Eliza is also having a grand old time. Redeployment Chess With Added PTSD is competitive with hostage chess for her favourite variant.

Rupert sneaks occasional sips of tea, careful to keep the tea across the room from the widget, and in this fashion gets through all the rest of Blai's books.

Is it then time to pack up and go back to Eliza's house?

Yes. "We can walk back, it takes longer but I'm not in a hurry," she says. "And I'm sure Rupert would rather read than drive right now."

"You are correct."

It's jacket weather and he's jacketless but perhaps walking briskly will compensate. He collects his books and dismisses the chess paraphernalia.

Eliza is fully on board with a brisk walk back to her house.

And he's not armored, so he can in fact be reasonably brisk. Trot trot. "How cold does it get around here?"

"It's unusual but not unheard-of to see snow in winter."

"...ah, then I am unlikely ever to need a Worldwound coat."

"Does it get very cold there?"

"Extremely. In the winter at the northern border it is just barely possible to prepare cleric spells at all, the night is so long - I believe this was a consideration in building the wardstone line, though it's also lost some ground since then - and the snow sometimes doesn't melt all summer."

"I know of places like that but I've never been to one. The farthest north I've been gets snow regularly in winter but the nights don't get all that long—what amount of day do you need, to prepare cleric spells?"

"Dawn. It doesn't have to stick around long but there has to be a little sun. - there might actually be some arrangement possible if you go farther north than that, perhaps you stay on your last schedule or something, but I don't know what it is."

"Oh, wow. Very far north indeed."

"It's the northern border of a large region and even the southern edge gets cold in winter, yes. The northern forts have to be supplied by Teleport; mail and troops may come the long way but it's too unreliable for food and such."

"I've heard supplying a settlement that far north can get obnoxious on Earth too, but I haven't looked into the details. We don't have teleportation but I bet our version of the long way is quite a bit shorter than yours."

"The widgets would help. We have horses, but it's impractical to send them on long excursions in the winter because they need their own Endure Elements castings in the worst weather - they are at least bred to tolerate it acceptably when it's not at its coldest - and magical horses that go faster and don't have this requirement are scarcer still than extra Endure Elements."

"Well, as far as I know I'm not going to have business in the far north anytime soon, but if we do then I'll definitely be happy to have Endure Elements available... when we get home I should write down a list of your spells and their basic functions and constraints, I'm sure I'll get familiar with them over time but in the meantime it'll be nice to have a reference guide."

"Of course. I don't have a complete list of all cleric spells but I know the common ones and a couple of strange ones."

"Well, a spell you don't know about is a spell I can't ask you to prepare, so it comes out about the same from my perspective."

"Since I don't have a written list I might forget something," he amends. "But then I might think of it later if it came up."

"Reasonable. It'll still be nice to have you with me on patrol even without any spells at all, and if something more exciting than everyday vampires comes up, hopefully enough warning that you can prepare specific spells for the situation will also be enough warning that you can remember what they are in time."

"Yes - although I won't know what the special qualities of the monsters here might be or how they'll interact with various specialty magic."

"Rupert has an extensive library of monster-related books and can probably make good guesses about that kind of question a lot of the time."