Probably it should be out in the middle of the ocean, unless there's a local merfolk population. 

They do not as far as they know have a local merfolk population, although this is, uh, definitely still risking some major devastation on the inhabited coast, explosions at sea still cause waves even if they don't set everything on fire. Does she need a boat? Is she just going to swim? They'll do their best to work something out - and assuming she doesn't have a way to get herself there, they can get someone with a thousand-mile Gate range who can also do blind unscaffolded Gates using just a bearing - but Gating to the middle of the ocean is not really something they've had reason to do before. 

General Movat is ALARMED and does, in fact, want to talk to Iomedae immediately. Also they should probably send a message via the Predain monitors as soon as possible, before Ma'ar finds out via his spies or some other route, which - sounds like it would give him a worse impression of Tantara's intent to cooperate on preventing a disaster here. 

Yep, contacting Ma'ar should indeed be a very high priority here, for exactly that reason plus the possibility he has some additional ideas what's going on. She can probably swim all day but would prefer a boat and will, at any sign of a Gate, actually take off flying, so hopefully most of the explosion doesn't actually move the water. It can be a small boat. Probably should be a small boat. 

They'll do a short message to Ma'ar just so they can get one out FAST, and work on a longer and more thorough report to follow it – it would be nice if they could give Ma'ar literally any other information on the known movements of the mages involved in the actual weapons theft, a question which is hopefully being investigated right now. 

General Movat is not, uh, really sure how to secure his camp against mages who might be able to drop a superweapon through a Gate at any moment, there isn't a level of alert that feels high enough for that, and he is not incredibly confident that the cultists with the insane plan are going to stick to agreements they made, such as waiting until dawn tomorrow. He would feel more comfortable if Iomedae were not here for very much longer, though he does want to take the time to ask if she's ever been in an even slightly analogous situation and can advise him. 

She has attracted the opposition of Evil gods before, and some of them have tried to have her killed. Some even succeeded, back when she was weaker, but the gods' servants can return the dead to life in her world. She has never encountered this sort of thing, with a church itself divided on assassinating her and telling her about this to her face, and isn't sure what to make of it, but getting out of here sooner rather than later sounds like a good idea. 

Gods sometimes don't care about human life. Even if it's useful to them to pretend they do, so their churches serve them, often they only care about their own things and are willing to cause immense human suffering to have it. It's a possibility to keep in mind, though so is the possibility Vkandis doesn't want this at all or at least directed them to minimize collateral damage by warning her first. Her only advice is to not assume that because something is grand it is good.

That's...good context to have, that in her experience gods sometimes want things other than what's best for Their followers' – and that They can lie about it.

It's not really clear what to...do...about the fact that maybe Vkandis really does want her gone, and really did send a specific assassin without working through His temple hierarchy, and wants this for reasons that have nothing to do with the wellbeing of Tantara and instead have to do with obscure incomprehensible god goals. If it were happening through the temple order they could at least negotiate about it. 

Iomedae can get a Gate back to the Tower now. They are very urgently grabbing the senior matron of a rural temple order and attached girls' school dedicated to Bestet, and are hopeful about having a representative of the Nameless Everburning Flame by the time Iomedae is done with that conversation, and also Urtho wants to speak to her directly. 

Understood. Also if there are any ways to make her hard to magically track, that might slow down attackers until she's out of the Tower and on to somewhere safer for others.

The best option there is probably to get her behind the Tower's shields as quickly as possible – and one would hope that the assassin is unlikely to try to explode Urtho's Tower even if Iomedae is there, especially since she has nearly sixteen candlemarks left before her deadline. Urtho will have ideas for what other artifacts to give her, to make her hard to track once she leaves the inhabited areas, but without permanent shields they cannot realistically make her impossible to track, just inconvenient. Especially given that, who knows, maybe Vkandis can directly send a vision revealing her location. 

The first short message to Ma'ar should now be en route. The Predain monitor briefed on it is pretty furious about it, and definitely unimpressed with Urtho's efforts at security, but they probably aren't going to start assuming that Urtho let this happen on purpose. 

Urtho is now (kind of) recovered enough to be sitting up an armchair in his office. He's rigid and white-lipped with - whatever range of very understandable emotions he's having right now. 

What does Iomedae think he should do. 

Well, it'd be nice if he could help get the rest of the superweapons deconstructed, but Iomedae actually suspects that between her innate abilities and the large number of shield-items of Urtho's she is wearing, she'll be fine. She's hard to injure and much harder than that to kill. 

She's more worried that the cultists will try for Ma'ar, or for Urtho himself - it's hard to predict what people behaving that erratically will do, and taking out either of them probably collapses the peace if that's someone's objective. 

His people are ready to go ahead and dismantle two of them (...Urtho looks actually kind of distressed about the prospect, but he's not going to argue that they shouldn't, with everything happening right now). The remaining thirteen are going to be - harder, and riskier, and Urtho wants to be present and able to direct the work. He's concerned that trying to push himself to do it sooner, when he's still not fully recovered, will actually increase the risk. 

He's considered having the Tower evacuated, but he actually thinks it's relatively safe; it seems unlikely that even an insane man would target them here, and many sections of the Tower are very difficult or impossible to Gate into directly. The problem with evacuating is that there isn't really anywhere else; they could spread people out between towns and villages, so there's less of a concentration here, but that requires thousands of Gates and they just don't have the personnel, not with everyone on high alert at the front. 

He's also very worried about Ma'ar's safety, much more than his own, but - isn't sure what he can do to help. He certainly can't invite Ma'ar to the Tower. 

