Also Brightstar's going to come back at some point to get Protection from Energy cast on him but that shouldn't take long. 

Blai drinks. It is not that hard to do it because he did on several memorable occasions try the alternative. He casts various spells when prompted.

(Seldan is definitely in favor of not finding out whether waking up really dehydrated will give his Herald flashbacks to horrifying thought experiment Asmodean seminary even if it's not, strictly speaking, a result of not having access to water.) 

She'll have him use one of his channels now, because normally he would pick them up a bit after midnight when Vanyel's channels were out but he will hopefully, instead, be ASLEEP at midnight. He and Seldan can hang on for eight candlemarks on a single Blai-channel, and Van has one left and the Healers covering overnight have been instructed to stretch it as late as possible. 

Shavri does at one point shake Vanyel awake and get Blai to cast Guidance on him and instruct Vanyel very firmly to cast Remove Sickness on Stef, who in the last candlemark has started throwing up substantially more than they're putting into him. She thinks he might have an infection. It's okay, they just need to get him through the night and an extremely well-rested Blai can prepare a Remove Disease.

The Nap Stack room is not very crowded; they're not trying to fit the Companions this time. (Several Heralds opt out on this basis, but most are willing to sleep in a bunk bed that they don't have to share with anyone else.) The lack of crowding means that Shavri can painblock the whole time; basically everyone senior enough to have painblocking really solidly down was prioritized in the first Nap Stack, and thus didn't get the one three days ago and are in the current one, but Shavri has recently discovered the capability to painblock two people at once if they happen to be soulbonded to each other. It's very convenient. She'll sleep...later. 

Blai is not really with it enough to be tracking whether this is wise of her. He casts. The pillow vanishes. He rolls over a little bit and goes to sleep.

Good, because it's absolutely not Blai's job to be tracking that, and it is Shavri's job to make absolute sure that he and Seldan are as comfortable as possible and not going to be woken up prematurely by something hurting. 

In any case Gemma is in this Nap Stack, since she was in the first and missed the second, and isn't actually sleep deprived enough to sleep more than three and a half candlemarks. She wakes up feeling like she's been on holiday for a month. She hangs out in rapport with Shavri for five minutes until she gets the hang of the trick for painblocking both of them at once and then she can take over. Shavri should sleep. 

....She's going to check on Stef first. But after that, sure. 

Zzzzzzzzz. 

...Seldan is going to wake up spontaneously before Blai, just because there is, in fact, a limit to how much sleep a Groveborn Companion can need even when they're slowly dying and Seldan is now glutted on sleep. He doesn't feel good, exactly, but he sure does feel awake. 

It's...four candlemarks in? Sixteen hours of sleep. He feels like Blai could use more.

Seldan holds very still and keeps his mind calm and quiet; he imagines being the surface of a placid lake, sun-warmed water at the height of summer, for Blai to float in. ...Did he live near a lake or something when he was human, he has no idea where that sense-memory came from, it's surprisingly vivid for something that happened six hundred years ago in a completely different body...

He grew up near Lake Sorrow. He never swam or touched a boat, because when he was a child he allowed what he was anxious about to affect what things he did at all.

Awww. What a normal, not-a-horrifying-thought-experiment memory to brush past. 

Seldan spends the rest of the time that Blai is asleep while he isn't aimlessly thinking about...well, mostly poking at the thought of writing a treatise someday that tries to define what people mean by "conscience". It's a word that would be useful to factor out into all of its constituent pieces and he doesn't think he ever did, when he was human. Blai claims not to have a conscience but Seldan is pretty sure this is incorrect and Blai has plenty of the normal pieces, just - not connected up in some of the ways that some definitions of the term would consider central, like "being unwilling to do something because it feels wrong and bad to him."

But that's not the only piece and, honestly, it's kind of an inconvenient way to have a conscience in many situations? If Shavri had that kind of conscience she might have had it about euthanizing Nayoki, and...Seldan's intuition is that it's good and correct for a Healer to hesitate to stop a patient's heart, and feel all sorts of uncomfortable gross feelings about it, just - in fact sometimes you don't want the feelings to get in the way and affect the things you do, except - indirectly, upstream, in the questions you ask yourself.

Seldan is pretty sure he's ever been deeply uncomfortable with something and then, separately, decided against doing it, but - it wasn't because it was uncomfortable, it was because he laid out the details of the situation in front of him and considered all the possible outcomes in order of most-to-least-likely if he did this, and all the possible outcomes if he did that, and put some made-up numbers on it to check that his reasoning was clear enough to do math on, even though quite a lot of decisions in the real world have less clear and measurable numbers on them than, say, Joshel's job has...

...he lost track of where he was going with that. Anyway. Blai has Law feelings and those absolutely determine what he does and that's a fascinating way for someone to have a conscience set up! It makes perfect sense, Asmodeus is Lawful Evil, Law was allowed in Cheliax, having intuitions about it wasn't against Blai's childhood religion. It's just interesting! Blai hasn't had nearly as much opportunity to...formalize his inchoate intuitions about the probably-not-entirely-coherent cluster of things that gets referred to as 'Good', he just has the little observations, things like 'it does seem bad that Leareth is suffering even if it has no causal impact on the future' and 'wow, it's not great how little the Valdemargod seems to care about murder as long as it's Vkandis murdering His own people all the way over there'. 

