"Okay!"

Nod.

And they go to sleep.

She can sleep. And in the morning she can wait for them to be ready to go.

Sleeping and waiting are both hard! But she can practice her magic and that'll keep her from being, like, insanely bored.

And in the morning they can go out to the docks and get on the flying carpet and take off across the water.

Cool!

They all seem pleased to be getting out of the city too. Hagan unbuttons his shirt and flops on the front of the carpet to soak up sun. Mahdi reorganizes his purse, which contains several weeks of rations and some spell scrolls and some gold and lots of spell components and some carefully labelled boxes, and tells Hagan all the gossip from the adventurer's guild while he does so. Reportedly there's an enormous, dangerous demon preying on a trading route between two cities, and local insurance has a bounty out for it; these other people are retiring and so-and-so's getting married, they're invited but Mahdi passed along their regrets; this other idiot went for the Starstone for some fucking reason and unsurprisingly died. He had insurance but it isn't paying out because there's a clause about not being an utter dumbass.

Zara listens with interest. 

"People do sometimes pass the Starstone test, right?"

"Not for nine hundred years."

"Who passed it then?"

"Iomedae, herald of Aroden, from Cheliax. But she was a very powerful paladin."

"I'm sure someday there'll be another but it won't be a mid-level adventurer who got lucky in a couple of recent fights and got too sure of himself," Fazil says.

"Well, yeah. Have to be someone really amazing."

       "You know," Mahdi says to Hagan, "with everyone getting married you're going to have to get over your thing about going to weddings." 

"Nah I won't, we're going to be out of town."

       "You going to skip mine, someday?"

"- dunno."

        "You gonna skip yours, someday?"

"Yes definitely."

"What's wrong with weddings?"

"The wizard who inadvertently created me hates me and wants me dead, and attends most of the major social events in town, and I fear I'll be recognized and turned back into a mouse."

"I thought you were a seagull."

He waves his hand vaguely as if to say 'whatever'. 

       "So," Mahdi says, "if I disguise you for my wedding, you'll attend?"

"Delightedly."

She flops back into Korva's lap. 

"I'm never getting married. I'm going to be the most powerful sorcerer ever, and maybe someday a wizard, too, and learn everything there is to know in the entire world."

Patpat. "Last person to do that went insane."

"Who?"

"Nethys."

"I follow him," says Mahdi cheerfully. "He empowered the founder of Osirion and was its initial patron, thousands and thousands of years ago. Abadar's much more suitable as a patron because he is not insane but there are still lots of holy sites of Nethys."

"How do you follow a god who's insane? Isn't that, like, confusing?"