"That sounds good, thanks." Because it's a plan that doesn't involve him asking Lancir for money, mostly.

"Excellent! I'll talk to him next time I have a chance, then."

And Savil serves them food and wine and asks Sandra about weapons lessons and then goes off into a rant about irritating lords on the Council. 

Abras has questions about what the irritating lords are trying to accomplish, but sits on most of them because presumably Savil has to think about this sort of thing enough already and just wants to get the rant out. Once she's winding down a bit he asks if she has time to come see their demo airbag.

"Oh, sure, I can do that now." Savil gets up, wincing slightly and rubbing her lower back, and drains the rest of her wine-cup. 

Then they can all go see a cloth bag full of hot air puff up and weigh less than it did when the air was cold! Abras is getting better at holding it so the hole is downwards, which helps a bit with keeping it heated up.

"Huh." Savil shakes her head. "How odd." 

"It's funny how something as common as air can still surprise us."

"I guess so!" She pats his shoulder. "Well. Very impressive discovery. I'll talk to Lancir for you. Better go now."

And she forges off. 

Abras, having run out of experiment-related things to do, promptly switches from "keyed-up" to "worn out" and goes to bed not long after.

And he finds himself in a frozen snowscape, standing at the mouth of a pass carved straight-and-true through the mountain. Across an expanse of white, a man in black stands with an army behind him. 

"Herald Abras." 

"Leareth."

"I read the book you mentioned. Herald Seldasen's work on ethics."

"Ah." A brief flicker of something that might be a smile. "What did you think?" 

"He's very . . . sensible. And clear. A lot of people, when they talk about ethics, you can't tell what would be different about the world if what they said was true versus if it was false; he had a lot less of that."

This earns him something closer to a real smile. "What an excellent framing on it. I agree. One of the best qualities of Seldasen's works is his clarity." A pause. "Do you think that it gave you a better understanding of - what I meant, in our previous conversation?" 

"It doesn't make everything you've claimed make sense, but--I can see a framework that would let it potentially make sense, if the pieces you don't want to tell me were the right shape."

It would be a very unlikely shape for those pieces to be, and he's not especially sure of the framework either, but he does see it. It's like the difference between how there's no such thing as a fire-breathing dragon and how there's no such thing as a four-sided triangle.

A fractional nod. "Yes. I understand."

Leareth pauses for a long ten seconds, looking levelly at Abras.

"Well. Since you appear to have a talent for insightful framings and asking the right questions – what do you feel are the most valuable questions I might answer for you? Where are your greatest uncertainties, in terms of who and what I am?" 

"What makes you think your plan to invade Valdemar is better than the vast majority of invasion plans throughout history? And can you imagine anything that would persuade you not to do it?"

"...Oh, there are a great many things that would persuade me not to do it. It is not my first choice of plans by far. If I received new evidence that the chances of success were far lower than I had believed... Or if I were granted any other opportunity to succeed at my longer-term plans, I would take it." 

A pause. Leareth regards Abras, calm, thoughtful. "As to the first question, there are several possible things you might mean by 'better' - could you clarify?" 

"So, most wars--this is an oversimplification, wars vary a lot, but it's hard to think of any that left everyone better off than they started. Sometimes one country ends up better off, but as far as I know you don't have a country, you just think you can fight a war that leaves the losers better off. And that doesn't generally happen. So what's different this time?"