Iomedae is immune to poisons, which means she can drink but not get drunk; she does. She's happy to stick by Ma'ar except if there's sparring for fun she definitely wants in on that.

This will make Iomedae very popular! A number of people would like to spar with her, though mostly mages who don't fight with swords. 

Iomedae is definitely keeping in mind that all of these people are commoners and half of them are drunk, yes? 

Of course! She will not use a sword at all. (They can have one if they want.) Also she'll be blindfolded.

It's still not going to be a fair fight.

It’s still fun even for the losers! And hilarious for the audience! 

Iomedae should fight Ma’ar! There are dares!

- sure. Not blindfolded, though.

Ma'ar is not immune to poison and has had several drinks, but this has not noticeably slowed him down. He gets up, to cheers. 

He grins at her. :I can't tell if that means you think if you were blindfolded I could take you.: He kind of doubts it. At the very least, Iomedae never gets tired and he eventually would. 

:Of course you couldn't! But I don't want to make you look bad in front of your people.:

:Awww: It is, in fact, very sweet of her - 

- and she can definitely take him but he's hoping to at least slightly make her work for it. Also they should go outside. It'll be way more fun if he doesn't have to worry so much about setting a table on fire. 

He is very very good at shields, and he can overpower a force-net harder than most people casting one in a fraction of a second - even so they won't hold up for very long at all against Iomedae's strength, but she doesn't have her sword to cut them and he can pin her feet and delay her slightly by making her have to wrench them free. 

Also, on the scale of 'within a single room', he can throw himself around through unscaffolded Gates that take a tenth of a second to come up and are down by the time he's through. This - especially when dropping himself through a horizontal Gate to a destination terminus which is vertical - is pretty useful for dodging someone who moves inhumanly fast, by instead semi-instantaneously being on the other side of the room, or ten feet above her. 

(This is actually almost useless on a battlefield in Velgarth, it's very stupid to Gate unnecessarily in active combat when the other side also has mages who can blast your Gate. Ma'ar learned it mostly because it's a good way to practice unscaffolded Gates a lot in very little time, and because 'winning duels' is a completely different skill than fighting for real and is a surprisingly important component of political success in Predain. And Iomedae can't throw fireballs; her sword is probably magical enough to wreck a Gate-terminus but she's not using it.) 

Meanwhile, he is vastly less worried about actually hurting her than anyone in the room, because most people don't really propagate the implications of things like 'Iomedae survived a superweapon.' He is not especially holding back on his levinbolts, though he is being very careful not to risk hitting anyone in the audience. (They're standing well back. Also shouting and cheering raucously. This is spectacular entertainment.) 

Can he at least manage not to lose to Iomedae for, like, thirty seconds? (He can't keep this up much longer than that anyway and is going to be exhausted and it's going to be worth it.) 

Yes absolutely! She's faster than him even with the flash-Gating and the force-nets, but with her bare fists she can't actually take him down instantly when she does catch up to him, just hammer his shields down in the space of a few seconds, and also she does need to pause to put up Resist Energy about the levinbolts after a few hits, and that means this will last until he can no longer put up a full-strength shield every time he manages to get out of range of her.

It is completely absurd how fast Iomedae can move and one of the best things about this is that now everyone else is getting to see it. Also for someone without mage-sight, she has ridiculous senses and reflexes and a resulting ability to anticipate where he's about to start dropping out of a Gate and head there to intercept him. He can get shields up in half a second, if he doesn't have longer, but they're not efficient shields, nor the kind he can reabsorb when they break, and that means a lot of energy lost every time Iomedae smashes them. If he gets her feet briefly stuck where she can't reach him, he can buy more than half a second and add a second layer of shield, but he is not consistently getting that time. 

He's an unusually powerful Adept who can do unusually efficient Gates, but he's not drawing on node-energy aside from topping up his reserves at the start, this would suck up a lot of it rather quickly and it's rude to disrupt the weather just for sparring. He can manage almost thirty-five seconds before he's too low on reserves to mount a strong enough shield the next time she hits him. 

Then he'll go down, hard, and she'll pick him up instantly with a Burst of Glory (it's temporary health, but it'll mean he can avoid being visibly unconscious the instant she got a hit in), and give him a hug, and tell him over Mindspeech they have about a minute and a half of Ma'ar having an absurd amount of life force glued to him.

