They need a channel from him in about five candlemarks and another in eight and that's all until dawn. 

...Shavri is beginning to realize that she may, perhaps, have made an error in her prioritization at some point. She's not sure at what point, but. 

The math people are working out of Sumpost, so they can get Guidances from Joshel. They're making steady progress and Jisa confirmed to her earlier that they haven't, yet, run into any surprises that would mean they got a measurement wrong and their model of the planar relationships is based on unsound extrapolations and they need another day of Brightstar doing weird Gates. They're going to work through the night - there are enough people to do shifts but also it's sufficiently high-context work that some of them are planning to take stimulants and work for 36 candlemarks straight - and they might, if everything goes perfectly and they don't make any mistakes and have to redo work over, have their model by as early as tomorrow night.

They have some...math things...from Leareth's notes that they can use to break up the routing problem for multiple people to work on; Jisa said that Leareth probably understood this kind of problem well enough and had good enough intuitions to do it on his own, but no one else is Leareth. Shavri asked how long, to solve it their way, and Jisa hemmed and hawwed and eventually said that it might, if everything goes perfectly and no work needs to be taken back to the drawing board, be doable in three days. 

There's a chance she can keep these people alive for four more days. But it's...Shavri wants to say one in ten odds, and it's going to be ugly, and in nine of ten worlds the only thing she's buying them with all of her desperate triage is a more prolonged and awful death. 

She should have asked. Before, when everyone was in their right mind. Nayoki didn't want to hang on even a candlemark longer once it was clear she wouldn't make it to this finish line, and Shavri cannot blame her at all. 

...Stef is probably the least delirious right now that he's ever going to be again. Vanyel, she's almost certain wants to die and knows that thought isn't trustworthy and will just hand the problem back to Shavri, but Stef might have a more specific opinion. 

She wakes him and asks. 

Mrghhhgowayhe'ssleeping– Mrrg. Stef isn't sure he's ever hated anyone's face as much as he hates Shavri's now but he's awake.

....What? That's such a stupid question. Obviously if there's still a chance they can survive until Golarion contact then Stef wants to try for that! Otherwise they're going to miss first contact, even if they get resurrected later it won't be urgent. Leareth is probably higher priority than Stef for resurrection and that's, like, reasonable, but that means Stef won't get to be in the room when Leareth gets resurrected and then he'll have to go off secondhand reports to write the song!! He wants to write the song where everyone is working as fast as they can and they get it just in time and rush everyone through a Gate to save them, that's a way better song and not just because he'll be there and can write it from a first-person perspective. That's so much Bard cred!! If it takes them a week to resurrect him then other Bards will probably write songs about the contact before he can get to it!!!

Shelyn Shelyn look at this how is his lifebonded so incredible and so himself

....Okay. 

Shavri drags herself away to try to get some sleep.

Sleep doesn't come easily. Shavri lies awake in her bed with her lifebonded, Randi's slow even breath tickling her cheek, and she wonders how much longer she can endure this. She's found a lot of unexpected stone in herself, lately, but - 

Okay. Tomorrow matters, tomorrow is - she thinks, she hopes - the last day they might learn that Brightstar needs another day of dangerous Gates to get their data. It's worth keeping them alive for that, tactically, because if Brightstar can't get channels then he's going to have to spread the work out over a much, much longer period and take fewer risks and it could easily stretch past the interval when a Raise Dead will still work. 

After that....

Ten percent odds of keeping her patients alive, if the researchers solve the Gate-routing math on the most optimistic possible timeline. Which never happens. Make it five days and she thinks their chances round to zero. 

She's not sure Who she's praying to, but she tries.

Someone, whoever You are, listen to me, please. If You're planning to pull out a miracle for us, if You're looking out for the math people and giving them the best luck so they get this on the shortest possible timeline, then - I need a hint, okay? I need to know that what I'm doing has a chance of mattering. I don't have the stomach for this otherwise. 

Eventually she sleeps. 

Two channels. Seldan wakes up when they wake Blai for it, but by the second one he's spending a good thirty seconds unsure where he is. ...Also his eyes are in fact no longer focusing well enough to read and he's - there's an important thing - why did it matter whether he can read - there's a thing at dawn. Someone is going to need to tell them what to do at dawn. Seldan manages to Mindspeak this at a Healer before he loses the battle against sleep. 

Dawn. Shavri can very calmly and crisply tell Blai exactly what spells he needs, thirty seconds in advance. Several times if necessary. 

yes sir. it helps that so many of them are all the same and the orisons are just the ones he already has. when did he even prepare those.

