Right. Okay. Iomedae wants the very very dangerous experimental weapons moved. Possibly dismantled, definitely moved. Right now, because it sounds like Levas could gate in and steal them?

(She'd have killed him, except she was worried he'd Final Strike and she'd been told that could destroy the Kingdom.)

They can go and see if Urtho left any kind of written instructions specifying whether the weapons can be moved safely and if there's a safe way to dismantle them. Taking very powerful magical artifacts through Gates always risks some kind of interaction. If they don't feel comfortable moving the weapons until Urtho can okay it, they can at least mount a very thorough guard? 

Sounds good. She can heal Urtho again; it’s her very last Lay On Hands, so it’s not an amazingly appealing solution, but if the healers think it’s needed she can do it.

The Healers are...not more than 70% sure that Urtho is going to survive. Certainly he's likely to be lucid much sooner if Iomedae can heal him again, though they're not sure if she has anything more effective at actually getting the poison cleared out of his body? It looked like the thing she did before healed all organ damage it had already caused, and just having that again would definitely help, buying them more time to work on it with Urtho relatively stable, but it doesn't seem perfectly efficient. 

Unfortunately she isn’t the kind of paladin whose touch heals poison because she had people for that, back home. She can heal him and at least get him lucid to ask superweapon questions?

Urtho still looks pretty awful, ashen-pale and shivering.  They've got him bundled up in heated blankets with about eight Healers arranged around his bed. 

The second Lay On Hands helps more, though, now that the Healers have made some progress on clearing the poison from his system and suppressing the hallucinations. He opens his eyes and this time actually manages to focus on Iomedae's face. 

“How do we dismantle the superweapons?”

Urtho can speak in reasonably coherent sentences, though it's halting and clearly costing him a lot of effort. 

Most of the weapons should be stable taken through a Gate; these two shouldn't be transported that way but can be moved overland on a floating platform he designed for that purpose. He also left detailed instructions for disabling all of the weapons but he admits it's a complex and fraught process that he hadn't really intended to delegate to others. 

Okay. What do the two that can't safely be Gated do.

One of them more or less opens a one-sided Gate directly into the Void, instantly draining all of the magical energy out of the area. The design concept wasn’t even originally conceived of as a weapon - he was musing on ways to clean up blood-magic residue or similar - but it turned out to be impossible to control the process. (The weapon also requires a living channel to initiate it, he couldn’t figure out how to replace that with artifacts, and it would inevitably be fatal for them.)

The other tears open a temporary planar rift into the Abyssal Plane and uses the energy released to drag through several million Abyssal demons and bind them in construct-bodies. Urtho…admits this one doesn’t really have any purpose other than for violence, he mostly just got caught up in testing whether the idea would work.

Both involve complex planar manipulations and shouldn’t be moved through Gates, which are themselves planar anomalies. He thinks they would remain stable but they might not. 

The thing is that all wizards are like this so she can't even be disappointed. At least he didn't test them on any villages to see if they worked as well as they were supposed to.

Does he have a backup secure location for them to be hidden at.

Nnnnnnnnot really but he can suggest some options that are at least thoroughly shielded against scrying and other search-spells, and that no one else will have Gate-locations to. 

All right. She proposes that the two un-Gateable ones be moved within the tower while preparations to dismantle them are accelerated, it being too easy for something to go wrong on the open road or for their location to be tracked, and that all the rest be Gated to a sort of secure place where at least if they go off there are not very many people around.

She promised not to try to bring about the death of Conn Levas but she does rather hope that there are other people thinking about that; she'll say nothing of him aside from noting aloud, as she promised she would, that he has requested a duchy in exchange for not selling the superweapon locations to the highest bidder; are any available?

He requested WHAT? He was otherwise planning to do WHAT???? Urtho thinks he should absolutely not get a duchy!!!! 

(Someone else will quietly inform her that there are, in fact, several duchies currently unclaimed.) 

Iomedae proposes that they think about which duchy if any would be suitable for a while, like at least long enough to move all the superweapons.

They....will do that. And get to work on moving the superweapons. 