With a lot of temporary life-force glued to him, Ma'ar feels great, and that was exhilarating. He hugs her back and beams and - yeah they should definitely arrange to not be in front of his people when that wears off. 

The audience is yelling and chanting and stamping their feet and someone is proposing a toast and shoving a vial of fortified spirits in Ma'ar's face, which he accepts because you can't not do that even though this perhaps a dubious idea when he's likely to collapse soon, and Predain in the daytime is not really a place where people are affectionate in public but Predain well after midnight when one's audience is drunk is different and there is definitely a chant of "kiss her! kiss the lady!" rising between the less understandable cheers, and Ma'ar is not going to deny his audience the satisfaction. 

(One gets the sense that, in Predaini culture, there is a definite and very specific flavor of romantic subtext in this kind of public sparring.) 

And then he can make a suitably dramatic exit by unscaffolded Gate with his arm around Iomedae's waist, with fifteen seconds to spare, which may or may not be long enough to make it from his living room to somewhere he can be horizontal when he finds out how much he's about to regret this. 

.....yeah he's going to be unconscious once it wears off. Not dying, just - like he ripped every last bit of mage-energy out of himself casting something, except without the backlash. 

Iomedae will apologetically cuddle him and defend him from harm, not that she's expecting harm.

There is, indeed, no one and nothing showing up to try to harm Ma'ar in his private suite well after midnight when he just took a girl home after a spectacularly romantic fight. Who would do that. 

He's unconscious for a candlemark, intermittently shivering; the spell didn't put previously broken bones back, when it wore off, but he had already pushed himself past the point of backlash even before the end of the fight, and not all aspects of backlash count as injuries to Golarion magic. It takes a while to rebuild any internal reserves while he's still too unconscious to eat or drink. 

- eventually he wakes up, disoriented and dizzy and incredibly thirsty but not actually in any pain, which - once he manages to piece together where he is and how he must have gotten here - is already an improvement on what he was expecting. He's clearly not injured, just - he feels like he just threw a lot of fireballs around after not having eaten in three days. (Speaking from previous experience.)

He can't really figure out Mindspeech right now, or...move...but Iomedae is there so it's okay. 

Iomedae is there! Would-be assassins will have a bad day, not that there have been any. She can get him food and water, if there's any in his suite. 

She can find food and water in his suite! Ma'ar flops on her and is going to be very incompetent at feeding himself until he's a little more with it (which food and water will help with fairly quickly, at least.) 

He's not at all tense or stressed. Predain is his, the war is over, and he trusts Iomedae.

He smiles drowsily at her, and eventually decides he has enough strength for Mindspeech. :S'very romantic, yknow: he manages, somewhat slurred. :To beat someone in a fight: 

:Yes,: she agrees contentedly. :Especially a close fight.:

Ma'ar does not especially think it was a close fight, unless she's counting the fact that he could have Gated out and survived it, which is only true because she wasn't using her sword and he was using his magic. It's sweet of her to say, though. He would kiss her about it except for how he totally cannot sit up yet. 

Maybe once he's had some more food and water they can kiss about it.

They can do that! Ma'ar is having trouble regretting any of tonight's decisions, even if they mean he's unlikely to be up for heading to meet with Urtho until at least noon. 

He is probably going to fall asleep involuntarily before they can go any further than kissing, but he is nonetheless very very happy right now. 

Being happy is really important for humans! She and Ma'ar are both humans and the happiness is clearly very good for them.

And also she does want to buckle down, when Ma'ar wakes, and get the interworld Gate work started as early as possible. 

Ma'ar sleeps until noon. But he's young and resilient; he wakes up feeling basically fine and ravenously hungry. He's already informed the King of his the upcoming research plans with Urtho. 

If Iomedae is there with the no-fear effect, he feels - basically just ready to pass a communication-spell message warning of their impending arrival, and then Gating to the receiving area outside the Tower. 

She'll go with him.

Urtho would be delighted to receive them at the Tower! He's been looking forward to seeing Iomedae again face to face for days. ...And slightly dreading it, because he owes her some apologies for what happened with the shamans. But he also owes her a great deal of gratitude, and he'll be there.