View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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."
Leareth fields a few more questions about replacing defences from the Heartstone, and then:
"Do you have a plan to put Haven back?" one of the lords asks. "Heard you were selling Gifts to the highest bidder for it." He sounds more impressed than judgemental about it.
"Yes, I don't want to lean on the tax base for it when a fair fraction of the tax base didn't have any warning and suffered a lot as a result of that! So I'm auctioning some of my time selling Gifts to screened individuals. I brought copies of the screening quizzes, if anyone wants to check them over, and also I have some sketched proposals for architectural replacements from various interested architects, which, as long as we're building from the ground up anyway, will have first floor scaling that accommodates Companions better."
Ooh, the lords would be delighted to review and give opinionated commentary on Gift screening lists and architectural proposals, and then argue about it.
:Aaaand this is the part I hate: Vanyel complains to Belrun. :Got any tips this time to hate it less?:
:Well, you could form your own opinions about the architecture, though you've already seen the screening quizzes. See what Yfandes thinks of the sketches maybe:
Getting Yfandes' opinions on architecture does seem like an improvement over being annoyed that the lords are having stupid arguments about it.
The Council seems relieved to have a concrete topic to argue about and they do it for a while before Randi cuts them off.
"We can call smaller meetings about this later," he says. "We should talk about, er, the upcoming transition of power that we voted on before this."
There are some murmurs, but no one actually comes out and says 'maybe we don't want Belrun as Queen after she burned down the capital city.'
"I'd be happy to take over for you. I'm sure you could use one heck of a vacation but would in the medium term really value having you around for advice, you've got experience with a lot of things I'll need to catch up on. I'm told that this would also be more generally palatable if I marry Leareth to formalize the fact that we'd be folding his organization into the collected resources available to Valdemar, which I'm happy to do according to whatever the traditional wedding forms are. Since I can't have kids I think this would probably be best if it were accompanied by a graceful change in law to reflect that biological relationship is no longer understood to be a particularly relevant factor in succession, with some sort of vote or appointment of heirs substituting."
There are nods of agreement.
Does she have an heir she wants to appoint? The consensus is still that Treven is too young, it seems in general poor form to have the official heir be someone who couldn't actually take over yet in the event they were suddenly required.
"I favor Dara, myself, she has a preexisting qualification for the approximate job of running things, she's younger than me but not by that much, and she has a good head on her shoulders. Complicating the matter is that she does not at this time have a Companion and I'd understand if that was a bridge too far but I'd need to meet more of the new Chosen to scare up a second choice."
This probably goes over more smoothly than it would have otherwise, because it's nearing the end of a longish meeting and they've spent all their opinion-energy on architecture. The Council would like time to think about this question.
"Of course. And Dara herself is currently up north but will probably come down as soon as there's enough long-range Gates to go around."
Great!
The Council thinks they should reconvene in a few days and hold an actual vote then. There is disagreement over whether Belrun and Leareth should be properly married before the official handover from King Randale to Belrun or after. Either way, ideally there will be at least one building that isn't a tent to hold a coronation ceremony and/or wedding in, how long is that going to take?
"I have very loose preliminary time estimates from approval to completion I squeezed out of the architects, written on the backs of the designs -"
Plans are looked over. It sounds like they'll have some buildings just about complete in a month's time or a little longer? Maybe they can plan the formalities to happen six weeks from now, just to make sure there's time to get Haven put together again.
"The estimates are more likely to be optimistic than pessimistic, but assuming it's all right to have a deficiency of, say, furniture, six weeks will probably be fine."
Maybe they can hold the official vote for all the things in two weeks, at which point they'll have better estimates of the timing too?
Randi confirms that all of the Heralds find this reasonable, and then calls the meeting to an end.
...Oh no now he has to walk back. Leareth isn't especially looking forward to this.