Yeah, that sounds both very complicated geopolitically and like it'd make the Tower more of a target. Iomedae thinks she could protect Ma'ar from assassination only to a limited degree and only by giving him the Ring of Evasion, which might be fine - in recent training exercises, she in fact was managing the same result without it - but is a major risk to take when it's not a training exercise and when she's probably a likelier target. And which may still be insufficient to let him survive the blast; you do have to have some way of partially mitigating the damage yourself for the Ring to do the rest.

- thinking that through out loud, though, she's actually inclined to give it to him, if Urtho would be comfortable with that.

Can she explain to him again what it actually does? Ma'ar probably can significantly mitigate the damage to himself – he's just as good at shields and talismans as Urtho himself, if not better – but would be pretty likely not to survive it without additional aid. He wants Ma'ar to have as much defensive aid as possible, but - is still kind of uncomfortable giving Ma'ar any capabilities he could use offensively, that might change his assessment of whether it's worth, for example, instead trying to conquer the Tower after all. 

Yep, that makes sense. Evasion is more or less purely defensive. When you successfully take defensive action against an attack - flinging up a shield counts - it amplifies it, makes it adequate whatever the magnitude of the explosion. Of course, that still would make Ma'ar much harder to take down on the battlefield, but Evasion does not affect the thing Iomedae would do, were he her adversary, which is driving a sword through him. Her sword cuts through a lot of defenses automatically as a product of the enchantments on it, and through many of the rest by virtue of doing much much much more damage than a normal sword.

Urtho is a little confused about the exact category boundaries here – a sword does not seem like it should be capable of being more dangerous than a fireball fifty miles across, however magical it is and however fast Iomedae can move – but Urtho does, in fact, trust her assessment of her magic and her own capabilities. 

And - it seems like the sort of thing that would be actively politically helpful? Urtho knows his former student, and Ma'ar is going to read it as a very strong indication of good faith. It's - more meaningful to him than most things, someone taking a costly action to keep him safe. It's probably not something he's had much of, in his life. 

They're in accord, then. Perhaps her location out at sea can be transmitted to Ma'ar and he can come out to get the Ring? She doesn't want to travel into Predain.

- will the fifty mile fireball do anything at all underwater, incidentally, she'd feel silly planning all these desperate things to try if she can just hang out underwater and be entirely fine. Honestly even if it boils the water she'll be fine; the worry is whether it'll cause a tsunami on shore.

It will absolutely cause a tsunami on shore. It's still a better idea than anything else he can think of - they'll have warning, tsunamis don't travel that fast and Iomedae does and if she's in fact alive after the explosion they can send someone to collect her by Gate - but he's concerned that it's going to cause a tsunami even if it's mostly not underwater. 

Urtho wouldn't have been inclined to tell Ma'ar where Iomedae was planning to be - and it seems like a bad idea for them to be in the same place for very long at all - but it seems like the main downside risk here is if they're wrong, and the rogue mage is in fact working for Ma'ar rather than Vkandis. This seems unlikely and if it were true then plausibly he could find Iomedae anyway, just with more time and inconvience and costly use of search-spells. He trusts Iomedae's assessment of whether it's worth it more than his own. 

It's a realistic possibility, but she doesn't in fact think that 'don't get found by the assassins' is very viable as a long term plan, so she'd really just as soon speed it up even if it's Ma'ar. Also maybe he'll have a moment of realization and call it off when she gives him the ring. Things like that don't happen enough to plan for, but they do happen and Ma'ar's the kind of person they might happen to. 

All right. They can try that, then. 

...Urtho would be inclined to do it after Iomedae has done her investigation, spoken to all the religious representatives she can, and is already in the middle of the ocean. But it's not impossible that the threat against Iomedae was misdirection, and actually the cultists are planning to take out the capital of Predain or something – and Ma'ar is probably paranoid enough to get himself to a secure undisclosed location far away from any major cities, as soon as he receives the warning message, but fifty miles is a lot of explosion. 

It really is. (What was Urtho thinking.) She'd warn him specifically about the radius; they can do the handoff later.

(Well, it was really cool that it worked, and it would have been even cooler if he could have pulled off the power supply. Urtho does not bring this up. It doesn't seem helpful.) 

He'll make sure that Ma'ar is warned specifically about the blast radius, and that Iomedae has a plan to offer him some protection, further details to follow. 

Also it sounds like the Bestet representative is ready to meet her, if they're done talking here. 

Yep. She appreciates Urtho and is grateful to be working with him.

The leader of the temple and school...reminds her a lot of the older, mid-level paladins she's worked with. She's wearing drawstring trousers and a dusty and sweat-stained man's shirt, sleeves rolled up to show tanned and powerfully muscled forearms. She has a sheathed sword at her hip. She looks very annoyed. 

She's not Gifted, so Urtho can provide a Mindspeaker to translate if Iomedae doesn't have her translation magic easily available or wants to save it for later. 

She indeed does not. She will convey her apologies about the short notice over Mindspeech. She is Iomedae, paladin of Aroden; she was just threatened by a priest of Vkandis who stole a superweapon, and she's trying to determine if the gods other than Vkandis have concerns about her presence here.

The woman - who introduces herself as Marlana - was dragged through a Gate ten minutes ago and was informed that either Vkandis is having some kind of tantrum or else some of his mages have gone rogue for no reason. She has no context on anything Iomedae might have done to upset Vkandis or other gods. The two-minute summary she got certainly makes it sound like the gods - or Bestet, at least - should think very highly of her. Of course, the churches of different gods often don't get along, and while nobody actually has direct information on this reflecting disputes between the gods, it's not ridiculous to think it would. 

Did the priest of Vkandis say what they were upset about? If not, does Iomedae have any guesses?