Iomedae feels different, at dawn, than Asmodeus does. That's... that's good.

...Yeah that's good. Seldan is very gluey-headed and is taking a while to retrieve context but he's pretty sure he hates Asmodeus' guts. For some reason. Whoever or whatever Asmodeus is. 

Vanyel does wake up at dawn and it's very nice to feel Someone there and he's going to lean toward it as hard as he can, but he has a very high fever at this point and is very dehydrated and does not have the slightest idea where he is or what he's supposed to be doing. Someone tries to Mindspeak him and he can't even manage to resolve it into words. 

Blai gets through his prayers (wordless scrabbling in the general direction of Iomedae, prickling his hand on his gold wire rays, fighting to remember which spells he's supposed to get) for the whole hour, almost drifting off twice and waking up in a panic but never quite slipping away long enough to ruin anything.

One Lesser Restoration each targeted at Endurance. Shavri will instruct Blai to cast the one on himself first and then pick up his hand and put it on each person in turn and instruct him to cast it again.

One Remove Sickness each. Same process. She's not going to try to stretch it later. Blai might not get another Remove Disease, she needs to stare at it longer but if she allocates one Remove Disease per bonded-people-pair then it really needs to be Seldan, he's been brewing an infection in his gut for...days, probably...and he's been skipped on a lot of Lesser Restorations, he absolutely has a raging infection in his blood at this point and for all that he's surprisingly stable but once he starts declining it's going to be fast. And she's going to draw it out as long as possible deciding which of Van and Stef needs it more. Van will get his last Remove Disease at whatever point she tries to wake him for the channel and can't anymore. 

(Shavri has, at this point, crossed some internal threshold, and decided that today is going to be the last day. Blai won't be in any shape to pray for spells in 23 candlemarks with no treatment for his half a dozen brewing infections, and he's physically tough enough that he could probably still hang on for...half a day, maybe longer...even with no Lesser Restoration and no Remove Sickness, but what's the fucking point.) 

Message for Jisa: there will be a channel in this room every three candlemarks for the next eighteen candlemarks and after that she's not making any promises. 

Understood. 

(It's not fair. They're so close. They're doing everything right and it should be enough and - shit. 

Jisa allows herself exactly ten minutes to be upset and then she puts a lot of redirects on herself and gets back to work.) 

Vanyel pulls off his late-morning channel but, by the time it's early afternoon, is not rousable enough even for that. 

...And Seldan isn't actively dying quite yet but there's no point trying to stretch her resources to the finish line anymore.

Shavri shakes Blai awake. Remove Disease on this person he's touching, please, now. Then on this horse. 

"Remove Disease... Remove Disease..."

OH NO it's tomorrow he missed dawn he doesn't even remember dawn happening - Shelyn he's so sorry - 

Vanyel does his channel. He stares miserably at the ceiling. He tries to cast Guidance to snap out of it and fails and considers waking Blai for one and settles on, instead, trying to return to unconsciousness as soon as possible. 

Seldan is back! Eeesh. He has only very vague memories of dawn but...at least...they prayed to the right god...? 

...Blai is not in good shape, is he. And Shavri's face is - 

- that was two Remove Diseases. They're out. They're probably not getting more. 

:How long: he asks Shavri.

:Three or four days.: Bitterly, :- if we get the miracle of a research project finishing on time, have you ever heard of that happening?: Pause. :They might still benefit from channels today and tonight. If Brightstar needs one more set of measurements.: 

Ah. 

Yeah. 

Well, they tried. It sounds like they even have pretty good chances of getting it in time for a Raise to still work on Leareth. He's lost track of how long it's been since the Gentle Repose on Yfandes. 

By late afternoon the team of math researchers is preeeeeeetty sure their basic model is sound. They're not done with the model but they're just about done with the parts that require brilliance, all that's left is double checking and details. 

They'll relocate back to Haven. 

Brightstar stares at all the huge paper sheets of notation for a while and concludes that he still cannot read math.

:Make it a picture: he tells the lead researcher. 

Like, with an illusion? They....can do some simplified toy views that way but it's a high-dimensional space, you can't solve high-dimensional math problems visually, if anything it's just a way to end up trying to use intuitions for normal three-dimensional space that don't actually hold and confuse yourself. 

Brightstar doesn't speak math notation though. 

Jisa thinks they should try to give Brightstar what he's asking for even if it's hard and they think it's a stupid way to approach the problem and won't work.