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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."
Dara is very glad to be back, and wants an update on everything that Belrun's been doing in Haven.
Dara is very pleased, Belrun keeps the best notes. She immediately starts trying to make herself as useful as possible. (This surprises no one.)
The day before the scheduled Council vote, Leareth asks Belrun to check him over and judge how much longer he needs before it'll be safe for him to do another marathon day-and-night-nonstop of magic. He's pretty stuck on safely splitting up the work, and doesn't think he should wait for that.
"I think... hm. Is this going to require practically all your personnel again?"
"No, this part is not power-intensive. I could do it alone if I needed to; doing it in concert with Vanyel would make it somewhat less exhausting, though."
"Okay. Then I think you can do it in a couple of days, since if something awful happens we'll have backups available for evac instead of like last time."
"All right." Leareth takes a deep breath. "...In that case I think I ought to talk to the Shadowgod today, for the preliminary instructions. I would need to wait a week and recover if I wanted to do it afterward."
:Yeah, it won't be fun, but it didn't hurt us last time: She pats Amshalan, fixes a stray bit of mane.
Leareth takes a deep breath and reaches for Belrun's hand, then rests his other hand on Amshalan's mane and closes his eyes.
He knows he should try to get the Shadowgod's attention, now, but he can't bring himself to reach for it. :Belrun, could you...?:
WELCOME BACK.
It's not quite those words, of course, more a swirling, dizzying haze of concepts.
This is very overwhelming. Leareth has to remind himself that it's the last time he'll ever need to do it this way.
:We have made preparations for the avatar: he sends. Mindspeaking with a god-part is such a bizarre and unpleasant experience. :I will need to give you some instructions to follow, once it is done:
SHOW ME.
So Leareth unshields entirely and holds the concepts in the surface of his mind, one by one, sort of pushing them in the god's direction. This is even more disorienting than the last conversation; he can sense the Shadowgod poking at him, at the pattern that makes up a Leareth and a Leareth's plans and ideas and designs, and it feels not very gentle, and sort of like They might accidentally unravel him.
It seems to take forever, but finally, Leareth has finished conveying the instructions from all angles. And still seems to have his sanity intact. He hopes so, at least.
THANK YOU. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK WHEN THE TIME COMES.