the little elemental. It feels so rude not to be able to offer it anything!!! :I may wish to build a spell-structure in the Elemental Plane of Fire nearer where you are from. It will not be dangerous and I will tread lightly. Will you tell your fellows not to be alarmed if they see this?:

If it reacts like this is the worst idea in the world then that would of course be good to know too.

Dunno dunno, thinks the elemental. It is not in charge of anything.

That’s much better than getting freaked out about the concept! Brightstar will take it as generally encouraging. 

He expresses some more gratitude until the summons ends, because it still feels very weird not to be able to offer it a gift.