:I hope so! He lives really far and, um, you saw what happens when I Gate. But Savil visits them sometimes: Vanyel starts to peel off. :I'll see you soon – oh, er, do you know where Savil's suite is?: 

:Nope. But if it's not shielded I can just find you there.:

:It's a little shielded but not very, not like the Work Room – I think you'll be all right: 

:Sure. See you then.:

She gets there some ten minutes after he does, DZ following along one step behind.

Savil greets her with a smile. :Thank you for coming! Er, have a seat – I'm sorry, the table's kind of small: With four chairs around it, it is rather crowded. :Van said you wanted to ask me about the Heralds and how we work?: 

She signs along as Savil Mindspeaks, and as she does, translating for DZ. :Mmhmm. I'm not sure what I'm going to want to do next, but it seems like I'll be able to pick up some Force techniques that are useful to your kind of magic user; the question is whether we should take the time to figure that out or if I'm going to prefer to be elsewhere.:

:Hmm. Have to say I hadn't thought that far ahead. You're certainly not obliged to stick around. What are the factors that would go into it?: She heads over to the sideboard. :Wine for either of you? I, er, don't know if droids can drink: 

    "We can't, ma'am, but thank you."

:Sure, thanks. So, the obvious part is how much time and effort it will take to get competent at working together that way, on both sides - I don't think it'll be much for me, it's within my specialties, but I don't know how your training works. And then, what would we be doing with it, if we did, and how long or how often would I need to be around for that investment of effort to be worth it for you. I expect to be most interested in working with him,: she nods at Van, :if that helps answer the question at all.:

The first thing Deskyl will notice, probably, is the quick meaningful look back and forth between Savil and Vanyel at her final sentence. 

Savil carries three glasses of wine over. :I can tell you some about what Heralds' duties generally are: she starts, :but, well, Van is an exception in a lot of ways. He's...maybe the most powerful mage we've ever had: And Heralds with particular Gifts have been noted to show up when they're going to be necessary in the future, and Vanyel's case is more suspicious than most; Savil doesn't say that out loud but it's pretty high up in her surface thoughts if Deskyl is reading those. :Currently he's in Haven most of the time: Not because he isn't desperately needed elsewhere but because Lancir doesn't think he can handle more frequent missions and, in Savil's opinion, Lancir is extremely right.

:He's only been a Herald for a few months: she adds. :You bumped into him on his first solo mission, actually: Thank the gods, because from Lancir's report to her after debriefing it with Van, it sounds like her nephew was being incredibly reckless, which is understandable but it could have gone so much worse. :So I don't know exactly what his next few years will look like. Most Heralds spend most of their time on the road, on circuit in an assigned region; Van may be someone we prefer to keep back and send out just for the emergencies: If only he didn't have the damned Gate problem... :But...there are a number of those. So, if you did choose to stick, around, even just to be available for the most critical missions we deploy him on, I think it could be of great value to him and to us. I'm not sure how much training on Van's end it would take, but he's a quick learner and he works hard; I reckon a few weeks would be enough to give you a sense of the rate of progress?:

(Savil...is still pretty unsure what to think about Deskyl. But she's excellent in combat, Lancir's report made that very clear, and she healed Van after the Gate, and - if she wants to help him in particular, for whatever mysterious reason, Savil isn't going to pressure her on anything but damn it she won't turn down any help either.) 

"...DZ, can you hear Mindspeech?" she adds out loud, that piece of confusion finally catching up. "Or is Deskyl relaying it to you somehow?" 

"She's translating for me, ma'am, the hand signs are a language."

"Huh! That's neat. Could be really useful, actually. Is there any way that you'd be interested in teaching us?" 

:It's not usually taught to non-Sith, but I suppose it won't hurt anything. What kinds of missions do Heralds usually take?:

Savil sits back and describes some examples of her own past missions, back when she was younger and was herself the most powerful mage in Valdemar. Lots of border security; she spent a lot of time in the northwestern region, where the most common issues were Pelagirs beasties, colddrakes in the north and wyrsa in the west, getting in past the border and killing rural villagers, and bandit groups of various levels of organization from the fairly lawless northern region. In particular, sometimes the criminal bands have mages, and usually those mages aren't very powerful or well-trained but disturbingly often they're willing to murder some helpless farmers for blood-power. Oh, and every so often some warlord in the north with a big landholding decides he'd like it to be bigger and tries to nab some of the better Valdemaran farmland. Usually that kind of mission gets multiple Heralds.

There are natural disasters, of course. Every so often when there's a particularly heavy snowfall up north, the river floods south of Haven, usually they can see this coming and she used to get sent and use her magic to help put up dikes and levees. Earthquakes, fires, mudslides, mines collapsing, it goes on. 

There are also the gnarlier criminal cases that happen within Valdemar – murders, kidnappings, blackmail, bandit groups terrorizing a given section of road, and the occasional Gifted person misusing said Gifts. These are easier ever since her colleague Deedre discovered how the ubiquitous vrondi, little air-elementals that aren't very clever but can sense intent, can be co-opted for the Truth Spell. Which any Herald can cast, and which makes confessions a lot more trustworthy. Van likely won't spend as much time as she did using fiddly detective magic to try to figure out whodunnit.

...The Leshara-Frelennye family feud is actually a very good example of such a criminal case but she sure isn't going to mention it in front of Van. 

Deskyl nods along. :That sounds unobjectionable. If you do keep him back for emergencies, does that change what kinds of things he'll be dealing with most often?:

:Hmm. Well, it's more likely they'll involve fighting other mages, since that's a case where the nearby Heralds who aren't mages are disadvantaged. And it'll be things that are a bigger deal, of course - where it's worth waiting for him to get there, rather than having whoever's on that circuit try to deal with it:

She remembers some of the more recent times, after she was mostly in Haven teaching, when they would still send her out once in a while. :Or, well, incidents where the Heralds who were nearby tried and...couldn't handle it: Usually those involved a Herald getting dead, and now she's thinking about poor Raina and the wyrsa and how they tried to get a message to her in time...

:I do have an advantage at fighting mages. And if I'm here most of the time I can work on your tech level; I can probably improve on your transportation speed fairly easily, and we can use the prototype ourselves even before I have something that it makes sense to send out without an engineer on hand.: Also, radios, but she's not going to let on that she's getting more of Savil's thoughts than the woman is intending to show her.

Nod. :Faster transportation – that isn't a Gate – would be really, really useful, honestly. We have the Mindspeech relay, we can get messages around fairly quickly: if not always with perfect reliability when it's desperately needed, :and Companions are faster than horses, they can be a LOT faster in an emergency, but it's still at least a two-day ride to the closest border and that would be pushing it really hard. It's not really ideal for a mission to be exhausted when you arrive: 

:What sort of transportation?: Van sends, curious. :Does it work with the Force, or just - without magic, like droids?: 

:Without magic. Electricity and other forms of power can turn wheels; put that on a cart and you have a cart that pulls itself. I don't know what I'll be able to do here but twice as fast as a horse seems likely, given a few years of work. And a machine like that doesn't tire, either.:

:But you can't hook a cart to a waterwheel: Vanyel sends, confused. :Can you put enough in a battery to go that far?:

:I'm not sure, I'll have to see how much I can figure out about making better batteries. That's not the only way to power things, though - burning things for fuel isn't great, breathing smoke is bad for people and if you do very much of it you'll wreck your planet in the long term, but it definitely works, and it's portable enough. Or something that runs on mage-fire, if our powers turn out to make that sustainable, or do an infrastructure project to get the power where we need it, maybe. It will be a few years, to figure out what works best and do it, but there's lots of options.:

There's a knock at the door, Savil gets up and answers it and comes back with food, which she puts on the sideboard. :Er, everyone help themselves. Deskyl – it sounds like you're leaning toward sticking around? But I don't want to assume or anything: 

:I'm leaning that way, yeah. I still have a lot of questions before I'll be sure about it. And I'll want to do engineering no matter where I end up.:

Savil nods. :Well, let's eat. And if you have any questions I might be able to answer now, ask ahead: 

DZ puts a plate together for Deskyl, who switches to signing one-handed while she eats with the other. :I'll want to know more about your country, at least - who runs it, what their policies are like, what its political situation is, that kind of thing.: