Savil slides her chair back and stands. "Van, ke'chara, you and Fazil are welcome to join me for lunch if you'd like...?" 

"Thank you, but I think I'm going to take a nap or something." :Not sure if I literally need a nap: he tells Fazil, :but - it was really stressful, earlier, even if it went totally fine. I can catch you up on it if you want?: 

:Sure.:

Vanyel walks back with him to the guest wing - wondering privately if it makes sense for him to stay there or if he should go back to his room, but he doesn't really expect them to be in Haven that much longer - and he explains Randi's reaction to the Yfandes issue in Mindspeech. :'Fandes was right, I think, it's sufficiently not the weirdest or most concerning thing he's learned about recently that he couldn't be bothered being upset with me over it: 

Aaaaand he should probably explain the blood-magic incident, too, which Yfandes thinks he also got off on very lightly due to everyone having bigger fish to fry. So he does. Along with a little of the background on his conversations with Leareth and previous soul-searching on whether using blood-magic could ever be justifiable. 

: - wow. We don't ...have anyone who can do that. I think it might be bad if it were advertised that it's possible, lest it's also possible with our magic and not widely known...:

:Mmm-hmm. I'm guessing that Leareth didn't mention it and that's probably part of why: 

:He did not mention it. Which, yes, seems very sensible, though he also may have been trying to give us less reminders about what he's done. Probably if it could be done at all with our magic Evil would have advertised how but not necessarily.... for what it's worth I'd expect it to not be Evil, or not very, in the circumstances you described. Kick you right out of Law, though."

:Are all the other Heralds Lawful? Yfandes wondered if I was right up until that. Though - in hindsight something like that had been brewing for a while, she thinks: 

Almost all of them. All the other Companions are. You - reason about the world more like neutral good. But it's possible that you were Lawful, before that; I would think being part of something like the Heralds is a strong push towards Law even if it's not exactly the same thing.

Vanyel nods. :And - I reasoned like this less before, I think. I got a lot of it from Leareth: 

:Who is himself Lawful! But I guess distinctly not using the Heralds' system, and probably with a long list of objections to it.:

:And I'm not sure I can do the thing he does. I'm - not careful enough. Possibly I'm just not smart enough. And Yfandes thinks it might be important, here, that he's millennia old. He's had a lot of time to develop his personal code and flesh it out for all contingencies, right? Whereas I keep - ending up in situation where I really should have thought through what decision process I'd use, and I didn't because it never felt like there was time. Sunhame...isn't the first time that happened and I was unhappy with what Heraldic ethics said to do. It's just the first time I acted on that: 

Nod. Adventuring is bad for Law for the same reason. The world is complicated, it can be really hard to - figure out how the rules even apply, let alone whether you really believe in them.

:Yfandes keeps complaining about that. The world being complicated, I mean, and it not being clear how any given standard would even apply. I - guess she always really believed in our rules, before this, she was made that way. It's pretty confusing for her to have that suddenly stop being true: 

:...yeah. I can imagine.:

They reach their rooms. Vanyel rings for a servant and asks for lunch to be brought.

"I don't know what makes sense to do next," he says, leaning on his doorframe. "I wish we could expect to hear back from Leareth and the others soon, but they're probably going to take ages." 

"I think it's probably worth talking with Valdemar about plans for the Worldwound in the case where Leareth's right and there'll be a simultaneous invasion of Cheliax and also the case where he's not and we're just joining the existing forces trying to do things about the Worldwound. It seems like maybe Velgarth magic would still let us do something about the situation."

"I think so. The Worldwound is the one where there's a lot of Abyssal-related damage to the land, right? It - occurs to me that we should maybe contact the Tayledras, since they have techniques for fixing magic-damaged land here." He rubs his chin, thoughtful. "I'm also still curious if your Abyss is the same as our Abyssal Plane. And if so, why we can access that from Velgarth but not any of the other afterlives." 

"There's a lot of damage to the land, yeah. And whether they're the same thing - and whether the other Outer Planes can be reached from here - seems worth looking into, though I don't know how you go about checking, exactly."

"Can you, er, tell by watching if someone is accessing your Abyss? We - have a technique for summoning Abyssal demons here in Velgarth. I am not technically trained on it but I could derive it from other Elemental summonings. Unfortunately then I would have an Abyssal demon on my hands and they're terrible, so." 

"Well if the Abyssal demon were not chaotic evil that would be decisive. If they were, I'm not sure how I could tell whether they were from our Abyss or a different one."

"Makes sense. I don't think that's a high priority for right now or anything, I'm just curious." 

"I am too! It would be nice to be able to - situate Velgarth in our model of the universe a little better, even though with planes that kind of thing is almost always very confusing. And if you are near enough to summon from the other Outer Planes once you know about them, Good outsiders're very useful and can often be paid in things like - a promise to dedicate a month to helping the poor, or the time and attention of an evil person who wants to repent or a detailed tactics-focused summary of a war."

"Huh! Why do they wanted detailed summaries of wars?" 

"Well, Heaven fights lots of wars, and there are tactician-archons who mostly want to learn how to get better at fighting wars, and would be interested in another world mostly for the details of how it fights wars. It would be sort of a disturbing thing to be obsessed with if Hell weren't, well, what it is."