:I certainly don't want him to have it, so, agreed: Tense pause. :Bella, what's your plan here? What outcome are you wanting to get?: 

I want everyone to still be okay by the time I leave the universe. ...I'm planning to leave the universe, I guess I hadn't told you that.

:No. You hadn't. Why?: 

The details of why I do not want to live here are infohazardous. I can tell non-Herald non-Companions. Vanyel already knows, Yfandes and Sayshen already know. If you want to ask any of them or any non-Herald-non-Companion of your choice to assess my reasoning.

:I'll consider it. I would have gone for Melody, but you grabbed her and - I can't be sure you or Leareth haven't done something to her. I'm sorry for being so mistrustful. Just – we're not in a very comfortable position right now. Anyway, when can you fix up the gryphons? It might help calm down some of the, er, tense feelings between our side and theirs:

Tight pause.

:I have no idea why their priest had a prophetic dream about you: Lancir sends finally, picking out his words slowly and carefully. :But it was, very obviously, about you. And...I don't like what that says about your current or future activities: 

Yeah, that's why I didn't try to recommend someone myself. I would love to explain it. I really would. I think if I explained it to you, that would cause you problems with Taver. I can fix my gryphons whenever you're done talking to me and then find Melody.

:I see: Lancir is not happy about this. At all. :...Well, seems the best we can do right now is undo the damage from that unfortunate little battle, and go from there. So I guess we're done: 

I'll go ahead and do the gryphons then.

She drops the call. "Gryphon time," she murmurs, mostly for Vanyel's benefit, and she goes "to" each gryphon in turn and pulls out the command.

A couple of them have Mindspeech and, recognizing what's happening, start trying to yell at her. 

I apologize for the delay, she tells the yelling gryphons blandly.

This does not seem to particularly calm them down, but fortunately she doesn't have to listen to them for very long before she's done and can move on to the next. 

When she's done: "I want to let Melody fix her set if she can - I can try but it'd be more complicated - but if I go out of the room I can't painblock Vanyel, where is she?"

"I arranged her a place to sleep. I can ask her to come here." He turns, says something to another of the personnel, who run off. 

"Thanks." Sigh. She wants to go flop facefirst onto Sayshen and bitch about how her species is horrifying but this is not really the time.

Melody arrives shortly. She seems to be in a much better mood than the day before; she sees Shavri and keeps her voice low as well. "Sleep all right, Bella? Oh, Vanyel, you're awake." She ducks her head. "I, um, looked at your mind with my Sight, really briefly, last night. Nayoki was panicking and Bella wasn't allowed to talk about anything because of her oath and I wanted to confirm it wasn't some kind of Gate-damage. I, er, don't need to know more." 

"...Oh, I already told Nayoki," Vanyel says tonelessly. "Broken lifebond. It's fine. I don't actually want to talk about it any more though." 

"–What, really?" Melody blinks, lifts a hand to her collar. "Sorry, I'll stop talking about it. Bella, you want me to do the gryphons now?" 

"Yeah, I've done mine. If you run into a limit I can try to do yours too but I'm not confident how it'd work out." She hands over the earcuff.

"I don't have hard limits like you – if I run low on reserves, Leareth can boost me again, I'll just give myself another headache." Melody takes the earcuff and nabs a chair. "Sorry, this will be a while. I haven't, um, actually done this in a pretty long time." 

"I can fix your headache again if you stay near me. And if I don't expect to be doing anything else arts-intensive."

"I'll keep that in mind, but I haven't got the faintest idea what other things you might end up having to deal with." Melody puts the earcuff in and gets to work. 

Bella sighs. "Leareth, do you have really big paper - I can settle for lots of small paper but really big paper is better - and inks in at least four colors?"

Leareth smiles slightly. "We chose the right facility for those supplies. I do. Should I have it brought here?" 

"Yeah, I think there's just barely enough room on the floor, at least to get started."

Leareth nods and passes on instructions to one of his staff.