"Is that everything for now, then?" 

"I believe so. I should tote everybody back now. Thank you for your hospitality and flexibility."

"You are very welcome." 

And she goes and finds both Companions and Vanyel to confirm they are ready to go back and send them all out.

Vanyel is still nervous about all the awkward conversations in his immediate future, but he's been bracing himself for it and he's ready to go. 

Him and Yfandes one right after the other, then Sayshen, then Bella herself, scrolls under her arm.

Lancir catches up to them shortly later. He hugs Sayshen around the neck, then walks over to Bella. "It's good to see you. Are you all right?" 

"Yup, it was pretty comfortable for me, though I imagine it was annoying for the quadrupeds and they'll be happy to have grass and stuff again."

:Yes, definitely, and lots of space to run around: Sayshen sends to both of them. She Mindspeaks privately with Bella. :Goodness, this is awkward. All those years pining for him to visit me, and now I think he's happier to see me than I am to see him. Which is really weird and uncomfortable. Am I horrible for feeling that way?: 

No, I don't think so.

Lancir says something politely neutral to Vanyel and then pleads having work to do, so Sayshen has a chance to go run around the field and stretch her legs. She jumps over a bench, showing off. :This is wonderful!: 

Without magic boots I can't run around because I'll trip, I remember when I first got them. You look happier than I was then.

:Aww, I wish I'd gotten to see that moment: Sayshen gallops a big circle around some trees while Yfandes trails off toward the stables. 

They were a graduation present when I finished high school - that's age fourteen to eighteen, ish. I needed them at college, there's less supervision there and it'd be easier to run into things needing running away from.

:...That's a bit less of a nice reason: 

My homeworld is very horrible. It has lots of nice things in it, very high level of development in the better-off places, but it's horrible.

:...Is there any way of fixing it? Given that science doesn't work there and presumably things developed with science in other worlds also don't?: 

I'm leaning 'evacuate the place'. Though I don't actually know how much it would turn out to care about things developed with science elsewhere, if someone wanted to risk checking? It's - one way to model the world is, like... I know Companions don't go buy things in stores but I assume you know how it works, imagine you suddenly had finances to manage, okay, and someone wanted to sell you... horseshoes, fancy overpriced ones, and they decided to go about this by visiting you ten times a day, no matter what you were doing, and walking up to you and giving you an incredibly rehearsed spiel about why you should buy their horseshoes, and every time they changed exactly one thing about the speech, one word or how fast they're talking or the exact cadence of a sentence or how they gesture at the sample horseshoe, because they think if they do this exactly right, eventually you will give them money, and you can't convince them to stop. The idea is that the universe doesn't like this, and in fact hates it so much that by the second or third time someone walks up to it and says 'have I got a deal for you', it strikes them with lightning, so everybody knows better than to try. And if this model is the right one - it has never explained itself, this is guessing based on patterns of bad luck and so on - if that's the right model it might not mind at all if we invent a million things in universes that don't care, and export them. I was there for a moment, between Arda and here, and my magic things still work and I'm alive and everything, though maybe it just didn't have to deal with me long enough to get irritated.

:Huh. Interesting. Though, yes, it'd be a risky move to check: 

Yeah. So I think I want to evacuate the place but that's - also going to be hard and risky? Like, there are a lot of species there and some of them like to eat people and some of them can't survive without having sex several times a day and some of them are sort of built in to how the universe protects itself and might retain worrying reality-warping powers outside of it and some of them have specific ties to fixed locations they can't trivially discard. So it might eventually be worth it, if somebody wants to try, to send someone over and see if it can be improved from inside.

:Makes sense. And, I mean, some people might not want to leave at all? People are like that. Even when there's a war and they really should leave, sometimes: 

Yeah, that too, I'm not going to kidnap people.

:Because you're not Leareth, huh?: 

I am not!

:I'm glad of it. I mean, I don't dislike the man, not really – which is weird, I think I would've had to hate him when I was mind-controlled about it – but I like that you're you: