:...I get the feeling it's a pretty confusing time for the local gods right now: Vanyel says, thoughtfully. :- Also She was definitely communicating with Shelyn. I got an apology relayed that way. - not for anything recent, for killing Tylendel. And a comment that She had been doing some reflection. ...I think it might be genuine? It could be - manipulation - if it were just Brightstar, but - I don't work for Her and that's not going to change. And I think Shelyn might be...pretty good at this.: 

That is definitely new information! Leareth doesn't know what to make of it right now and is aware he's in a terrible position to figure out the ramifications but it's absolutely new information that's probably very important in some way!

There was another, separately confusing piece, though...

:...Brightstar asked me not to hurt Her. I am not sure why he thought I could do that.: 

:What? You definitely could, if you set your mind to it. Especially with Golarion's resources. Brightstar clearly didn't understand that you're the last person who would change your plans over someone pleading with you, but - I do think it's not the best use of Golarion's resources? At least not for Her, I don't think we've had any indication of Vkandis redemption and He might be a problem again once He's not broke.: 

That...is probably true...why didn't it feel true at all at the time? Because he was feeling helpless? Leareth really, really hates the realization that apparently feeling helpless can distort what thoughts he's capable of having! At least in the Brightstar conversation, Leareth doesn't think it was happening so notably before, which...is its own very unpleasant thought, because that means the problem is getting worse. 

:I am feeling worried that the - impairment - is worsening over time and not getting better: he tells Vanyel, rather than stew on it until he manages to fall into another mental spike pit of panic. 

Vanyel hugs Leareth a bit harder. :I would be surprised if it is? It's some kind of physical damage, I don't think being upset could possibly affect it one way or another. ...I'm not surprised if it feels harder to think when you're upset! That's how it is for most people, if it's not normally like that for you then I think that's just one of the special Leareth abilities that normal humans can't dream of. You'll get it back, we're going to fix it.:

:Mm.: That...is slightly reassuring.

:And in the meantime you've got me to talk you through it if you're stuck: Vanyel adds. :Trust me, I'm an expert in how being upset can make you worse at thinking.: 

...That startles Leareth into a soft huff that isn't quite a snort of laughter but - is perhaps a tiny step in that direction. 

:I am glad you are here: he thinks to say. 

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! Shelyn Shelyn look! Vanyel is getting a good grade in friendship, a thing which is both reasonable to want and possible to achieve

:- And you're probably tired?: he adds. :As an expert in this topic, I'm pretty sure that if you're upset about a horrible thing that happened, and still stuck in a situation that you don't like, and having trouble thinking to begin with, being tired on top of all that just multiplies it. Why don't we get you something to eat and drink, and then you can try to get some sleep?: 

Sleep does not feel safe or allowed or maybe even possible, but Leareth is distrusting most of his assessments right now. He is tired, albeit mostly mentally and emotionally and not physically, which feels like a bad combination for sleep but maybe eating something will help. He trusts Vanyel. 

---

Once Blai had bounced around through a couple of Gates and cast all of his directly-useful spells, the most useful place for them was parked in a drafty barn in Devin at the end of the old northern road. (In Seldan's time it was the equivalent of the North Trade Road now, though it only ran as far as Briarley Crossing, past the town that used to be called Devin and has inexplicably been supplanted in the intervening six hundred years and renamed "Lower Devin".) Anyway, from there Seldan has the Mindspeech range to cover literally the entire stretch of border shared with Iftel. And he's in range of Rolan in Haven. 

It was fun to be the relay point for all the Mindspeech chatter that needed to make its way to Rolan's ears. For a while. Maybe a candlemark. It has since then gotten very, very old. At least Blai has an Endure Elements and isn't bothered by the draft, and there are enough five-minute pauses to fit in a lot of mental chess. 

A Herald-trainee brings them a late supper - well, brings Blai supper, Seldan is expected to just eat hay from the piles of it everywhere, and to be clear fine with this, his horse digestion is still clamoring for it and he's been nibbling more or less continuously all afternoon. But the delivery is a reminder that it's getting pretty late? Sunset was four or five candlemarks ago. And Blai still has a Minor Prophecy unused, right? 

He does, yes. Who's likeliest to do something importantly interesting in the next week-ish? - Blai has totally forgotten to tell all the other clerics that Minor Prophecy works here. The higher circle clerics can probably do even better prophecy spells, even.

Well, several of those clerics are now on the border after doing the Raises and Gentle Reposes that were mostly needed up north! They're in Seldan's range. The Nethysian one in particular might just know what spells one can get at fourth or fifth or sixth circle rather than having to go dig in old books? 

...Leareth is always a solid bet for "most likely to do something importantly interesting in the next week-ish", Seldan thinks? And tonight might be especially valuable, because Leareth is still not really Leareth-ing at full speed and won't be until tomorrow morning. It seems plausible that either they'll get something really important, about some unforeseen problem or a non-obvious serious mistake that Leareth's org is making in his absence, or they'll get something not all that interesting, which will hopefully calm everyone down about the likely absence of terrible mistakes for Leareth to point out to them tomorrow. 

Are they going to have a chance to go see him in time to use the slot today rather than tomorrow or is the Mindspeech relay expected to go on all night?

The Mindspeech relay work will totally go on as long as Seldan is willing to continue putting up with it, but Seldan was already not very inclined to put up with it all night, and having a spell to cast on Leareth that might give them valuable information is a great excuse to tell Rolan they're not putting up with it any longer. The message-volume is already way down, because no one is riding around in the dark on a freezing winter night, and at this point Seldan is mostly sitting around waiting in case there's a weird emergency. Which is possible! But it does not seem very worth Seldan getting no real sleep tonight, given that the emergency will be dealt with anyway and having him here mostly just means the information will reach Rolan in thirty seconds rather than five minutes. 

Anyway it's not, like, an emergency to Gate back to Haven, but Seldan is inclined to remind Rolan now that they have a spell they expressly prepared today to cast on someone important, for example Leareth, who is in Haven, and since the Mindspeech relay is a lot less critical when nearly everyone is asleep, they may as well be transferred back to Haven for tonight whenever it's convenient for there to be a Gate. 

Blai is not, uh, very comfortable with begging off from the assigned duty at which Seldan will be most useful just because it's boring. Five rounds versus five minutes can be a big difference in an emergency! Blai can go without him if that's the most efficient resource allocation! ...but if it's also going to cost Seldan the sleep he needs that is a pretty good reason to push back, if not to, uh, go AWOL or whatever it is Seldan is envisioning there.

Yes yes it's uncomfortable to have to be the ones to interject and inform Rolan that this is a stupid use of staying up all night. But it's a stupid use of staying up all night! There is absolutely nothing exceptional about tonight compared to tomorrow night, and it's very likely and predictable that tomorrow daytime will make more use of a Seldan-relay, and given that Seldan has no intention of staying up every night from now until ????? to cover the period when a relay is least likely to matter, he's not intending to do it tonight as a one-off either.

The thing is that the entire Heraldic system is not, currently, set up in a way where someone else is going to reliably catch that they're implicitly expecting Blai and Seldan here all night and also, he assumes, expecting Blai and Seldan to do something useful tomorrow. It's a stupid way to set it up, because it means that the most earnest conscientious people are exactly the ones who will be chronically on the edge of exhaustion at all times until they crash and burn enough times to start looking out for themselves. It was like that in his time as a Herald and he put quite a lot of effort into training the next crop of Heralds both to actually inform their superiors if their schedules were wedging them into consistently getting less than five candlemarks of sleep every night, and to put a little bit of effort into not scheduling other people like that. But it seems like things are more or less just the way they used to be, on that front, and so they had better in fact look out for themselves because Dara and Rolan will not take care of it for them. 

(Also, there is in fact a cost to doing boring tedious duties every single day all day! It's not great for people even if they're kind of sort of getting enough sleep on the side! But that's not the main reasoning; mostly, it's that tonight is not exceptional within the larger emergency, and the larger emergency will last weeks, and you simply don't pull out the 'stay up all night' moves on an unexceptional night of a weeks-long emergency, that's setting yourself up for disaster.) 

(But having boring tedious duties is great. They're so nonstressful. You can make little Prestidigitated figures and turn them colors and shuffle them around and write tidy schedules and send reports and it's the best.) .......Blai is tempted to personally take on the management role that is here going undone since a) he has experience with it and b) he has a high-coordination-bandwidth Companion to match but he is not going to be able to keep doing it for any meaningful amount of time, he's got a Convention to get to kind of soon. Anyway it is at least definitely reasonable to present this argument to Rolan.

Aww, yeah, it would be really fun to fix the Heralds' management situation with Blai but they do have future plans that aren't especially compatible with taking on a long-term role, and in the short term Seldan doesn't have a better approach than making himself really, really annoying in those areas where he thinks the Heralds need a smarter strategy. 

(Liking boring repetitive work is a useful trait! Seldan does not have that virtue. Hating boring repetitive work can be its own different virtue, but it's definitely better that between the two of them they have both sides represented, even if perhaps Seldan is a little suspicious that 'boring is nonstressful' is moooostly an Asmodean-Cheliax-shaped belief.) 

He harasses Rolan. 

...He obtains Gossip. It is very definitely Gossip, capitalized. 

