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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."
"Human short-range Foreseers still cannot get much, but they can guess somewhat better than chance up to fifteen, twenty minutes in advance, usually not longer. I assume gods can do better than that but had not previously had any willing to cooperate with tests."
"'Theory' would be overstating it but - you can weight dice, right, their weight matters for how they roll, so it's not obvious to me that if you're using future-predicting magic anyway it'd be harder to guess how they'd turn up if they're fair to casual observation than if they aren't."
"My guess is that too many random factors affect exactly when and how the dice is thrown - human short-range Foreseers can See how it will land the instant it leaves someone's hand, that part is more predictable. I do put some credence that from a god's view it is actually predictable much sooner, and the gods were just not incentivized to confirm this in the past. Randomizing my actual plans this way does seem to go better than not doing it, but that data is very noisy and also this decision is unusually high-stakes."
"If you have time you could get a bunch of different dice and see which ones are noisiest to your human Foreseers."
"I suppose I might as well do that, the testing would not require me specifically."
:Oooh! How clever. I'm happy to help test, sounds interesting, and I think my Foresight is a bit higher-resolution than human short-range Foresight. Rolan would be even better:
:Inconveniently Rolan is in Haven: Belrun introduces Amshalan to Leareth's Foreseers.
Amshalan cheerfully helps them test it! Her Foresight is in fact a bit further-reaching than the human Foreseers', but the 'noisiest' dice still don't give her much to work with more than a few minutes in advance. She suggests that if they feel like adding even more noise, they could randomize the exact-minute timing of rolling the dice that determines whether they leave that candlemark or not.
"Ooh, I like that." She relays it to Leareth when they have found the noisiest of dice.
Leareth agrees that this is a clever suggestion, and seems low-cost to add so they might as well.
She goes back to helping with the food poisoning. For a big push like this she can just directly help them grow with a shove of Gift, even though in the long run as a sustainable energy source it would be better to have them managing that all on their own.
The other Healers can help out as well.
Leareth is normally very good at not being physiologically stressed out even from very major high-stakes undertakings, but the evening before the planned departure, he's noticeably tense and restless.
Eventually Leareth is relaxed enough to fall asleep in her arms.
He wakes up once from a very weird nightmare about the Heartstone being secretly able to extract blood-magic by running the Companion Foresight backwards (this makes zero sense as a concept but tell that to his dreaming brain) and somehow this can make time run backwards and disappear the containers and he has to keep having people Gate them back again, and also Dara turns out to secretly be the same person as Queen Karis and he spends a stomach-dropping moment 'remembering' this and worrying that maybe Vkandis is going to use her to do a miracle and set him on fire.
What a weird and stupid dream. Though the underlying stress isn't very stupid at all.
:Bad dream, sorry: He wraps his arms more tightly around her.
Leareth resists the half-asleep urge to wake her and check that she thinks Dara is definitely not secretly the same person as Queen Karis. He goes back to sleep.
In the morning he rolls a die for how many minutes to wait before rolling a four-sided die to decide if they'll leave in a candlemark (on a one) or wait one candlemark to roll it again. The ritual is going to run overnight anyway and he'll be awake for a day and night with stimulants, given that he's not too worried about starting it a little later. His original plan had been just to roll for the number of candlemarks to wait, but then the departure time is predetermined from that point onward; the repeated checks will make it much noisier.
They will not be leaving in one candlemark, which means he and Belrun have time for a sit-down breakfast if she wants.