Aziza (and her brother, who hasn't said a word but is grouchily glaring at any male who gets within arm's reach of her) follows the crowd into the designated room. "Hi Songbird!" she chirps at Vanyel. "Vanyel, right? I'm Aziza."

Vanyel can take a hint and will keep a polite distance. He's walking with careful deliberation - the mystery problem-fixing spell helped but he's still not feeling fully normal, maybe at this point it's just the being bedridden for over a week. 

:Yes. This is Yfandes, my Companion, and this is Bard Stefen, my lifebonded.: It occurs to him a fraction of a second later that he has no idea if they're from somewhere like Rethwellan where being shaych is more than just 'a bit frowned up', but then again he's been wrapped around Stef since yesterday, they can't have failed to notice. He smiles again to cover the slight pause. :Fortunately he's not a Mindspeaker so he can't bother you about the ballad he's wring unless someone translates for him.: 

Vanyel included Stef in this. Stef sticks his tongue out.

"Ooooh, a ballad!" she grins, clasping her hands. "I'm not a music specialist but I love a good ballad."

Vanyel is also a fan of ballads in general but much less so when they're about his actual life. They always end up covering the horrible parts in loving detail.

"Ask her what she went off with Shavri for earlier," Stef says lightly to Vanyel. 

"What? Oh." Vanyel was distracted because they just passed Leareth. He nods to Vanyel in a way that looks from the outside like his usual unruffled self, but Vanyel doesn't at all believe it. 

:Stef wants to know what you were doing with Shavri early in the morning today. ...He just wants to know if it's something juicy for the song, you don't have to say if you'd rather he not do that.: 

"Oh, nothing like that, I just thought she looked run down and might want a minute talking to somebody in a less crowded room. - is that Leareth? I meant to ask him how he was doing too."

You can't just ask Leareth how he's doing, that's not how anything works

:That's Leareth: Vanyel confirms. :...He had the worst time after being Raised but he got a whole lot of healing, though he should really get at least a few more Restorations.: Shrug. 

She whistles a little through her teeth (and means "spendy!") but just says, "Any tips on approaching? He's one of the telepaths, right?"

(Vanyel wouldn't have caught the meaning of the whistle at all if they were just speaking normally. Since he's currently trying to skim just enough of her surface thoughts to get the meaning of what she's saying, he does get a hint of it, and wonders vaguely if there's anyone who would spend an entire big diamond on bringing someone BACK FROM THE DEAD and then decide not to spend a fraction of its value in diamond dust and to just leave them vaguely messed up and unwell forever instead?) 

...He's known Leareth for a very long time and he feels like he definitely should have advice and yet. What can he possibly - oh, right, it would help an awful lot to know what the Songbird already knows about Leareth. Vanyel was mostly not tracking much at all until quite recently and is very unclear on what Joshel communicated to the Abadaran cleric he recruited first - Raad, he thinks? - and then which parts of that were conveyed to the lower-circle clerics who tagged along. 

:He's a complicated person: he sends, slowly. :Er, what have you been told about him?:

It's not like Vanyel has any information on Leareth that one, Leareth wasn't willing to tell him openly when they were ostensibly enemies, and two, that has been debated up and down and sideways by the entire Senior Circle. It's not private. And it's probably stupid to feel protective of Leareth. But he knows almost nothing about this person other than 'agreed to cross an experimental interworld Gate on no notice to help people in desperate need who she knows nothing about' which...honestly says a lot about someone even if they’re being paid well for it…and that she’s chosen by the same god as him. And Shelyn is lovely! But Leareth doesn’t feel very trusting toward gods and Vanyel is kind of worried that Leareth will be uncomfortable about Van working for one now. From Leareth's point of view it won't by itself be a recommendation for Aziza. 

"He's an archmage - your kind, not a wizard, but still - and he had a plot to invade here and kill ten million people but we don't think he's going to do that now."

Those are indeed some key facts about Leareth! 

:He didn't want to: Vanyel says, even though he's realizing it sounds kind of absurd to state that someone had a plan to invade a kingdom and murder ten million people and then claim in their defense that they didn't want to. :He really wanted there to be another way. I couldn't remotely offer him a - a different solution to the problem he wanted to fix, the thing where our world's gods seemed to hate change, especially the kind that makes kingdoms wealthier and fewer babies die - and he did convince me it was a problem, and one that - shouldn't be inevitable, that things could look different - but that he'd exhausted all the...normal things, to try...:

Shrug. :He dropped everything when he learned Blai was really from another world. He wanted to find allies, not enemies. But he's been working alone for two thousand years and he's been murdered by our world's gods over and over and he's - the sort of person who could keep going at all with that life. He's not very - trusting. Especially not of gods, and - you work for one.: 

"That's true. I guess I could send him my brother but my brother is busy expressing his love for me by being a big grouch."

Yeah Vanyel cannot see how that would possibly help with anything. 

They've reached the room. It does feel less like a sickroom, which is nice, though a little in tension with how Vanyel feels a lot more like a patient after that walk.

:...Why did you decide you wanted to talk to him?: he asks Aziza. 

"Well, Shavri said he seemed almost Chelish in how he acts sometimes? And Chelish people aren't like that because of how okay they are."

