Jisa is much less reluctant than Brightstar to question other traditions. What if they’re dumb! 

:So what’s in it for the elemental, when you summon it?: she asks Blai brightly when the spell ends. :Here we give them a gift but yours didn’t have any way to accept mage-energy and take it home.:

:I'm not sure. I have heard some guesses to the effect that there are places in the planes from which summonses come where summonses work, and others where they don't, so they can choose where to be at any given moment:

:Oh, that's an interesting way to do it, I guess you'd mostly get the really adventurous ones...: Blai does not look super up for conversation, does he. 

Also if they're all done with him Shavri would like her patient BACK now please. Brightstar can come by later to get his shield cast - or tomorrow ten minutes before dawn, if that's a more useful time for it - but should Mindspeak her first and not just barge right in, please. Oh good there's the mage for the Gate. 

Blai was behind Work Room shields for ALMOST AN ENTIRE MINUTE and Seldan didn't like this at all! ...Did it seem to go well and be helpful at all? 

Maybe. They had some conversation with the elemental. It's gone home now. They didn't look like they had discovered something completely research-ruining.

Aaaaand now seems like an excellent time to start rotating through the Remove Sicknesses! Blai can go first. Seldan gets a whole hour this time! Van already used his ten-minute one on himself literally the moment he finished his hour of prayer, because it was the only thing Shavri could think of to motivate him to stay awake for the hour. At some point it's going to stop being worth it - well, at some point he's going to stop being capable of casting and at this rate it might be tomorrow and at that point she might as well let him sleep if he gets his channels either way. Unless it would upset Shelyn? She should probably check that, actually. 

:Blai, would it bother Shelyn if we don't try to wake Vanyel to pray in the mornings once he's too weak for the gestures to cast them anyway?: 

:I'm not an expert in what bothers Her. It makes sense to me and won't affect his channels if it doesn't make Her renounce him altogether, which would surprise me if it happened. Dawn itself should wake him and if he goes back to sleep rather than pray I should think this would be between him and Her:

:Mm. As long as he can cast spells at all it seems worth it if he needs some handholding to stay focused for a candlemark, he can handle casting Virtue on himself and Stef to cover half a candlemark if someone's cueing him and I think he's using Guidance a lot to - help him cope. And it's motivating that he can use the short Remove Sickness as soon as he's done, now that we're not trying to save all the little ones to stack for Seldan. But I'll leave it up to him once he - once he's getting spells he can't use anyway.: 

Here's his extra-nutritious extra-runny porridge. Shavri isn't sure at this point how much real nutrition any of the patients are getting from the food, but eating something has still got to be better than eating nothing. 

Seldan is (drowsily) on alert for any sign that today is the day that feeding himself is too tiring for Blai and they should get someone to help him. 

He might slop a little down his chin but he can pick up the bowl, with both hands, and drink it, once he's cast his Remove Sickness on himself.

He gets his almost-exactly-an-hour nausea-free and as many porridge refills as he can manage and then exactly fifteen minutes of a somewhat distracted Shavri abusing the throwing-up-is-banned Healing trick and trying to convince his stomach that food should keep going further down, before she has to rotate off to give Gemma a break on painblocking for Seldan. 

Who is agonizingly bored of only eating soft grain mash. It doesn't have any satisfying texture to it! He would immediately regret the interesting texture as soon as the painblocking stopped but that doesn't prevent him from missing it. Does Blai want distraction chess or is that too much today. ...Mmmrgg it might be too much for Seldan unless they do the tiny chess variant, he can probably still keep track of the mental board for tiny chess. 

Maybe there's some kind of... chess solitaire... that they could collaborate on... but he doesn't think his book had any that he could dredge up the rules for.

Maybe it will somehow turn out that the Heralds all need a Nap Stack again once it's been another...two days??...and it'll be the best use of a third circle spell and Seldan might get an entire six candlemarks of being able to think properly and he can come up with some rules for solitaire chess. He used to love coming up with rules for games, he thinks, he - doesn't actually remember what for but it's not a bad way to teach fourteen-year-old boys to ever think about strategy. 

Until then, maybe just being in rapport and flopping? 

The rest of the day passes. Vanyel is cranky about being shaken awake every three candlemarks for the channels but it's not like she wouldn't be shaking him awake anyway to drink tea. 

Shavri confirms to Blai that Brightstar has requested his Protection from Energy tomorrow morning right before dawn, so he can use it for something she wants to do. Shavri didn't ask what he wants to do and just told him that during the candlemark after dawn is a particularly inconvenient time for him to show up having exploded himself in the Elemental Plane of Fire and needing an urgent channel. ...When do the new channels come in, actually, if it's right at dawn they'll just get a less effective use of one (because it's before the daily Lesser Restoration) but if it's at the end then Brightstar really cannot explode himself then, they'll have used up everyone's channels getting through the night. How long does Protection from Energy last again. 

As long as a Remove Sickness or until it's used up. Channels should come in at dawn sharp but using one interrupts prayers. ...if Iftel is in a different time zone they may be able to pull something cute with grabbing Joshel through a Gate.

Oh can you do that? Neat!

...Unfortunately Iftel is both east and north and she thinks those differences in time-of-dawn go in opposite directions? And Joshel is only on the Valdemar side of the Iftel border, the difference won't be very much later.

Last she heard Karis was in the very northwestern part of Iftel. (They think it's approximately where the attack originated and they are both in worse shape and might have witnesses to talk to about what they witnessed.) Dawn is going to be later where she is, though, so she might not be praying but she would need to have saved a channel the whole day and night and that's costly to ask of her, and she's not sure if it would still work to ask Karis tonight, as a favor, to go be in the far southeast corner instead where dawn is as early as possible and she might have already finished her morning prayers when Brightstar starts his...whatever it is. But if that would work then she'll look into it. 

...At worst she'll interrupt Vanyel and he gets whatever spells he's already gotten, his spells aren't critical. 

Mmhm.

Ginger tea. Flop.

Flop. 

It's a very long day and a very long night but nobody dies. 

And ten minutes before dawn Shavri wakes Blai. She has Brightstar with her to get his Protection from Energy. Vanyel has been warned that it's possible his prayers will be interrupted by the urgent need for a channel and it's okay if this means he doesn't get all of his spells. 

Blai wearily waves his hand through the air. A wizard would not be able to cast like this - he probably can't do Prestidigitation - but the cleric gestures are broader and more forgiving. "Protection from Energy."

It's so beautiful! 

(Three of Leareth's mages are discreetly hovering to watch the actual casting. They fully agree.) 

Dawn. 

Vanyel is supposed to pray and he's also been told he might get interrupted and that it's okay if he doesn't get spells, which is kind of mixed messages in terms of whether any of this matters literally at all. 

He is having an extremely hard time praying, both the remembering what spells to ask for and the thinking about music and love and nice things like that part, because at this point it's been days of abject misery and things were already very very bad and it's getting to the point that he's kind of constantly having intrusive thoughts about how he could just stop his heart with Healing and then he wouldn't be alive anymore. 

He can't, of course, because Stef, and because he has three times as many channels as Blai for some inexplicable reason and so they need him desperately and dying would be equivalent to killing everyone else with his own hands, and also it wouldn't even work because the Healers would notice right away and Blai would cast Stabilize. It might just actually be impossible to succeed at killing himself when there's a second person in the room who can cast Stabilize and he just - 

Guidance. Stop it, snap out of it. I'm sorry, Shelyn, I don't actually - they need me here - but it's hard and maybe none of this matters and I, I don't know if I can... 

He doesn't have an ending to that sentence because none of the endings are allowed. 

<3