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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."
The last couple of weeks before the wedding slide past.
"What are you wearing for it?" Dara asks her, a week before. "Please tell me you have an actual wedding dress."
"I delegated that to my mother, you'd have to ask her. She did measure me at some point."
"Maybe you don't care at all what you're wearing, but I do, so I think I will!"
Rana has at some point buttonholed a local dressmaker for the purpose and is helping rush the dress along herself. It's white - "so it will be suitably Heraldic, you see" - and instead of trying to get a lot of white-on-white embroidery done under the wire it's making a statement out of its time-efficient minimalism, just some drapery and ruching to add detail.
Preeeeeetty! Dara approves. Does Rana know what Leareth is wearing? And can it please not be the same extremely boring black clothes he wears most of the time.
"I haven't been working on his, actually, do you have ideas? Or maybe he has - someone in charge of that in his chain of command somewhere?"
A while later Leareth Mindspeaks Belrun. :Dara is having opinions about wedding attire at me! I asked Nayoki to figure something out but Dara thinks it is not celebratory enough, I am not even sure what that means here:
:...fancy? Not what you'd usually wear, especially if that is by virtue of fanciness?:
:Nayoki asked about traditional Valdemaran wedding attire for men and it is terrible, it has tailcoats. My wedding clothes will be new and made of high quality fabric and not black, I am not sure what more Dara wants!: Pause. :She says embroidery. I suppose there is nothing actually wrong with getting married in a shirt that has flowers on it but it seems unnecessary:
:Did she specify flowers? You don't strike me as floral. I'm sure they can embroider arbitrary things. Cover your clothes in embroidered math notation if you want:
:Possibly!: Leareth sounds intrigued. :If I am allowed to ask for anything I want embroidered on it, then I will give it a think:
:Just keep in mind there's a deadline, I'm told my dress is going to be very light on the embroidery and designed so they can stop midway through and still have it look nice if they fall behind:
:I will talk to her about it:
A candlemark later Leareth reports that he's given Dara an embroidery pattern that looks like the way a particular kind of ward spell does to mage-sight, and should deal gracefully with being unfinished since they can do the larger features first and then the finer detail.
:Yes, of course: When he joins her a few minutes later, he casts it for her. It's meant to detect most offensive magic but not give alarms for shields or passive artifacts, which is somewhat complicated as a specification, and it has an interesting spiral-y pattern to how the threads of mage-energy are laid down.
"Many spells are very pretty to mage-sight but I like this one in particular, it has good symmetry to it."
And they can continue with preparations. Leareth is spending most of his time sanity checking the security arrangements and being moderately stressed about it.
Welp having a moderately stressed lifebonded isn't great but she can still dish out Gifts and confirm her mother's occasional check-ins about the wedding.
One time she asks Shadowgod if they "just" see the Foresight-web that's what she can see in the blue place or if they can also perceive human-scale events (or foresee them, or remember them having occurred in the past) and if so what sorts of events.
Other gods can perceive human-scale events through specific humans with a link to Them - priests, or the Tayledras in the case of the Star-Eyed. Foresight of the future is generally in mostly godconcept-form, the sort of abstraction that she can perceive a fraction of by visiting the blue place. Godmemory of the past includes more concrete elements, if a god was able to see them through a human. The Shadowgod operates less in this way than other gods; technically They can look through the Web and Companions, seeing not quite human-scale events but closer to it.
Probably, it hasn't come up before because the Shadowgod does not in fact do this and has also never communicated with the Companions about whether or not They do it.
Fair enough.
What makes gods specialize how they do, with Shadowgod's whole death thing and Vkandis's sun thing and so on?