Well, the armor was magic but the coat was just standard issue. Probably people make coats on this planet. It does mean he will tend to consume more Endures and be in a bit more danger if they expire though, it was a nice warm coat. There were two copies of the Acts, did he at least leave one in Haven...? He doesn't have great habits about this, he was carrying considerably more stuff than you want to bring on a patrol because he was packing up his entire life when he packed that bag.

Oh no. (People definitely make coats on this planet and Seldan is really quite sure that they can arrange for Blai to come into possession of a warm coat before tonight, though it won't be the same.) 

...The mace was also up north when the attack happened, Seldan thinks? Presumably someone with context on Leareth's Gate-research must have realized it was worth the risk to retrieve. Ovada is right there, Seldan can harass him to find out if there is any possible chance that anything else was retrieved - 

"...I do not believe that there was an opportunity to retrieve anything more," Ovada says, a little stiffly. "The stone surrounding the base melted and it collapsed fully as soon as all of the shielding had gone down. We had a short window."

And retrieving the magic artifact that they needed to have any hope of targeting a search-spell at Golarion – at that point, in the first ten minutes, they still thought they would have Leareth back on his feet for that research – did, very likely, come at the cost of retrieving the bodies of some key staff, who would have been worth prioritizing high up on their current Raise Dead list, and may not at any point be worth the presumably-much-higher cost of the resurrection spell that doesn't require a body at all. 

Well, it should at least be more doable now to replace Iomedae's holy book, if Blai wants a copy on hand. Maybe not the letters so much. ...It's possible the armor is intact down there, if Seldan is interpreting Blai's memories correctly about the hardiness of magic items? But if it's embedded in melted and re-solidified bedrock then it might be pretty impossible to retrieve, it doesn't sound like it's necessarily valuable enough to be worth a mining operation rather than saving up to buy a new set of armor? 

Gemma goes and checks the cabinet. 

She does have some of Blai's things! He was wearing a belt with an attached mug and a knife, and he can have that back. 

...Also there's a cloth bag of, like, eight separate talismans they secured from Leareth's body, she should possibly have thought at some point to hand them off but here they are if Leareth wants them back. 

Leareth takes the bag of talismans and starts putting them back on. He can re-power them himself, even, his mage-gift is working fine and he wouldn't want to risk anything delicate or high-power but this task is easy. 

(He's having...some sort of loud and unpleasant emotion about it, which takes a minute to unpack even as far as 'it's upsetting that he failed to notice earlier that his shield-talismans were missing and ask for them.' It doesn't feel like that would particularly help anyone with their goals, so he keeps it to himself.) 

Jisa kind of wants to get back to her elemental summoning for diamond-searching negotiations and so now would be a good time to take Blai to get his mace back? Well, except that Blai apparently doesn't have a coat, and it's snowing again. 

:I prepared Endure Elements today and can use one on myself if that's expedient. - an earth elemental might be able to tunnel through the rock, at least once it's cool, to retrieve anything that could survive the lava, but that might be literally only my chainmail, which was expensive but not so vastly so that I can be confident it'd be worth the logistics and spells to retrieve it...:

Seldan thinks it's a great idea for Blai to go ahead and Endure Elements himself. It'll save Seldan from the temptation to lose his temper with anyone for insufficiently prioritizing getting Blai immediate access to a nice warm place to stay, which...seems unlikely to be anyone's highest priority, he has the feeling things are still extremely hectic and it seems pretty unlikely the guest room Blai had for a bit was held open for him. 

:Huh, I don't think our technique for summoning elementals would let a summoned earth elemental tunnel around in stone, even if they could do it in their real body in the Elemental Plane of Earth? Can your summoned ones do that? I guess your summons really doesn't last very long...: 

"Endure Elements."

:The wizard may be able to turn himself into one? I suppose I could plan to sell the armor and offer him a cut if he retrieves it for me but he'd still need a local to Gate him:

Seldan does, in fact, think that Leareth’s people would consider themselves to owe Blai enough that if he asked they would obviously offer to Gate. And separately it’s possible there are some intact Velgarth mage-artifacts down there that are worth enough to salvage if the cost is a Gate and paying a wizard for a spell rather than excavating a giant hole through solid rock. 

…Seldan would want to make sure someone checked that it’s safe. It’s been a while, the stone should have cooled, but the attack nearly killed them even after passing through ten feet of solid stone and all the shielding, the state of things on the surface could be…worse.

Jisa meets up with Enara out front and takes them to the Work Room. The path is mostly cleared of snow, and the grounds have an interesting empty-yet-frazzled feel compared to the last time Blai was out and about. There are fewer people around, but the ones they pass all look to be in a tearing hurry.

His armor is certainly not urgent - it's useful in a fight but he only wears it when the background risk of a fight is known to be high and that probably isn't going to describe many occasions in the next month - so if they think the place might get less dangerous over time then he can certainly wait.

What are all these people in a tearing hurry about? Is something wrong? Is there another monster in the water eating another princess, or the same princess? Is somebody four minutes away from the very edge of the Luminary's Raise window? Should he be regretting not having his armor on now?

