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When Vanyel is ready for the mad science tour, he shows him the monkeys. "They're monkeys," she feels it necessary to clarify. "I know they look very human at this point, because the whole point of them is that I'm going to move into one if I ever die, but they're not people, and I have forbidden the staff to name them. I could move into one now if I had to but I'd like to get one actually looking like me in particular first, and I want to stick more Gifts into them, I got Fetching out of some Changesquirrels but further work is needed." She shows him the mice, too. "Do you suppose Jisa'd like a winged mouse? What's her favorite color?" She shows him all her microbiology eggs. "That's a flu sample from the recent plague! I remembered to take one. Those there are other flus. The white eggs have more-alive microbes and the brown eggs have less-alive kinds - there's a cold one of the staff mages had a few months ago, there's food poisoning, there's the most common kind from healthy intestines - you could get your Sight this fine, you know, I don't do heavy Healing-Gift use apart from Sight for this work."
"My sister only ever wanted to play soldiers, she hated the entire concept of princesses. Anyway. Congratulations, Dara." He offers her a hug.
"Someone may decide to make a fuss about you not having a Companion," Belrun warns. "Assuming of course that we can't hit Rolan over the head with the concept of the Star-Eyed endangering Valdemar hard enough to jailbreak him, though it seemed like that was maybe almost happening when everybody had the flu."
Dara winces. "I - don't know - gods, that would be so awkward. I was really incredibly mad at him for a while."
"Yeah, I don't blame you at all. He's going to be sort of unavoidably around, whether or not anything, uh, weird happens."
"My opinion is that he is still extremely frustrating, but he is also trying quite hard."
"Yeah, he talked to the Shadowgod when he got fed up about the annoying coincidences around the plague, and then brought me and Leareth and Amshalan all into the blue place to look at what he got out of Them and then repeated stuff we thought was important at the time and then forgot, which turned out to be really, really helpful."
"Wow, um, that's really good for him." She frowns. "And - you think he might come and want me back, if he does - manage to jailbreak himself?"
"I do not have specific indications in that direction and reasoning about what gods want is weird but - it seems like insofar as the Shadowgod could probably see that it would occur to me to ask you, and the Shadowgod is the god the Companions primarily answer to, They might have a solution to the resulting inelegance? I can't remotely promise it's a good solution because I'm pretty sure They also did our lifebond and wedged me into my situation with Amshalan, and I encourage you to tell Rolan to go fuck himself if you want to, but if you don't..."
"Yeah. I am excited to have you aboard in whatever capacity without Rolan's involvement, it's just sort of a dangling thread, you know?"
Dara shuffles her feet. "So, is there anything I can do to help with what you're working on now?"
"You don't have the Gifts we're leaning on but if you want to feed microbes gross sludge you can do that!"
Then she can see lots of places where microbes are even though she cannot see the microbes.
Vanyel points out that Dara is a Mindspeaker; Belrun can't do concert-Sight with her, but Vanyel himself is nearly to the point that he can see the microbes, and he can definitely see the big clusters of them, so he's happy to show her.
