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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."
"It would be very scary for me too! I trust you and I suspect it will go fine, but I am in favour of you testing it first with some informed, consenting volunteers, so that both of us are less anxious about doing it on myself."
Lots of people! After the explanation of risks, still six different people are interested!
Dara would love to have Farsight! As prospective heir, though, possibly she should wait until the second round?
It turns out to be pretty straightforward to attach Farsight channels to humans, especially humans who already have other Gifts; it's easier than monkeys. Giving them the brain region to control it is more fiddly, but they can also talk to her about what they're feeling, so there's more useful direction there and it averages out to being about equally hard.
It's really interesting work! She goes carefully and methodically through each subject and monitors them for any misbehaving cells and finally she will try on Dara and Leareth.
Leareth is still kind of tense throughout the process, and tightly holds Belrun's hand for the part of it that involves poking in his head; it's trickier for him in particular because he also needs to be in rapport with her to lend his mage-sight.
She will squeeze his hand while she works and shows him what she's doing and attempts to be calm at him through the bond. When she's done she hugs him.
Leareth hugs her back, holding her tightly for a long time, and then starts trying out his new Farsight.
- it's really weird! He hasn't had this Gift in the last many lifetimes, it's rather rare outside of Valdemar and Rethwellan, so he has no helpful procedural memory at all, and his mental viewpoint keeps jumping around at random.
"I had not realized how much I cheat at learning to control mage-gift!" he admits.
"I will do that!"
He extracts some more hug, first, and then goes off to find Vanyel.
When it's Dara's turn, later when Leareth has gotten some initial advice from Vanyel and also a rest and is ready to lend his Sight again, she doesn't seem nervous at all. She is instead almost vibrating with excitement.
Farsight Farsight Faaaaaarsight! This is great! Dara's control isn't any better than Leareth's was at the very start, but she is DELIGHTED even by her randomly hopping-around viewpoint.
Can she get other Gifts too???
"I want to wait a few weeks to see if anybody tries to get brain cancer before I get too wild with it! You may as well spend that time working on controlling this one."
All right, fine, she can be patient about getting herself a list of Gifts as long as Vanyel's. ...She maybe doesn't want Mindhealing. Mindhealing sounds scary.
Vanyel happily offers Farsight lessons to both of them. "Maybe you can spy on the monkeys right back."
Belrun's microbes, oblivious to all of this, keep happily consuming gross slurry in their stacked-cheesecloths enclosures; they're up to double the maximum density of before, now, and Leareth's mages are all getting more efficient too, most of them are getting close to ten aellae of power per giant tank of food poisoning.
She should be! Also she should get kisses about it, definitely.
Final logistics. His mages are pretty ready, Leareth thinks, and he doesn't want to move too slowly at this point, in case it's the difference between a surprise gryphon attack and not.
He does need to decide if they want a generic baby-god or specifically to have something they can then hook up to the Shadowgod to allow Them better communication with humans. Probably this requires asking the Shadowgod for Their preferences?
"Hm, ways to try that - asking Rolan again, asking Amshalan if I can blue-place again with just her, prayer... if Dara were going to get a vision she'd probably have done that by now but I guess if I get in touch with the Shadowgod at all I can suggest it as a reply method..."
"Hmm. Maybe you can ask Amshalan first, see if that works, and if not try Rolan, since obtaining his help is somewhat more inconvenient especially if you want to accompany him?"