Bea is...exhausted. As the leader of the team she gets double the shares of any profits they make, but it also means she has to handle all the paperwork and bureaucracy and meeting with clients. She is not looking forward to canceling the contract.

But they're right. This is more important than surveying ruins.

"I think we should think about it first. The contract was very generous with the time. We'll ask the hotel whether we can extend our stay one more day, and then decide tomorrow morning."

"I agree that we should cancel and don't think I'm going to change my mind about it tomorrow, but that seems sensible. And in either case we'll need time to think about what to do."

Feli will replace the needles she took out back into the box and carry it, and Bea will lead everyone out of the waystation and back to the hotel, where she'll beg and/or argue with the hotel owner into letting them stay another night. Hopefully they haven't had someone else occupy their room yet.

They haven't! It's currently noon, and it's not check out time yet, so they can extend their stay another night.

"You said it was a person. Is it possible to talk to it without Telepathy?"

Not really! The needles can communicate through the touch-range channel, without using its full bandwidth if that's preferred, and can very slowly alter the texture of their energy to make them more eye-catching to passers by through a sort of tuned energetic resonance, but are otherwise unable to proactively communicate. Feli knows these things, as they are apparent through the episodic memories the needles shared with her.

"Yes, but you have to touch it."

This isn't as strange as one might think, since while Telepathy is a cheap spell, its cost increases superlinearly as you move away from the target, and for the majority of Flowers Practitioners, who are Weaker than Feli is, sustaining a conversation through Telepathy requires touching them.

"There are multiple needles. Are they separate or are they acting as a collective entity? If each of us holds a few needles could all of us have a conversation with it simultaneously?"

"Collective entity. Don't know the answer to your second question; let me ask."

She will take one of the needles and ask!

:Yes, we can communicate with multiple wielders at once, though splitting up the needles across significant distance can create unfortunate gaps in our practical functioning, since each needle is unique in its exact construction.:

"Needles says yes but that if the needles are too far apart they'll have trouble with it because each needle is unique – they're not duplicates of each other."

"Did you just name the thing 'Needles'."

"I – oh my stars, I realize I haven't introduced myself yet."

:My name is Feli. What's yours?:

:Our creators did not give us a name, and our wielders have called us many things. Our first wielder called us the Jade Needles, after the substance of our constituent needles at the time of our acquisition by him. Our ontology no longer includes an exact conception of substance, so Needles is appropriate.:

"Wow, they actually said that they're fine with having 'Needles' as a name. Actually, everyone go grab a needle so that I can stop having to translate."

:How far away can separate needles be before you start having issues? Is it possible for you to communicate with them? It would be lower friction to us if we spoke and transmitted our words to you in thought, and then you gave your response to all of us simultaneously.:

:Our communicative function would not be interrupted by distance, or even by ontological disjunction, at least not in our experience thus far, though some powerful magical effects have been able to temporarily prevent needles from maintaining connectivity. The practical limit on how far any individual needle might be kept apart depends strongly on the frequency at which different exotic ailments or misfortunes which might require that specific needle are encountered, the urgency of such encounters, and the speed at which separated needles can be moved should there be an encounter which urgently demands it.:

:I see. Our group isn't planning to split but I was maybe thinking that you would have had issues if needles were kept in separate rooms or something. 

You talked about attunement back then – is it possible for multiple people to be attuned to you simultaneously? Or use your powers simultaneously?:

:Keeping needles in separate rooms within the same building should not greatly impact our functionality, so long as no exotic ailments or misfortunes occur with such urgency that the time needed to carry the relevant needle from one room to another would be too long.

We can aid and counsel multiple individuals so long as no individual needle is needed for more than one procedure simultaneously, but only one can be attune us at a time. Attunement can be attained and relinquished quickly, though, and can be done so by anyone touching at least one needle, which previous wielders have used to exchange attunement rapidly across great distance when the need arose.: