You did. I was excited when that happened, too.

They have a couple weeks left before the baby comes, to the best of her knowledge. Obviously that's at the point where the baby could really come whenever, if it really wanted, but her intention is not to stop working until she literally goes into labor, because - well, any amount of time she takes off dooms a bunch of other babies to death, and she doesn't really love doing that.

This does mean that they at least have a little bit of time to test how the connection works while she's working. As always, she teleports off to Hospital Island at dawn the next morning, apprentices in tow. 

Élie is not a morning person. 

The earliest couple hours of Naima's day are not, actually, excruciatingly boring. This is the part of her day that she devotes to training her couple dozen lower-level apprentices in herbalism. It saves way, way fewer people per hour than her regenerative hex, but it's also far more likely to be able to scale beyond her, especially if Élie's witch patron idea never pans out. It totally might, and she hopes it does, and believes it can, but, also, it might not, and it's important to also be pursuing other ways of eliminating disease. That means teaching people to do what she does, which, conveniently, she doesn't even really mind.

But she's also excited. So a couple patients in, while she's mixing herbs together and not really explaining what she's doing at all (although the better apprentices are watching raptly and taking furious notes), she decides there's not much reason to wait until she's actually excruciatingly bored.

How are you doing?

bwuhhhhright this is a time when hard-working and responsible people like his wife are up and about and ministering to the public. 

Awake! I mean, fine. I am fine. And awake. Saved any lives yet?

Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to wake you up. Whoops. Have to keep better track of that going forward, I guess. Uh - probably haven't literally saved any lives yet, we just did a remedy for typhoid and one for zombie rot. But if the kids learn to treat them then they'll go on to save more.

Oh, dear. I thought the whole point of Osirian burial practices was to not have this problem. Good luck.

– And since he's awake anyway he might as well drag himself out of bed and get to work. After he's made sure Rahim's had his breakfast, of course. And informed Naima that he can spell "porridge" all on his own! In two languages, almost. He's a very bright child. 

Awww! Naima actually has no idea how smart that indicates being because she didn't learn how to spell anything until she was in her twenties, but it sounds very impressive!

The guy might not be Osirian, we get a lot of people coming in on ships. I'm not gonna personally follow up on it, though. We have other people on staff for that.

Élie wishes he had other people on staff! Right now his work process mostly involves drawing up illusion-diagrams and staring at them and getting distracted by the idea of maybe working out more stable higher-dimensional visualizations like using crystals or something and going into town to see about getting materials where he runs into a wizard he met in Quantium who's doing interesting things with crops or planar anomalies or something and oh look now it's afternoon. 

Does Naima have opinions on how likely is it there's some obvious cheap solution to the visualizing spells-in-progress problem, because, seriously, every high-level wizard would want this? and, moments later, of course there is but none of them share it because they're all too obsessed with personal power instead of the advancement of the arts by which mortal beings understand the nature of the universe and that stand outside the arcanamirium has those date things you like and I don't suppose you remember what was that fellow's name again? 

I don't have an obvious solution off the top of my head, but it's admittedly not something I think about as much as you do. You could, hm - oh, one moment - 

Whose name? - you should buy the date things. 

She packs up her things up as soon as she runs out of supernatural intuition for remedies, takes Dahab and a couple of the newer female apprentices with her, and teleports them all to Azir, where they can begin on the lines of patients that are already waiting for her. Then it's Merab, and Katapesh, and Quantium, and Sedeq, and Oppara, which she will get through by talking about how she wonders how she should be assessing whether her students are actually learning anything and not just wasting time, and how she wonders how much it affects your reading on the law-chaos axis if you keep going through the Bachuan portal to get to the rest of Tian Xia even though you've been formally exiled from Bachuan, and whether they have any idea how Grandfather Pei is doing, and how Grandfather Pei is a ridiculously terrible person but she also kind of likes him just because he was interesting, and because it's hard to dislike anyone that committed to destroying hell too much, and on that note do they know where Ping is and what he's up to, and also is the one-winged bird okay? Is it eating? It's such a dumb bird. Maybe she'll have time to argue with the bird more when she has more time in her life. 

Élie thinks she should be having her students record remedies in minute detail – as they already do, of course – and cross-reference treatments for the same disease and find commonalities and then make remedies with different combinations of those traits and try them themselves, which might or might not work since he still thinks the remedies are supernatural but at least it would be information, and doesn't Naima want to read more Chaotic anyway, and that he's still really angry at himself if he's being honest since the only person he's definitively rescued from Hell is a murderous tyrant but it's not like he's going to put him back – and, no, he's not going to start planar binding hundreds of petitioners either, he's been sufficiently convinced that's a bad idea – and it is good to know that Heal still works on souls that've been in Hell for years because maybe it means the ones who've been there a hundred times longer might be recoverable, and last he checked Ping was in Mendev and the bird is eating sunflower seeds but does seem sort of listless, and on that subject they should really get their kid some more normal pets, and – 

Do you think you'll be home for dinnner?

Probably not, today's the day I finish up in Katheer and then compare notes with the professors at the medical college. Planning to do some troubleshooting on some parts of the inoculation process. I'll probably be out pretty late, I'm sorry.

Don't worry, I'll wait up. Where are you now?

Oppara. Last stop before Katheer, and then I'll take the newer apprentices back to the hospital and come home.

Then he can be in Oppara with some date things! 

Awwww!! Best husband.

He works very hard at it. 

Naima is not one of those people who stops working when she's about to have a baby. She works up to the last possible second. "The last possible second", in this case, means after she's started early labor, because it's not like she hasn't had a couple false labor pains before anyway, and after each person there keeps being another one, each as hopeful and needy as the last, most of them having stood in line for an hour or more, and she hates to just turn them away...

She's in Tian Xia, which means home is a minimum of two teleports away.

Before, of course, she'd have been weighing when to go back on her own, but now updating Élie is basically free.

I think it may have started.

It takes him a full thirty seconds to realize what she's talking about. 

Where are you – I'll be right there – 

I can get home, I'm just letting you know! I'm in Goka right now.

Élie can be in Goka!!! ...Wait, does he have a teleport point in Goka? 

Fine, he can be in Sothis and grab Shawil's crystal ball and scry his wife and then he can be in Goka, a whole six minutes later. 

" - Élie! Hi!"

She's still tapping people.

He did know these things take hours, but really – 

"I don't suppose you'd like to go home now?"

"All right, all right, just give me a sec - ahh - "

(One of the apprentices whispers something to one of the Gokan staff, who yells "She's having a baby!" to the crowd in three different languages.)

We also have to get the apprentices home, she tells Elie, finding it very convenient that she can do that without actually having to inhale right now.

"You two, grab my hand – " he shouts in Taldane, and if they don't hop to in the next thirty seconds, a night in Goka won't kill them. 

Diobel or Hospital Island?