There are probably going to be such fascinating ethics debates at the Chelish Constitutional Convention. People will have opinions! A lot of them will be wrong but Seldan loves wrong opinions more than right ones, honestly, it's such a delightful way to make himself uncomfortable and then poke that until interesting new framings on the situation fall out. 

Iomedae, I hope we make it to the convention, he thinks vaguely. I know You probably can't do anything more to make that happen, but I'm really sure we would be a valuable addition. 

Blai would say that he can identify what things are Good in about the same way as he can identify what things are plants, and also that much of his discernment is from having been rigorously trained in knowing what things are Evil. But he has spent more time, much more, on thinking about Law; he used to write a lot of letters to other philosophically inclined sorts of people posted to the Worldwound (and equally bored with it) about the subject when he had downtime.

That is such a fascinating angle on it. "Rigorously trained in knowing what kinds of things are Evil", that is.

...Seldan could write a treatise! He could write an entire treatise that approaches the classification of 'Good' and 'Evil' actions and traits and such like the classification of plants, and meticulously avoids at any point making a claim about whether it's desirable or preferred to aim for the things in the Good cluster. People would get so mad about it! He could drop it in a room of barely literate thirteen-year-old boys whose Companions had plucked them out of rural Valdemar, that's got to still be a thing, and incredible debates would fall out and they would perhaps be convinced that book-lessons weren't always boring after all. 

Seldan cannot actually do it, of course, because they're slowly dying and this current run of mental energy is at best going to last a few candlemarks, but it would be so funny. 

Blai is having a dream about trudging through the snow. The snow keeps getting deeper and deeper as he progresses and when he runs out of Snow Shapes he has to claw it apart in front of him with his bare hands and sometimes he has an Endure or gloves while he's doing that and sometimes he does not. Eventually the snow will be too much deeper than he is tall, deeper than he can reach even by jumping, and he will have to tunnel through it, and in the dream he doesn't have Light prepared.

...There's supposed to be a way of nudging your Herald's dreams without actually waking them but Seldan is not actually sure how it works, he's pretty sure that Mindspeaking Blai will just wake him up and then no more Nap Stack. He will...hmm, he'll try to project the sense that behind dream-Blai is a Companion-shape radiating Companion body-heat walking with him, that seems like it shouldn't be so weird and out-of-place that Blai wakes himself up reacting to it, and he starts with it very faintly and only ramps it up slowly, so he can stop if it seems to be anti-helping. 

Seldan isn't a mage in real life and so dream-Seldan isn't going to have a mage-light either, but Groveborn Companions can safely gallop on uneven ground on a moonless night, no one is sure how and Seldan himself isn't sure what extra senses he has to make that possible, maybe it's just very short-range Foresight. Anyway, a lightless snow-tunnel doesn't bother him. 

The dream was only mildly unpleasant before, really, but throwing in a dream-Seldan does help.

Being a Companion is so cool.

Wow it seems like Blai really is going to sleep the entire duration of the spell. Hopefully he'll benefit from it and they can have a little while of both being slightly clearheaded at the same time. (Seldan still feels pretty gross, but resting his stomach for a good few candlemarks while getting two night' worth of recovery at once against over a few candlemarks of deterioration has, actually, helped a bit with the nausea.) 

...Seldan should try to come up with solitaire chess rules that he thinks he can keep track of later when he's stupid again. He will work on that diligently until Blai wakes up. 

Blai sleeps for the whole duration of the Nap Stack, and then he wakes up. He's tempted to sit up but decides that's probably a bad idea. Is there tea in reach?

Gemma is right there and tea can be in reach within thirty seconds, along with a trainee to help prop him up. 

Good morning Blai! Seldan has been awake for candlemarks and he’s outlined a treatise in his head on what it means to “have a conscience” and also one based on Blai’s Asmodean background that would bait earnest but unschooled young Herald-trainees into engaging with book-learning (by making everyone very upset) and also he made up a set of rules for chess solitaire! 

Chess solitaire! Considering that if they are very lucky they will be on Golarion for the foreseeable future maybe Chelish commoners are the better audience for would-be treatises in case people spot the holy symbol and demand ethics advice. ...does Seldan just read Chelish now in his own right or would he be piggybacking entirely on Blai for that.

Seldan does not just get to read Chelish because Blai does, tragically, though a reread of Iomedae’s holy book through Blai’s eyes with that goal in mind would get him a lot of the way. 

…Seldan is not sure he could produce a treatise for an audience of Chelish people from a cold start. It’s an unforgiving medium compared to, say, teaching a class, you can’t course-correct midway, you have to understand from the beginning what your audience does and doesn’t know and which claims will be trivially obvious to them versus needing a whole chapter to defend. He could do lectures for Chelish commoners - well, Mindspeech lectures, he supposes, since he’s a horse now - would he be allowed to mindread them a bit to tailor his arguments in real time or is that frowned upon by the church of Iomedae - it’s just that Chelish people are really quite hard to read from their faces alone, compared to earnest but barely literate Herald-trainees…

Blai does not know if the Church has a policy on that and would want to ask. It might be fraught even if it's normally fine though, anyone in a remotely sensitive position got Detect Thoughts'd sometimes or was at least aware it was a possibility.

…Hmm, yes, that would produce certain associations, wouldn’t it.

Once Blai has had some tea, Gemma had better arrange to get them back to their room. It’s still about ninety minutes before dawn - two and a half candlemarks until Blai has new spells - but he has a second channel left, right? It sounded to her like it might be needed sooner rather than later.