"Go ahead. Enjoy yourself."

Leareth heads off with Vanyel, still smiling. 

He will leave them to it and get back to work. 

Vanyel tows Leareth back a number of hours later, exhausted as promised; the sun is mostly set at this point. :Maitimo, you around? You're better than me at getting him to eat when he's tired without making a big deal about it. Also I think he gave himself a mild backlash headache so I'm finding Stef to painblock until he's rested a bit. We had fun!: 

Oh good! Sure, I'll come over with dinner. He picks out some things Leareth likes and does this.

Leareth nods to him. He's still smiling, though it's a very tired smile at this point. 

Stef is sitting sideways across a chair with his feet dangling, teasing Vanyel by segueing perfectly innocent songs into one of the songs about his war victory and seeing how long it takes him to notice. 

He hands out dinner. "Everyone has to eat a reasonable amount of dinner and then go to bed. I am in charge here and that's an order."

"Well then." Leareth gets to work. 

"Since when have I ever needed orders to eat enough delicious food?" Vanyel says, smiling. 

"Since when are you in charge?" Stef says, stealing some of Vanyel's food off his plate in between songs. 

"While you were out I decided that my father probably won't notice if I take over all his duties one by one. It's been going swimmingly."

"He really wouldn't," Stef agrees cheerfully. 

"–Stef, if you keep eating my food then both of us are going to end up eating unreasonable amounts of dinner in opposite directions, which would be disobeying orders and that would be so rude." 

Leareth chuckles and then starts absently playing with a little illusion of a house, adding windows to it. It's less detailed and clean than Vanyel's illusions but recognizable. 

"Quit it," Vanyel says without looking up. "You're done for today." 

"You will still have magic in the morning."

He will!

"Just to update you on progress," Vanyel says once he's finished his food. "He's definitely rusty, mostly on finesse and a bit on endurance, it's not affecting raw power. He can Gate fine but has trouble with the weirder variants like the moving Gate - but honestly, I can't do the moving Gate at all despite practicing Gates for years. We should make some artifacts together, get the fine detail work covered. Not sure what else there is to practice..." 

"Well, compulsions."

"Do you think you'll... Hmm, it's probably good to have the option even if we hope not to need it. I'm kind of terrible at compulsions so I don't know if I can help you much at practicing, I guess you could do them on me?" 

"You seem like in a lot of respects the worst person for him to be practicing compulsion spells on? Not that I don't trust you," he says fondly to Leareth.

“You know, that’s fair. If I were good at them I could maybe give him pointers, but,” equally fond glance at Leareth, “we have some evidence that I’m really not.”

"What does being good at compulsions look like?"

Vanyel glances over at Leareth. "My understanding is that the skill I don't have involves making compulsions to do a way more specific complicated thing than 'don't move', and - making them not blatantly obvious."