Shavri said - what - it’s such a bizarre and baffling claim to make about Leareth that Vanyel spends a moment just sort of boggling stupidly at it. Why would Shavri even - is it just that he's Lawful Evil, that seems really unfair actually - 

:...I wouldn't have put it that way? I didn't have the impression that, er, making a solemn vow to save everyone and fix everything and then personally declaring war on the gods of an entire planet is a very Chelish thing to do?: 

"- well in that case I'm really curious how it all squares!"

To Vanyel the entire way that Leareth is feels perfectly coherent and, like, exactly the way you would expect someone to be if they were the sort of person who was capable of deciding to make themselves immortal to fix an entire world, and then executing on that. The habits Blai has that seem the most related to his background, and are - not the habits of a person who's okay - seem completely incompatible with Leareth having done all of the things he has demonstrably done! Vanyel could never! He wouldn't be okay enough to keep going for two thousand years, but ergo, Leareth must be way more okay than him

Leareth has now caught up, and is very carefully and with great concentration and deliberation trying to sit down in a way such that he'll actually be able to get up again unaided. The problem isn't mostly that he's weak - Velgarth Healing is slow, Leareth has survived serious injuries before even just in this body and spent a month recovering, he's been more deconditioned than this before and knows how to be careful. The problem is half that unless he's actively paying attention his limbs start doing things that were not the things he intended to do. The other half is that he's inexplicably failing to...something...that would compensate for it? Leareth isn't even sure what, he just keeps - trying - and there's a mental motion that should go somewhere and instead just sort of stumbles, and then he's still having the problem and also off-balance and upset. 

It's very unreasonable to be upset! His people, the Heralds, and apparently Brightstar k'Treva managed to ally with each other and cooperate, were able to solve the Gate-routing problem in substantially less time than he had expected to need, and have successfully made an alliance with the other world and leveraged it to bring Leareth back to life. There are all sorts of implications to that alliance and Leareth clearly needs to be catching up. Mage-commander Ovada is there for some reason and the obvious reason is that he's been in interim command for eleven days and would like to give Leareth his report as soon as possible. Vanyel doesn't seem entirely healed. There's some sort of constraint-problem with healing and that shouldn't be hard to think about, he has so much practice with the allocation of scarce resources to a problem limiting people's ability to themselves be resources.

Leareth really wants to be alone somewhere with a lot of paper to slowly lay it all out where he can see it and break down what he most urgently needs to know. And at the same time, actually picturing being alone somewhere shielded brings back the awful overwhelming helpless resignation of realizing that he's dying (and without his contingency in place, the default absent someone else rescuing him is that he's dead forever), realizing that no one was going to find him - 

He keeps trying to wrestle his mind back to the topic at hand, and it keeps taking way longer than it should to remember that he should do that, and then separately to remember that he even can do that deliberately. 

(Leareth is externally very controlled. That isn't taking deliberate effort. On an instinctive level he isn't at all feeling safe here, and when he doesn't feel safe in a place the default is not showing weakness. ...At one point some sort of - observation? of something? - related to that thought catches, and he tries to pause it and turn it over to examine it, a trivial mental motion that he probably does thousands of times if not hundreds of thousands of times in a single day, and it - stumbles -) 

Great, everyone is in a room now! And it's been a good opportunity to observe closely who had trouble with the walk over. (Gemma wouldn't have chosen that assessment method if anyone were in danger, but she's quite sure that at this point everyone is stable.) 

Stef doesn't look too badly off! He moaned about being tired on the way over but he's always been a bit inclined to be melodramatic about his illnesses. 

Ovada follows them into the room with his folder of notes. He's still not sure if he should? Interrupt? To ask Leareth and Nayoki if they want their report? It seems like perhaps not an ideal time for it but he also doesn't feel like he can just leave and get back to work without having briefed them? 

Oh right and Shavri had suggested they bring in Jisa and then belatedly declared she needed to sign off and dumped the entire problem in Gemma's lap before...actually doing anything to arrange that...

Gemma is a Mindspeaker but not a strong enough one that she's at all inclined to hunt around the entire Palace grounds for a specific person, who might not even be findable anyway she's been spending a lot of time in Work Rooms. She pokes Rolan again to inform him that Enara needs to bring Jisa over, they need a Mindhealer for reasons. 

Then she addresses the room. "You've all gotten the mystery healing spell now and you're cured of the progressive damage condition! But it evidently doesn't handle everything else that went wrong. Shavri thinks it was curing some but not all of the - sticky - damage to your Endurance. We've got six Restorations available today and that's assuming we don't want to save one for an emergency. Blai and Stef got one each yesterday, and it shows, but they did spent the whole night still ill and deteriorating. Of the people who've spent the last eleven days sick, Van and Seldan haven't at any point had a Restoration. For the people we just Raised, I was told to expect them to come back a bit weaker and need a Restoration to fix that. No one's had one except Leareth and it did not fix him nearly as much as we hoped. Am I missing any considerations?" 

Seems like they are in fact here to have a strategy-meeting or something. :- We can talk more about Leareth later if you want?: he tells Songbird Aziza in private Mindspeech.