:- Well, that's a bit of a mess. Apparently nobody thought to in any way prevent Brightstar from wandering on top of Leareth in the House of Healing to - apologize? I think? And cry a lot at him. And now Leareth is having an operational constraint. I - think not in a way where we can't show up and cast a Minor Prophecy? But we may want to plan on reporting the result to someone else.: 

That's such a weird thing for Brightstar to do. It manages to be surprising even against the backdrop of Brightstar doing almost exclusively surprising things. Is he still there, is Blai going to have to chase him off? What if he doesn't want to leave and explodes about it? Who else is a reasonable person to report to? Is there any plan to prevent Brightstar from doing more surprising things, what if next he burrows into the center of the planet and releases Rovagug, this is the wrong planet for it but maybe that won't stop him.

No, he's not still there! Leareth managed to summon Vanyel, who chased him off. Seldan now has the additional being-in-Haven motivation of not being sure that there's, like, a great plan to intercept Brightstar on the next occasion he comes up with some completely wild plan and charges into it headfirst without thinking. 

(It's...not in hindsight actually that baffling to Seldan. People in normal, non-Cheliax cultures are often socialized pretty hard that when you feel guilty over something you did it’s appropriate to apologize to, specifically, the people you wronged, and Brightstar might additionally feel like he should because the Goddess apologized to him. …Sane people in their right mind, with intact judgement, also know better than to show up unannounced and blast an unsolicited apology at someone who’s predictably going to be upset by interacting with them, but that’s apparently too advanced a skill for Brightstar right now.)

What does the normal non-Cheliax success mode of this socialization look like? (Does it have one?) Where are they going for the Gate and when, has Seldan filled up on hay - if Blai winds up mastering more aspects of Prestidigitation which he hasn't done in twenty years but theoretically nothing's stopping him would it be good to make hay taste like other things and still be hay -

(It definitely has a success mode! The success mode is a lot more likely when an apology is exchanged between friends or family members - say, if Savil had done something careless that hurt Vanyel - and when it’s for, you know, the ways that friends can plausibly hurt each other by being careless or reckless or having poor judgement or getting really drunk - and not actual murder attempts. A well-delivered apology - generally, one which includes apologizing for the thing the other person is upset about and not a different thing that’s less embarrassing, and ideally also a believable story on how you learned a lesson and won’t do it again - can go a long way toward repairing a relationship, but there has to BE a relationship. Apologizing for an actual murder attempt, to the person you tried to murder, face to face and from their perspective less than a day later, is enough of a blatantly terrible idea that Seldan hadn’t thought to worry about it at all, it’s just - in hindsight barely a stretch. If there’s a right way to express your remorse in that situation, it’s to…write a formal letter, probably? And wait at least a week. And honestly this isn’t…really…an apology situation, it’s one where you should find a way to handle feeling terrible about it that DOESN’T actively ruin the other person’s day. And most people don’t actually want crying groveling apologies! - Seldan has one million thoughts on this topic, probably, but he’s not writing a treatise on apologies right now.)

There’ll probably be a Gate in the next half a candlemark or so. Seldan has eaten a lot of hay and he may still want more later but it’s not like Haven won’t have it. …Hay prestidigitated to taste like something else would be a fun experiment, at least.

Blai would really like to master the cleaning function next but he can prioritize the taste one afterwards. ...is there anything useful he should be doing here besides "not be far away from Seldan". Preliminary low-context assignment logistics or something.

Seldan should really at some point see if he can teach Blai the poking-in-Seldan’s-memories trick, it’s so useful if one is like Blai and benefits from a multitude of useful avenues to direct contingency-planning because if the contingency-planning-anxiety isn’t fed enough then it starts doing the metaphorical equivalent of gnawing on its own fingers and produces things like “what if Brightstar burrows to the center of the planet to release Rovagug.” (This is thought very fondly.) It’s probably harder for someone without their own Thoughtsensing to learn but Seldan feels like the Companion-bond and being in rapport all the time should be sufficient with the right kind of practice -

- to start, here’s a list of all the Heralds younger than twenty-five currently on the border, as a proxy for “not yet experienced enough to realize they need to sanity-check their own schedule and mention to someone in actual words that it’s insane”. Seldan can use the remaining relay-point time to gather intelligence on facts like “when is the last time they slept and for how long”, plus their Gifts because that’s relevant to planning assignments, you want Farseers and long-range Mindspeakers paired up unless someone has both, and a Fetcher should be matched up with at least one of those other Gifts, and NOBODY SHOULD BE TRAVELING ALONE because that’s how you freeze in a snowbank, and there aren’t very many Herald-mages but these are their maximum Gate-ranges and they should be inside that range for at least one town that currently has a cleric in it with channels left, which of course is a counter that will reset after dawn prayers…

(Seldan is pretty sure the assignments haven’t been literally random, and as far as he can tell Joshel and Dara are between the two of them doing a decent job and it’s mainly the “people need time off to sleep” component that slips through the cracks. But Dara absolutely isn’t the type to get offended if they hand her a redrafted version to work off tomorrow, and Rolan might but Seldan currently feels like that’s actively a reason to do it.)