Oh no this is the predictable result of the ongoing emergency somewhere far away. Seldan is pretty sure, at least, he’s gloriously back to being clearheaded and he’s delightedly having half a dozen Companion-backchannel conversations at once. The problem is…really just that there aren’t enough Heralds. There must be two or three times the number that there were in his time but Valdemar is a lot more than three times bigger both in land area and population, and the Heraldic system adds some intrinsic friction on delegating to anyone without a Companion and it seems like the number of Heralds never quite keeps up for— he was about to think “for some unclear reason” but he bets it’s the Valdemargod being a bloody miser and not wanting to spend any more godresource than necessary on Companions. Whatever the reason, he remembers Haven feeling like this during an emergency in his time too, even if the emergency was as distant as the border. 

Jisa unlocks a Work Room - no one is using it right now - and takes down a bunch of set-spells and hands him back his mace. :Do you need anything else right now?: The ‘or can I get back to work already?’ remains unspoken.

- well yes but probably not from Jisa specifically so he shakes his head. Mace on belt. Does the horse conspiracy know where his remaining Endures and Reposes and Remove Diseases are wanted?

Inconveniently they may be wanted in different places! But right now the Gentle Reposes are needed in the supply depot up north - but on this side of the mountains, so it got minimally Vkandis’d - where Leareth’s organization is storing all the dead bodies. (Wow that’s a depressing mental image. Seldan wonders vaguely if they, like, moved the supplies somewhere else first.)

…Sounds like there’s a Gate there in - probably less than a candlemark, depending how long Nayoki wants to get up to speed from here. Probably not worth trying to get to the border, where they’re likely to want Endure Elements and Remove Disease, and back in time.

Buuuut consider: it might be the perfect length of time for Blai to finish a proper grooming in the stables. …Or for Blai himself to bathe, if he feels a pressing need, there’s probably time for only one of those things.

Well if Seldan wants he can go get a real non-prestidigitated comb but he does in fact really want a bath even though he's always found an Endure Elements to limit the intensity of felt uncleanliness, something about how it suppresses sweat.

Then Seldan is fully in favor of Blai having a bath! He spends fifteen seconds considering where and concludes that Blai can totally use the baths in the Heralds' wing, which he hears are the best (Seldan is perhaps a little jealous that he did not get to experience them as a human and now can't.) They're going to be pretty deserted, anyway, given how it's now the middle of the day and most of the Heralds are out somewhere along the various borders - they've still got a bunch of people in Waymeet, because apparently standing down their forces is taking four times as long as rushing them up there in the first place - and the fraction still in Haven are hard at work.

And he'll obtain a proper comb so that they have it later for future opportunities. Maybe there'll be an awkward wait for a Gate back from the facility full of dead bodies and Blai can finish Seldan's tail. ...Probably not, Leareth's organization seems a lot more on top of Gate-logistics than the Heralds, but surely at some point. 

---

It's with some reluctance that Nayoki leaves the House of Healing to have a meeting with Mage-commander Ovada and, apparently, Treven. She's not actually very much less worried about Leareth; within three minutes of trying to talk to him while actually awake and alert, she formed an opinion that Jisa should really have done the "Wisdom" one first, but at this point, short of trying to override Gemma's preference that they save a spell for emergencies, there's not much to be done.

(She tried to ask Leareth if he wanted her to do that, and he did the Mindspeech equivalent of making a lot of odd faces - while showing no visible emotions on his actual face - and eventually declared that having resources in reserve for emergencies is in most cases a good idea. She tried a few different ways to ask if it would help to have her stay, but Leareth eventually just told her firmly to please go catch up on the situation so she can handle important decisions that come up before tomorrow, and it seemed like there was no possible way he would feel better and more reassured if she ignored that and stayed anyway.) 

She asks Gemma to get a message to her right away if anything new goes wrong, and then heads out. 

Gemma honestly isn't entirely sure what to do with a patient who isn't actually ill or injured in a way that a Healer can help with, and isn't confused enough about where he is to accidentally harm himself and definitely doesn't seem inclined to try to harm himself deliberately, and has just...been made her problem for lack of any better idea. 

She...can stick him with the other Healer from his organization in the room at the far end of the hall? It should be fairly quiet and they won't be disturbed too much there. 

Leareth...thinks...that he would strongly prefer some different thing, but he isn't getting very much traction on figuring out what, which is kind of an important prerequisite for causing things to be different in a way that's better rather than random and very plausibly worse.

He can follow Sera down the hall without running into any walls. 

On the one hand, Vanyel is worried about Leareth on multiple levels and he hates something about the idea of just leaving Leareth here without doing something to make sure he's okay.

On the other hand he desperately wants a bath, and he's not sure how long he has before Savil realizes he's up and about and calls for his backup on the Web and he loses the chance. 

Probably Shelyn thinks it's important to be there for your friends? (He feels slightly weird thinking of Leareth as his friend because he has no idea if Leareth would see it that way, but he was upset that Leareth was dead and very relieved to have him back and it would feel really awful to just, like, ignore Leareth and forget about it until he's all the way fixed tomorrow.) 

He...could ask Aziza for advice? He looks around for her. 

Aziza has found a random corner in the Healers' building to hang out in because as far as she knows she's still on call for channels locally and she's chatting with her brother in Osirian. He seems less grouchy till he notices Vanyel approaching and then he falls silent.

"Hi Vanyel!" says Aziza.