Urtho is available if she has further questions or wants to talk strategy, but he's pretty clearly flagging at this point. 

He can rest. Iomedae's got some peace talk proposals to draft, and also wants to talk to the monitor from Predain as soon as she's recovered, and still needs to stay in touch with everyone to make sure the ceasefire hasn't broken down anywhere else, and she wants to take a look at the superweapon guard precautions and make sure they seem adequate.

The ceasefire is holding. Not comfortably, and she can quickly discern that the Predain commanders on the front are incredibly tense and stressed and one unexpected twitch away from panicking - and it's continuing to be unfortunately hard to prevent the gryphons from pushing the boundaries of the official restrictions. 

The monitor is stable, and she's now conscious and mostly lucid (though she's on a lot of painkillers). She would be happy to talk to Iomedae, but cannot currently use Mindspeech and probably won't be able to safely use her Gift for days; they can provide a different Mindspeaker to hold a conversation out loud and relay back and forth for Iomedae in Mindspeech, or she can use her translation magic thing? 

She is very limited in her spell access, unfortunately. A different mindspeaker-interpreter is all right with her as a solution.

Then they'll arrange that and Gate her in. They have the monitor in a private room, with the window very thoroughly curtained and no source of light. Backlash is very unpleasant. 

She's eager to see Iomedae, though, and can manage with some effort to express her very emphatic and heartfelt gratitude to Iomedae for managing to prevent the ceasefire from falling apart, and her willingness to help Iomedae in any way she possibly can.

This is relayed to Iomedae in Mindspeech.

She was absolutely expecting to be yelled at for killing her people, but she doesn’t need it; she reviews her decisions whether anyone confronts her about that or not. She just wants to communicate that they’re going to send the monitor home to Predain soon to give Predain an account of Tantara’s actions, and to answer any questions the monitor wants answered for that.

(She's pretty upset but it wouldn't in a million years occur to her that it's the sort of thing one could be angry about. Anger is for things that weren't reasonable, that violated what a sane person with a moral sense would think was appropriate, and Iomedae's reaction is just obviously what someone would do when faced with, not just an attack, but one that was breaking a formal ceasefire agreement.

...She's a little bit angry that Iomedae didn't heal them but that does not seem useful to bring up.) 

People are going to want to know that Ma'ar is all right, obviously, and Tantara's account of exactly what sequence of actions Iomedae took when Ma'ar Gated in. Also they're going to want clarification of the extent to which Iomedae's response should be considered as a Tantaran operation, or not – is Iomedae better thought of as part of their command structure or as a largely independent actor who chose freely whether and how to respond to their call for aid? Does Tantara intend to police Iomedae's behavior - she's hasty to clarify that she doesn't think Iomedae will do anything unconscionable, but if she did, would Tantara consider it under their remit to stop her or punish her for it, and do they...actually have any way of doing that...?

They're going to want to know her plans going forward for peace talks. And whether she has any intention, after the war, of trying to prosecute Ma'ar for war crimes or something. 

Ma’ar is all right. He Gated out. She did, actually, stab him as he surrendered, but she healed him the instant she heard the surrender, and he should be in perfect health.

When he Gated in and she got an alert that he’d arrived, she sprouted wings and flew towards the bearing. When she was close she shouted at him to surrender. She then instructed him not to move or use magic and held him at swordpoint while communicating with the Tantaran leadership. Eventually he told her Sheiknam was on the move and she released him. She didn’t ask for any promises and he hasn’t made any but they discussed intent to set up peace talks.

She is an advisor to the Tantaran government and has represented to them that she’ll defend them if they are attacked during the ceasefire. She’s not in their command structure and is generally cautious about committing to take orders from anyone. She does not think anyone could stop her if she were out of line. At home there are people who wear paired magic items with her that would let them kill her at need, but she doesn’t trust anyone here that much yet. She will not retaliate for complaints and will generally pay costs associated with her actions but doesn’t expect them to trust that yet. 

She wants a durable peace. She doesn’t know Ma’ar to have been accused of any war crimes?