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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."
"- Interesting. I suppose I will try that and see if it works. My best theory here says that mice souls are not normally detailed or distinct enough to particularly hold together and be reincarnated the normal way, but this method is different and there would not be an interval in between."
He'll get to work on that, then!
...And after a few days of Leareth doing more in-depth study, they can finally install mage-channels in a monkey.
Not a very strong one, both because there isn't a lot to 'attach' it to and because Adept-strength monkey mages sound like a bad, bad idea. In human terms it would probably be categorized as a hedge-wizard, below the cutoff even for Master mages (usually defined as 'strong enough to draw from ley-lines, but not nodes').
She doesn't want an Adept-monkey but she'd like to be able to make one if it ever seems like a good idea, or if she becomes confident enough to mage humans, does that look straightforward?
"I think a creature might need to be smarter than a monkey to have enough - soul-stickiness, to attach a Gift that strong to? I am not sure how to explain it better than that. You ought definitely be able to do it with a human. Or strengthen the current Gift to Adept once the monkey contains a person later."
"That will do, I think, though I'm going to have to be conservative about how I advertise it to the first human subjects..."
"If you are giving someone a totally new mage-gift, it might be safer and more pleasant for them to start it off with - hmm, not narrower channels to begin with since that is difficult to safely change on other people, but perhaps partially-open, the way children's potential Gifts naturally awaken gradually rather than all at once. My understanding is that Vanyel had a rather difficult time because his Gifts were at full strength immediately, before he had even rudimentary control of them."
"I'll see if I can finagle that, then." She fiddles with it as she runs through her monkey supply.
It does seem possible to give monkeys partially-open channels, they just (in Leareth's mage-sight) start to look dangerously not-glued-on-enough, which is the part Leareth thinks would be addressed by having a human-sized instead of monkey-sized soul in there.
They're still not particularly able to use their Gifts; the brain area to control mage-gift is trickier as well.
That's okay. This is all proof of concept and not part of a master plan to have monkey mages running operations. All her monkeys are surviving this procedure?
No dead monkeys, at least not yet!
Cool. They can float the idea of sticking a Healing-Gift in Randi with these encouraging results. (After, not before, he's abdicated.)
Leareth's mages are making good progress. He thinks they need maybe one more month.
"I need to make a decision," he says to Belrun. "On whether I am going with them - which will mean being in fairly close proximity to the Heartstone, for the duration it takes to set up and complete the process, but it will be much harder to run from a distance."
"It is a very complex working and I do not really feel comfortable delegating the direction of it. It would be possible to do from Mindspeech range, and cue everyone on their pieces, but it would impair my ability to watch what is happening and I would be very stressed."
"I don't want to test it on you first but I haven't lost a monkey yet and maybe some other people would like it."
"There would certainly be volunteers from among my people! Particularly if the downside risk is 'they do not get functional Farsight' as opposed to 'they die of brain cancer.'"
"Well, if you are reasonably confident you could notice and fix early brain cancer if it turns out humans are more susceptible than monkeys, you are welcome to start asking for volunteers."
"I think I would notice and be able to fix it if you had early brain cancer though it would be very scary."