…He’s keeping the same orisons and he wants Remove Sickness and...the other one...he still has the other one, Shelyn should perhaps be aware that he has no idea what the other one is for and isn't going to try to cast it at random to find out, but he can keep having it and not-casting it. It's going to be so upsetting if he can't even cast Remove Sickness because his hands don't work, it kind of feels like his hands might not work, but he can at least try...

<3 <3

Shavri spent the night— well, mostly asleep, actually, and not even a room over, Gemma pointed out that there were unlikely to be surprises at this point and they can be nearly certain tonight is not when anyone will start dying. 

They’ve done the spells Brightstar needs. He did say hopefully, as he was leaving this morning, that maybe they could do a different plane elemental summoning today, but in a sort of wheedling 'well, if there happens to be space since he has the extra spell...' way that did not leave Shavri feeling like he has a solid plan to make the maximum possible use out of whatever information it gives him. 

She wishes if she knew whether there were other useful spells at third circle. It's too early for anyone to benefit from a Nap Stack, though she really does want to try to squeeze it in tomorrow - even if it's only Blai and Seldan who can benefit, they can incidentally get the rest of the Senior Circle too - unless both Van and Stef both manage to get pneumonia by then and won't make it another day without a Remove Disease each. The air-cleaning precautions won't protect them from everything that lives normally-harmlessly in their own mouths, and that's often what gets the elderly and infirm in the end, even if they meticulously avoid colds and flus, they're too weak to cough and keep their chest clear and something migrates down and moves into their lungs. Continuous monitoring by a Healer to burn out incipient infections before they get too deeply-rooted, but it helps a lot when the patient’s body retains any natural defenses. Randi did, until nearly the end, or a pneumonia would have taken him out years ago. Her patients are already worse off than that and it’s only going to keep getting worse.

But a Remove Disease doesn’t work by boosting the native defenses, it just…removes the disease. No one in fact has an infection yet, won’t help with an illness that someone is predictably going to come down with tomorrow.

She ends up asking Blai to prepare six Lesser Restorations, all of his second circle and both of his third circle spots. They can double them up on Van and Stef, try to hit Strength as well as Endurance. It won’t save them from an infection in the gut but at least they’ll have the strength to cough properly and a better chance of toughing out a night with pneumonia while they wait for a Remove Disease spot. She leaves Blai an opening to mention if there are other third circle spells for healing - other than Remove Disease which they don't actually need yet - but she’s happy with the plan.

Remove Disease and Remove Blindness/Deafness which they already know about are the third circle healing gamechangers. He'll prep Lesser Restoration a lot. While lying down. This is WEIRD lying down while he prays. WEIRDDDDD.

It's weird for Seldan too! You wouldn't think that he would have as many associations with the correct way to pray, given how new it is, but apparently a week was long enough to get very used to a certain way.

He'll be there in rapport the whole time, offering his own fragmentary prayers of information that might be of interest to Iomedae. 

Brightstar does not explode himself in the Elemental Plane of Fire!

Leareth's mages want to spend half a candlemark running tests on the Protection from Energy shield - not ones that will use up the spell, just trying to get a sense of what it's doing. It's actually very different from the standard Velgarth shielding you would choose if you expected to be blasted with fire! They can't replicate it exactly but the fundamental concept doesn't seem to rely on it being specifically a divine spell provided by a god. 

Then Brightstar tries to open what more or less amounts to a one-sided Gate directly to the Elemental Plane of Fire (from a very very well-shielded Work Room) and drop a test scry-focus artifact through. It won't survive there, and in any case it's the 'closest' spot he can reach and not attempting to get it to where Blai's summons came from, but how long it remains scryable and what fails first will apparently be helpful to Leareth's mages. 

Jisa and several of the mages carry him over to the House of Healing. He's pretty badly burned - the problem wasn't the time needed to fling a mage-artifact, it was that it turns out to be pretty hard to close a Gate to the Elemental Plane of Fire - but Shavri ducks out into the hall to glance at him and declares that he's not going to die in the next twenty minutes and he can wait until everyone is done praying and the patients have had their Lesser Restorations in order to benefit fully from Van's first channel of the day. ...She will somewhat grudgingly agree that he can have painblocking for the wait. 

Blai almost falls asleep again as soon as he feels Iomedae's presence back off at the end of the hour. Is there... a thing he needs to be awake for... does he need to cast some of these right away...

