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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."
"I think at least - three, maybe even six months, unless I do another recruiting round to get more mages in total, and that would be time-consuming in itself."
"I'm going to see how long the microbes take to die if I don't feed them. If they can last a while that way we can construct relatively portable little containers of them, full of an initial batch of food and growing till it runs out."
"That makes sense. I do think we could transport a large number of them quickly, with Gates and magic to help carry them through."
"I should probably make a trip back to Haven and at least try tweaking the Web alarms to catch gryphons, we don't know for sure that the Star-Eyed would interfere directly–"
"And She and Vkandis were probably working together last time Leareth died."
"Yes." Slight shiver, and he reaches to put his arm around Belrun. "I - suppose it might act as a deterrent, if She thought an attack was less likely to catch us unawares, but...on balance I think we should hold off on revealing it. I will think on it further."
They get back to work. Leareth still slips by to kiss Belrun fairly often, though it's just as often because he's worrying about Vkandis' gryphon cavalry and wants reassurance as it is because she's being excellent.
Vanyel gets the hang of killing microbes and extracting their life-energies as power, and he can do a lot at once. He's also very comfortable with concert-work so he tutors Leareth's mages, who are improving a bit faster than Leareth's median prediction.
Belrun does SCIENCE. But a lot of the work is just assembling containers and feeding microbes and seeing about how many there are in various containers and that can be delegated so some of her SCIENCE is done trying to stuff Gifts into monkeys.
It's tricky! Even once Vanyel confirms that she's given them Fetching and he can see the channels, the monkeys seem unable to use it, except occasionally completely at random.
"I suspect you need to give them the corresponding brain region that a Gifted person has," Leareth muses. "Nayoki would be able to See it directly, I think - perhaps she could concert-See it with me and then I could share the result with you?"
Leareth suggests they grab Vanyel as a test Fetcher (he minds much less having Mindhealers examine him than Belrun does.)
Sure! Vanyel will happily Fetch a ball across the room and back a few times, and do the floating-around rather than teleporting kind of Fetching with it too.
Once they've done a few test runs, Leareth drops out of rapport with Nayoki so that he can instead be in rapport with Belrun and show her the memories of which bread-bits in Vanyel's mind moved or lit up when he was Fetching.
"Nayoki, your metaphor is weird," Belrun mutters, taking notes with a lot of swoops and half-drawn diagrams.
