"I can wake them up if you want, we're taking turns. Do you know how many people?"

:Four. Two girls, two boys. Though apparently it was a little ambiguous for one of them whether he was part of the team or had just somehow ended up with them anyway: 

"Okay. There were something like eleven or twelve hundred people trying to get out and--half of them probably died trying--so it's not going to be more than six hundred total even if they're scattered all over the planet."

:Half of them! That’s…the normal success rate - survival rate…? Gods. I - your parents must be so devastated right now - I’m so sorry…:

Focus. Not the time for condolences. 

:All right. I’m sure all of you are exhausted, so - I won’t wake the others unless you don’t recognize the descriptions but think they might. Joshel? You have the notes?:

:Yes. One moment: 

He squints at scrawls on a piece of paper; it’s clear from the handwriting that his hand was shaking when he made the notes. 

:Four young adults of about eighteen: he reads off, half rote. :One of the young men had a sword? Or sword-like artifact at least. One of the young women claimed to be able to heal people by singing to them. The other had a pack with magical drinks and bandages that could do healing. Does that ring any bells?:

"Singer and a healer on the same team, that'd be . . . Shannon and Rebecca or Jacqueline and Chu Hua, or some other team I don't know--did they say if the singer had darker skin than me and eyes more like yours, or skin and eyes more like mine?"

:Er, sorry, Dara wasn't sure on the descriptions, it was all very hectic. She... Descriptions are: first boy, dressed fairly nicely, light-colored hair, sword or sword-like artifact and a bracelet that the Groveborn thinks was also a magical artifact, of very foreign nature. One of the girls had darker skin - nobody remembers if she was the singer or not, though. The other girl had lighter skin and dark brown hair, about Jisa's coloring. The second boy had a bracelet that matched the darker-skinned girl's, and about my coloring: 

The bracelets are presumably power-sharers, but that doesn't narrow it down enough. "And I assume you didn't get any of their names or you'd've started with that . . . it could be Raleigh and Shannon and Rebecca but then who would the fourth kid be . . . Did any of them say the name of a city or a country?"

:One second: Joshel consults the paper. :....Yeah, they did mention some places right at the start when Marius was trying to figure out where they'd come from and whether they were a threat. He - unfortunately didn't remember all of it because a lot of other things happened right away. There were...three different cities? All of them were in a place called 'America'. One of the cities was New Something but he doesn't remember what the second placename was: 

"Okay, that narrows it down some and is consistent with Shannon and Raleigh and Rebecca and some other random person who didn't have a--wait a second, blond boy with no group and a bracelet and a 'sword-like artifact' and 'New Something' is probably Orion Lake." She wouldn't be all that surprised if it turned out this whole accident was down to some crazy thing Orion Lake was doing, but she'd be surprised enough that she's not going to accuse him of having fucked up out loud.

Tran is hurriedly taking notes. :Right. Shannon, Raleigh, Rebecca. They're a team? Who's Orion Lake and, er, is there a particular reason to think he might end up tagging along with some other team rather than with his own?: 

"Yes, those three are a team. Orion Lake--is weird. He's insanely good at killing mals, it's his affinity--does this planet even have affinities? Anyway he's a totally unstoppable once-in-a-generation outlier and he loves it so he didn't join an alliance, he was just going to go in with his swordwhip and kill as many mals and save as many people as he could and then get out at the last minute. I don't know if he ended up getting out at the same time as us for some reason or if this means the gate was like that for the whole time and there's a thousand more of us out there or what."

:Hmm. Could you give us a more detailed description of his sword-artifact? We can pass that back up north, see if the people who saw it agree that it looked like that:

She describes its appearance in various configurations and how it unfolds and extends to switch between them. "It's pretty much uniquely identifying; I don't think anyone else goes in for that design." Unfortunately she doesn't remember what Sacramento's power-sharers look like.

:Thank you. We'll pass that on and try to get confirmation. ....Er, do you have any other identifying information for - Joshel, Tran, what were their names again -?: 

:Shannon, Raleigh, Rebecca. Er, if there are other identifying traits you can give us, for them, we can see if that jogs Dara or Marius or Rolan's memory: 

She knows a few more facts about Shannon and Raleigh, fewer about Rebecca and Orion. Mostly what languages they speak and what healing spells Shannon can do.

None of this is especially helpful for comparing against information already on his paper, and Joshel somehow doubts it'll be useful to Dara or Marius or Rolan either, but he can pass it along. 

When he contacts the relay up the line, he also gets a response on the earlier query. 

:Rolan didn't see the sword artifact switch configurations but otherwise it matches. He says the boy carrying it seemed to be doing guard duty for the other three? He came across as very brave and maybe kind of reckless, he'd run toward a commotion rather than away. When the others were all jumping in to do healing for casualties, and the boy was standing watch, Rolan did ask if he was good in combat and wanted to help guard one of the Heralds going in to try to accept a surrender from Iftel. The boy said he was good at fighting mals, not people. Does that all sound like Orion?: 

"Yeah, that's him all right. What's the situation with Iftel, currently?"

:They were supposed to be allied with us. We...um, we were sort of calling in all our allies, because we thought an enemy up north had attacked and we were about to get invaded - or, we weren't sure yet but we didn't want to be caught unprepared. And then things - escalated - there were a lot of conveniently coincidental messages getting lost or garbled, so Haven didn't know we were negotiating with him, and long story short they ended up attacking the place where we were meeting him to negotiate. And then Iftel ignored the order to stand down. And then they chucked a superweapon at the pass and nearly killed all of us. ...They've surrendered to our King now but it was pretty dicey for a while: 

:For context, Iftel belongs to Vkandis Sunlord. It's behind a miraculous magical barrier that He made and we didn't even know until the last couple of years that they had an entire secret army in there: 

Marcy is used to being attacked by monsters in the shower. She's used to checking all her food for poison before she eats it. She's used to being woken in the dead of night by things crawling under her door to suck the life out of her. She has never been scared of being killed by her allies.

"That's--fuck. And Vkandis made them do it?" 

Shrug. :Or convinced them it was a good idea, at least. We don't know if it was Foresight or what. I mean, it - gods, it's hard to blame their leadership? If Vkandis had been protecting my country from all harm for thousands of years, I'd probably trust Him too! Anyway, it wasn't just Vkandis. The magical weapon they used came from Urtho's Tower. Or what's left of it. It was mostly destroyed in the Cataclysm. And that's the territory of the Star-Eyed Goddess, and - She's the one who got my half-brother to try to destabilize the Heartstone in Haven. To kill Leareth. It would've killed tens of thousands of other people, too: 

And instead, it only killed her father, and her brother. And poor Kilchas. Jisa spent five minutes standing by the bier where they laid out his body, even though it was time she didn't have to spare. 

Tran raises his eyebrows a little. :Are we just telling them everything now?: he asks Jisa, along a private Mindspeech link. 

Jisa is so, so far past caring about secrecy here. From where she's standing, it feels like secrets and failures to communicate all the context are what nearly destroyed everything.