Yes Shavri is right there to nudge him about casting Lesser Restorations. Two each on Van and Stef, please, targeted to Endurance as usual and then Strength, and the usual one each for himself and Seldan, and then Vanyel can channel for everyone. "Everyone" includes Brightstar and also three random House of Healing patients who came in with broken bones and have been carefully checked over and confirmed not to be ill with anything contagious. It shouldn't be that high a risk, given the mage in the corner continuously circulating the room's air through a bizarre hoop-shaped artifact that Leareth's organization apparently possessed and murdering anything alive in it. But Shavri is inclined to be cautious. 

If that gets Blai feeling perky enough to want to use his Remove Sickness right away and eat something, that's great, but if he's still sleepy then Shavri will let him nap for a candlemark or two first. 

He's up, he's up. Lesser Restorations six in a row. That does feel a little better. He might as well eat now if there's a bowl of porridge ready.

Vanyel is capable of rolling over in bed again! It turns out that it's possible to feel a really shocking amount of gratitude for the small things, in a situation like this. He's still shaky and clumsy and having trouble doing anything precise with his fingers, but the spell gestures at at least somewhat forgiving of shakiness and it's easier to compensate for it by focusing really hard on precision when it's not already taking every ounce of willpower he can muster just to lift his hand a few inches off the bedspread. 

Bowl of porridge! Starting tomorrow they may have to go to clear liquids only, the patients' guts are dying and the channels are patching it just barely enough to keep them from being one giant open wound on the inside but they're not, really, enough to keep the tissue able to digest, and they're going to want to start minimizing how much is in there before it gets to the point that it's feeding the gut bacteria that will eventually kill her patients more than the patients themselves. But for today she thinks there's still more good than harm in a properly nutritious meal. 

She doesn't need anything from them after that, not until Vanyel runs out of channels sometime around midnight. Blai can cast Virtue on himself and Seldan if he wants, if there are periods when he feels able to stay awake for a few minutes at a stretch to give the Healers a break, but they're not relying on it, and he needs to be up for ten minutes or so of keeping it up continuously before it's even worth the Healer taking a break, given how much effort it takes to get a stable Healing-link up in the first place versus maintaining the existing one. 

Brightstar shows up twice more for channels. They're testing the prototype shield-artifacts and a prototype miniature Gate-threshold with a set-spell that makes it easier to shut it down when he's done. Brightstar is coming in with third-degree burns on most of his body but he's not, actually, being reckless enough that he's in any real danger of dying before Jisa can haul him back into the House of Healing, and Jisa is making sure that he's timing it for around when Vanyel is due to channel anyway. 

Seldan is only slightly following at this point but it sounds like one really can make faster progress at dangerous research, if anything that definitely won't kill you inside of five minutes is more or less safe. He doesn't know their current time estimate on a successful Gate. Maybe they'll be in time. 

If Brightstar weren't taken Blai would expect him to wind up belonging to Nethys any minute.

Seldan is kind of getting the feeling that Brightstar may be, uh, using the research as an opportunity for self-harm because he feels really guilty about his role in getting Leareth and Yfandes and a bunch of kyree and a whole lot of other people killed? But it is, actually, really important, and if he succeeds then maybe he'll be able to tell himself that he did his penance and fixed it and can move on? Anyway Brightstar's emotional wellbeing isn't really his problem. Hopefully they've got his sister giving him lots of hugs in between the parts where he inflicts horrible burns on himself. 

....Shavri is detailing a second Healer per person to park themselves in place and focus 100% of their attention on finding and murdering the heck out of anything that could even start to become an infection. It takes pretty senior Healers for it, because they need the Sight-training to block out the patient's life-force to focus on the much smaller and dimmer life-forces of things growing on them, but if you can get to them when they're only growing on a mucus membrane and no deeper, it's feasible to murder them without touching the patient's life-force at all and then it doesn't risk running into their stamina-for-being-Healed problem.

It should be enough to hold off pneumonia and infections that originate in the skin. Which won't save them forever but it should buy them another day before Remove Disease is an absolute necessity. 

(It's a lot of senior-Healer time, but all six of the people she's pulling in for it were in the first Nap Stack in Haven, which means they missed the most recent one and can be included in the one tomorrow. She's got Lady Treesa working on another pillow, though at this point they've run through even Lady Treesa's copious backstock of unnecessarily fancy fripperies to sew onto pillows and had to get Leareth's organization on procuring more from Seejay. Honestly, Leareth's organization probably has someone better at making unnecessarily fancy pillows, too, but they're not in that much of a rush and it makes Lady Treesa so very happy that there's a way for her to contribute. Shavri probably needs to let Vanyel's mother in to see him at least once if it looks like they're...not going to make it...but she knows that Vanyel doesn't actually particularly want his parents hovering and fussing at his bedside, and for now Shavri is very pleased to have a way for Lady Treesa to help her son from somewhere else.) 

She made Vanyel a gorgeously beaded bird that won't fall apart if he touches it wrong! She did not particularly follow the explanation of why this would help him do magic when he's never needed it before, apparently there was a god involved? Somehow? But it doesn't matter. Her son has rather austere tastes, she thinks, but she made it so he would approve. 

Jisa comes by late that night to talk to Shavri about their research. 

They've made genuine progress! They know, approximately, what 'bearing' Golarion is on, relative to the Void and the Elemental Plane of Fire - or rather, it's a complicated higher dimensional math problem that Jisa doesn't know enough math to understand, but the mage told her to imagine it like how she would target a blind Gate off a bearing. But it's really, really far away, and they're going to need to do something much cleverer to cut the distance to something even a team of mages off a powered permanent Gate-terminus can handle.

...And she's telling Shavri this because there are a couple of different ways that Blai's higher-circle spells could really, really help. One would be getting a variant casting of Protection from Energy against a different kind of energy, if there's one that would help Brightstar survive brief direct exposure to the Elemental Plane of Water or the Elemental Plane of Air. Another would be getting a second summoned elemental from a different plane. 

....She'll see if Blai-and-Seldan are coherent enough at their next mandatory tea-consuming wakeup and if so she'll ask about it and let Jisa know.

A candlemark or so later she's nudging them awake. :Blai. Hey. Need you to wake up for a minute. Here's some tea.: She's gotten them a cup with a sort of spout, so it's a little easier to hold without spilling. :...Jisa asked me what other forms of energy you can cast a Protection from Energy for, and whether any would help with surviving the Elemental Plane of Air or of Water. If not they want another summon. She specifically asked me if there's a third circle summoning that either gets a smarter elemental or lasts longer. We could still spare a third circle slot for it tomorrow, I think, after that we're going to need both slots for Remove Disease.: 

Tea. Sip sip. :The summon spells will all last the same amount of time and going from II to III is not enough to get a bigger smarter elemental. It is enough to get a lantern archon but those are for all that they are angels not rumored to be very clever either - and I'd worry that it has intervention budget effects on Heaven. For a plane like Air or Water you'd want Planar Adaptation, fourth circle, because Protection from Energy relies on the damage being from a specific type of energy, though if he happens to know that the danger is cold or electrical specifically, I can do that:

:...I assume this can't possibly work but just to check, you can't in fact use a summons to summon something from the material plane to a different part of the material plane that's very far away?: This is probably an incredibly stupid question for reasons that would be obvious if Shavri were a mage, but the only cost to asking it is three more seconds of bothering Blai and looking like an idiot. 

:No:

:I'll talk to Jisa before you need to prepare spells. - I'll tell you the full list at the time: in fact, she's going to WRITE IT DOWN in GIANT VALDEMARAN TEXT in Seldan's line of sight, it won't help Blai who can't read Valdemaran script but Seldan is in rapport and can probably, like, keep it in their working memory without it counting as interrupting Blai's prayers, :but I'd like to fit in a Nap Stack. We have a pillow and tomorrow it'll have been a week for you and Seldan, plus everyone else who was in the first one. Unless I'm missing another reason why it won't work or it's a terrible idea.: 

....Seldan would not swear to tomorrow being exactly a full week after the first Gate but presumably Shavri is more capable of reading a calendar. It's in fact a week, as in seven days, weeks are the same length in Velgarth and Golarion? Does the time of day matter, he can't remember if the last Nap Stack was cast first thing or later than that. 

There can't be a seven day period in which you get a stacked nap twice. Blai is... not actually sure if time of day matters. Usually pillows are a limiting factor. Anyone important enough to be chewing through expensive pillows like that has a Ring of Sustenance.